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Radical Joe: A life of Joseph Chamberlain by Denis Judd (1977)

‘The great problem of our civilisation is still unsolved. We have to account for and grapple with the mass of misery and destitution in our midst, co-existent as it is with the evidence for abundant wealth and teeming prosperity.’
(Joseph Chamberlain in 1885, quoted on page 122)

Joe Chamberlain was to become the only politician in British history to split two parties and destroy two governments of which he was a member.
(The Edwardians by Roy Hattersley, page 105)

Joseph Chamberlain (1836 to 1914) shot like a charismatic meteor across the late-Victorian and Edwardian political scene.

Chamberlain made his name as a Liberal reforming mayor of Birmingham, where he cleared the slums and introduced municipal control of gas, water and electricity supplies, rousing loyal support and bating entrenched interests with his fire-breathing, radical oratory. He entered the House of Commons in 1876 at the relatively advanced age of 39, as a Liberal Party MP for his home turf, Birmingham. He rose quickly and after just 4 years the Liberal leader, Gladstone, gave him a cabinet position as President of the Board of Trade in 1880.

What is enjoyable and interesting about Judd’s biography is he takes you right into the nitty-gritty of the local administration of a dirty, polluted but relentlessly growing late-Victorian city like Birmingham, and then into the knotty detail of Chamberlain’s Parliamentary career. He gives you a powerful sense of how difficult it is to get into any position of power, how challenging it is to formulate meaningful policies, and then of the struggle to co-opt support and create coalitions ready to take on often very entrenched interests, if you want to change and improve things.

Reforming acts

Take, for example, the acts Chamberlain supervised as President of the Board of Trade, 1880 to 1885:

a Grain Cargoes Bill for the safer stowing of cargoes
a Seaman’s Wages Bill for fairer wages
an Electric Lighting Bill which enabled municipalities to set up electricity supplies either themselves or through private companies
a Bankruptcy Bill which created a body of official receivers in order to investigate and speed up bankruptcies, where necessary
a Merchant Shipping Bill designed to stop owners sending to sea unworthy ships, known as ‘coffin ships’, in the expectancy that they would sink and the owners claim the insurance money; due to the resistance of big business, the Bill failed (pages 106 to 108)

Radical Joe

Although Chamberlain rose to prominence as a crusading, reforming mayor of Birmingham, the opening chapter of the book details the surprising fact that he was born and bred in London, first in semi-rural Camberwell, then in smart Canonbury. His father was a successful merchant with a shop in Cheapside and Chamberlain didn’t go to university but left his private school at 18 and went to work for his father’s firm. It was only when a business opportunity arose in Birmingham, to invest in a new firm being set up to exploit a new technique to mass manufacture pointed screws, that his father dispatched him to England’s second city to look into the opportunity.

Chamberlain was by all accounts an extremely effective businessman or, as his enemies put it, relentless and ruthless. But he was from the start interested in local politics, active as a counsellor and then elected mayor in 1873 where he set new standards for slum clearance, clean water and sewage facilities etc. With the same ruthless efficiency he had brought to business, Chamberlain now embarked on a systematic programme of municipal improvement; this included the building of branch and central libraries, raising money for the art gallery and other public collections to be augmented, founding public swimming pools, new parks and gardens.

Judd liberally quotes from Chamberlain’s speeches and letters which are very enjoyable, pithy, clear and forceful. (Many contemporaries testified to what Beatrice Potter called his ‘energy and personal magnetism… [that he possessed] masculine force in a superlative degree.’ p.76.)

These letters, articles and speeches show how, right from the start of his career, Chamberlain really understood the misery and poverty of many in Victorian cities. Take this excerpt from an article in The Fortnightly Review, the Liberal periodical edited by his friend and political ally, John Morley:

We are compelled occasionally to turn aside from the contemplation of our virtues and intelligence and wealth, to recognise the fact that we have in our midst a vast population more ignorant than the barbarians whom we profess to convert, more miserable than the most wretched in other countries to whom we attempt from time to time to carry succour and relief. (p.72)

And he had, right from the start, a firm belief in the ability of local and national government to physically improve the environment of the poor and, by so doing, significantly improve their lives, as expressed in a speech he gave when opening Highgate Park in Birmingham:

‘It is simply nonsense to wonder at the want of refinement of our people when no opportunity is given to innocent enjoyment. We are too apt to forget that the ugliness of our ordinary English existence has a bad influence on us.’ (quoted page 67)

It was this kind of straight-talking support of the poor, and his acts and bills which aggressively took on entrenched interests, which quickly earned him the reputation as a radical – a socialist or even a communist – although Judd makes clear he was neither. Chamberlain is quoted in numerous contexts clarifying that he thought the improvement of the lot of the poor was not only a moral good in itself but was a form of social insurance which would ensure the ongoing survival of the wealthy, propertied classes, classes which he never seriously threatened (p.117).

Nonetheless the accusation that he was a fire-breathing republican led to much popular entertainment, for example the rash of humorous cartoons when he was obliged to kiss the Queen-Empress Victoria’s hand upon taking his Cabinet post (p.102).

In July 1885 Chamberlain wrote the preface to a pamphlet titled the ‘Radical Programme’, the first campaign handbook in British political history. The Programme proposed:

free elementary education
land reform, including measures to help people buy land, taxes on unoccupied or unused land, provision of allotments and smallholdings by local authorities
higher rates for big landed estates
progressive income tax on land owned
an increase in direct as opposed to indirect tax
encouragement of local government and housing schemes
as well as free public education
the disestablishment of the Church of England
universal male suffrage
more protection for trade unions

He also proposed to separate the goal of free education for every child from the religious groups which wanted to maintain their stranglehold over it. His policy was rejected by groups on all sides, who continued to use education as a political weapon, including the National Liberal Federation, Nonconformists, Catholics, and the Church of England-supporting establishment.

The Radical Programme earned the scorn of Whigs and Conservatives alike. Chamberlain had written to his friend, John Morley, that with Radical solidarity ‘we will utterly destroy the Whigs, and have a Radical government before many years are out.’ But in the event nothing came of it. Gladstone’s Liberal government was defeated on an amendment to its budget and Gladstone resigned, to be replaced by a minority administration led by Lord Salisbury (who had replaced Benjamin Disraeli as leader of the Conservative Party when Disraeli died in 1881; Salisbury led the party from the House of Lords, with a deputy in the Commons, still a possibility in those days).

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 1

Insults and abuse

Chamberlain established from the start of his career a reputation for plain speaking which sometimes overstepped the boundaries of decorum. Before he’d even been elected as an MP, soon after being nominated to stand, he rashly denounced the then-Prime Minister Disraeli, as ‘a man who never told the truth except by accident; a man who went down to the House of Commons and flung at the British Parliament the first lie that entered his head.’ (p.75). He was quickly forced to apologise.

During the intense period of manoeuvring between the various factions of both the Liberal and Conservative Parties which led up to the 1884 Reform Act, Chamberlain notoriously declared in a speech that Salisbury was ‘himself the spokesman of a class – a class to which he himself belongs, who toil not neither do they spin’ (p.118). In response, Salisbury branded Chamberlain a ‘Sicilian bandit’ and his deputy in the Commons, Stafford Northcote, called Chamberlain ‘Jack Cade’.

1. Home Rule

Chamberlain’s first big contribution to history was to split the Liberal Party in 1886 over Home Rule for Ireland. In early 1886 a new Liberal administration was elected and Gladstone made widely known his determination to push through a bill permitting home rule for the Irish. Chamberlain vehemently objected, on the basis that it would weaken the power of the British House of Commons and introduce fractures into the foundations of the wider British Empire. Chamberlain’s alternative was a plan for a federal system for not only Ireland but Scotland too, which would create an Irish devolved administration with powers over internal affairs. It was a masterpiece of compromise which satisfied none of the parties involved.

After a lot of manoeuvring, Chamberlain led a group which came to be called the Liberal Unionists out of the Liberal Party proper and into independent existence, thus severely weakening Gladstone’s Liberal government. There then followed years of complex machinations, but Chamberlain’s Liberal Unionists as they came to be known, by their very nature, came into closer tactical alliances with the Conservative Party and eventually merged with them.

2. Liberal Imperialism

Chamberlain’s second massive contribution was to become the cheerleader for British Imperialism during the peak of jingoistic enthusiasm from the mid-1890s to the middle Edwardian years. (The British Empire didn’t reach its geographic peak until after the Great War when Britain awarded itself various colonies belonging to the defeated Germans and also adopted ‘mandates’ in the Middle East.)

Secretary of State for the Colonies

When a Conservative government was returned after the 1895 general election with the help of Chamberlain’s bloc of 50 or so Liberal Unionists, the new leader, Lord Salisbury, offered Chamberlain a cabinet position. To many people’s surprise, Chamberlain turned down more senior departments and chose the Colonial Office, becoming Secretary of State for the Colonies, an office he held for the next eight years.

It is fascinating to read about how the British Empire was actually administered. In modern cultural discourse it is dismissed as one big evil monolith but, of course, it was a lot more complicated than that, run, like most British affairs, in a ramshackle, amateurish way. The Indian Empire was run by a separate office, the Secretary of State for India and, anyway, Chamberlain never showed much interest in it. His responsibility was for 11 self-governing colonies of white settlement with a European population of 11 million, and a jumble of crown colonies, protectorates and chartered territories, with a population of around 40 million (p.187).

Chamberlain’s Liberal Imperialism was an extension of the Radical reforming approach he’d brought to Birmingham. He thought that by wise investment, the disparate territories clumped together as ‘the Empire’ could be made more economically efficient and productive, its people educated and provided better jobs, housing, amenities, infrastructure and so on. He was a hard-working and diligent colonial secretary (notably unlike many of his predecessors) but his tenure is remembered for two policies which were out and out failures.

1. The Boer War

Chamberlain encouraged the ill-fated and derided Jameson Raid of December to January 1895, a force of 500 British soldiers led into the Boer-held Transvaal in expectation that the large number of British labourers working in its gold mines would rise up, join them, and together the Brits would seize government from the properly constituted Boer government. Not only was this a shameful attempt at a coup, but a shambles and dismal failure. How much exactly Chamberlain a) knew about it b) encouraged the conspirators, is unclear to this day. But the fact that establishing his role was one of the aims of the subsequent British government enquiry shows there was widespread belief that he was involved.

His continued support of the parties who wanted to take on and conquer the Boer republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) so as to absorb them into an unambiguously British country of South Africa, meant that when the Boer War commenced in October 1899, many critics saw it as ‘Joe’s War’. Thus his name became associated with the military disasters of the first six months of the war, with the humiliating failure to end it, with its long drawn-out two years of guerrilla fighting, with the shameful policy of rounding up Boer farmers’ wives and families into concentration camps which were so appallingly run (by the shambolic British army) that some 28,000 died of hunger and disease. Not a good look for someone who had once been a radical, reforming politician, always on the side of the poor.

What makes the Boer War all the more of a pitiful shambles was that, within a few years, the Boers were restored to full power over their own republics. It need never have been fought at all.

2. Tariff reform

As to tariff reform, Judd details the complexities of Chamberlain’s decisions, first to commit himself wholeheartedly to trying to create a tariff or customs union between the nations of the empire, and secondly, once he’d made this decision, the very complicated negotiations with Arthur Balfour, who had taken over leadership of the Conservative Party in 1902. These led Chamberlain, ultimately, to resign from the Conservative cabinet and to set up a well-funded and well-organised national campaign for tariff reform.

Judd shows in sad detail how it was doomed, for at least two reasons. Chamberlain, like plenty of other British politicians, businessmen and commentators, had realised that British business was being out-performed by its international rivals, America and Germany. His solution was to unite the white imperial nations – Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand – into a customs union to encourage mutual trade and create a powerful economic and agricultural bloc which could hold its own against competitors. The only problems were:

a) Economic reality

Experts showed him that trade between the colonies and Britain had been steadily declining i.e. we did more trade with the rest of the world and that percentage was increasing.
There was no getting round the fact that, if we imposed extra tariffs on goods entering the union from outside, that would increase the cost of food, seeing as most of the UK’s foodstuffs were imported. Hence the slogan developed by the Liberal opposition, ‘Big loaf, little loaf’, meaning big loaf under the Liberals, little loaf under the tariff reforming Tories.

So Chamberlain was forced to abandon hard facts in preference for rhetoric about the Empire as a civilising force and the power of the Anglo-Saxon peoples when united, and so on. Although he started from Radical roots, he ended up sounding as pompous as the windiest Conservative. But this kind of rhetoric about the great British Empire and the great Anglo-Saxon peoples was extremely popular. His movement distributed posters and banners and badges and placards, and held countless meetings, and was widely supported by leading newspapers of the time. It was wildly popular and it was a complete failure.

b) Political reality

Unfortunately, the other ‘white’ colonies (or the dominions, to give them their technical name) weren’t all that interested in Chamberlain’s rhetoric. A meeting was held of all the dominion leaders in London at the time of Queen Victoria’s jubilee (1887), another one was held (in Ottowa) in 1894, then Chamberlain organised another one in 1897, and arranged for them to be held at regular intervals thereafter. And so they were: 1902, 1907, 1911, 1917, 1918, 1921 and so on, being replaced, after the Second World War, by the Commonwealth Prime Ministers meeting.

But at those early meetings Chamberlain was disappointed to discover that the colonial governments were very hard bargainers indeed, cared nothing for his imperialist rhetoric, and were only prepared to negotiate tough deals to their own advantage.

The 1906 Liberal landslide

Balfour’s Conservative government was plainly running out of steam during 1905, and Chamberlain’s aggressive tariff reform campaign did it a lot of damage by attacking Balfour’s refusal to commit to it wholeheartedly. The election held in January 1906 proved a devastating defeat for the Conservative and Unionist Party, leaving them with the fewest seats in the party’s history (156), and the Liberal Party with a record landslide victory which kept them in government till the middle of the Great War.

Summary

So it’s a fascinating story, fascinating in the detail of Chamberlain’s youth and young business success, and how he parlayed that into a dazzlingly successful career in local politics leading to him becoming the superstar mayor of Britain’s second city. Fascinating to learn how, when he entered Parliament then government, he continued his radical approach with bills and acts designed to help the poor and exploited. And then fascinating to watch the distortion of these early principles when he came to apply them as Colonial Secretary, the man who had once been feared as a communist revolutionary ending up encouraging the Boer War and trying to create an entirely impractical policy of imperial union which ended up dividing the nation.

When I picked up this book second-hand I didn’t realise it was quite so old (1977). Partly because it comes from the era before critical theory became widespread in the humanities, it is a wonderfully readable account, short on politically correct carping and long on a sympathetic understanding of the Unitarian, non-conformist origins of the Chamberlain family. The older reader such as myself is perfectly capable of recognising the racism and the sexism prevalent throughout the age and often found in Chamberlain’s attitudes, without having it made the centre of the account to the neglect of the other important aspects of his political theory and practice. The sympathetic way Judd handles Chamberlain’s non-conformist origins makes it all the more poignant when we read the letters in which he confessed to close friends how the death of his wife in childbirth had made him question and then completely reject his native religion.

The art of the possible

More interestingly, like the Richard Shannon book I read recently only more so, Judd’s account takes you deep into the nitty-gritty of real, actual politics, which is the art of the possible and how this, in practice, comes down to endless number-crunching – how policy-makers are mainly concerned with: a) how many people will vote for them at a general election; b) what number of MPs they will gain in the election; and then c) how to mobilise these numbers in order to get actual bills passed into law.

(It was, apparently, Bismarck who said that: ‘Politics is the art of the possible, the attainable — the art of the next best’.)

It is eye-opening to read so many accounts of the back-room horse-trading and negotiations, of the creation of coalitions, of the offers and counter-offers and endless behind-the-scenes negotiations which were required to get even the simplest piece of legislation passed through Parliament.

It makes you realise the immense distance between, on the one hand, the grand and rousing rhetoric of politicians’ speeches and articles and party manifestos and the broad hopes of commentators and critics on the Left or Right for sweeping social change, for Noble Principles and Grand Visions – and, on the other hand, the extremely cramped and narrow room for manoeuvre most actual governments and politicians in power have to operate within.

Immersing yourself in the clotted realities of the politics of this faraway era, and studying Chamberlain’s brilliant but ultimately frustrated career, really helps you understand why politics so consistently ends in disappointment. Chamberlain’s sorry career suggests that the high hopes of all commentators, of both left and right, are always going to be disappointed.

Remember the high hopes which greeted the election of Tony Blair and New Labour in 1997? How is he regarded now? Remember the high hopes of Gordon Brown’s supporters that, when he assumed the leadership, we would finally have a proper democratic socialist government. How did that pan out? Remember the Liberals going into coalition with the Conservatives telling their supporters how it would allow them to implement lovely Liberal policies? How did that end up for them?

And then the past five years of Brexit mayhem, 2016 to 2021, including the hilarious decision of Theresa May’s advisers to go for a snap general election in April 2017, promising it would lead to ‘strong and stable’ leadership – but which in fact led to a hung parliament in which she was entirely dependent on the support of the tiny Democratic Unionist Party to stay in power? And then faced a series of no confidence votes until she was replaced by Boris Johnson, the same Boris Johnson who sacked all his moderate MPs and bulldozed through the worst possible Brexit deal, which we will all now have to live with for a generation?

Politics = disappointment.

In fact it was in an essay precisely about Joseph Chamberlain that Enoch Powell MP wrote his often-quoted judgement:

‘All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.’

So Chamberlain is not just a disappointing politician but, in Powell’s view, the epitome of the politician who had all the gifts, who worked hard, who had deeply held principles and yet… whose political career fizzled out in failure and disappointment.

Two divorces

The book features two high-profile divorces from the period.

Dilke and the Crawford divorce

Sir Charles Wentworth Dilke, Second Baronet (1843 to 1911) was an English Liberal, Radical politician and good friend of Chamberlain’s. He helped the passage of the Third Reform Act and supported laws giving the municipal franchise to women, legalising labour unions, improving working conditions and limiting working hours, as well as being one of the earliest campaigners for universal schooling. In July 1886 the MP Donald Crawford sued his wife, Virginia, for divorce, citing Dilke. At the trial in February 1886, the judge found in Crawford’s favour.

Two months later, determined to clear his name, Dilke reopened the case but was subject to a withering cross-examination from which he emerged much worse off. Virginia alleged that Dilke had introduced her to every type of French vice and even that he had introduced a serving girl into their bed. The result was that Dilke’s name became a byword for lurid sexual scandal and he became the butt of music-hall songs. Dilke lost his seat in the 1886 general election, the Queen demanded he be stripped of his membership of the Privy Council and his career as a high-flying politician was over.

What is, in a way, most striking about the whole story is that modern historians now think Dilke was actually having a long-term affair with Virginia’s mother, and it was this fact which made so many of his answers during the cross-examination evasive or contradictory – and that he knew the family in the first place because his younger brother, Ashton, was married to one of the other Crawford daughters. In other words, Dilke was accused of having an affair with his brother’s wife’s married sister, but made a hash of denying it because he was in fact having an affair with his brother’s wife’s mother! (p.142)

Parnell and the O’Shea divorce

Charles Stewart Parnell (1846 to 1891) was an Irish nationalist politician who was Leader of the Home Rule League from 1880 to 1882, then leader of its successor, the Irish Parliamentary Party, from 1882 to 1891.

It is vital to an understanding of the politics of the period to realise just how much the issue of Irish Home Rule dominated British politics from, say, 1880 right up to the outbreak of the Great War, and the fact that the bloc of 80 or so Irish MPs who sat in the House of Commons often held the balance of power. Parnell rose to become leader of this bloc and the decisive figure in Irish nationalism, the man who Gladstone and all English politicians had to negotiate with.

