(i) Walpole and the Whig Oligarchy
CHAPTER VII
POLITICS, PENAL CODE AND PRISONS
OFTEN it is assumed that the period of notorious " political bribery and corruption " began with Walpole.
Lecky, however, points out that the "systematic corruption of Members of Parliament" had begun "under Charles II, in whose reign it was practised to the largest extent.'?!_
It continued both under James II and after the Revolution of 1688; and by the Septennial Act of the first Parliament of George I, which more than doubled the life of Governments, its powers of mischief were vastly enhanced.
To Walpole, none the less, was left the shameful distinction of making bribery and corruption a persistent and consistent policy of State.
The first real " Prime Minister" of Britain, he vied with any Stuart sovereign in the misuse of Government funds and places for the maintenance and augmentation of personal power.
Once, on scanning a gathering of Members of Parliament, he observed:
" All these men have their price."
That conjecture, unfortunately, was _ far too true, and on it he moulded his policy.
(i) Walpole and the Whig Oligarchy Government, Walpole believed, must be sustained either by corruption or force, and the former he chose as the " basis of his rule."
"' Sleeping dogs" persistently he "let lie"; but if they awoke barking, and angrily showed their teeth, he was always ready with a meaty bribe.
'' He bribed George II by obtaining for him a civil list exceeding by more than £100,000 a year that of his father.
He bribed the Queen by securing for her a jointure of £100,000 a year, when his rival, Sir Spencer
Compton, could only venture to promise £60,000."2
His immense expenditure of "secret service money"? went chiefly to the buying of "' rotten" and "' pocket "' boroughs and to the 1W. E. H. Lecky, History of England in the Eighteenth Century, Vol. I, p366.
* Ibid., p. 365.
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upkeep of a retinue of political jobbers and henchmen.
During his long administration a large percentage of the Members of Parliament were secret pensioners or placemen, while variegated bribes were also resorted to in the House of Lords, where means were found of keeping even the bishops within his control.
Indeed, in 1733, in " two critical divisions "' of the Upper House, Walpole actually was "saved from defeat" by the fact that *' out of twenty-six bishops, twenty-five were present, or voted by proxy, of which twerity-four were for the court.''}
Again, on February 2oth, 1739,- Walpole carried a critical division of the House of Commons by 262 votes against 235.
Among those who voted for the Government," it has been discovered, '' were 234 placemen, whose employment was worth
In one revealing sentence Lecky depicts the crassness of Walpole's political strategy and its danger to the liberties of any free people :—'"' It was his settled policy to maintain his Parliamentary majority, not by attracting to his ministry great orators, great writers, great financiers or great statesmen, not by effecting any combination or coalition of parties, by identifying himself with any great object of popular desire, or by winning to his side young men in whose character and ability he could trace the promise of future. eminence, but simply by engrossing borough influence and extending the patronage of the Crown.'
een Walpole was the arch-political expression of his Deistic, slave-trading age.
As he said of himself, he was "no saint, no reformer, no Spartan."'
He might have said much more.
In his person and policy the prevailing '' Natural philosophy "' bore its natural fruit.
The pursuit of self-interest was to him the "' law of Nature," though he left it to ambitious State prelates and assuming economists to adorn it and call it the "' law of God."
' Nature' to Walpole connoted, not divine ordinance, but human appetites; and "natural rights" to him spelled self-aggrandisement, unabashed.
Ruthless materialism and laissez faire economics therefore were the habitual moulds of his thought and expression, which withal were metallic and vulgar.
Wittingly or unwittingly, Walpole mentally was a child of Machiavelli and of Mandeville.
His personal habits, too, were as gross and sensual as his mind and spirit were cunning and coarse.
He was given to drunkenness and gluttony; he lived in open adultery ; and having a positive taste for obscenity,
See Professor N. Sykes, " The Church " (%ohnson's England, I, p. 17). ei Sir Walter Besant, London in the Eighteenth Century (Appendices, p.
643).
* Op. cit., I, 369.
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AND BER Ts Onis Tl 7 "the gross sensuality of his conversation was conspicuous in one of the coarsest periods of English history."
This lewdness, moreover, he carried not only into public life but also to Court, where he jested drolly with the capable, disillusioned and cynical Queen Caroline, even upon the infidelity of her husband, the King.
Under Walpole England was waxing fat; but this obesity betokened moral and spiritual disease.
True, during his long administration, all absolutism on the part of the sovereign was broken, and Parliamentary government by a Prime Minister and Cabinet, responsible to the Legislature, was being evolved :? but it is equally true that systematic and organised corruption was rapidly making the House of Commons a non-representative body and that the arrogant, acquisitive, quarrelsome Whig oligarchy which for half a century dominated English politics was, at the termination of Walpole's rule, already putrid to the bone.
Besides certain titles and honours, Walpole, during his tenure of power, bestowed upon his own sons
" permanent offices, chiefly sinecures," totalling " about £15,000 a year "" ;8 and foreseeing his own downfall, he procured for himself not only the title, Earl of Orford, but also a pension of £4,000 a year—the equivalent of some £10,000 to-day.
