Britain in the Age of the French Revolution

1785 - 1820

Jennifer Mori

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138157408
• eBook ISBN: 9781317891888
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

This new survey looks at the impact in Britain of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic aftermath, across all levels of British society. Jennifer Mori provides a clear and accessible guide to the ideas and intellectual debates the revolution stimulated, as well as popular political movements including radicalism.

CHAPTER ONE
Parties and Politics

Once upon a time, the political history of Britain during the French Revolutionary wars was simple and straightforward. Parliament, for much of the eighteenth century an assembly of independent MPs whose voting preferences were determined primarily by factional and family connections, reacted to the French Revolution by dividing into two groups. William Pitt the Younger, despite a liberal youth, had seemingly taken fright when confronted by the emergence of a militant French Revolution in Europe and democratic parliamentary reform at home. Having taken Britain to war against revolutionary France in 1793, supported by a corps of ministerial MPs who shared his fears, Pitt would superintend the emergence of a new Tory Party committed to the defence of the status quo ante helium in Britain and Europe. A gallant band of liberal Opposition Whigs led by Charles James Fox, in sharp contrast, defended the civil liberties of Britons against the repressive policies of a reactionary government, finally coming to power in 1830 as a pro to-Liberal Party.

Like all sharply delineated dichotomies, the division of British politicians into Whigs and Tories obscures the complexities of political theory and practice during the French wars. Although the French Revolution began to divide British high politics into groups that would become the Liberal and Conservative Parties of the nineteenth century, this bipolar split was superimposed over an older Commons comprised of Court, Country and independents that continued to exist up to 1832 (O'Gorman, 1982: 116-21). Pitt and Fox, the two great antagonists of the French wars, were canonised by the Victorians as the founding fathers of the Liberal and Conservative Parties, but these were apotheoses that ignored the many inconsistencies in the thoughts and actions of both men, not to mention the conduct of their contemporary and posthumous admirers. The aristocratic Whiggism of the Foxites made them ambivalent about the wisdom of franchise and electoral reform, so much so that no party line could be laid down on the issue after Fox's death (Mitchell, 1967: 15-17; O'Gorman, 1982: 39—40, 68, 101-2; Smith, 1992: 210-11). The unity of the Pittites had been shattered by the resignation of their leader in 1801 in defence of Catholic Emancipation and they divided thereafter into pro- and anti-emancipation camps for the next three decades (O'Gorman, 1982; Sack, 1987; Harvey, 1978a,b). The nineteenth-century two-party system would be built upon myths of supposed strong leadership and intellectual consistency. The reality was different and much more complex.

Party Politics before the French Revolution, 1785-1789

In 1789 Prime Minister Younger Pitt was thirty years old, having taken office as First Lord of the Treasury in 1783. He was, like the vast majority of MPs, an enemy to the notion of party, believing that it divided a parliament that ought to function as a moderate and consensual body. His cold personality and refusal to curry support in the Commons ensured him a personal following of 52 MPs, only 20 of whom would support him out of office. His government majorities consequentiy depended upon two .groups: the King's Friends, the 185-200 Court MPs who would support any government endorsed by the monarch; and the independent members, whose support could be unreliable but was nevertheless vital to the survival of any administration (O'Gorman, 1989a: 23—5). Anxious as Pitt had been during the 1780s to be a reforming minister, his reliance for survival upon the politics of consensus ensured his pursuit of a flexible and conciliatory conduct that, in the eyes of his critics, bordered upon hypocrisy. Pitt's famous 1785 Reform Bill was never seen again as a comprehensive package of reform measures following its first rejection by the House of Commons. The Irish Commercial Propositions met the same fate. An ambitious though poorly drafted Poor Law amendment bill was withdrawn from parliament in 1796 after widespread criticism of its provisions was expressed within and without doors and, in 1804, Pitt returned to office after promising George III that Catholic Emancipation would not be raised again during the king's lifetime. Pitt predeceased George III by fourteen years.