Parnell was at the peak of his power when, in December 1889, one of his most loyal lieutenants, Captain William O’Shea, sued his wife, Katharine O’Shea, for divorce and named Parnell as co-respondent. In fact, political society had known that O’Shea and his wife had been separated for years and that Parnell was her lover. In 1886 he moved into her home in Eltham and had three children with her (!). Political leaders knew all about the situation and accepted it; Mrs O’Shea even acted as liaison in 1885 with Gladstone during proposals for the First Home Rule Bill. However, the wider public, and the devoted members of Parnell’s Irish Parliamentary Party knew nothing.

Parnell assured his followers that he had nothing to hide and would be exonerated in the divorce proceedings, and loyal supporters, not only in Ireland but in faraway America, held meetings, passed resolutions, created posters and leaflets and bullishly supported their Chief. So it came as a devastating shock to all these people, many if not most of them devout Catholics, when the full details of Parnell’s living in sin with a married woman came out in the divorce case in November 1890. Supporters were dumbfounded and heart-broken. The Catholic hierarchy in Ireland condemned him. Gladstone, as always having to cater to the very strong nonconformist faction of the Liberal Party, was also forced to abandon Parnell as his negotiating partner.

The crunch came at a committee meeting in Whitehall where senior figures in his party tried to expel him, he refused to go, and so the majority of anti-Parnellites left to form the Irish National Federation. The bitterness of the split tore Ireland apart, set back the cause of Irish independence by decades, and resonated well into the next century (p.145).

The record from Charles Parnell to Matt Hancock shows that: a) politicians are just normal people like you and me, with messy complicated private lives, and b) how rubbish British society, or political and media society, has always been at dealing with fairly straightforward relations between the sexes i.e. how ‘scandalous’ the Press still find the crushingly banal idea of a politician having an affair. Compared to how badly they’re screwing the entire country, who cares who they’re screwing in their private lives.

Credit

Radical Joe: A life of Joseph Chamberlain by Denis Judd was published by Hamish Hamilton in 1977. All references are to the 1993 University of Wales Press paperback edition.

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by Simon on August 25, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Books, British Empire, History, imperialism, Politics

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Posted by Simon on August 25, 2023

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Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 1

‘Matters are gloomy – I never saw them gloomier.’
(Lord Salisbury in March 1885, but could have been at any time in his long life, quoted on page 318 of ‘Salisbury: Victorian Titan’)

‘The first of duties is to be pachydermatous’ (p.286)

The great thing about Tory writers is they are completely untroubled by theories, ideas or doubts. Living in a dream world of privilege and entitlement, they radiate confidence and suavity. This explains why the writings of so many Conservatives are often so clear and attractive. It explains one of the reasons why Andrew Roberts is so attracted to the hero of this huge biography – for his adamantine certainty:

Unlike so many conservative leaders before and since, Salisbury was a true, dyed-in-the-wool Tory, entirely lacking in either middle-class guilt or ideological doubt. (p.365)

Andrew Roberts is an accomplished biographer and journalist with a very strong Tory bent. He comes from the same kind of privileged, public school background as his subject (though not, admittedly, from the same kind of grand and venerable old family Salisbury came from).

Roberts attended Cranleigh public school then went on to Cambridge, where he chaired the Cambridge University Conservative Association. He has had a distinguished career as a freelance i.e. non-academic, historian, writing 19 books, including four about Winston Churchill, along with countless papers and articles. He writes regularly for the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. He lives in Knightsbridge. In 2022 he was created Baron Roberts of Belgravia by that reputable politician Boris Johnson (who has also, coincidentally, authored a book about Winston Churchill; I think everyone should write a biography of Winston Churchill, at least once in their lives) and so took his seat in the House of Lords draped in much the same ermine cloak as Lord Salisbury wore. You get the picture.

This is a blockbuster of a political biography, enormously researched and enormous sized, weighing in at 852 pages. It covers all the political issues its subject was involved in, in extraordinary detail, giving daily, sometimes hour-by-hour descriptions of changing events and opinions. And yet it is written with such tremendous clarity and verve, with such an authoritative presentation of the facts in such a logical order, presented in such beautifully lucid prose and with such amiable good humour, that the pages fly by.

Lord Salisbury

This is a blockbuster biography of Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury KG GCVO PC FRS DL (1830 to 1903), British statesman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times, for a total of over thirteen years. He was also Foreign Secretary before and during most of his tenure, holding these posts at arguably the high peak of the British Empire, 1886 to 1892 and then 1895 to 1902.

Salisbury’s forebears were the Cecils, advisers to Queen Elizabeth I, who built the imposing Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. The 7th Earl of Salisbury, politician and courtier, was raised to the marquessate, becoming the Marquis of Salisbury, by George III in 1789. (There are currently 34 marquises in Great Britain and Ireland.)

The first Marquis of Salisbury was a solid Tory, as was his son, the 2nd marquis, born in 1791, and so was his son, our hero, when he himself became the 3rd marquis on the death of his father in 1868. Cecil’s own father, the second marquis, had been a successful politician in his own right, Lord Privy Seal in 1852 and Lord President of the Council between 1858 and 1859.

Anyway, this is why Roberts refers to our hero by the family name of ‘Cecil’ in the first past of the book, up till the moment when his elder brother died, in 1865, at which point he inherited the title of Viscount Cranborne, from which point Roberts refers to him as ‘Cranborne’. When his father died in 1868 and he inherited the marquisate to become the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, from that point onwards Roberts refers to him as ‘Salisbury’.

1830 to 1865 – Cecil
1865 to 1868 – Cranborne
1868 to 1902 – Salisbury

In 1821 Cecil’s father had made a strategic marriage into the wealthy Gascoyne family, marrying Frances Mary Gascoyne, daughter of Bamber Gascoyne of Childwall Hall, Lancashire, which explains why the family name became Gascoyne-Cecil.

Lonely, sensitive and sad

Cecil’s siblings were either a lot older or younger than him, his father was away in London a lot, so he had a lonely childhood, wandering the echoing corridors of Hatfield House, his only company the house’s 40 or so servants and its vast library. He became a book addict.

Cecil was sent to Eton where he was so mercilessly bullied that he wrote his father a letter begging to be allowed home, and Roberts includes excerpts from his letters with quite harrowing accounts of being punched, kicked in the shins and spat on by older boys.

Cecil was lonely, hyper-sensitive, often depressed and his boyhood experiences made him an extreme pessimist about human nature, always ready to believe the worst, convinced that just beneath the civilised veneer lurked the savage, a belief he saw confirmed by, for example, the savage fighting of the American Civil War. ‘The optimistic view of politics assumes that there must be some remedy for every political ill,’ he wrote in 1872. But what if there isn’t?

High Tory conservatism

This extreme pessimism formed the basis of Cecil’s arch conservatism: we must hang on to what we’ve got because all change and innovation risks opening the door to democracy, which leads to nationalism, which leads to war, which leads to barbarism.

Cecil didn’t just go up to Oxford but to Oxford’s poshest college, Christ’s Church. It was the time of the Oxford Movement to restore quasi-Catholic decorations to Anglican belief and services. This attracted him because it gave the C of E a more solid foundation in the central tradition of Christianity. At Oxford he crystallised into an arch conservative in religion, domestic politics and foreign affairs. High Anglican, High Tory. He was vehemently against all forms of change or innovation, in any sphere of life; after all, he was doing just fine, so why change anything?

That said, Cecil was too sensitive to complete his degree at Oxford and so was awarded an honourable 4th. But then academic qualifications didn’t matter. Oxford had done its job of putting the finishing touches to another deep-dyed reactionary member of the English aristocracy.

Perhaps surprisingly, given that he was a lifelong bibliophile, Cecil was solidly, thumpingly philistine, in that dim conservative aristocratic way. He didn’t like contemporary fiction, he disliked theatre and ballet and had no time for art. He didn’t even like music very much. He was also notoriously scruffy and badly dressed all through his life, even on state occasions, even when meeting royalty.

All this is what makes Cecil so funny, a very amusing caricature of a huffing, disapproving old buffer. Given his family name of Gascoyne-Cecil, I wondered whether the extended family of doddery old aristocrats of the Ascoyne D’Ascoyne family in the Ealing comedy ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ were based on him.

In line with tradition, Cecil was packed off on the Grand Tour of the Mediterranean sights. But then, a little unusually, he continued on to the southern hemisphere and visited Britain’s main colonies there, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand.

Like upper-class Englishmen before and since, Cecil got on well with the ‘natives’, conceiving an admiration for the ‘Kaffirs’ in SA and the Maoris in New Zealand, liking to think that he detected in them a certain aristocratic independence and natural superiority, much like his own. Just as predictably, he complained about the ghastly, awful, vulgar middle class people he was forced to mix with on the long sea voyages between these places. He hated the Boers of South Africa who he thought crude slave-drivers, an antipathy which mattered 40 years later when he was to be Prime Minister during the Boer War.

In Australia and New Zealand he saw how white men behave when far removed from the steadying hand of England with its hierarchy of Queen, Lord lieutenants, justices of the peace etc, which was appallingly. In colonial towns like Melbourne and Sydney he saw drunkenness, prostitution, violence, and unfettered lust for gold and money. It confirmed him in his High Toryism: human nature is essentially barbarous and needs to be restrained, by order, disciple, hierarchy, an established church, monarchy etc.

Married and elected MP

Within ten weeks of returning he was ‘elected’ unopposed i.e. nominated, to the ‘pocket borough’ of Stamford (p.20).

Surprisingly, he married not for money or to make an aristocratic alliance, but for love of a middle-class woman, Georgina Alderson, much against his father’s wishes, in 1857. Cut out of the family inheritance, he turned to journalism to support his wife and growing family (he quickly had seven children) and wrote a prolific amount, mainly reviewing and articles in a wide range of publications, notably The Saturday Review. The period 1857 to 1866 (i.e. from age 27 to 36) were his Journalism Years.

The journalism years, 1857 to 1866

Roberts does a great job of showing the themes and attitudes which informed Cecil’s huge output, demonstrating his fierce satire and sarcastic opinions on everything from women’s fashion to foreign affairs (his policy was to ‘encourage supporters and anger opponents,’ p.261). He was a fierce opponent of nationalisms on the continent and prophetically warned against the rise of German nationalism; scratch the sophisticated veneer of a German professor, he wrote, and you find the same barbarism which transacted the Thirty Years War. The twentieth century was to prove him right.

Cecil was anti-slavery but supported the Confederacy against the Union in the American Civil War because of a deep dislike of Americans as a whole, and of Abraham Lincoln in particular. He thought Lincoln’s actions during the war, such as closing the free press, suspending habeas corpus and interning up to 14,000 political opponents, was exactly what you got if you let democracy run rampant i.e. tyranny.

He also thought that letting the Confederacy win would have the benefit of splitting the US into two countries, both a lot weaker and less of a rival for Britain. He also worried that if the Union won the war, it would attack Canada next.

Roberts’ descriptions of Cecil’s vehement and bigoted views makes for hilarious reading. Cecil had strong views about everything, which he expressed in often very funny satire and sarcasm. For example, he hated the Irish. While happily admitting that England had behaved terribly to the Irish for centuries and possibly even owed the Irish reparations, he still wrote waspish satire such as that Ireland ‘had given us foreign invasions, domestic rebellions, and in quieter times the manly sport of landlord shooting’ (p.53).

Having just read Paul Collier’s book, The Bottom Billion, which highlights the need for capital investment in the poorest African countries, it’s interesting to see that Cecil thought this was precisely the trouble with 19th century Ireland too, that investors didn’t want to invest because of the poor returns and, above all, the lack of security i.e. threat of violence. Interesting to think of 19th century Ireland as experiencing the same problems as 21st century Africa.

So regarding Ireland, in Salisbury’s view, if inward investment was the solution, then it was vital to establish security and the rule of law in order to attract investors; in which case, the continual agrarian unrest in Ireland had to be ruthlessly crushed.

Cecil approved of Ireland’s high migration rate and, indeed, looked forward to a time when every single Irish person had emigrated and the island could be populated with law-abiding Scots and Saxons: ‘the sooner they are gone the better’ (p.53). Mind you, he was just as scathing about the Orangemen and ‘the special fanaticism of Ulster’ which is, of course, still causing trouble one hundred and sixty years later.

Another major issue was electoral reform on which Cecil had a very blunt utilitarian view: if the working classes were given the vote they would elect radicals who would redistribute wealth via fierce taxation on the rich. So in defence of his class, and out of naked self interest, Cecil was against extending the franchise. It wasn’t that the ruling class was morally better than the plebs – he wrote plenty of satirical articles criticising the lifestyle of the Victorian rich – but that the leisure and education they enjoyed made them likely to be better, more disinterested legislators, who would act for the national good, compared to radicals who, if elected, would owe their position to pleasing i.e. bribing, the electorate, probably by levying unjust taxes on the wealthy i.e. Cecil and his class.

(Cf Richard Shannon’s excellent book, The Crisis of Imperialism 1865 to 1915, which also drums home how both conservatives and opponents believed that the 1832 settlement had produced a nice balance between the interests of the landed aristocracy, the new business-based bourgeoisie, and the skilled working class. It wasn’t extending the franchise to the lower middle classes and rest of the working class they objected to, as such (although some did), it was upsetting this delicate balance by giving too much prominence to one particular part of the population, which they thought risked toppling the country into either anarchy or demagoguery.)

Cecil also pointed to the baleful example of America where, once every four years, the entire administration ground to a halt while the political parties competed in offering bribes (tax cuts, favourable government policies) to the electorate.

Timeless issues

The appeal of reading about old politics like this is that as well as the obvious appeal of explaining how political leaders behaved as they did and so helping to explain how and why we got from there to here – it also takes you way out of your comfort zone and presents you with completely different ways of thinking about all sorts of political problems. In my opinion this is useful because closely observing how people in the past were prisoners of their age’s assumptions, their level of technological, economic and social development, sheds light on how we, in our own time, are just as much prisoners of our technological, economic and social conventions. It prompts the thought that our descendants will view us with the same curiosity, puzzlement and disgust as we view the Victorians.

And it’s always disconcerting to learn how few of those issues have really changed: electoral reform; trade reform; worrying about economic rivals; worrying about our poor standard of education; squabbles about the rights of trade unions and strikers; managing clean water and sewerage; difficulties with Ireland; small wars in Africa; instability in the Middle East; how to fend off the growing threat from Russia. Ring any bells? Plus ça change… (a phrase which was coined in 1849 and itself hasn’t changed).

Using the Saturday Review

By the time I got to the end of the book I realised a simple central fact about it which is that Roberts uses Salisbury’s early journalism as a central structuring device. The main structure of the book is straightforwardly chronological, he covers all the events in Salisbury’s career as they occur. But almost every single one of these topics or themes is introduced with a quote from a Saturday Review article which Salisbury wrote about it. Sometimes, 10, 20 or 30 years later, and now in power, his early opinion as evinced in a Review article shows the continuity of his thinking; sometimes, on the contrary, the quote from an article shows how either his thinking or the situation has changed.

But either way, Roberts uses the fact that he has clearly read and carefully annotated all of Salisbury’s early journalism as a kind of running commentary on his later career. Thus almost every incident of Cecil’s long political career is seen from two perspectives: that of the cocksure young journalist writing in humorous, general, cynical terms; and that of the older, experienced statesman, acting on experience. Two voices, two perspectives. Or a running commentary on the mature politician by the cocky young tyro.

Viscount Cranborne

In June 1865 (two months after the end of the American civil war) Cecil’s older brother died, aged just 42, and so Cecil inherited the courtesy title Viscount Cranborne, he and his wife becoming Lord and Lady Cranborne. From now on Roberts refers to him as ‘Cranborne’. From now on Cranborne enjoyed the income associated with the title and so his journalistic activities wound down, as Roberts demonstrates with a graphic statistic: before his brother’s death he wrote 589 articles for the Saturday Review; afterwards, he wrote just 19, mostly to whip up support for policies he was trying to promote.

Four months later Lord Palmerston died and the numerous competing forces in British politics which he had been holding in check were let loose. Lord Derby and Disraeli formed a joint leadership of the Conservative Party, Derby in the Lords, Dizzy in the Commons. Cranborne grew to dislike and distrust ‘Dizzy’. He was the lead figure in the attempt to water down if not cancel Disraeli’s reform bill of 1867.

In 1868 Cranborne’s father died, aged 77, and he inherited Hatfield House and all its incomes, becoming the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury and, of course, being forced out of the House of Commons and into the House of Lords.

Cecil was a surprisingly ramshackle father who let his kids run wild. They all remember a boisterous sociable happy childhood, the exact opposite of his. Lady Salisbury grew into a formidable hostess and manager of the Hatfield Estate, which employed well over 100 staff. Parliamentary colleagues nicknamed him ‘Buffalo’ because he was big (well over 6 foot), solemn and obstinate. In 1870 he built a big ugly red-brick holiday home near Dieppe on the Channel coast of France, naming it Chalet Cecil.

Victorian Prime Ministers

Lord Derby – February 1858 to June 1859 (Tory)
Lord Palmerston – June 1859 to October 1865 (Whig)
Lord John Russell – October 1865 to June 1866 (Whig)
Lord Derby – June 1866 to February 1868 (Tory)
Benjamin Disraeli – February 1868 to December 1868 (Tory)
William Gladstone – December 1868 to February 1874 (Liberal)
Benjamin Disraeli – February 1874 to April 1880 (Tory)
William Gladstone – April 1880 to June 1885 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – June 1885 to January 1886 (Conservative)
William Gladstone – February 1886 to July 1886 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – July 1886 to August 1892 (Conservative)
William Gladstone – August 1892 to March 1894 (Liberal)
Lord Rosebery – March 1894 to June 1895 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – June 1895 to July 1902 (Conservative)

Posts Salisbury held

Member of Parliament: 1853 to 1866

He never canvased to be an MP but was simply appointed one by the Earl of Exeter to a pocket borough.

Secretary of State for India: 1866 to 1867

In 1865, his older brother died, he inherited the title of Cranborne, and in 1866 Disraeli appointed him Secretary of State for India.

Salisbury was blamed for mishandling the Orissa famine of 1866, a disaster which affected the east coast of India from Madras northwards. At least a million Indians died, roughly one third of the population of the area. New to his brief, Salisbury believed his officials and experts who said it wasn’t serious, until it was too late, leaving him with a lifelong suspicion of experts. It made him quick off the mark and insistent on spending whatever it took to save lives in later Indian famines. The scale of the disaster made educated Indians realise maybe Britain wasn’t the all-powerful protector she pretended to be. The famine was one among many triggers for Indian nationalism.

Fear, awe and respect

Salisbury thought Britain’s rule over India was achieved by psychological means. There was no way 250,000 (mostly native) troops could hold down 250 million people if they chose to rebel against them. Earlier India officials such as Macauley had recommended that a select number of upper class Indians be educated, in English, up to western standards, in order to become intermediaries between western and Indian culture. Salisbury was sceptical about even this colonial, patronising idea, in fact he thought it was catastrophic since it just produced a class of ‘seditious article writers’. He thought India was vital to Britain’s prestige in the world i.e. vis-a-vis the other powers, and must be kept down by ‘fear, awe and respect for the law’ (p.139).