The great Whig families who supported him, accordingly, expected and got proportionate " rewards " ; while meantime there was growing up that nauseating brood of political-jobbing attorneys who "rode the country and bought and sold seats openly," thus anticipating, if not actually heralding, the day when venal boroughs were "' publicly advertised for sale in the newspapers," and when the scandals of a great county election made it cost as much as £100,000.
With a lawyer's characteristic love of a "case," Mr. J. W.
Jeudwine, the barrister-historian, holding a brief for George III as a great Constitutional monarch, tries to establish the double thesis, (1) that George and his " only strong ministers " were
"non-party men " who sought unswervingly the common good, and (2) that the Whig oligarchy, or confederation of family clans, which with difficulty they dislodged, had not only " gorged itself with political spoil,' but literally was rancid with internal corruption.
That he fails to establish the first part of this thesis 1 Lecky, I, 36s.
This was due largely to the fact that George I knew no English and that even George II, who also spent much of his time in Hanover, was not sufficiently conversant with English institutions to preside at Cabinet meetings.
3 W. Coxe, Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole (1798), I, p. 730f.
4 See Religion, Commerce, Liberty, p. 182.
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is not surprising.
To argue that George III, Bute, North and the younger Pitt were not Tories but were all " non-party men," seeking disinterestedly the Nation's good, is to fly in the face of a vast volume of established and irrefutable evidence : it savours too much of case pleading and legal casuistry to carry conviction, even though admittedly some of these men have been unjustly maligned by '"' Whig historians."
Certainly it is well to remember that in 1768 Benjamin Franklin, then a resident in England, writing from London when the excitement and turmoil of the Wilkes riots were at their height, said : '' What the event will be, God only knows.
But some punishment seems preparing for a People who are ungratefully abusing the best
Constitution and the best King any nation was ever blessed with."'+ Certainly, too, it is wise always to bear in mind that the turn of events associated with the American Revolutionary
War has caused most popular historians to paint the characters of Bute, North and George III in colours unreasonably sombre and dark.
Such facts, nevertheless, do not establish the contention that George III and his "strong ministers'? were non-party men, actuated only by the highest National ideals: they all were Tories, and for the realisation of their schemes they played
Tory politics and depended on Tory support.
They laboured, however, in an atmosphere which gradually was being impregnated with new moral and spiritual life, and wherein higher ideals of public service were slowly being evolved.
But if Mr. Jeudwine fails to establish the first part of his thesis, the second he proves to the hilt: for the solid historical evidence establishing the " rottenness " of the '' Whig clans," which for two generations manipulated and corrupted English politics, is overwhelming.
Even Horace Walpole, that vain, polished, gossiping man of affairs, who lived smugly on sinecures left him by his father, complains, despite his Whig prejudices, of " the growing danger from aristocracy and from those confederacies of great lords."
In 1770, for instance, he writes of the Whigs :
"The various factions hated each other more than they did their common enemies, and most of the leaders of the opposition had in their time contributed to the grievances of which they complained."
Again, of the '' proud aristocracy of Whig lords," he says: they " thought of nothing but establishing their own power" and '"'as it suited their occasional purposes, now depressed and insulted the Crown and the royal family, and now raised the prerogative.''?
* Grahame's History of the United States, Vol, IV, P453.
* Jeudwine, op. cit., pp. 83-4,
POLIT Gs, PENAL GCODE AND PRISONS
When Dr. Johnson, in his Dictionary, defined " Whig" as "the name of a faction,' and declared "' patriotism "' the "' last refuge of the scoundrel," he was turning a realist eye on the politics of much of his lifetime.
Popular representation " was so corrupted as to be " almost a dead letter " 3 election petitions were heard and decided solely by favour or party in the House of Commons," while designing politicians were, in Burke's phrase, "' pigging together " in the same truckle trough
—the better to feed upon the State.
Of this plutocracy of nobles, Jeudwine says:
"They were supported by great wealth and enormous borough interest ; the secret service money was at their disposal ; the whole official world, owing to their long tenure of office, was filled with their partisans, including the bishops."?
And again : " As each faction supplanted the other, they arranged the shift by providing the retiring official with a pension or a title or both.
Their use of the revenues of the country to fill their own pockets is too large a subject for any one volume.''?
One need not, however, as Johnson observed, eat a whole ox to tell "if the meat be tough": and of the rare toughness of the English political carcass during at least the first six decades of the eighteenth century there can be no doubt; it has tried both the temper and the digestion of many a hardy historian.
Pulteney once said that political " parties, like snakes, are moved by their tails"? ; ? and he knew whereof he spoke : for certainly at this time the slimy, murky end of politics was its propelling force. Bribery and corruption, duplicity and deceit were the very cogs and levers of the political machine.
Lecky says of the " assembly " behind Walpole's Government that it was "saturated in corruption"; and if it inherited much of this corruption, it propagated more.
Well into the second half of the century Members of Parliament enjoyed immunity from all actions of law and suits of equity, thus being able to defy their creditors, while to their servants was extended the same immunity.¢ Not till the early years of the reign of George III, moreover, were Press reports of Parliamentary debates: permitted to the public ; hence the secrecy originally conceived as a protection against the absolutism of the King was perverted into a "'shelter from the supervision of the constituencies.''®
Parliamentary representation therefore at many points was 1 Jeudwine, op. cit., p. 181.