As Secretary of State for India, where British resources depended to a large degree on prestige rather than actual resources employed, Salisbury…was one of the first people to appreciate quite the extent to which militarily the British Empire was a gigantic bluff. (p.178)

And, criticising the more enlightened policies of Gladstone’s Liberals, Cecil declared in a speech that:

‘They will not learn that these tribes, these vast uncivilised multitudes, are not governed merely by the sword. They are governed by the imagination. They are governed by their fears.’ (p.293)

As Roberts summarises:

He stood out against the Whig ethos propagated by Macauley and others that Britain’s duty was simply to prepare Indians for eventual self-government. In Salisbury’s view, India was a prize that should remain Britain’s until it was forcible wrested from her. (p.216)

The 1867 Reform Act

The big issue was electoral reform in which Disraeli dished i.e. scuppered the Whigs. Salisbury made himself a master of electoral statistics and predicted reform would eliminate support for Tories. Salisbury made a big speech attacking Disraeli for rubbishing the Whig bill in 1866 then introducing one which was even more radical in 1867. Disraeli calculated that the newly enfranchised middle classes would be grateful to the Tories. Salisbury had done the math and said they wouldn’t and they weren’t. In fact he was fanatical about research, and always read everything he could get his hands on about whatever issue was at hand, electoral reform in 1867, and then again in 1885, being classic examples.

In opposition: 1868 to 1874

Gladstone’s Liberals won the 1868 election and were in government for 6 long years which they devoted to reforming all aspects of British law and society

Cranborne’s father died and he inherited the title of Lord Salisbury, the big house at Hatfield and a seat in the House of Lords. Roberts describes the ecclesiastical and political issues around his election as Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the core of high Anglican high Toryism.

Roberts also has a passage describing Salisbury’s unexpected interest in new technology. He was an early adopter of electricity and built a laboratory at Hatfield House where he carried out quite serious experiments about light. Cecil had a surprisingly scientific openness, for example he refused to be drawn into attacking Darwin after the ‘Origin of Species’ was published.

Secretary of State for India: 1874 to 1878

Queen Victorian wished to be awarded the title Empress of India was sharpened when a newly united Germany, after its victory over France, declared itself an empire in 1871, so there as a danger that her daughter, Vicky, who had married the Crown Prince of Prussia, would take precedence over her, a mere queen. Also the Tsar made a state visit to Britain in 1874 after the marriage of his daughter to the Duke of Edinburgh. In other words, everyone else was, or was becoming, an emperor – why not her?

The delicate handling of the issue, for British public opinion, abroad, and, of course, in India itself, are covered by Robert with typical thoroughness. He describes the great hou-ha that was held across India on the declaration on New Year’s Day 1877 (p.215).

The extremely complicated manoeuvring during the crisis triggered by uprisings against Ottoman rule in Bulgaria and Serbia in the summer of 1876. The Turks crushed the Bulgarians with great brutality, sending in mercenaries (the notorious bashi-bazouks) who were allowed to rape, pillage and murder at will. Gladstone publicised all this with his famous pamphlet of September 1876, ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East’.

You have to understand that this was all caught up in the long-term consequences of the Crimean War. The Crimean War had been fought to prevent Russia’s extension of its influence into the Balkans i.e. further into Europe, at the expense of the Ottomans. The Treaty of Paris which concluded it pledged the allies i.e. France and Britain, to come to the support of the Ottomans.

The point of a detailed account like Roberts’ is to take you right into the Cabinet of the Prime Minister of the day, Disraeli, and describe in very great detail the different positions of the 12 men who comprised it. And this issue split them up into half a dozen factions as the crisis dragged on and a host of different responses, political, diplomatic and military all emerged.

Basically, some of the Cabinet thought the Ottoman Empire was irrevocably doomed to collapse and so we should never have pledged to prop it up. This led to the view that the Crimean War should have never been fought and was a colossal mistake. But this didn’t mean we supported Russia and its restless aims for expansion. Some supported Russia but opposed any expansion of its territory or power. Some thought we should continue to prop up ‘the sick man of Europe’. Some trod a middle way, trying to find a formula to support the Christians in the Balkans – the Bulgarians and Serbs – without insulting the Turks and without allowing undue Russian influence. Some went to an extreme and thought the European powers should partition the Ottoman Empire and civil servants in European capitals began drawing up suggestions for who would get where.3

Queen Victoria was a confirmed Russophobe. I was startled to learn that she threatened to abdicate no fewer than five times through the course of the crisis, leading Salisbury to speculate privately about her sanity (p.174). Disraeli had made it his policy to suck up to Her Majesty, maybe because it was good politics to have the monarch behind you, maybe because he saw it as his duty as ‘a minister of the Crown’, maybe because he liked sucking up.

Foremost in everyone’s minds was how to keep the route to India, the jewel in the British Crown, open and secure, but there were multiple answers to this problem: the most extreme was letting Russia invade and conquer through Bulgaria and down into Ottoman territory until she, possibly, took Constantinople and restored it as an Eastern orthodox Christian capital, as Russian extremists wanted to. In that case, some Cabinet members were for a) pre-emptively seizing Constantinople ourselves or b) sending an Expeditionary force to seize the Dardanelles i.e. the gateway from the Black Sea. The point of this would be to prevent the Russian fleet from freely passing through it and staking a claim in the Eastern Mediterranean. A simpler route would be to annex Egypt, thus securing the south east Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. The rearguard position was continuing to prop up the sick man – and our power and influence in the region – hoping something would come along.

The enormous pleasure of a book like Roberts’s is that he takes you right into the detail of this complex chess game, in which everyone – not just Russians, Ottomans, and neighbours like Austria – had multiple points of views and proposals, but even within the British cabinet there were multiple beliefs and strategies and that these kept changing and evolving as the situation changed.

Thus Salisbury was chosen to attend the Constantinople Conference (December 1876 to January 1877) to try and sort out the crisis, very usefully meeting the heads of all the important states en route (including huge, coarse, very clever Count von Bismarck), but Roberts shows in great detail how his ostensible aim of securing peace between Turkey and Russia was secretly sabotaged by Disraeli and his ally Lord Derby who, along with the Queen, loathed Russia, but couldn’t be seen to be supporting the perpetrators of the atrocities. Roberts’ suggests that Disraeli’s reputation for two-faced slipperiness was well deserved.

Anyway, the peace conference failed and so Salisbury’s mission failed, but many commentators in the press realised that he had been set up to fail by his boss. It was a hugely useful experience of the realities of power and diplomacy for a man who was to become Foreign Secretary then Prime Minister.

And so war between Russia and Turkey broke out, lasting from April 1877 to Match 1878, with Russia recruiting Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro to her side. Russia won. Her army fought all the way to the gates of Constantinople at which point the western powers intervened again.

In victory Russia reclaimed provinces in the Caucasus but more importantly, the principalities of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro formally proclaimed their independence from the Ottoman Empire and, after almost five centuries of Ottoman domination, the Principality of Bulgaria emerged as a free nation.

So there’s one layer of pleasure to this narrative, which is watching the drama of high politics play out like an episode of House of Cards. But there’s a huge additional pleasure deriving from Salisbury’s Eeyorish character, always pessimistically convinced of the worse – ‘Things that have been secure for centuries are secure no longer,’ (p.274) – a doom-laden attitude which very often converts into hilariously satirical attitudes and observations. Roberts cites from Salisbury’s letters and dispatches countless examples of ironic reversals and witty sarcasms, a permanent attitude of ‘amused cynicism’ (p.215).

His unexpected juxtapositions aren’t on the level of Oscar Wilde’s deliberate paradoxes, but indicate the taste for aristocratic humour which characterised the age:

‘General Ignatiev is an amusing man without much regard for truth and an inordinate vanity which our Embassy takes every opportunity of wounding.’ (p.159)

Salisbury was an inveterate phrase-maker’ (p.247). Epigrams came naturally to him:

‘No one is fit to be trusted with a secret who is not prepared, if necessary, to tell an untruth to defend it.’ (p.194

Good government avoids one of the causes of hate; but it does not inspire love.’ (p.214)

And ran in the family. Salisbury’s daughter, Maud, accompanied him on his journey across Europe to Turkey, and kept a diary. Roberts cites her being told by beaming Ottoman officials that they were travelling on had been built by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, to which she politely enquired whether anyone had mended it since.

Beaconsfieldism

In 1876 Queen Victorian rewarded Disraeli for his ~~toadying~~ services to the nation, by making him Earl of Beaconsfield. From this point onwards contemporaries, and Roberts, refer to him as ‘Beaconsfield’.

From 1878 to 1880 the leading opponent of the Tories, William Gladstone, gave a series of speeches as he campaigned to win the parliamentary seat of Midlothian in Scotland. There were 6 very long speeches and over twenty shorter ones, addressed to halls full of thousands of voters, which harped on four main themes. He charged Disraeli’s administration with: financial incompetence, neglect of domestic legislation, and mismanagement of foreign affairs. In particular he charged Disraeli with a strategy of distracting public opinion from the economic and financial problems of Britain by means of foreign adventures. Gladstone gave the name Beaconsfieldism to ‘the immoral, bullying acquisition of territory almost for its own sake’ (p.212). One Tory critic defined it as: ‘occupy, fortify, grab and brag’ (p.227).

Foreign Secretary: 1878 to 1880

As mentioned above the recurring concerns of Britain in foreign affairs were: continual wars, unrest and Russian threat in the Balkans; management of Egypt and her southern extension, Sudan; management of South Africa and fractious relations with the Boers and the irritating little states like the Transvaal which kept being claimed or created with resulting tribal wars where we had to decide where we stood. And above all else, the running sore of Ireland.

Russo-Turkish War (April 1877 to March 1878)
Second Afghan War (November 1878 to September 1880)
First Zulu War (January to July 1879)
Egypt

Congress of Berlin

Roberts gives an intricate account of the multi-layered diplomacy which brought an end to the at the Congress of Berlin, June to July 1878, for which he was rewarded by the Queen with the Order of the Garter (as was with Disraeli).

Afghanistan

Many in the Foreign Office panicked about Russian intentions in Afghanistan i.e. it was placing diplomats there with a view to infiltrating/overthrowing the Amir, with a view to eventually invading India. Salisbury was sceptical about this talk of Russia attacking. He believed that the expansion of the Russian empire, or ‘the Russian avalanche’ as he called it, was unstoppable but was moving east across central Asia.

‘If it keeps north of the Hindu Kush it may submerge one caste of Muslim robbers after another without disturbing our repose.’ (p.145)

The Afghan war was the fault of Lord Lytton, the viceroy of India. Lytton’s despatches had become steadily more hysterical and Salisbury predicted to a cabinet colleague that he expected him [Lytton] would no conduct operations ‘so as to achieve the most brilliant results – lose the greatest number of men – and spend the largest amount of money’ (p.221).

Sure enough Lytton disobeyed instructions to disengage and sent a British force to force the Amir to accept a British representative at his court, which was defeated at the Khyber Pass. This forced Salisbury’s hand because he believed Britain must be seen to be strong.

The Battle of Maiwand

The war included the Battle of Maiwand on 27 July 1880 when Afghan forces under Ayub Khan defeated an admittedly smaller British force consisting of two brigades of British and Indian troops under Brigadier-General George Burrows, some 969 of whom were killed.

The point of mentioning this is that when British forces were dispatched to south Afghanistan in 2006 their bases in Helmand Province turned out not to be very far from the site of the battle and they discovered that local Afghan leaders and fighters still remembered it as a great patriotic victory over the infidel invader. The moral being that we, the British, have forgotten or never even knew most of our imperial history whereas, for scores of nations which we fought and conquered, our violent interventions are very much part of their national story.

The Anglo-Zulu War

From Wikipedia:

Following the passing of the British North America Act of 1867 forming a federation in Canada [Salisbury’s friend and ally in Disraeli’s cabinet] Lord Carnarvon thought that a similar political effort, coupled with military campaigns, might succeed with the African Kingdoms, tribal areas and Boer republics in South Africa. In 1874, Sir Bartle Frere was sent to South Africa as British High Commissioner to effect such plans. Among the obstacles were the armed independent states of the South African Republic and the Kingdom of Zululand. Frere, on his own initiative, sent a provocative ultimatum on 11 December 1878 to the Zulu king Cetshwayo and upon its rejection sent Lord Chelmsford to invade Zululand. The war is notable for several particularly bloody battles, including an opening victory of the Zulu at the Battle of Isandlwana, followed by the defence of Rorke’s Drift by a small British force from attack by a large Zulu force. The British eventually won the war, ending Zulu dominance of the region.

Salisbury in several places rages against the way the men on the spot, politicians or viceroys or diplomats or sometimes buccaneering businessmen like Cecil Rhodes, were forever stirring up trouble and starting conflicts which the government back in London then had no option to follow through. It was true of both the Afghan and Zulu wars where the same ends might have been achieved through diplomacy, trade and deals.

Roberts tells how Salisbury couldn’t understand why the Queen was so keen to allow the son of the exiled French Emperor Napoleon III (who had sought refuge in Chislehurst in Kent) Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, to accompany British forces, but she insisted. He was promptly killed on 1 June 1879 by Zulus who stripped his corpse, all except for one blue sock bearing the initial N from which he was identified.

Egypt

Salisbury wanted to exercise ‘informal empire’ over Egypt not officially annex it. In theory Egypt was run by a Khedive appointed by the Ottoman Sultan. In practice, in return for propping up the Sultan and broadly supporting him against the Russians, Britain was allowed to interfere in Egypt. Apart from anything else Britain had huge sums invested in the Suez Canal and associated businesses. When the stroppy Khedive Ismail Pasha threw out British representatives, Salisbury had the British ambassador to Istanbul ask the Sultan to oust him in favour of his son, Tewfik Pasha, who would be more pliable. A few weeks later Salisbury wrote with typical dour cynicism to a colleague:

‘The only form of control we have is that which is called moral influence, which in practice is a combination of nonsense, objuration and worry.’ (p.229)

I had to look up ‘objuration’. It means ‘a firm binding by oath’. Salisbury’s cynicism is deliberately witty but it’s also bullshit, isn’t it? We also had a massive army (in India a truly huge army), the Royal Navy (which bombarded Alexandria and docked at Istanbul to threaten the Sultan with their guns), and various instruments of financial control through the City of London. A lot more tangible than ‘nonsense, objuration and worry.’

British troops used Egypt as a base to head south to defeat the forces of the Mahdi in what is now the Sudan. Despite all Salisbury and other British politicians’ insistence that the occupation of Egypt was purely temporary, it was, of course, strategic and long term, designed to secure the Suez Canal and the route to India (p.343). British troops didn’t leave Egypt until 1956, leaving a deep legacy of suspicion and resentment.

Tory defeat in 1880

The Tories were surprised at the scale of the landslide which turned them out in the 1880 election: Liberals 352, Tories 237, Irish Home Rule MPs 60 (p.238). Beaconsfield was ill, he had looked tired at the Conference of Berlin, had fluffed his lines and missed sessions due to chronic asthma (p.203).

Leader of the Opposition: 1881 to 1885

Salisbury took up some of his old hobbies including experimenting with electricity and collecting seaweed. Beaconsfield continued as Tory leader until his death in April 1881.

The Liberal Party had only been founded in 1859 as a coalition of anti-Tory forces. As the number of Radical Liberal MPs increased, it alienated the other wing of the party, the landed aristocratic Whig faction (p.244). In opposition, one of Salisbury’s cunning plans was to subtly egg on Gladstone’s radicalism, specially regarding Irish Home Rule and electoral reform, in order to inflame the Radicals’ expectations and rhetoric and so scare the landowning Whigs that they would come over to the Tories. There’s huge amounts of that kind of Machiavellian scheming in this book.

Electoral reform

The big issue at the end of Gladstone’s ministry was electoral reform. Eventually he passed two acts, the Representation of the People Act 1884 (known informally as the Third Reform Act) and the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885. Both were passed by the Liberal House of Commons but strongly resisted in the House of Lords led by Salisbury. This was for the simple reason that both acts tended to favour the Liberal, Whig and Radical interest at the expense of the aristocracy.

For the first time Britain was divided into 670 constituencies of roughly equal size, each returning just one Member of Parliament (previously many constituencies had returned two MPs, who tended to be one Liberal and one Tory, who didn’t even bother campaigning against each other. In other two-member constituencies the fractured Liberal Party had handed one to a Whig and one to a Radical. Salisbury cannily calculated that forcing them to choose one or the other would drive wedges between the two factions.

A lot more constituencies were created in cities, but Roberts shows that Salisbury, with characteristic thoroughness, had done intensive research into British psephology and correctly guessed that although some of these cities might turn Liberal or Radical, a lot of Britain’s big cities now had extensive suburbs and the inhabitants of these were just as scared of working class radicalism as the aristocracy (p.306). This was referred to ‘villa Toryism’ and came to be seen as a legacy of Disraeli.

A small symbol of this was the establishment in October 1882 of the periodical the National Review, designed to produce intelligent journalism for these middle-class Tories.

‘Caretaker’ prime minister: 1885 to 1886

Roberts chronicles the extraordinary manoeuvrings which surrounded Salisbury’s first spell as Prime Minister. In February the Liberals were defeated in an amendment to a bill and Gladstone immediately resigned. But the organisation required by the new Reform Act had not yet been put in place and wouldn’t be until the end of the year so, if he accepted power, Salisbury was faced with the unappetising prospect of being Prime Minister of a minority government for 6 months which was just long enough to make numerous mistakes and, at the next election, be unceremoniously chucked out. It’s fascinating to read the long maze of negotiations this led to, centrally getting Gladstone to agree to pass various nuts and bolts laws and acts which needed to go through. Gladstone had done the same thing to Disraeli in 1874; Salisbury had watched and learned.

There were two other problems. Salisbury wasn’t a shoe-in for Prime Minister. He sat in the House of Lords whereas the leader in the Commons throughout the period in opposition had been Sir Stafford Northcote, 1st Baronet [Eton]. Northcote expected the job but was widely seen to be too weak and lacking drive whereas Salisbury (as we’ve seen) enjoyed nothing more than making swingeing attacks on his enemies.

The second problem was Winston Churchill’s father, the radical and unreliable Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill (Eton). Randolph had set himself up with a cohort of followers on the Radical wing of the Conservative Party the leaders of which came to be referred to as ‘the Fourth Party’ (Churchill, Henry Drummond Wolff, John Gorst and Arthur Balfour). He promoted something called ‘Tory democracy’, that the Tories should accept the 1885 Reform Act, and the rise of the working class which lay behind it, but ensure the boundaries and details were drawn up to their advantage. A flashy update of Disraeli’s ‘One Nation Conservatism’. He created the National Union of the Conservative Party, created to ‘organise propaganda to attract working men’s votes, registration, choose candidates and conduct elections’, had many followers but refused to serve in Salisbury’s cabinet unless various demands were met.

Salisbury’s juggling of all these issues, trying to square various circles, makes for fascinating reading, insight into the real, smoke-filled rooms nature of actual party politics, more like a soap opera or school playground, with gangs and threats and changing alliances, than anything to do with principles, let alone serving the country.

Salisbury only finally accepted the job when Queen Victoria shed tears and pleaded with him. It was called a ‘caretaker’ government. He was 55. Lord Northcote was gutted but rewarded by being made Earl of Iddlesleigh and packed off to the Lords. Apparently, this is the origin of the expression, being ‘kicked upstairs’.

It is impossible to take the honours system seriously when you see titles like this being used with the utmost cynicism as rewards for mediocrity or being a big donor to party funds or simply to shut people up and get them out of the way. The people these made-up ‘titles’ get handed out to are generally lapdogs, the superannuated or inconvenient mediocrities who need to be shut up. That the givers or takers of these ‘honours’ then get on their hind legs and spout about ‘honour’ and ‘tradition’ and all the rest of it is risible, pathetic: see the way Boris Johnson simply rewarded key allies with peerages, damehoods and knighthoods. Dame Priti Patel. Or Liz Truss’s ‘honours’ list which even the Daily Telegraph described as ‘shameless’.

IRELAND

Salisbury was as solid as a rock against any form of home rule or national assembly for Ireland, because:

the 1800 Act of Union was a bulwark of property rights, law and order
it would be a slippery slope, the first step on an irresistible drive towards independence
as the first and nearest colony of Great Britain, giving Ireland any measure of home rule would immediately trigger calls for the same from every other colony in the empire, especially India (cf pages 574, 587)
it would mean abandoning the minority of the population of Ireland who were active supporters of the Union i.e. mostly in Ulster
on a moral level, it would be an ignoble surrender to the forces of violence (what was later called terrorism) i.e. the continual low-level agrarian protests and occasional murders all across Ireland
losing our prime colony would undermine Britain’s prestige in the world, make us look less powerful, and also
an independent Ireland led by people who hate us would become a serious security threat, even a starting point for invasion by enemy powers (as it had been for the French during the Revolutionary Wars)
a neutral or hostile Ireland would threaten Britain’s ability to import food in time of war (p.587)

Ireland quotes:

‘Are we to cut our country in two and, in the smaller portion, are we to abandon a minority of our own blood and religion to the power of their ancient enemies, in spite of their bitter protests against the debasing and ruinous servitude to which we propose to leave them?’ (p.586)

There was also rabid anti-Catholicism. Salisbury wasn’t just an Anglican, he was a fierce insister on the rights and perquisites of the Church of England in all its aspects. There was, therefore, a strong element of religious bigotry in his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland. It’s not just in the last few years that politicians have come up with superficial trivialising jingles: it was about this time that ‘Home Rule means Rome Rule’ began to be repeated by the lighter minded Conservatives and chanted at meetings and conferences (p.380).

But Roberts gives the game away, on the same page, about Ireland and the whole imperial ethos, by telling us that the very First Earl of Salisbury had been instrumental in the wholesale CONFISCATION of land in Armagh, Cavan, Derry, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone between 1607 and 1609 and selling it in lots roughly the size of parishes to Scottish and City businessmen for settlement. He makes it crystal clear that the Protestant English stole the land from its rightful owners, then distributed it according to English law and from that point onwards, for the next 400 years, insisted it was a bulwark of English law when it was plain for any bystander to see that English law was, in that case, just a form of organised thieving, looting, imperial confiscation.

To then turn around and claim that this act of grand larceny, the organised theft of an entire nation’s patrimony, represented the epitome of ‘law and order’ and defending the theft amounted to ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’ (p.276):

Hartington looked upon the Irish Question primarily as one of defending property and landowning rights. (p.367)

is either to lie to yourself or be guilty of ridiculous hypocrisy. Ask any Irish historian what they think of English ‘honour’ and ‘legality’.

Roberts’ long account of the lengthy manoeuvrings about Home Rule is interrupted for a brief mention of how the British ‘formally annexed’ Upper Burma. The king of Burma, King Theebaw, was negotiating a convention with France but Salisbury was having none of that – Burma had little or no value in itself but might be a useful conduit to western China, and the French certainly weren’t going to have it! — so he sent a force of 9,000 troops who smashed the Burmese army, overthrew the king and put him in prison, installing a friendly Buddhist in power.

Invading foreign countries, overthrowing their traditional rulers, making them subservient to British rule. Only a special kind of mental perversion could talk about this in the same breath as ‘preserving law and order’ and ‘the inviolable rights of property’ and ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’, let alone think that ‘Britain’s greatest contribution to civilisation and mankind [was her] empire’ (p.370).

The violent overthrows, the coups, the imposition of rule by military force, the suppression of opposition voices, were all carried out to defend British strategic and business interests. The fact that they were dressed up in fancy rhetoric was what prompted continental observers like the French or Germans to routinely accuse the British of stunning hypocrisy.

Anti-democracy

It’s worth exploring the thinking behind Salisbury’s opposition to expanding the franchise. Basically he thought liberty was based on a) property and b) tradition and c) the law which upheld them. Only people with property have an interested in the existing system. Give the vote to people who have no property and their opinions will be wild and unpredictable, harmful to tradition, security, property etc. It would be mob rule, unjust, arbitrary and destructive. This is why he often referred to ‘the tyranny of numbers’. Just because a majority of the voters vote for something doesn’t make it right.

If you start from the position that property is the bedrock of liberty, then it follows that all attacks on property are, to the same extent, attacks on liberty. Thus Salisbury put a wide variety of reforms, such as extending the franchise or a graduated death duties, under the heading Attacks on Property which, in Salisbury’s mind, was synonymous with Attacks on Liberty.

It’s a coherent and logical position, but one which doesn’t take account of poverty. Its twinning of liberty with property, the more the better, gives no representation, voice or opinion to the large number of people who have little or no property: should they have no say in the running of the country? No, according to Tories of Salisbury’s stripe.

This was because he had nightmares that enfranchising the working classes and the poor would encourage in them, or demagogues, a wish to overthrow the aristocracy and take the money and property of everyone better off than themselves. He had a lifelong fascination with, and horror of, the French Revolution, not only read books on the subject but amassed a collection of pamphlets and ephemera, often some up from Paris bookshops and second-hand stalls (p.541). The conclusion he drew from it was that it was the fault of weak-willed liberals who set off with the best of intentions but broke down the constitutional checks and restraints and so opened the door to Terror and tyranny. That’s how he viewed the Liberals of his day: as well-intentioned but weak-willed types who, by attacking ‘privilege’ and ‘property’, threatened to sweep away restraint and open the door to anarchy.

Ironically, however, the actual result of electoral reform was virtually the opposite: as a result of the 1884 Reform Act, during the 1890s Salisbury began to worry that the effect of widening the franchise would not be revolution but the opposite, the triumph of super-patriotic Jingoism which, with his incurable pessimism, he regarded as almost as bad.

Salisbury sayings

‘The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.’ (p.173)

When a member of his own party objected to the way bits of other countries were traded like counters at the Berlin Conference, Salisbury robustly replied:

that if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British Empire would not have been made.’ (p.185)

Comedy

At the Conference of Berlin in the summer of 1878 it was very hot. At the Kaiser’s residence in Potsdam there were mosquitoes, but at Berlin there were ‘minor powers. I don’t know which is worse.’ (p.201).

Of the army hero and adventurer Colonel Frederick Burnaby, who had undertaken a 1,000 mile midwinter expedition across Central Asia, he wrote: ‘I cannot see any reason for interfering with the natural right of a Briton to get his throat cut when and where he likes,’ (p.218). (Burnaby was subsequently killed in hand-to-hand fighting against followers of the Mahdi at the Battle of Abu Klea, 16 January 1885.)

When, at the time of the Congress of Berlin, an Admiral Hornby demanded that preparations for war with Russia be stepped up, Salisbury wrote to a cabinet colleague that:

‘If Hornby is a cool-headed, fearless, sagacious man, he ought to bring an action for libel against his epistolary style.’ (p.192)

At a tricky point of negotiations with Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Salisbury wrote to the British Ambassador at the Sublime Porte, Sir Austen Henry Layard, that they might get their way in small matters with the Sultan but at the risk of inflaming his Muslim people and risking revolution, which was ‘rather like burning down a house to procure roast pork.’ (p.237).

‘To those who have found breakfast with difficulty and do not know where to find dinner, intricate questions of politics are a matter of comparatively secondary interest.’ (p.250)

In 1889 the Shah of Persia, Nasr-el-Din, visited England for a month. When he was taken to see a model modern prison, he asked to see a gallows in action. On being told that no-one was due to be hanged that day he offered one of his own entourage (p.543).

Of the Daily Mail Salisbury quipped that Alfred Harmsworth had:

‘invented a paper for those who could read but not think’ (p.668)

He liked to say that bishops came in two mutually exclusive categories: those who were fit to be made bishops but unwilling, and those who were willing but unfit. A lot of bishops died and needed to be replaced during his premiership, he appointed 38 new bishops, more than any other Prime Minister before or since. He joked: ‘They die to spite me’ (p.676).

Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1895 to 1902 was so appalled by the rapidly escalating cost of the (second) Boer War that he repeatedly threatened to resign from the cabinet. So many times in fact, that Salisbury joked that he had a special drawer in his desk just for Hicks Beach’s resignation letters (p.744).

Balfour said of his uncle that he certainly believed that all men are equal, ‘by which he means, equally incompetent’ (p.746).

When the Liberal politician John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley, attacked the dire management of the Boer War, Salisbury replied that:

‘A more gloomy collection of lugubrious vaticinations I never heard.’ (p.755)

In 1896 Victoria asked Salisbury to promote Lord Waldegrave from being a Lord in Waiting to the Yeoman of the Guard, because as a Lord he was constantly in her presence and she found him simply too ugly to look at (p.794).

Roberts says that Salisbury’s wit was the equal of Disraeli’s but different in kind, relying on ‘high irony rather than mere paradox’ (p.849). Discuss.

Roberts the fanboy

Roberts loves his hero:

Protecting the Royal Family from embarrassment, whether it be political in Berlin, financial over the Royal Grants, sexual over disappointed mistresses, or even highly tangential, as over the Cleveland Street Scandal, Salisbury simply saw as part of the duties of the premiership, and he carried them out impeccably. (p.561)

This is not the tone of an objective historian but of an impassioned fan. Robert devotes pages 336 to 338 to citing witnesses to Salisbury’s sense of fun, his dry humour and cynical wit:

Just as he could not write a boring sentence, so Salisbury was also incapable of uttering a commonplace or canting remark. Lord Rosebery [Eton] once wrote that reading old political speeches was as dull as drinking decanted champagne. Salisbury’s extra brut speeches are the exception, and of a vintage that is still effervescent. (p.208)

Roberts himself often mimics or echoes Salisbury’s drollness:

Sultans of Turkey lived on the grand scale, some compensation for their occasional short life expectancy. (p.161) [E.g. Midhat Pasha was dismissed as Grand Vizier during the Russo-Turkish War, banished to Baghdad and eventually strangled.]

They both have that lofty Tory irony, that droll detachment and amused good humour, which makes the book so readable.

Conclusion to part one

This is a magnificent biography, huge, compendious but written with a tremendous lightness of touch and good humour throughout, echoing the ethos of its subject who portrayed himself as a gruff old Tory but, as his letters and speeches reveal, was a lifelong humorist. It is an absolute goldmine of insights into every aspect of British domestic and foreign policy for the 35 years when Britain reached the peak of its economic and imperial might, 1867 to 1902. It is massively enjoyable on every level.

But none of this should blind us to the fact that Salisbury was the enemy. He was the rooted opposition to everything progressive that was attempted through the period. He stood for a level of privilege and entitlement that almost no one nowadays can conceive, an almost incomprehensibly dedication to the life-or-death importance of hierarchy, the aristocracy, the Church of England. Like all conservatives and authoritarians he thought that if any of this was tampered with it would open the floodgates to anarchy. Thus he resisted every move to give Ireland more home rule because he saw it as threatening a wider collapse:

He saw the [Home Rule] campaign in Ireland as merely the precursor for a general class struggle over the rights of property. (p.258)

Of course it didn’t. Trying to hang onto this world of privilege in the face of changing technologies, social norms and culture, in the increasingly embittered clinging onto India, in the embittered clinging on to Ulster, in the embittered fight against electoral reform (all leading to the climactic struggle between Tories and Liberals in 1911), it was these rearguard positions which nearly led to anarchy.

Above all, he held positions of power during the height of empire and openly admitted it was based on threat and intimidation. In Roberts’s view: ‘Salisbury believed implicitly in the politics of prestige and revenge’ (p.247).

The single biggest conundrum is how he managed to reconcile the windy rhetoric of his speeches about ‘the highest interests of Empire’ and ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’ (p.276) (cf Ireland p.351) with the acid cynicism of his private papers and correspondence, which bluntly state that we had to hang onto India and Ireland by whatever means possible because they’re what made Britain ‘great’.

You know the cliché ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’? Well, every time you read a Victorian politician talking about ‘honour’ you can be sure it’s high-sounding cover for either he and his class clinging onto their wealth and privileges or, in an international context, for the British clinging on to countries they acquired by force, with no right or law or ‘honour’ involved in either.

Roberts’ central argument is that Salisbury kept the peace between jostling European Powers for a generation by his foresight and intelligence and diplomacy. This is all true and yet we know that the sweeping changes across all aspects of society which he held back for so long were inevitably going to come about, and it could be argued that, by delaying them for so long, Salisbury made the process of managing them when they became unavoidable (votes for women, rights for workers, Irish independence) much more violent and painful than they need have been if they had been addressed more sympathetically and much earlier.

Credit

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts was published in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1999. References are to the 2000 Phoenix paperback edition.

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 7. James II and the Glorious Revolution

Because King Charles II died in February 1685 without a son and heir – without, in fact, any legitimate children from his marriage to Catherine of Braganza – the throne passed automatically to his brother, James Duke of York, who ascended the throne as King James II.

Catholic

James was a professed Roman Catholic and a zealous reformer. He wished to lift the multiple legal restrictions which had been placed on his fellow Catholics and, as a balancing gesture, to lift legal constraints on the Puritans and non-conforming Protestant sects. However, within three short years he managed to alienate almost every party and profession in the country, and especially the powerful Whig politicians.

The seven bishops

The crisis came to a head over two big issues. First James made the error of trying seven Anglican bishops for seditious libel. To be precise, in April 1688, encouraged by the Quaker leader William Penn with whom he had struck up an unlikely friendship, James re-issued the Declaration of Indulgence first promulgated by his brother, and ordered Anglican clergy to read it in their churches.

When seven Bishops, including the Archbishop of Canterbury, submitted a petition asking the king to reconsider this request, they were arrested and tried for seditious libel, the trial taking place in June 1688. This looked like a full-frontal attack on the Church of England which was, by now, central to almost everybody’s concept of the English political system.

A Catholic son

Secondly, his Catholic wife, Mary of Modena, who he had married in 1673, bore him a Catholic son and heir, James Francis Edward, on 10 June 1688. Now, when James’s only possible successors had been his own two Protestant daughters – Mary and Anne – from his first marriage to Anne Hyde (who had died in in 1671) most Anglicans could put up with James’s pro-Catholic policies in the belief that they were a temporary aberration from what was essentially a Protestant succession. But the young prince’s birth at a stroke made it seem likely that Britain would become a Catholic dynasty and that the unpopular religious policies James was ramming through would become permanent. All kinds of former loyalists began to think again.

The supposititious child

And so did the people. Rumours quickly spread about the baby, irrational sometimes hysterical rumours, the most lurid of which was that the baby proclaimed as the Prince of Wales hadn’t been born to Mary of Modena. The rumour went that the royal couple’s actual baby had been stillborn and so a new baby was smuggled into the Palace in a warming pan, purely to satisfy Jame’s dynastic ambitions. It doesn’t make sense, but it can be seen as a fairly simple piece of wish fulfilment: people just didn’t want it to be true that James had sired a Catholic heir.

Prince William

Channels of communication between English Parliamentarians and nobles who opposed James and the solidly Protestant William, Prince of Orange (a state of the Netherlands) had been open since the 1670s. William was in fact the grandson of Charles I, being the son of Charles’s daughter, Mary and so, before the birth of the baby, had been third in line to the throne. And he had himself married his cousin, James II’s daughter by from his first marriage, another Mary who – until the baby was born – had herself been first in line to the throne. In other words William had close blood ties twice over to the English ruling family. James II was his father-in-law.

For these reasons Protestant William’s position as a possible successor to Charles II, instead of Catholic James, had been widely canvased among Whig politicians during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81. In the event the crown passed peacefully in 1685 to James but, as he alienated more and more sectors of British society, William’s name began to reappear in political conversations – not as a direct replacement, but maybe as some kind of regent or protector, nobody was quite sure what.

William the defender

What Kishlansky’s account brings out is that William was totally aware of all these developments in England and their implications for him. And not just for himself, but for his country. Since he turned of age William had played a key role in the Netherlands’ ongoing resistance to King Louis XIV of France’s ambitions to seize its territory. From the Exclusion Crisis onwards he was alert to the possibility that England, with its great wealth, its army and its powerful navy, might, in some form, come under his control. But how? What form would it take?

Thus William had well-placed spies and ambassadors in London who not only kept him informed of events but acted as propagandists for his cause, promoting him as a defender of Protestantism and traditional English liberties against the Francophile, Catholic James.

The Immortal Seven

All these tendencies crystallised in the sending of a letter to William, on 30 June 1688, jointly signed by a group of seven Protestant nobles and clerics which invited the Prince of Orange to come to England with an army. In fact William and the dissidents had been discussing what constitutional or legal forms could be used to justify his invasion since April the previous year. The letter of invitation wasn’t a spontaneous gesture but a carefully calculated contrivance agreed by both sides.

The letter

The letter asked William, who was a nephew and son-in-law of James II, to use military intervention to force the king to make his eldest daughter, Mary, William’s Protestant wife, his heir. The letter alleged that the newborn prince was an impostor. The letter told William that if he landed in England with a small army, the signatories and their allies would rise up and support him. The Invitation reprised the grievances against King James and repeated the widely held claim that the king’s son was ‘supposititious’ (the technical term for fraudulently substituted). The letter then went on to give advice about the logistics of the proposed landing of troops.

The courier

It was symbolic of the widespread disaffection throughout the English military and navy that the message was carried to William in The Hague not by a spy or diplomat but by Rear-Admiral Arthur Herbert (the later Lord Torrington) disguised as a common sailor, and identified by a secret code. It was also importantly symbolic that the seven signatories (who became known as ‘the Immortal Seven’) were not all dyed-in-the-wool opponents: five were Whigs, but two were Tories, traditionally the party of the Court.

Louis offers help

By September it had become clear that William planned to accept the invitation and to ‘invade’ England. Louis XIV could see this, too, and he offered James French support, but James a) thought his own army would suffice b) didn’t want to become even more unpopular by inviting French Catholic troops onto English soil. He also c) couldn’t believe that his own daughter, Mary, would conspire against him.

Defections

What he hadn’t anticipated was that when William did finally arrive with his Dutch army, landing at Brixham in Devon on 5 November 1688, many Protestant officers would defect from his army and join William, as did James’s younger, unmarried daughter, Anne.

James runs away

James had joined his army in Salisbury preparatory to marching south-west to engage William who had made his base at Exeter but, as key commanders and their troops defected, he lost his nerve and took horse back to London. On 11 December James tried to flee to France, first throwing the Great Seal of the Realm into the River Thames. He was captured by local fishermen in Kent hunting for just such fleeing Catholic priests and officials, but released and placed under Dutch protective guard. But William didn’t want to try or officially dethrone James, that would cause all kinds of complications and remind everyone of the execution of Charles I – it was much more convenient to occupy a throne which had been vacated – in other words to create the convenient fiction that James had abdicated of his own free will.

And so William let James escape on 23 December and take ship to France, where he was received by his cousin and ally, Louis XIV, who offered him a palace and a pension.

James’s Catholic crusade

What Kishlansky’s relatively brief chapter on James’s reign brings out, that I’d forgotten, is the astonishing speed and thoroughness with which James tried to recatholicise England.

The Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion

In 1685, soon after Charles’s death, James’s opponents in exile conceived a large-scale invasion of Britain, with a landing in Scotland to raise Protestants who had suffered under the Stuarts, and one in the West Country. The Scottish rising under the Earl of Argyll failed to materialise but Charles II’s oldest and most charismatic son, James Duke of Monmouth, landed in the West Country and raised a large army which gathered support as it marched towards Bristol. James dispatched an army to the West of England which massacred the rebel army at the Battle of Sedgmoor on 6 July 1685. But what Kishlansky emphasises is that James ensured that as many officers as possible in the winning army were Catholics.

It’s a stock A-level history question to ask why the English establishment and army gave James their full support when he crushed the Monmouth rebellion in the summer of 1685 and yet just three years later, abandoned him in droves and let him be overthrown?