2 Ibid., p. 185 and pp. 178-193.
* Lecky, I, p. 316.
4 See Burgh's Political Disquisitions (1774), I, p. 205ff.
> Lecky, I, 442-3.
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a farce.
Some venal boroughs, like Old Sarum, " withouthouse or inhabitants,"' sent two Members to Parliament, while large centres of the growing industrial population, such as Manchester, had no Member at all.
Eighteenth-century politicians long preceded the formulation and elaboration of the doctrine of "' the survival of the fittest "' ; but their pert, glib, soulless Deism, with its "' religion of Nature " and its paganistic morality, made them strangely familiar with the sharp claw, the bloody tooth and the mailed fist.
The pirit of the century was one of ruthless individualism, and nowhere was it more ruthlessly expressed than in politics.
If indeed one were '' cousin to a lord, or had a vote in a rotten borough," then "the lord would provide,'! such provision generally taking the form of a sinecure post—possibly that of a paid commission in the army to a young lady or a child.?
But the political life of the average subject consisted in obeying the laws devised, "under the Happy Constitution" by his
"betters? ; in paying cheerfully the taxes, tithes, tolls and duties imposed upon him by the ruling oligarchy ; and in praying fervently that he escape the press gang, the highwayman, the stocks, the debtors' prison or the gallows, all of which were highly characteristic institutions of the " Land of Liberty " in the '' Age of Reason."
x * * Court life under the first two Georges (1714-1760) was no more chaste than that of Parliament and general politics.
Overton and Relton, authoritative historians of the National Church of this period, describe the Court of these sovereigns as "little less immoral than that of Charles II, and infinitely more gross."* Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) bristles with scathing references to the jealousy, pettiness, artificiality and indecency which long had pervaded Court society.
'' Are you in earnest resolved," asks Smith, " never to barter your liberty for the lordly servitude of a Court, but to live free, fearless and independent?"
If so, he advises one "* never to enter "' the place whence " so few return unspoiled.' 4
He claims, too, that society is "' dishonoured and degraded " by the " vices and follies "' of the titled and the élite, and that "' the great never look upon their inferiors as their fellow creatures.'?5
G. M. Trevelyan, '"' The Age of Johnson " (Fohnson's England, Vol. I, Daw) *'W. C. Sydney, England and the English in the Eighteenth Century, I.,
Pp. 347-8; also an historical paper by Sir Walter Scott in Edi Weekly Journal, January roth, 1827. a Nee 3 History of the English Church from George I to the end of the Century, p. 7 i A. Smith, op. cit., p. 95.
: i ° Ibid., p. 93.
See, too, pp. 87-101.
POLITICS,
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It is possible, however, to portray the ruling castes of eighteenth-century England in aspects too harsh and_ bleak.
The well-known panegyrics of Voltaire and Montesquieu are a constant reminder of the enthusiasm which brilliant
Frenchmen could generate for the English Constitution and for the practical working of the English political system.
But even so, such panegyrics need not be taken too seriously.
Voltaire, with his annual income of perhaps £7,000,! during his three years in England (1726-29), was received with open arms into the society of all the smart set, including Bolingbroke, Pope, Chesterfield, Gay and the Duchess of Marlborough: and his joyous discovery that the English nobility were as interested in all affairs of " money-making" as he himself, together with the pleasurable flattery he here received and his free participation in the free-thinking and free-living of the most exclusive Deistic society, caused him to acclaim England—" The land of Liberty."
But pronounced as were Voltaire's courage and sagacity, his vanity, spleen and personal ambition were more pronounced ; and among the English oligarchy they were well fed.
Of the masses of Englishmen, there is no evidence that Voltaire knew anything at all, or indeed that he cared to know anything.
Montesquieu, who spent the years 1729 to 1731 in England, was received by the same circles as had féted Voltaire ; but, as has often been observed, he never really understood the working of the "happy English Constitution " which in his
De VEsprit des Lois he so loudly extolled.
Voltaire and Montesquieu, in brief, were spokesmen of those social classes (largely commercial) which already were wielding political power in England, but as yet only lusted for it in France.
They therefore saw England through rose-coloured spectacles.
The glowing eulogies, too, of our ' glorious"? and " inimitable'? Constitution by Blackstone and Burke require much toning down.
Ere the advent of Blackstone's fame the public life of England was admittedly much improved, while certainly in the days of Burke's triumph that improvement was yet more pronounced.
But both Burke and Blackstone were case pleaders : and is it not significant that whereas the Puritan Milton had received but £5 for his Paradise Lost, Blackstone, the Tory professor of English Law at Oxford, received £14,000 from his
Commentaries?
Blackstone's laudation, therefore, of '' English liberty '"—which he himself denied to the negro slaves in England
—was to the ruling oligarchy a highly appetising, if expensive, diet.
Burke's deification of the English Constitution represented, 1 Voltaire '" ultimately derived what would now be £20,000 a year."
See Chambers's Biog. Dict.)