Recatholicising policies

The answer is simple. In the summer of 1685 the nation as a whole didn’t yet know what to expect from James, but three short years later, they had learned the scale and thoroughness of his Catholicising ambitions. Just some among James’s many recatholicising policies include that he:

allowed the creation of Catholic seminaries in London, sent a message to the pope and supported newly-established Catholic presses in London and Oxford
set priests to convert his leading ministers and daughter Anne and sent one to convert Mary in the Netherlands
replaced half the royal judges with Catholics
appointed four Catholics to the Privy Council and composed an inner council including his Jesuit confessor
this council set about trying to retire JPs across the land and replace them with Catholics
Catholic officers were drafted into the militia and into the standing army
the two universities had Catholic officials imposed on them and when the fellows of Magdelen College Oxford refused to accept a Catholic warden, he had them all sacked and replaced with Catholics
he sent the Catholic Tyrconnell to be lieutenant-general of the Irish army and he immediately set about purging the army of Protestants; hundreds of Protestant gentry fled
insisted the bishops restrain anti-Catholic preaching by vicars under their charge, and set up a commission to charge Anglican officials who didn’t carry this out

All this by the end of 1686. In 1687:

London was stripped of Anglican aldermen, militia captains and members of livery companies
all Lords Lieutenant were issued three questions to ask potential JPs which required the latter to support repeal of the Test Acts

The Dissenters do not rally to James

Throughout his aggressive recatholicisation, James had hoped that the many Dissenters and Non-conformists who had been persecuted under Charles’s long reign would welcome change and religious toleration. But they didn’t. The Dissenters James was counting on to help him remained largely silent. He underestimated the strength of their enmity to Catholicism, with its devotion to a foreign pope and its overtones of political absolutism.

The Anglicans are tired of James

James also took it for granted that his Anglican subjects would passively obey him, and so they did, to begin with… but ultimately he miscalculated the extent of their tolerance, building up reservoirs of opposition at every level of the political system.

James tries to engineer a supportive Parliament

Then, in November 1687, the public learned that Mary of Modena was pregnant. James redoubled efforts to set up a compliant parliament by sending commissioners to check the loyalist character of its electors around the country. More Tories were put out of their seats and replaced with Catholics or dissenters. He used whatever expedients he and his ministers could devise to ensure the selection of a parliament compliant to the recatholicising project.

The Declaration of Indulgence

So it was against this background that James reissued the Declaration of Indulgence and ordered it to be read in every Anglican pulpit, that the seven bishops petitioned for this order to reconsidered and James, a man in a tearing hurry, had them tried for seditious libel, an extraordinary proceeding. They were acquitted by a London jury.

Considered in this much detail, it’s hard to see James’s policy as anything other than a thorough and concerted attack on the Church of England and Anglican belief at every single level of society.

William the defender

Meanwhile, Kishlansky goes into just as much detail about William of Orange’s position and aims. William, born in 1650, was a Protestant prodigy whose sole aim in life was to protect the Netherlands from the France of Louis XIV. Ever since he had married James II’s daughter, Mary, in 1677, England had played a part in his diplomatic calculations, and Dutch ambassadors and propagandists had been at work for some time presenting himself as a friend, and possibly saviour, of Protestant England.

William’s awareness

He had watched the political crises at the end of Charles II’s reign, the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis, with a canny eye, looking for his best advantage. Thus, as he saw James’s government set about alienating everyone in England and important factions in Ireland and Scotland, William was constantly aware of its impact on him and his wife, and on her and his succession to the throne.

The geopolitical threat

The birth of the Prince of Wales not only pushed him and his wife further down the order of succession, it helped to crystallise the real geopolitical threat the Low Countries faced. Louis XIV was again making belligerent noises and informed sources expected him to make a renewed attack on the Netherlands in 1689. Like his brother before him, James was a confirmed Francophile and was actually on the payroll of Louis XIV, who was subsidising his government.

Thus the situation for William was one of cold political realities: he needed to neutralise England by any means necessary in order to avoid an attack not just by France, but France in alliance with England.

William had been in touch for some time with opponents of James’s regime in England who had developed a network of dissidents and gauged the extent of opposition, not just in political circles but, crucially, in the army and navy – and the birth of the Prince of Wales triggered action on both sides.

William suggests the letter

It was William who actively asked the seven leading British political figures to write him a letter and suggesting the subject, making it an invitation to him to come and investigate a) the circumstances of the birth of James’s son and heir and b) to protect English liberties.

Even so it took four long months for William to mount an amphibious landing on England’s shores, and this period was long enough for James to discover what was being planned.

James suddenly reverses direction

In Kishlansky’s account it is almost comic the way that James, suddenly realising how many people he had alienated, set out on a charm offensive to rebuild his reputation. He suddenly announced that no Catholics would be allowed to sit in the upcoming parliament. He restored the bishop he had suspended and abolished the hated Commission for Ecclesiastical Causes. He restored all the Anglican fellows he’s sacked from Magdelen College. He abrogated all the charters on cities and boroughs since 1679, which had the effect of reinstating Tory Anglican mayors, aldermen and councillors. In the counties Tory lords lieutenant and JPs were reinstated.

William of Orange’s declaration

It was too late. In October William published a declaration in which he announced he planned to come to England in order to preserve and maintain the established laws, liberties and customs’ of the nation. Another plank of William’s strategy was to be claiming to defend the hereditary rights of his wife, Mary, as one in line to the throne, by investigating the alleged ‘supposititious’ birth of the Prince of Wales. In other words, his declaration carefully laid out a suite of arguments designed to appeal to Tories and traditionalists.

William’s invasion fleet

William assembled a huge invasion fleet, 500 ships carrying 20,000 of his best soldiers and 5,000 horses. He warned supporters to expect him on the North or West but let himself be guided by the wind which carried him down the Channel (and kept the English fleet in harbour) making landfall at Brixham in Devon on 5 November, an auspicious day for Protestants. It took two weeks to disembark his army which he marched to Exeter.

James’s army

On 17 November James left London for Salisbury where his own army was encamped. On paper he commanded 25,000 men and could expect local militias to supply at least as many again. On paper, it looked like things were heading towards an epic battle to decide the future of England. But there was no battle.

James panics

As soon as he arrived at Salisbury, James’s nerve broke. He suffered from insomnia and nosebleeds. He decided his army wasn’t large enough. Two of his most senior commanders defected. On 23 November he returned to London to discover his other daughter, Anne, had deserted him and gone to the Midlands, where insurgents for William had already taken major towns. His advisers told him to call a parliament and send envoys for peace and to ‘pardon’ William.

Negotiations

On the short wet December days the envoys struggled to make William an offer. William’s Whig advisers weren’t, in fact, that keen for a parliament to be called since they needed to time to assure their support around the country. While these negotiations were stuttering forward, all sides were astonished by the news that James had fled London. His last acts were to officially disband his army, destroy the writs required to summon a Parliament, then he threw the Great Seal into the Thames i.e. James did everything he could to sabotage the machinery of government.

Anti-Catholic riots

When Londoners learned James had fled there was an outbreak of anti-Catholic violence with rioters attacking and burning Catholic chapels. And it was now that James, in disguise, was captured by local fishermen in Kent hunting for just such fleeing Catholic priests and officials. After he was recognised, James returned to London where at least some of the crowd cheered his arrival.

William orders James to leave

William had begun his march on London and he and his supporters were stymied by this sudden reversal in the situation. After pondering all the alternatives, William sent an order to James to vacate the capital within ten hours, and an escort of Dutch guards to assist him to do so and to accompany him to Rochester.

Second time lucky

The great mystery in all of this is why James didn’t stand his ground and rally whatever patriots he could find against what was clearly a foreign invasion. But he didn’t. He meekly went along with the Dutch guard who were given instructions to let him slip away at the first opportunity and now, for the second time, James made an escape to the Kent coast, and this time successfully took ship to France.

What do we do now?

At this point the situation became humorous with the kind of comedy we find in the history of human affairs again and again, because – Nobody knew what to do. The Tories would certainly not have welcomed William’s invasion if they had thought of it as such, as a conquest by a foreign prince. The Whigs were William’s natural supporters but were themselves divided, some saying William should place Mary on the throne, convene a Parliament to ratify her succession, and then retire to become merely a king-consort. The more full-blooded Whigs wanted William as king. The leading figure of the day, Lord Halifax, pithily summed up the confusion:

‘As nobody knew what to do with him, so nobody knew what to do without him.’
(quoted on page 283)

The Convention Parliament

When he arrived in London, William summoned the Lords Temporal and Lords Spiritual to assemble, and they were joined by the privy councillors on 12 December 1688. On 26 December they were joined by the surviving MPs from Charles’s last Parliament, the one he held in Oxford (none from James’s tainted Catholic Parliaments). This assembly in turn summoned the Convention Parliament, consisting of Lords and Commoners, which recommended setting up of a ‘Convention’ to decide a way forward, which was formally opened on 22 January 1689.

The key fact was that nobody wanted civil war or the outbreak of rebellion in either Scotland or Ireland. The solution had to be fast. And so it was that the knottiest problem in English history was solved by the Convention Parliament in just two weeks!

Lords and Tories

In the House of Lords some, especially the bishops, wanted a simple restoration of James, the rightful king. Other Tories suggested that William and Mary might rule as ‘regents’ until the death of James II, and then Mary would reign as rightful queen thereafter. William, Mary and Anne all let it be known that they opposed this option, the two women deferring to the male monarch.

Whigs

In the House of Commons, Whigs put forward a formula that James had abrogated the contract between a sovereign and his people by abdicating. But 1) the notion that monarchy rested on some kind of voluntary contract between sovereign and people was unprecedented and revolutionary in implication, and 2) it was far from clear that James had, in fact, abdicated. He had been ordered to leave.

Moreover 3) the whole point of a hereditary monarchy is that the throne is never vacant: the moment one monarch dies, his or her heir succeeds. Even if James had abdicated, then his son the Prince of Wales automatically became the rightful heir – but nobody at all wanted rule by a baby (referred to by many of the debaters as ‘the brat’, according to Kishlansky). And 4. the notion that abdication created a sort of vacuum which had to be sorted out by the people implied another revolutionary idea – that the people in some sense elected their monarch. An elective monarchy.

Reluctant acceptance

Nobody wanted to explicitly say this, as it made a mockery of the fixed hierarchical principles on which the whole of English society rested. But nonetheless, this notion of an agreement by the people to choose a sovereign was the formula which was eventually accepted for the simple reason that the alternative – that the king had been overthrown by an armed invasion – was worse. That idea would legitimise the violent overthrow of the rightful monarch and take everyone back to the constitutional chaos of the 1640s.

Arguments

The differing arguments were played out in disagreement between the Commons, which accepted the new reality, and the Lords who held out for significant rewording the Act agreed by the Commons. The deadlock dragged on for days until William, always a busy man, threatened to go back to Holland and leave the English with a broken country.

The Lords capitulated and both Houses passed an Act declaring William and Mary joint King and Queen of Britain.

The Declaration of Rights

While the politicians had been arguing, the nation’s top lawyers had been drafting a Declaration of Rights. Like the Act, the Declaration had to be very careful in its language, ambiguous at a number of key moments in order not to alienate the different groupings of Whigs and Tories.

A compromise

Like many other constitutional documents (the Magna Carta or the American Constitution) The Declaration of Rights was less a bold statement of timeless principles than a fix-up designed to be acceptable to the largest number of the political nation. As it progressed through drafts, it evolved into a ringing restatement of old and existing laws and liberties, sweeping away James’s innovations, but not proposing anything new.

Even then, the situation called for equivocation. If William had been forced to agree to the Declaration, he would have become in effect an elected monarch and the monarchy and elective monarchy – something which was anathema to most of the bishops and lords and Tories throughout the land.

A tricky coronation

William’s coronation had to be accompanied by the Declaration but not dependent on it. Hence the peculiar fact that at William’s more-elaborate-than-usual coronation on 11 April 1689, the Declaration was read out before William was crowned, and he referred to it in the speech after his coronation as embodying the principles for which he had entered the country – but it was carefully made clear that his crowning was in no way dependent on accepting the Declaration. And no-one mentioned abdication or contracts or elective monarchies or anything like that. Shhh.

Muddling through

Once again the English had managed their way through a massive constitutional crisis on the basis not of logical principles, but of fudging and mudging, of masking ambiguity and unclarity in robes and orbs and high ceremonial. Was it a triumph of enlightened constitutional principles, or of English pragmatism, or of barely concealed hypocrisy?

However you interpret it, what came to be called ‘the Glorious Revolution’ certainly solved one immediate and pressing problem, but laid up a whole series of longer-term challenges for the future.

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by Simon on September 4, 2020 • Permalink

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Posted by Simon on September 4, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/09/04/a-monarchy-transformed-mark-kishlansky-7-james-ii/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 6. The restoration of Charles II

Introduction
Timeline of the Restoration
- 1659
- 1660
The reign of Charles II, the 1660s
Timeline of the 1660s
The reign of Charles II, the 1670s
The reign of Charles II, the Popish Plot and after
- Whigs and Tories
Death of Charles II

Introduction to the restoration of Charles II

When Oliver Cromwell died on 3 September 1658 there was no immediate sense that the Commonwealth would collapse and the king be restored. Rule passed smoothly to Oliver’s son, Richard – but things quickly started to unravel.

Cromwell’s rule had never reconciled the ever-increasing number of conflicting constituencies or parties or groups within not only England, but the other kingdoms of Scotland and Ireland. His rule rested ultimately on his control of the army, and the loyalty to him of (most) of the army generals. From this secure base he made attempts throughout the Protectorate, 1653-58, to reach out to:

in religion, episcopalians, moderate Anglicans, Presbyterians and independents
in politics, to moderate Royalists, to republicans and to the revolutionaries who had denounced his regime after the regicide
in Scotland and Ireland to moderate leaders prepared to accept his authority and work with him

These two central elements a) military authority and b) the intricate skein of negotiated settlements with all these constituencies, often based on personal acquaintance – vanished with his death.

The actual sequence of constitutional, parliamentary and political events following Cromwell’s death are extremely complex, but a high-level summary is that the general in Cromwell’s army tasked with running Scotland, General Monck, got in touch with representatives of the king and offered his services to broker a restoration.

Monck’s main concern was the material demands of the army:

there was to be a general pardon for actions carried out under orders
arrears of pay were to be fully met
titles to former Crown and Church lands bought during the Interregnum were to be confirmed
religious toleration for moderate sectarians was to be guaranteed

Charles and his advisers prepared a conciliatory declaration that offered a free pardon and amnesty to everyone who would swear loyalty to the Crown within forty day of the King’s return. However, Charles was canny enough to avoid the main points of contention, saying he’d put them off to be agreed by the first Parliament elected.

The result of these negotiations was the Declaration of Breda, signed by Charles on 4 April 1660, Breda being a town in the southern part of the Netherlands, where Charles had relocated for the negotiations.

Copies of the Declaration were sent to the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the army, the fleet and the City of London. A new Parliament had been elected in April 1660, and when Sir John Grenville delivered the Declaration to it on 1 May, both Houses unanimously voted for the Restoration.

Timeline of the Restoration

The timeline below gives some sense of the confusion and potential anarchy which spread after Richard Cromwell was forced to abdicate and then nobody knew what was happening or what to expect.

1659

May 7 – Richard Cromwell forced by the Council of Officers to reinstate the Rump Parliament.
May 24 – Resignation of Richard Cromwell after Parliament refuses to recognise the Protectorate.
June 7 – Parliament commissions Charles Fleetwood commander-in-chief of the armies in England and Scotland but retains the power to appoint or promote officers.
July 3 – Viscount Mordaunt arrives in England to co-ordinate a general Royalist insurrection.
August 5-19 – Booth’s Uprising: Royalist revolt in Cheshire, suppressed by Colonel John Lambert.
September – Officers of Lambert’s army meet at Derby and draw up a petition setting out their demands for the government of the nation.
September 22-3 – Parliament forbids any further petitioning by soldiers. Sir Arthur Hesilrige calls for Lambert’s arrest.
October 12 – Parliament revokes the commissions of Lambert and eight other senior officers.
October 13 – Lambert’s troops occupy Westminster and prevent Parliament from sitting.
October 15 – The Council of Officers appoints a ten-member Committee of Safety to consider how to carry on the government.
October 20 – General Monck sends a declaration from Scotland demanding the return of Parliament.
October 25 – The Council of State dissolved; the Committee of Safety re-appointed by Army leaders.
November 3 – Lambert marches north from London with 12,000 troops to block Monck’s route into England.
November 12 – Monck’s representatives arrive in London for talks with the Council of Officers.
November 24 – Former members of the Council of State appoint Monck commander of all military units in England and Scotland and empower him to take military action against the enemies of Parliament if necessary.
December 3 – Sir Arthur Hesilrige secures Portsmouth for Parliament.
December 5 – Riots in London for the return of Parliament.
December 8 – Monck crosses the border and establishes his headquarters at Coldstream.
December 14 – Vice-Admiral John Lawson sails for the Thames, threatening to blockade London in support of Parliament.
December 26 – Fleetwood forced to recall the Rump Parliament.

1660

January 1 – General Monck marches from Coldstream for London.
January 9 – Sir Henry Vane expelled from Parliament for having sided with the military junta.
January 11 – Lord Fairfax meets Monck at York and urges him to restore the Monarchy.
February 3 – Monck’s army arrives in London.
February 9 – Parliament orders Monck to remove the City gates and portcullises after citizens of London demand the reinstatement of Presbyterian MPs purged in 1648.
February 11 – Monck demands the re-admission of the purged MPs and apologises for his actions in removing the City gates.
February 21 – The Long Parliament restored: surviving MPs purged in 1648 re-admitted to Parliament under Monck’s protection.
March 5 – John Lambert imprisoned in the Tower of London.
March 16 – The Long Parliament calls free elections and votes for its own dissolution.
April 10 – Lambert escapes from the Tower and tries to rally resistance to the Restoration.
April 22 – Lambert and his followers defeated at Daventry; Lambert returned to London as a prisoner.
April 25 – The Convention Parliament assembles.
May 1 – Charles II’s manifesto the Declaration of Breda read in Parliament.
May 8 – The Convention Parliament declares Charles II to have been King since 30th January 1649.
May 14 – Parliament orders the arrest of all surviving regicides.
May 25 – Charles II lands at Dover.
May 29 – Charles II makes a triumphal entry into London.

The reign of Charles II, the 1660s

Charles’s reign breaks up into a number of periods and is dominated by a few key themes.

First, was how to deal with the legacy of the Civil War. Charles was in favour of forgiveness and tried to steer the first Parliament of his reign, the Convention Parliament, in that direction. However, the second Parliament, which came to be known as the Cavalier Parliament, not to mention the newly restored House of Lords, contained many who had suffered severely, lost land and family to the Roundheads. They were determined to push the clock back, to recover their lost land and money, to savagely punish all those responsible for the wars and the regicide, and to re-establish a rigid conformity in religion.

Convention Parliament

The Convention Parliament sat until the end of 1660. It was responsible for implementing the terms for the initial Restoration settlement under which Charles II established his administration.

The Convention passed the Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion, which was intended to reunite the nation under the restored monarchy by pardoning the majority of those who had opposed the Crown during the civil wars and Interregnum. It also undertook the task of disbanding the army which had underpinned the Commonwealth and Protectorate régimes. First steps were taken towards settling disputes over lands which had been sold off during the Interregnum, and initial legislation to provide revenue for the restored monarchy was set out. Charles dissolved the Convention Parliament on 29 December 1660.

The Clarendon Code

The Restoration religious settlement comprised four acts of Parliament known collectively as the Clarendon Code. The name derived from Sir Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, who served as Charles II’s lord chancellor – though Clarendon was not the chief instigator of the acts and even argued against some of the more severe aspects.

The Corporation Act (1661)

This required all office holders in towns and cities to take oaths of allegiance to the Crown, to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant and to take the sacrament in accordance with the doctrines of the Church of England.

The Act of Uniformity (1662)

This brought all ordained clergymen under the doctrines and liturgy of the established Church. Candidates for the ministry had to be ordained by a bishop according to the rites of the Church of England. They were required to renounce the Solemn League and Covenant and to declare their acceptance of the revised Book of Common Prayer and all doctrinal articles sanctioned by the Church. Hundreds of Presbyterian and non-conformist clergymen were expelled from their livings on St Bartholomew’s Day (24 August) 1662 for refusing to comply with the Act of Uniformity.

The Conventicle Act (1664)

This was intended to prevent clergymen ejected by the Act of Uniformity from forming their own congregations. Fines or imprisonment were imposed on anyone attending an independent prayer meeting or act of worship (a so-called ‘conventicle) that was not in accordance with the Anglican liturgy.

The Five-Mile Act (1665)

This was intended to curb the influence of dissenting clergymen by prohibiting them from residing within five miles of any living they had held before the Act was passed. Furthermore, they were required to take an oath of non-resistance to royal authority before accepting any appointment as tutor or schoolmaster.

Money

Once again a Stuart king let himself become poor, spending a fortune on the two stupid Dutch wars and frittering it away on mistresses and favourites at home.

A timeline of the 1660s

1661 Corporation Act – aimed at Presbyterians, the Act provided that no person could be legally elected to any office relating to the government of a city or corporation, unless he had within the previous twelve months received the sacrament of ‘the Lord’s Supper’ according to the rites of the Church of England. He was also commanded to take the Oaths of Allegiance and the Oath of Supremacy, to swear belief in the Doctrine of Passive Obedience, and to renounce the Covenant.
1662 Act of Uniformity compels Puritans to accept the doctrines of the Church of England or leave the church.
1662 Royal Society for the improvement of science founded

Catherine of Braganza

Charles married Catherine of the Portuguese royal house of Braganza. He married her for money but her dowry was quickly spent and then Britain found itself drawn into Portugal’s war against Spain. And, crucially, Catherine turned out to be ‘barren’ or incapable of conceiving children. Charles wasn’t. He was to acknowledge fatherhood of eighteen bastards (the most famous being the Duke of Monmouth, born as early as 1649, when Charles himself was only 19).

The lack of a male heir from the Braganza marriage meant the throne would pass to his brother James who was an overt Catholic i.e. more or less condemned the Stuart line to come to an end. As with Henry VIII, the infertility of a royal marriage was to have seismic consequences for the British.

1664 England seizes the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam, changing its name to New York.
1665 Outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War
1665 The Great Plague strikes London and over 60,000 die.
1666 The Great Fire of London rages for four days and three nights. Two thirds of central London is destroyed and 65,000 are left homeless

1667 As part of The Second Dutch War A Dutch fleet sails up the River Medway captures the English flagship The Royal Charles and sinks three other great ships. This humiliation provided Charles with a pretext to blame and thus get rid of the Earl of Clarendon, the statesman who had guided and mentored him in exile and dominated the first seven years of his rule.

Fall of Clarendon

Clarendon was replaced by a set of five statesmen or advisers who come to be known as The Cabal and held power from 1668 to 1674.

The Cabal

The linchpin of the Cabal was probably George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Although he only held the household office of Master of the Horse, with responsibility for overseeing the King’s travel arrangements, Buckingham was a long and close associate of King Charles II. They had practically been raised together since they were children, during the close association of their fathers, Charles I and the first Duke of Buckingham, a relationship they consciously compared themselves to in adulthood, and might have replicated, had the younger Buckingham possessed the skills of his father. Nonetheless, Buckingham was in constant contact and a clear favourite of the king, and the centre of the Cabal’s grip on power. Gilbert Burnet, who knew some of its members personally, said that Buckingham stood apart from the rest of the Cabal, hating them and being hated in return.

The Lord High Treasurer Wriothesley having died just before Clarendon’s departure, the Treasury came under the nominal chairmanship of George Monck (Duke of Albermarle). But as Monck was practically retired from public life, control of the Treasury commission was taken up by Sir Thomas Clifford (Comptroller and soon Treasurer of the Household) and Anthony Ashley Cooper (Chancellor of the Exchequer). With the assistance of their close associates John Duncombe (Ashley’s deputy at the Exchequer), Stephen Fox (the Paymaster of the Forces) and Sir George Downing, the secretary to the Treasury commission, Clifford and Ashley overhauled the monarchical finances, placing them in a much more solvent state than before.

Foreign affairs was directed by Henry Bennet, Earl of Arlington (Secretary of the South), with occasional assistance from George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. (Although foreign affairs were notionally in the purview of the Secretary of the North, the Cabal bullied Sir William Morice into selling the seat to Sir John Trevor, and then sidelined the latter.)

John Maitland, Earl of Lauderdale (Secretary of State for Scotland) had already consolidated his position in 1663 by securing the dismissal of his principal rival, John Middleton (Lord High Commissioner to the Parliament of Scotland) and his replacement by the more pliable John Leslie, Earl of Rothes. In 1669, Lauderdale went one step further, and got Leslie dismissed and the Lord High Commissioner position for himself, consolidating his hold and ruling Scotland as a virtual autocrat for the remainder of his career.

Sir Orlando Bridgeman, the Royalist lawyer who had prosecuted the Regicides, and who took over Clarendon’s duties as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal in 1667, was outside of this inner circle, although cooperated with their goals.

Despite their comparative energy and efficiency, the Cabal was a fractious and unpopular group. Although perceived as a secretive and unsavoury junta, they rarely formed a united front, and their internal quarrels often spilled over into the public arena.

J. P. Kenyon suggests that the King actually encouraged the Cabal members to quarrel, in the belief that this made them easier to control. They in turn, never trusted him not to bring them down as he had brought down Clarendon, and as Kenyon remarks, they hardly dared turn their backs on him for fear of sudden dismissal.

It was said that the King treated his ministers very much as he did his mistresses: ‘He used them, but he was not in love with them, and was tied to them no more than they to him, which implies sufficient liberty on either side’.

Sir William Coventry, the Secretary to the Admiralty, resigned from office following a duel challenge from the Duke of Buckingham, and re-emerged in the House of Commons at the head of a group of MPs known as the ‘Country Party’, which loudly opposed the Cabal and its policies.

Charles II acceded to the Cabal’s recommendation to prorogue parliament repeatedly, keeping it out of session for as long as he could, and leaving the Cabal to run the country on their own. When he found himself in financial difficulties following the Great Stop of the Exchequer in 1672 and the outbreak of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, Charles was obliged to re-convene parliament in 1673 and the parliamentarians were bent on revenge.

Fall of the Cabal

The Cabal began to split in 1672, particularly over the autocratic nature of the King’s Royal Declaration of Indulgence, the financing of the Third Anglo-Dutch War, and Britain’s relationship with France.

Personal rivalries and a conflict over foreign policy between Buckingham and Arlington escalated. The Ministry became very unpopular. The public saw them as ‘untrustworthy, venal and self-seeking, their eyes always on the main chance”.

Towards the end of the year, Ashley, now the Earl of Shaftesbury, became Lord Chancellor, leaving Treasury matters to Clifford and the Exchequer to Duncombe. He pressed publicly for greater reform of government, taking the side of the Opposition against his colleagues and the King.

Clifford resigned over the in-fighting and retired from public life: as an open Roman Catholic he would in any case have been debarred by the Test Act of 1673 from holding office in the future. Shaftesbury was replaced by Viscount Osborne, soon to become Earl of Danby, in the summer of 1673, on the recommendation of Buckingham and Clifford.

Danby immediately established his authority over the remaining members of the Cabal. Buckingham’s feud with Arlington saw him leak the details of the Treaty of Dover and fall from favour in 1674. Arlington survived as Southern Secretary until September of that year. Lauderdale retained his position and his relatively autonomous power in Scotland, becoming an enemy of Shaftesbury.

Shaftesbury began to agitate against Charles and his brother, the Duke of York, later James II. He briefly returned to government in the Privy Council Ministry and took a lead in forming the partisan group that would eventually become known as the Whigs.

Reign of Charles II – the 1670s

1670 – Charles signs the secret Treaty of Dover, by which Charles agrees to declare himself a Catholic, suspend penal laws against Catholics in England in return for secret subsidies from Louis XIV of France.
1670 – Second Conventicle Act
1670 – Hudson Bay Company founded in North America

1672 – Charles issues the Declaration of Indulgence, allowing dissenters and Catholics to practice their religion in private
1672 – Outbreak of the Third Dutch War as part of the secret treaty with France, the French invading the Spanish Netherlands while the British fleet engaged the Dutch fleet. The Dutch defeated the British fleet at Sole Bay and repelled a land invasion by France by flooding their dykes.
1672 James Duke of York’s wife, Anne Hyde (daughter of the disgraced Earl of Clarendon) died in childbirth, having delivered him two daughters, Mary (b.1662) and Anne, both of whom were brought up as Protestants. Who suspected, then, that they would both reign as queens of England?

1673 – James, Duke of York remarried, taking as his second wife Mary of Modena, a Catholic who was only four years older than his daughter, Mary. James came out publicly as a Catholic which caused a scandal.

1673 – When Charles allowed the Cavalier Parliament to sit again in 1673, it was inflamed by rumours of Charles’s deals with the King of France and Catholic influence in British statecraft, and so the vengeful Anglicans passed a Test Act which required everybody holding public office to take Anglican communion and swear an oath against a belief in transubstantiation – that the wafer of bread and the wine administered during communion actually and literally become the blood of Christ, a central premise of Roman Catholicism. In other words, the Act was expressly designed to keep Roman Catholics out of political office. The Catholic Treasurer Lord Clifford resigned his office then took his life. Charles’s brother, James Duke of York, resigned as High Admiral of the Navy.

In 1677 the Earl of Danby, who had emerged as Charles’s most capable minister, persuaded both Charles and James to let him make a strategic alliance by marrying James’s daughter Mary to her cousin, the Protestant Stadtholder of Holland, William III of Orange. William was the son of the King’s late sister, Mary, Princess Royal, and thus fourth in the line of succession after James, Mary, and Ann. When James told Mary that she was to marry her cousin, ‘she wept all that afternoon and all the following day’. She was 15.

Reign of Charles II – the Popish Plot and after

1678 – The fantasist Titus Oates concocted the Popish Plot, the notion of a complex, far-reaching plot to murder Charles and convert Britain to a Catholic dictatorship. His initial claims were passed up the chain of command to Charles himself who handed them to Danby to investigate, and with each telling they became more fantastic and baroque. They played into the sense that Britain was being sold into Catholic influence which had haunted the 1670s, what with James’s overt Catholicism, his marriage to a Catholic princess, with Charles repeatedly allying with Catholic France against the Protestant Dutch. Oates’s fabrications helped create a McCarthy witch-hunt atmosphere. Even when he accused the Queen of being a member of the plot to assassinate her own husband, he was widely believed.

A second Test Act (1678) was passed which excluded all known Catholics from both Houses of Parliament. Known Catholics were ordered to leave London and many Protestants in the city openly carried weapons to defend themselves against the impending Catholic ‘onslaught’. Shops in London were boarded up, chains were stretched across major roadways, ferry passengers were detained for questioning, a fleet of lesser crooks and narks emerged to inform on their neighbours and rivals. Some twenty-four utterly innocent people were tried and executed, while Oates was awarded rooms in Whitehall and a pension.

The hysteria lasted from 1678 to 1681. A new Parliament was elected in March 1679 which presented a bill seeking to prevent the succession of the Catholic James. Charles worked on numerous fronts to address concerns, taking opponents into his Privy Council, sending James out of the kingdom, being prepared to sign a bill limiting the power of a Catholic monarch. But he would not concede the right to determine the royal succession to Parliament and so he dissolved this Parliament and called a second one. The second Parliament of 1679 was called amid mounting hysteria and opposition was orchestrated by the Earl of Shaftesbury amid press campaigns and petitions.

The coalition of allies which Shaftesbury put together around this central anti-Catholic approach was arguably the first political party in Britain and became known as the Whigs. The king’s supporters quickly copied the new organisational tactics of the Whigs and began to be known as the Tories. Charles refused to let the second Parliament sit, proroguing it seven times over the course of a year. Whig propagandists played on fears of Catholic tyranny; Tories revived memories of 1641 and the way a Parliament trying to seize the king’s prerogatives had led to 20 years of chaos.

Whigs and Tories

The term Whig was originally short for whiggamor, a term meaning ‘cattle driver’ used to describe western Scots who came to Leith for corn. In the reign of Charles I the term was used during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms to refer derisively to a radical faction of the Scottish Covenanters who called themselves the Kirk Party (see the Whiggamore Raid). It was then applied to Scottish Presbyterian rebels who were against the King’s Episcopalian order in Scotland.

The term Whig entered English political discourse during the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1678–1681 when there was controversy about whether or not King Charles II’s brother, James, should be allowed to succeed to the throne on Charles’s death. Whig was a term of abuse applied to those who wanted to exclude James on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic. The fervent Tory Samuel Johnson often joked that ‘the first Whig was the Devil’.

In his six-volume history of England, David Hume wrote:

The court party reproached their antagonists with their affinity to the fanatical conventiclers in Scotland, who were known by the name of Whigs: The country party found a resemblance between the courtiers and the popish banditti in Ireland, to whom the appellation of Tory was affixed. And after this manner, these foolish terms of reproach came into public and general use; and even at present seem not nearer their end than when they were first invented

In response, King Charles prorogued Parliament and then dissolved it, but the subsequent elections in August and September saw the Whigs’ strength increase. This new parliament did not meet for thirteen months but when it did in October 1680, an Exclusion Bill was introduced and passed in the Commons without major resistance, but Charles was in attendance when it was rejected in the Lords and Charles dissolved Parliament in January 1681.

As Mark Kishlansky summarises, ‘the governing class was now irredeemably divided.’

The next attempt at a Parliament met in March at Oxford, but when it also determined on the Exclusion Bill, Charles dissolved it after only a few days. He then he made an appeal to the country against the Whigs and ruled for the rest of his reign without Parliament.

In February, Charles had made a deal with the French King Louis XIV, who promised to support him against the Whigs. Without Parliament, the Whigs gradually crumbled, mainly due to government repression following the discovery of the Rye House Plot, which directly implicated many of them.

1683 The Rye House Plot a conspiracy to kill Charles and his brother James and return to parliamentary rule is uncovered. The Rye House Plot of 1683 was a plan to assassinate King Charles II of England and his brother (and heir to the throne) James, Duke of York. The royal party went from Westminster to Newmarket to see horse races and were expected to make the return journey on 1 April 1683, but because there was a major fire in Newmarket on 22 March (which destroyed half the town), the races were cancelled, and the King and the Duke returned to London early. As a result, the planned attack never took place.

There seems to have been disagreement among the plotters on almost every aspect, including whether there even would be an assassination or whether it should be a kidnapping, and exactly how the subsequent uprising would be started and managed.

Once information about it was leaked, the plotters incriminated each other and letters and diaries were discovered which spread the net wider and wider.

Unlike the Popish Plot, Rye House was a genuine conspiracy involving an extended network of Whigs, politicians and non-conformists. Twelve were executed including William Lord Russell and Algernon Sidney, two condemned to death but pardoned, 10 imprisoned including the ageing Leveller John Wildman, 10 fled into exile including the noted philosopher John Locke and, most importantly, the Earl of Shaftesbury, who had been the effective leader of the Whig party. These formed a core of Whig opposition in exile, in the Netherlands.

As Anglican pledges of support flooded in from round the country, the authorities took the opportunity to crack down in dissenters and over 1,300 Quakers were imprisoned over the next 12 months.

Charles undertook a policy of reincorporation, systematically placing loyalist country officers around the country.

Death of Charles II

Charles died on 5 February 1685, aged just 54, only barely outdoing his father, who died aged 48. On his deathbed he was received into the Roman Catholic Church. In the absence of any legitimate male heirs, the crown passed to his younger brother, who became King James II.

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by Simon on August 31, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in History

Tagged Act of Uniformity, Algernon Sidney, Anglicans, Anne Hyde, Anthony Ashley Cooper, Bill of Indemnity and Oblivion, Book of Common Prayer, Cabal, Catherine of Braganza, Cavalier Parliament, Charles II, Civil Wars, Clarendon Code, Committee of Safety, Commonwealth, Conventicle Act, Convention Parliament, Corporation Act, Council of Officers, Country Party, Declaration of Breda, Declaration of Indulgence, Duke of Albermarle, Duke of Buckingham, Duke of Monmouth, Earl of Arlington, Earl of Clarendon, Earl of Lauderdale, Earl of Rothes, Earl of Shaftesbury, England, Exclusion Bill, Five-Mile Act, General Monck, George Villiers, Gilbert Burnet, Great Fire of London, Great Plague, Henry Bennet, House of Commons, House of Lords, independents, interregnum, Ireland, James II, John Duncombe, John Lambert, John Leslie, John Locke, John Maitland, John Middleton, John Wildman, Long Parliament, Lord Fairfax, Lord Russell, Louis XIV, Mary of Modena, New York, North America, Oliver Cromwell, Parliament, Politics, Popish Plot, Portugal, Presbyterians, Protectorate, Quakers, Republicans, Richard Cromwell, River Medway, Roman Catholic, Royal Society for the improvement of science, Royalists, Rump Parliament, Rye House Plot, Scotland, Second Anglo-Dutch War, Second Conventicle Act, Second Dutch War, second Test Act, Sir Arthur Hesilrige, Sir Edward Hyde, Sir George Downing, Sir Henry Vane, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, Sir William Coventry, Sole Bay, Solemn League and Covenant, Third Anglo-Dutch War, Titus Oates, Tories, Treaty of Dover, whiggamor, Whigs, William III of Orange

Posted by Simon on August 31, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/31/a-monarchy-transformed-mark-kishlansky-6-the-restoration/

A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 1. Key features of 17th century Britain

Mark Kishlansky (1948 to 2015) was an American historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1984 to 1991, and editor-in-chief of History Compass from 2003 to 2009.

Kishlansky wrote half a dozen or so books and lots of articles about Stuart Britain and so was invited to write Volume Six of the Penguin History of England covering that period, under the general editorship of historian David Cannadine.

I think of the history of Britain in the 17th century as consisting of four parts:

The first two Stuarts (Kings James I and Charles I) 1603 to 1642
The Civil Wars and Protectorate (Oliver Cromwell) 1642 to 1660
The Restoration (Kings Charles II and James II) 1660 to 1688
The Glorious Revolution and Whig monarchs (William and Mary, then Queen Anne) 1688 to 1714

Although obviously you can also divide it by monarch:

James I (1603 to 1625)
Charles I (1625 to 1642)
Wars of the three kingdoms (1637 to 1653)
Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653 to 1660)
Charles II (1660 to 1685)
James II and the Glorious Revolution (1685 to 1688)
William and Mary (1688 to 1702)

I appreciate that this is an English perspective, and Kishlansky is the first to acknowledge that his history tends to focus on England, by far the largest and most powerful of the three kingdoms of Britain. The histories of Scotland and Ireland over the same period shadowed the English timeline but – obviously – had significant events, personnel and continuities of their own. From the start Kishlansky acknowledges he doesn’t have space to give these separate histories the space they deserve.

Why is the history of seventeenth century Britain so attractive and exciting?

The seventeenth century has a good claim to being the most important, the most interesting and maybe the most exciting century in English history because of the sweeping changes that affected every level of society. In 1600 England was still a late-medieval society; in 1700 it was an early modern society and in many ways the most advanced country on earth.

Social changes

business the modern business world was created, with the founding of the Bank of England and Lloyds insurance, cheques, banknotes and milled coins were invented; the Stock Exchange was founded and the National Debt, a financial device which allowed the British government to raise large sums for wars and colonial settlement; excise and land taxes provided reliable sources of revenue for the government
empire the British Empire was defined with the growth of colonies in North America and India
feudal forms of government withered and medieval practices such as torture and the demonisation of witchcraft and heresy died out
media newspapers were invented and went from weekly to daily editions
new consumer products domestic consumption was transformed by the arrival of new products including tobacco, sugar, rum, gin, port, champagne, tea, coffee and Cheddar cheese
the scientific revolution biology, chemistry and physics trace their origins to discoveries made in the 1600s – Francis Bacon laid the intellectual foundations for the scientific method; William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; Robert Boyle posited the existence of chemical elements, invented perfected the air pump and created the first vacuum; Isaac Newton discovered his laws of thermodynamics, the composition of light, the laws of gravity; William Napier invented logarithms; William Oughtred invented the multiplication sign in maths; Edmund Halley identified the comet which bears his name, Robert Hooke invented the microscope, the quadrant, and the marine barometer; the Royal College of Physicians published the first pharmacopeia listing the properties of drugs; Peter Chamberlen invented the forceps; the Royal Society (for the sciences) was founded in 1660
sport the first cricket and gold clubs were founded; Izaak Walton codified knowledge about fishing in The Compleat Angler; Charles II inaugurated yacht racing at Cowes and Queen Anne founded Royal Ascot
architecture Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh created wonderful stately homes and public buildings e.g. Jones laid out the Covent Garden piazza which remains an attraction in London to this day and Wren designed the new St Paul’s cathedral which became a symbol of London
philosophy the political upheavals produced two masterworks of political philosophy, the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which are still studied and applied in a way most previous philosophy isn’t
non conformists despite repeated attempts to ban them, Puritan sects who refused to ‘conform’ to the Restoration settlement of the Church of England were grudgingly accepted and went on to become a permanent and fertile element of British society – the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians

Political upheaval

At the centre of the century sits the great 20-year upheaval, the civil wars or British wars or Great Rebellion or the Wars of Three Kingdoms, fought between the armies of parliament and the armies of King Charles I, with significant interventions by armies of Scotland and Ireland, which eventually led to the execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England – achievements which still form a core of the radical agenda to this day. These revolutionary changes were followed by a series of constitutional experiments under the aegis of the military dictator Oliver Cromwell, which radicalised and politicised an entire generation.

Soon after Cromwell’s death in 1658, his regime began to collapse and elements of it arranged for the Restoration of King Charles II, who returned but under a new, more constitutional monarchy, restrained by laws and conventions guaranteeing the liberties of British subjects and well aware of the mistakes which led to the overthrow of his father.

But none of this stopped his overtly Roman Catholic brother, who succeeded him as James II in 1685, making a string of mistakes which collectively alienated the Protestant grandees of the land who conspired to overthrow him and replace him with the reliably Protestant Prince William of Orange. James was forced to flee, William was invited to become King of England and to rule according to a new, clearly defined constitution or Bill of Rights, which guaranteed all kinds of liberties including of speech and assembly.

All of these upheavals meant that by 1700 England had the most advanced, liberal and open society in Europe, maybe in the world, had experimented with a wide variety of political reforms and constitutions, and developed one which seemed most practical and workable – which was to become the envy of liberals in neighbouring France, and the basis of the more thoroughly worked-out Constitution devised by the founders of the American republic in the 1780s.

Studying the 17th century combines the intellectual excitement of watching these constitutional and political developments unfold, alongside the more visceral excitement of following the dramatic twists and turns in the long civil wars – and then following the slow-burning problems which led to the second great upheaval, the overthrow of James II. There is tremendous pleasure to be had from getting to know the lead characters in both stories and understanding their motives and psychologies.

Key features of 17th century England

The first two chapters of Mark Kishlansky’s book set out the social and political situation in Britain in 1600. These include:

Patriarchy

Britain was a comprehensively patriarchal society. The king ruled the country and his word meant life or death. Le Roy le veult – the King wishes it – was the medieval French phrase still used to ratify statutes into law. The monarch made all political, legal, administrative and religious appointments – lords, ministers, bishops, judges and magistrates owed their position to him. In every locality, knights of the shires, justices of the peace administered the king’s laws. The peerage was very finely gradated and jealously policed. Status was everything.

Hierarchy

And this hierarchy was echoed in families which were run by the male head of the household who had complete power over his wife and children, a patriarchal household structure endorsed by the examples in the Bible. Women might have as many as 9 pregnancies, of which 6 went to term and three died in infancy, with a further three children dying in infancy.

The family was primarily a unit of production, with all family members down to small children having specified tasks in the often backbreaking toil involved in agricultural work, caring for livestock, foraging for edibles in woods and fields, producing clothes and shoes. Hard physical labour was the unavoidable lot of almost the entire population.

Marriages

Marriages were a vital way of passing on land and thus wealth, as well as family names and lineages. Most marriages were arranged to achieve these ends. The top responsibility of both spouses were the rights and responsibilities of marriage i.e. a wife obeyed her husband and a husband cherished and supported his wife. It was thought that ‘love’ would grow as a result of carrying out these duties, but wasn’t a necessary component.

Geography

80% of the population in 1600 worked on the land. Britain can be divided into two geographical zones:

1. The North and West

The uplands of the north-west, including Scotland and Wales, whose thin soils encouraged livestock supplemented by a thin diet of oats and barley. Settlements here were scattered and people arranged themselves by kin, in Scotland by clans. Lords owned vast estates and preserved an old-fashioned medieval idea of hospitality and patronage.

Poor harvests had a catastrophic impact. A run of bad harvests in the 1690s led to mass emigration from Scotland to America, and also to the closer ‘plantations’ in Ulster.

It was at this point that Scottish Presbyterians became the majority community in the province. Whereas in the 1660s, they made up some 20% of Ulster’s population… by 1720 they were an absolute majority in Ulster, with up to 50,000 having arrived during the period 1690-1710. (Wikipedia)

2. The south and east

The south and east of Britain was more densely populated, with villages and towns instead of scattered homesteads. Agriculture was more diverse and productive. Where you have more people – in towns and cities – ties of kinship become weaker and people assess each other less by ‘family’ than by achievements, social standing and wealth.

The North prided itself on its older, more traditional values. The South prided itself on being more productive and competitive.

Population

The population of England rose from 4 million in 1600 to 5 million in 1700. There were maybe 600 ‘towns’ with populations of around 1,000. Big provincial capitals like Norwich, Exeter or Bristol (with pops from 10,000 to 30,000) were exceptions.

London

London was unlike anywhere else in Britain, with a population of 200,000 in 1600 growing to around 600,000 by 1700. It was home to the Court, government with its Houses of Lords and Commons, all the main law courts, and the financial and mercantile hub of the nation (Royal Exchange, Royal Mint, later the Bank of England and Stock Exchange). The centre of publishing and the new science, literature, the arts and theatre. By 1700 London was the largest city in the Western world. Edinburgh, the second largest city in Britain, had a paltry 40,000 population.

Inflation

Rising population led to a squeeze on food since agricultural production couldn’t keep pace. This resulted in continuous inflation with foodstuffs becoming more expensive throughout the century, which reduced living standards in the countryside and contributed to periods of near famine. On the other hand, the gentry who managed to hang onto or increase their landholdings saw an unprecedented rise in their income. The rise of this class led to the development of local and regional markets and to the marketisation of agriculture. Those who did well spent lavishly, building manors and grand houses, cutting a fine figure in their coaches, sending the sons to university or the army, educating their daughters in order to attract wealthy husbands.

Vagrancy

The change in working patterns on the land, plus the rising population, led to a big increase in vagrancy, which the authorities tackled with varying degrees of savagery, including branding on the face with a V for Vagrant. Contemporary theorists blamed overpopulation for poverty, vagrancy and rising crime. One solution was to encourage the excess population to settle plantations in sparsely populated Ireland or emigrate to New England. There were moral panics about rising alcoholism, and sex outside marriage.

Puritans

Leading the charge to control immoral behaviour were the Puritans, a negative word applied to a range of people who believed that the Church of England needed to be further reformed in order to reach the state of purity achieved by Calvinists on the continent. Their aims included:

abolition of the 26 bishops (who were appointed by the king) and their replacement by Elders elected by congregations
reforms of theology and practice: getting rid of images, candles, carvings etc inside churches, getting rid of elaborate ceremonies, bells and incense and other ‘Roman’ superstitions
reducing the number of sacraments to the only two practiced by Jesus in the New Testament
adult baptism replacing infant baptism

Banning

Closely connected was the impulse to crack down on all ungodly behaviour e.g. alcohol (close pubs), immorality (close theatres), licentiousness (ban most books except the Bible), lewd behaviour (force women to wear modest outfits, keep their eyes on the ground), ban festivals, ban Christmas, and so on.

Trans-shipping

The key driver of Britain’s economic wealth was shipping and more precisely trans-shipping – where goods were brought in from one source before being transhipped on elsewhere. The size of Britain’s merchant fleet more than tripled and the sized of the cargo ships increased tenfold. London’s wealth was based on the trans-shipping trade.

The end of consensus politics

The second of Kishlansky’s introductory chapters describes in detail the political and administrative system in early 17th century Britain. It is fascinating about a) the complexity of the system b) its highly personal orientation about the person the monarch. It’s far too complicated to summarise here but a few key themes emerge:

Consensus

Decisions at every level were reached by consensus. To give an example, when a new Parliament was called by the king, the justices of the peace in a county met at a session where, usually, two candidates put themselves forward and the assembled JPs discussed and chose one. Only very rarely were they forced back on the expedient of consulting local householders i.e. actually having a vote on the matter.

Kishlansky explains how this principle of consensus applied in lots of other areas of administration and politics, for example in discussions in Parliament about acts proposed by the king and which needed to be agreed by both Commons and Lords.

He then goes on to launch what is – for me at any rate – a new and massive idea: that the entire 17th century can be seen as the slow and very painful progression from a political model of consensus to an adversarial model.

The entire sequence of civil war, dictatorship, restoration and overthrow can be interpreted as a series of attempts to reach a consensus by excluding your opponents. King Charles prorogued Parliament to get his way, then tried to arrest its leading members. Cromwell, notoriously, was forced to continually remodel and eventually handpick a Parliament which would agree to do his bidding. After the Restoration Charles II tried to exclude both Catholics and non-conforming Protestants from the body politic, imposing an oath of allegiance in order to preserve the model of consensus sought by his grandfather and father.

The point is that all these attempts to purify the body politic in order to achieve consensus failed.

The advent of William of Orange and the Bill of Rights in 1689 can be seen as not so much defining liberties and freedoms but as finally accepting the new reality, that political consensus was no longer possible and only a well-managed adversarial system could work in a modern mixed society.

Religion

What made consensus increasingly impossible? Religion. The reformation of Roman Catholicism which began in 1517, and continued throughout the 16th century meant that, by the 1620s, British society was no longer one culturally and religiously unified community, but included irreducible minorities of Catholics and new-style Calvinist Puritans. Both sides in what became the civil wars tried to preserve the old-fashioned consensus by excluding what they saw as disruptive elements who prevented consensus agreements being reached i.e. the Royalists tried to exclude the Parliamentarians, the Parliamentarians tried to exclude the Royalists, both of them tried to exclude Catholics, the Puritans once in power tried to exclude the Anglicans and so on.

But the consensus model was based on the notion that, deep down, all participants shared the same religious, cultural and social values. Once they had ceased to do that the model was doomed.

Seen from this point of view the entire history of the 17th century was the slow, bloody, and very reluctant acceptance that the old model was dead and that an entirely new model was required in which political elites simply had to accept the long-term existence of sincere and loyal but completely different opinions from their own.

Political parties

It is no accident that it was after the Glorious Revolution that the seeds of what became political parties first began to emerge. Under the consensus model they weren’t needed; grandees and royal ministers and so on managed affairs so that most of them agreed or acquiesced on the big decisions. Political parties only become necessary or possible once it had become widely accepted that consensus was no longer possible and that one side or another in a debate over policy would simply lose and would have to put up with losing.

So Kishlansky’s long and fascinating introduction leads up to this insight – that the succession of rebellions and civil wars across the three kingdoms, the instability of the Restoration and then the overthrow of James II were all necessary to utterly and finally discredit the old late-medieval notion of political decision-making by consensus, and to usher in the new world of political decision-making by votes, by parties, by lobbying, by organising, by arguing and taking your arguments to a broader political nation i.e. the electorate.

In large part the English Revolution resulted from the inability of the consensual political system to accommodate principled dissension. (p.63)

At a deep level, the adoption of democracy means the abandonment of attempts to repress a society into agreement. On this view, the core meaning of democracy isn’t the paraphernalia about voting, that’s secondary. In its essence democracy means accepting other people’s right to disagree, sincerely and deeply, with what you hold to be profoundly true. Crafting a system which allows people to think differently and speak differently and live differently, without fear or intimidation.

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by Simon on August 24, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in History, War

Tagged Bank of England, Baptists, Bill of Rights, British Empire, Calvinism, champagne, Charles I, Charles II, Christopher Wren, civil war, Civil Wars, coffee, consensus, Covent Garden, disestablishment of the Church of England, Edmund Halley, emigration, famine, Francis Bacon, gin, Glorious Revolution, Great Rebellion, history, House of Lords, India, inflation, Inigo Jones, Ireland, Isaac Newton, Izaak Walton, James I, James II, John Locke, John Vanbrugh, Leviathan, Mark Kishlansky, monarchy, National Debt, New England, Nicholas Hawksmoor, non conformists, North America, oath of allegiance, Oliver Cromwell, Parliament, patriarchal society, Penguin History of England, Peter Chamberlen, political parties, port, presbyterianism, Presbyterians, Protectorate, Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell, Puritan, Quakers, restoration, Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, Royal Ascot, Royal College of Physicians, Royal Society, rum, Scotland, St Paul's cathedral, Stock Exchange, Stuart Britain, sugar, tea, The Compleat Angler, the Scientific Revolution, Thomas Hobbes, tobacco, Tories, Two Treatises of Government, Ulster, vagrancy, Wars of the three kingdoms, Wars of Three Kingdoms, Whigs, William & Mary, William Harvey, William Napier, William Oughtred, witchcraft

Posted by Simon on August 24, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/08/24/a-monarchy-transformed-mark-kishlansky-1/

British Baroque: Power and Illusion @ Tate Britain

‘British Baroque: Power and Illusion’ covers art and architecture (and gardens and sculpture and oddities and gimmicks) from the Restoration of Charles II in 1660 to the death of Queen Anne in 1714. The big word in the title is Baroque but it’s a problematic term and by the end of the exhibition I was left wondering, in my non-scholarly way, whether any of the art on display here actually qualifies for the description ‘Baroque’.

‘The Sea Triumph of Charles II’ by Antonio Verrio (c.1674) The Royal Collection / HM Queen Elizabeth II

1. Dates

Traditionally, in art history, the term Baroque denotes Power – Religious and Royal Power. Baroque art and architecture are big, heavy and imposing.

The Baroque is one of the major Periods of Western Art, preceded by the Renaissance and Mannerism and followed by the Rococo. The dates usually given are:

Early Renaissance 1400 to 1495
High Renaissance 1495 to 1520
Mannerism 1520 to 1600
the Baroque 1600 to 1740
Rococo 1730s to 1760s
Neo-Classicism 1760 to 1830

The convention is to date the Baroque from the early 1600s, at least in Italy and on the Continent. It is a striking decision by the curators to delay it as late as 1660 for this exhibition, though you can see why – England was always slow to adopt developments in continental art and architecture.

Some outliers and pioneers may have been introducing ‘baroque’ styles into the English court in the 1620s and 1630s (the designer and architect Inigo Jones is often mentioned), but then all artistic and architectural endeavour was suspended during the great cataclysm of the British civil wars, which lasted:

from the rebellion in Scotland in 1637
through the civil wars in England (1642 to 1648)
the execution of King Charles I in 1649
continued wars in Scotland and Ireland into the early 1650s
the rule of Oliver Cromwell from 1653 till his death in 1658
the collapse of the Parliamentarian regime in 1658 to 1659
to the triumphant restoration of Charles II in 1660

Quite obviously the commissioning of royal art and architecture was put on hold for the whole of this war-torn and then republican period.

So starting the exhibition in 1660 with the restoration of Charles II provides a neat, clean starting point to a period which was distinctive in music (Purcell), literature (Dryden, Restoration Comedy) and philosophy (John Locke), as well as architecture (Christopher Wren) and art (Peter Lely) – the subjects specifically covered in this exhibition.

Plus – England was always late. Stuck up here on the remote periphery of Europe, England was late to experience all the trends which originated in the Mediterranean heartland. Thus Renaissance art and literature was flourishing in Italy in the 1400s but we date ‘our’ Renaissance period from the 1530s or later. Literature students tend to equate it with the reign of Queen Elizabeth which started in 1558, getting on for 150 years after the Renaissance started in Italy, by which time the Italians had been all the way through the Renaissance, High Renaissance and Mannerism. During the 18th century the motor for artistic innovation moved to France and stayed there until, arguably, the First World War, maybe beyond.

Anyway, for centuries the Europeans were waaaay ahead of us Brits. Mind you, we had something they didn’t have, which was an empire to set up and run.

2. The term ‘Baroque’

Its origin is obscure. It seems to derive from the Portuguese barocco meaning, ‘irregular pearl or stone’, i.e. a technical term in jewellery for a kind of pearl which was not perfectly round: for a pearl which was ugly and misshapen.

It seems that early uses of the term ‘baroque’ were all negative and used to criticise unnecessary complication and ugliness which were creeping into art. The word was never used by the artists or architects actually working during the ‘Baroque’ period; it wasn’t a self-conscious movement like Cubism.

Baroque is a term which was imposed a long time later, by late-eighteenth century or nineteenth century historians who, looking back, needed terms to assign to all the ‘period’s they wanted to divide art history into.

‘The Annunciation’ by Benedetto Gennari (1686) The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, The State Art Museum of Florida

3. The origins of the Baroque in the Counter-Reformation

Articles about the Baroque all point to its origins in the Councils of Trent, the organisational centre of the Counter-Reformation.

In 1517 the monk Martin Luther had nailed his theses about theology to the door of his local church (in fact a traditional way to announce a theological debate). Luther called for a revolution in all aspects of European Catholicism, sweeping away scores of central dogmas and traditions and ceremonies which he regarded as later additions, corrupt folklore and legends and superstitions and inventions which had been grafted onto what was originally the pure and spartan teachings of Jesus as recorded in the four gospels.

Many German princes and north European kings took Luther’s teachings as an opportunity to throw off the shackles of Catholic rule from Italy, and within a generation a host of independent ‘Protestant’ churches and states had been established across northern Europe, not least in England where Henry VIII rejected rule of his church from Italy by an Italian pope and declared himself head of a newly-styled Church of England.

One aspect of the Protestant revolt had been aesthetic. In rejecting the cults of saints and relics – the excessive worship of Mary Mother of God and a host of other Catholic traditions – the really revolutionary Protestants (who came to be nicknamed the Puritans, in England) cleaned out their churches, smashing statues, defacing medieval paintings, burning wooden rood screens and so on in an orgy of iconoclasm.

Result: by the 1550s or so European Christianity existed in two forms, a stripped-down, militantly white-walled protestant form held in bit white undecorated halls – and a defiantly gold candelabra-ed, smells and bells Catholicism performed in churches crammed with statues of saints and the crucified Christ and a blue-robed Mary.

In light of the Protestant attacks, the Catholic authorities called a series of congresses at Trent (Trento in northern Italy) to thrash out just what they did agree on, in order to redefine every element of Catholic theology and practice, to create a new, stronger, more centralised ideology. Reacting against what had become known as the Protestant Reformation, this fightback became known as the Counter-Reformation.

Among a host of new theological and administrative rules emerged a belief that Catholic churches, Catholic aesthetics, should defy the know-nothing, philistine, iconoclastic, whitewash-everything Protestants and build their churches on an even more elaborate scale.

Catholic architecture should be enormous, characterised by domes soaring into heaven and festooned with flocks of angels and risen Christs flying over the heads of the congregation. Every nook should be full of florid statues of saints in the agony of their martyrdoms, and the authorities encouraged a style where every fold of their robes and cloaks became more and more elaborate, intricate and charged with emotion.

Italian Catholicism deliberately set out to be as flamboyant, as big, as majestic and as over-awing as could be achieved in buildings, statuary and painting. This is the key impulse behind the new heavy, elaborate, contorted and highly emotional style which later ages were to term the Baroque.

Examples of the Baroque: from top left: The interior of the church of Santa Maria, Rome; ‘The Calling of Saint Matthew’ by Caravaggio; The Trevi Fountain in Rome, designed by Italian architect Nicola Salvi and completed by Giuseppe Pannini in 1732.

4. Royal power

Not surprisingly, kings liked this style. ‘Big, imposing, overpowering, yep that’s me’ was the thought of rulers all over Europe, who proceeded to commission artists and architects to copy this new, super-solid, massive and imposing architectural and artistic style in their realms, from Poland to the Palace of Westminster.

It’s important to remember that, although he rarely features in histories of the civil war and Republic, Charles II was very much alive during all the events and where was he living? In the French court of Louis XIV (in fact the extended reign of Louis XIV, the so-called Sun King more than matches the entire period covered in this exhibition, he reigned from 1645 to 1715.)

Thus Charles didn’t just return in triumph to the palace of Westminster and resume all the rights and accoutrements of a king of England; he returned:

with his head full of European theories about the Divine Right of Kings
with the example of Louis XIV firmly in his mind about how to be such a king
and with his imagination packed with the architectural and artistic achievements of the French courtly builders and painters

It was under Louis XIV in the 1680s that the Palace of Versailles was redesigned and rebuilt to become the largest and grandest royal palace in Europe. Charles had watched his French peer think and plan on the grandest scale.

The British Baroque

So that’s a brief background to the ascent of the supposed Baroque style in Britain. But was it really Baroque? Here’s one of the thousands of definitions you can find on the internet:

The Baroque style is characterized by exaggerated motion and clear detail used to produce drama, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, dance, and music. Baroque iconography was direct, obvious, and dramatic, intending to appeal above all to the senses and the emotions.

If the Baroque is anything it is dramatic, operatic and exuberant, grand gestures in enormous buildings, huge and heavy marble statues, imposing porticos. Histrionic is a good word.

But after a few sort-of grand paintings in the first room (such as The Sea Triumph of Charles II by Antonio Verrio at the top of this review), the exhibition leads into a room of court beauties, a handful of Charles II’s many mistresses – and ‘grand’, ‘dramatic’ and ‘exuberant’ are not really the words which describe these paintings at all.

‘Barbara Palmer (née Villiers), Duchess of Cleveland with her son, probably Charles Fitzroy, as the Virgin and Child’ by Peter Lely (c.1664) National Portrait Gallery, London

There’s a nice pillar in this painting and, to those in the know about painterly symbolism, the Duchess of Villiers is wearing the bright red and blue traditionally associated in Renaissance painting with the Virgin Mary, but… It’s not really ‘grand’, ‘melodramatic’ or ‘histrionic’, is it? In fact Barbara’s snub nose, poky little mouth and bulbous eyes are more homely than grand and intimidating.

The seed of doubt whether the term ‘baroque’ really applies to the British art and architecture of the period is sown early and crops up throughout the rest of the exhibition.

The Sea Triumph of Charles II by Antonio Verrio at the top of this review is certainly an elaborate allegorical composition and contains a neat pyramid of tumbling sea nymphs and sea goddesses and so on, but the figure the whole composition leads you to… Charles II’s black moustachioed face of an old debauchee… to me it completely lacks awe or grandeur or dignity.

To me Charles looks a bit of a twerp, as if his face has been photoshopped onto a foreign fantasia.

There’s a moment in the room devoted to architecture where we learn about the murals the painter Sir James Thornhill was commissioned to create to decorate the dome of Sir Christopher Wren’s magnificent new St Paul’s Cathedral. They are a series of large murals depicting scenes from the life of St Paul, so far so good. But then we learn that he rendered them in black and white in order to be restrained and dignified and to suit the Protestant atmosphere of what was, in effect, the world’s first Protestant cathedral.

Restrained? That’s like saying we’re going to an all-night Brazilian samba party and we’re going to drink lemonade and dance the waltz.

It is completely against the spirit of the Baroque. The baroque is drama and opera and huge flights of angels soaring up into vast church domes. But that isn’t the English spirit at all. The English spirit then as now is faaar more sensible and restrained and undemonstrative.

A glaring indicator of this was the simple lack of religious imagery throughout the show. Of the exhibition’s ten rooms, only one is devoted to religious imagery and that one is virtually empty. The only interesting thing in it is a wonderful carved wooden cover for a font by Grinling Gibbons which is all Italianate grapes and leaves, with a few winged putti holding up the swags, but there’s nothing particularly Christian about it. Certainly none of the agony and ecstasy and religious melodrama of the Italian Baroque. There are no bleeding saints rolling their eyes to heaven.

Font cover from All Hallows by the Tower church, London, by Grinling Gibbons, carefully avoiding all religious imagery whatsoever

Instead, what comes over is the way British and foreign painters domesticated the brash, grand, outdoors Italian Baroque for a culture which is far more indoors, domestic and family-orientated.

‘The Children of John Taylor of Bifrons Park’ by John Closterman (1696) National Portrait Gallery, London

There’s as much, in fact I think there’s more in the exhibition about the late 17th century fashion for trompe l-oeil optical illusions in paint as there is for Christian imagery. We just didn’t go in for the melodrama, the agony in the garden, the upturned eyes of adoring angels and the flurried cloaks of muscular saints.

A quick review

Here’s a quick overview of the ten rooms and my highlights:

Room 1. Restoration

Artists who returned with King Charles and became associated with his reign included Peter Lely, the King’s Principal Painter; Samuel Cooper, his official miniaturist; and the mural painter, Antonio Verrio.

Miniaturist? Yes there are a number of miniature portraits of Charles and leading courtiers. Couldn’t help thinking that the entire concept of a miniature is the exact opposite of the Baroque spirit which is to be as big and imposing as possible.

Room 2. The Restoration Court

Contains classy but surprisingly restrained full-length portraits of half a dozen of Charles’s mistresses and assorted courtiers, including John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, the rudest poet in English, one of whose poems begins:

Much wine had passed, with grave discourse
Of who fucks who, and who does worse
(Such as you usually do hear
From those that diet at the Bear),
When I, who still take care to see
Drunkenness relieved by lechery,
Went out into St. James’s Park
To cool my head and fire my heart.
But though St. James has th’ honor on ‘t,
‘Tis consecrate to prick and cunt…

What is really striking about these portraits is nothing to do with Power and Magnificence, and everything to do with the extremely stylised depictions of their faces. They all look the same. All the women have the same rounded faces, long noses, white skin relieved by heavily rouged cheeks and, above all, the same rather bulbous eyes, the overlids and underlids of the eyes deliberately shadowed to create a sense of an unhealthy prominence of the eyeball.

‘Two Ladies of the Lake Family’ by Sir Peter Lely (c.1660) Tate

Room 3. The religious interior

As I’ve mentioned, a thin collection. Some surviving paintings and wall paintings from the Catholic chapels in London, at St James’s Palace and Somerset House, where the Catholic consorts Catherine of Braganza (Charles’s wife) and Mary of Modena (James II’s wife) enjoyed freedom of worship, providing a focal point for the Catholic community.

But this was a very small, constrained part of English life or architecture.

Room 4. Illusion and Deception

Much more fun, much more interesting, and much more English, is this room full of fashionable trompe l-oeil optical illusions. Highlights include a series of paintings by Edward Collier of items apparently pinned to a real wooden board or held in place by tape, which appear astonishingly lifelike and three-dimensional.

There’s an elaborate peepshow by Samuel van Hoogstraten: you look through a little pinhole to the side and see what looks like a realistic interior of a house with rooms giving off in front of you and to the side. There’s Chatsworth’s famous violin painted as if hanging on the back of a door, and the hyper-real flower paintings of Simon Verelst which looked so real that they fooled the diarist Samuel Pepys.

‘A Vase of Flowers’ by Simon Verelst (1669)

Room 5. Wren and Baroque architecture

Here, in the magnificent churches designed by Christopher Wren and his student Nicholas Hawksmoor, with the Queens House and other buildings built at Greenwich and plans to rebuild Whitehall Palace after it burned down, and the country houses designed by the later John Vanbrugh, you approach something like the continental Baroque in scale and ambition.

But as the story of Sir James Thornhill’s murals indicates, it is a European style which has been restrained, watered down and made sensible.

Room 6. Country mansions and courtly gardens

How Hampton Court was remodelled to be more like Versailles and so was William III’s grand Het Loo Palace in Apeldoorn in the Netherlands. Diagrams and paintings of Chatsworth and Bleinheim, the grandest of grand English country houses.

Paintings of huge, geometric, symmetric formal gardens.

Room 7. Painted interiors

This was maybe my favourite room. It contains a photo of the vast and sumptuous mural on the ceiling of the dining room at Old Greenwich Palace, and is lined by preparatory paintings of other vast mythological murals by the likes of Antonio Verrio and Louis Chéron and Sir James Thornhill.

Apparently, it was the arrival of seasoned muralist Verrio in England in 1672 which sparked a new fashion for grandiose murals, and it’s in these (essentially private) murals – vast compositions awash with Greek mythical or allegorical figures that you get closest to thinking the English had a Baroque period or style.

Lower Hall ceiling of the Painted Hall at the Old Royal Naval College, Greenwich by Sir James Thornhill

But what I really liked was the preparatory sketches for these works. The exhibition includes huge sketchbooks in which Thornhill sketched out his initial designs and compositions for various murals. For me, these rough sketches often had more energy, vim and dynamism that the finished works.

In particular, the human shapes and faces, although left as rough outlines, somehow, have more character and vibrancy than the smooth finished oil paintings, in many of which Thornhill has had to defer to the peculiar contemporary style of restoration faces, with their rounded features and bulging eyes.

Thornhill’s sketches are fun, mad profusions of tumbling cartoon characters. This one shows a grand mythological scene which was clearly designed to cover the wall of a staircase (hence the 45 degree angle at the bottom left): at the bottom-right Venus is being born from the waves; watched from the left by Neptune King of the oceans holding his triton; and above her a frothing scramble of other gods and goddesses.

A Ceiling and Wall Decoration (circa 1715 to 1725) by Sir James Thornhill

Room 8. Beauty

A striking and inventive piece of curating in which the Tate has taken seven of eight massive, full-length portrait paintings of English society beauties and made an attempt to recreate the atmosphere of the kind of grand drawing room they would have adorned. They’re selections from two series of paintings:

The Hampton Court Beauties, a set of eight full-length portraits, commissioned by Mary II in 1690 to 1691
The Petworth Beauties, commissioned by the 6th Duke and Duchess of Somerset for their country mansion Petworth House

In a way, though, the real star of the room is the huge heavy wood furniture, adorned with gold clasps and legs modelled from what appear to pregnant black woman (!?) and which bear a set of massive Chinese vases. There are candelabra on the walls and one can only wish the curators had had the courage of their convictions and turned the gallery’s electric lights off and installed replica candles so we really could have seen what paintings like this would have looked like in the flickering candlelight of the 1690s.

Room 9. Triumph and glory

Critics could easily complain that the exhibition doesn’t really describe or explain the complicated and momentous political events of the years 1660 to 1700, which saw not just the restoration of Charles II, but:

Charles’s death in 1685 and the succession of his brother, as King James II.
The rebellion of Charles’s eldest illegitimate son, the Duke of Monmouth, who raised an army in the West Country, before being crushed by James’s army.
The so-called ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 when James announced that he was going to raise his son by his second wife, Mary of Modena, a Catholic i.e. ensuring that the next in line to the English throne would definitely be a Catholic. At this point a cabal of leading aristocrats decided to overthrown James and invited William Prince of Orange (a state in the Low Country) to come and be King of Britain, using the fig leaf that William was the son of James’s dead sister, and also that his wife Mary was the eldest daughter of James II, the king she helped to overthrow.
Having secured the throne in England, William went on to defeat the Irish at the Battle of the Boyne in 1689, a defeat/victory which is commemorated to this day in Northern Ireland.
And the creation of the Bill of Rights and other constitutional devices which ensured the supremacy of Parliament and other legal rights which made Britain one of the most advanced and liberated nations on earth.

But then this is an art exhibition and not a history lesson.

The advent of William as King not only overthrew the House of Stuart but created two broad political parties among the political elite – those who remained true to the old Stuart line and came to be known as Tories, and those who moved to ingratiate themselves with the polemically Protestant new rule of this progressive king and came to be known as Whigs.

And it also drew Britain deep into European politics. We gained not only a new king but a new web of complex international alliances and enmities which this king brought with him, not least total opposition to the king of France’s ambitions for European hegemony.

And thus this room has paintings of William and various of his generals, in warlike pose, astride horses, in martial postures. The thing is… most of them are a bit rubbish. Here is a painting of Charles I on a horse by the genius Sir Anthony van Dyke back in the 1630s.

‘Charles I with M. de St Antoine’ by Sir Anthony van Dyck (1633)

Now here is a painting of King William III, portrayed as the victor of one of his innumerable endless wars, by Sir Godfrey Kneller.

‘William III on horseback with allegorical figures’ by Sir Godfrey Kneller (1701)

The van Dyck has genuine grace and dignity and regality. The Kneller has many good effects, but it’s just nowhere nearly as good as the van Dyck. And there’s something about those high wigs for men which is just… ludicrous. And whereas Charles is accompanied by a real retainer the chocolate box angels and putti flying above William are laughable.

(To be precise, the allegorical figures in the Kneller painting are: Neptune in shadow on the far left; Ceres and Flora [goddesses of fertility and crops] the two women on the right; Astrae [Justice] and Mercury [messenger of the gods] flying overhead.)

Room 10. The Age of Politics

The constitutional and legal reforms which accompanied the Glorious Revolution which ushered in a new age. Formerly a king appointed a lead minister whose job it was to draw up policy and steer legislation through a mostly passive parliament until, that is, the increasing dissension which led up to the civil war.

Now it was agreed in law that parliamentary elections would be held every three years, and this ushered in a new era where groups and cabals of aristocrats came together to press for their own interests. It was the birth of parliamentary parties. And also the birth of an early form of journalism as magazines arose to cater to the taste for reading about the ever-more complex political intriguing and jockeying which was going on in and around Parliament, such as the original Spectator magazine, founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in 1711.

Thus it is that the final room contains portraits of leading lights of the is new world of intrigue, clubs and parties. There is a massive and unflattering portrait of Queen Anne (reigned 1702 to 1714) along with portraits of the members of the various clubs which had their origins at this time, including Kneller’s portraits of members of the Whig Kit-Cat Club, and this fine body of podgy, bewigged men – the leading figures in the Whig Junto as depicted by John James Baker.

‘The Whig Junto’ by John James Baker (1710) Tate

Conclusion

If you watch the Antiques Roadshow or flick through popular history, nobody refers to an English ‘baroque’ period – the eras and styles they refer to are the Restoration, or Queen Anne, or Georgian periods and styles (the Georgian began at Queen Anne’s death in 1714).

And the exhibition skimps on the enormous importance of the political events of the time, and skates very thinly over the momentous philosophical and scientific revolutions of the period – Newton discovering the laws of the universe and the nature of light, the Royal Society founded in 1660 and sponsoring all kinds of breakthrough in engineering, hydraulics, dynamics, the circulation of the blood and so on.

But then it’s an exhibition of art and architecture not a history lesson. And one of the most interesting lessons I took from it was how very unBaroque a lot of the art of this period was. In sharp contrast with the European Baroque, it was dedicatedly Protestant, unreligiose, unshowy, undramatic and often very tame and domestic in feel.

In fact walking slowly back through all ten rooms I came to the conclusion that in the entire exhibition there was only one real Baroque pieces, an enormous, fearfully heavy marble bust of Charles II made by the French-born, Genoa-based sculptor Honoré Pelle in 1684.

This, it struck me, was grand – large, imposing, showed its subject in a moment of movement, dramatised by the extraordinary realism of the cloak of fabric flying around his shoulders. This, for me, was by far the most convincing and successful Baroque work of art in the exhibition.

‘Charles II’ by Honoré Pelle (1684) Victoria and Albert Museum

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1 Comment

by Simon on March 1, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in Architecture, Art, Christianity, European History, Exhibition, History, Politics

Tagged Anthony van Dyke, Antonio Verrio, Astrae, Baroque, Benedetto Gennari, British Baroque: Power and Illusion, Caravaggio, Catherine of Braganza, Catholicism, Ceres, Charles II, Christopher Wren, Councils of Trent, Dryden, Earl of Rochester, English history, exhibition, Flora, Godfrey Kneller, Greenwich, Grinling Gibbons, Honoré Pelle, James Thornhill, John Closterman, John James Baker, John Locke, John Vanbrugh, John Wilmot, Joseph Addison, Louis Chéron, Louis XIV, Mary of Modena, Mercury, Neptune, Nicholas Hawksmoor, Oliver Cromwell, Peter Lely, Petworth House, Purcell, Queen Anne, Richard Steele, Samuel Cooper, Samuel Pepys, Samuel van Hoogstraten, Simon Verelst, St Paul's cathedral, the Battle of the Boyne, the Counter-Reformation, the Glorious Revolution, the Hampton Court Beauties, the Kit-Cat Club, the Petworth Beauties, the Restoration, Tories, Whigs, Whitehall Palace

Posted by Simon on March 1, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/03/01/british-baroque-power-and-illusion-tate-britain/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged Whigs

Radical Joe: A life of Joseph Chamberlain by Denis Judd (1977)

Reforming acts

Radical Joe

Insults and abuse

1. Home Rule

2. Liberal Imperialism

Secretary of State for the Colonies

1. The Boer War

2. Tariff reform

The 1906 Liberal landslide

Summary

The art of the possible

Two divorces

Dilke and the Crawford divorce

Parnell and the O’Shea divorce

Credit

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Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 1

Lord Salisbury

Lonely, sensitive and sad

High Tory conservatism

Married and elected MP

The journalism years, 1857 to 1866

Timeless issues

Using the Saturday Review

Viscount Cranborne

Victorian Prime Ministers

Posts Salisbury held

Member of Parliament: 1853 to 1866

Secretary of State for India: 1866 to 1867

Fear, awe and respect

The 1867 Reform Act

In opposition: 1868 to 1874

Secretary of State for India: 1874 to 1878

Beaconsfieldism

Foreign Secretary: 1878 to 1880

Congress of Berlin

Afghanistan

The Battle of Maiwand

The Anglo-Zulu War

Egypt

Tory defeat in 1880

Leader of the Opposition: 1881 to 1885

Electoral reform

‘Caretaker’ prime minister: 1885 to 1886

IRELAND

Anti-democracy

Salisbury sayings

Comedy

Roberts the fanboy

Conclusion to part one

Credit

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A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603 to 1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996) 7. James II and the Glorious Revolution

Catholic

The seven bishops

A Catholic son

The supposititious child

Prince William

William the defender

The Immortal Seven

The letter

The courier

Louis offers help

Defections

James runs away

James’s Catholic crusade

The Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion

Recatholicising policies

The Dissenters do not rally to James

The Anglicans are tired of James

James tries to engineer a supportive Parliament

The Declaration of Indulgence

William the defender

William’s awareness

The geopolitical threat