Pitt's willingness to trim or drop unpopular policies was evident by 1789, and has been blamed upon his subordination to George III, who had in 1783 made him the leader of a minority government to oust the Fox-North coalition (Barnes, 1939). While compromise with the crown was required on some issues of personal importance to the crown, most notably religious toleration, Pitt was not a royal cipher. His decision to oppose Test and Corporation Act repeal in 1787 was partially conditioned by the king's determination to oppose the measure and all who supported it. The premier nonetheless overrode the king's hatred of revolutionary France to make overtures of peace from 1795 to 1797 and, despite George Ill's open hostility to parliamentary reform, would continue to promote parts of his 1785 reform bill as an independent MP from 1785 to 1789. Before 1792, Pitt's freedom of action was limited by the presence in his Cabinet of several 'King's Friends', most notably Lord Chancellor Thurlow and Home Secretary Lord Sydney. In 1785 it was said that only two members of the Cabinet supported Pitt's reform bill, for the rest sided with the king. From 1789 to 1791, Pitt gained more control over executive decision-making by remodelling the Cabinet through the promotion of Henry Dundas and William Grenville to the posts of Home and Foreign Secretary respectively. In 1792, Pitt challenged George III by threatening to resign unless the obstreperous Thurlow was dismissed: following the king's compliance with the premier's request, Pitt, Grenville and Dundas made state policy with little direct interference from the crown. George III accepted their leadership without question during the 1790s to the extent that, by 1799, all three felt they could force Catholic Emancipation upon the king. In this they were mistaken (Mori, 1997b: 270-1; Mackesy, 1982: 197; Ehrman, 1996: 495-509).

Pitt's willingness to compromise was resented by his old mentor, Earl Shelburne, according to whom the 'economical' reform initiatives of the 1780s were pale shadows of Shelburne's original projects. To the 'Jesuit of Berkeley Square', piqued by his exclusion from Pitt's Cabinets, any deviation from the Shelburnite campaign to cut costs, increase bureaucratic accountability in the offices of state and conduct government in an efficient and rational manner was a betrayal of principle (Norris, 1963: 271-82; Brown, 1967: 101). The tale of Pitt's achievements from the East India Act of 1784 to the establishment of the Consolidated Fund for the redemption of the National Debt in 1786-1787 has been told many times. From it he emerges as a prudent and pragmatic administrative reformer (Ehrman, 1969: Chs 10—11). Seventeen years in power enabled Pitt to make a virtue of expediency, but the ground rules for this system of pragmatism had been laid down by 1789. Pitt's modus operandi of statesmanship was essentially Court Whig in conception, as he told a Commons Select Committee on dockyard reform in 1785. His professed subscription to traditional Blackstonian notions of executive power and responsibility and a reluctance to antagonise vested interests in the state bureaucracy militated against acting upon Public Accounts Commission recommendations to introduce 'economical reform' during the 1780s (Breihan, 1983: 80-1). These reservations did not prevent him from embarking upon moderate and consensual change in the interests of public welfare where possible. Pitt was no radical, original thinker or doctrinaire bureaucratic reformer, but he was determined in the aftermath of the American War to restore domestic public confidence in the structures and practices of Hanoverian government. This was restorative reform and, though interrupted by the French Revolution, did not stop in 1793 (Mori, 1997b: 39-43; Ehrman, 1969: 282-36, 308-11; Harling, 1996b: 58-63).

This begs the question what, if anything, Pitt learned from his father, the Elder Pitt, whose career appeared to embody the ideals of Country Whig radicalism (Brown, 1963; Robbins, 1959). When divested of the hagiography surrounding his name, Chatham appears as an intensely ambitious politician whose independent Whiggery was preordained by his lesser gentry social roots and exclusion from the circles of the Old Corps. His son's inheritance consisted of little more than a talent for public relations, a hatred of party politics, a spirit of conciliation towards the Thirteen Colonies and, come the war with France, a desire to emulate the swift and startling successes of the Seven Years War (Peters, 1998: 113—14, 238—42, 247-8). Pitt's political theory was shaped by a taste for Court Whig classical literature informed by Scottish Enlightenment theories of history and a critical desire to improve, if not revolutionise, existing structures and practices of government. Pitt's political economy was not that of Adam Smith: the so-called 'free trade' treaties of the 1780s with France and Portugal contain many anomalies while Pitt, during the bad harvest years of 1795—1796 and 1799—1800, authorised the statutory regulation of grain supplies, for which he was criticised by Grenville. 'I was not more convinced than you were of the soundness of Adam Smith's principles of political economy till Lord Liverpool lured you away from our arms into the mazes of the old system' (Stanhope, 1861-2: iii, 371; Ehrman, 1969: 47; 1983: 445-7; 1996: 278-82; Wells, 1988: 88-90). By the 1810s, Grenville would be demanding the repeal of the Corn Laws and an end to Pitt's own wartime funding system. A conceptual model of modernising state and society, rather than a strict code of laissez-faire principles, was what Pitt took from Scottish political economy. This vision of western European development functioned as the basis for limited bureaucratic reform, freer trade and a series of unsuccessful improving projects mooted over the 1780s and 1790s, including the commutation of tithes, the reform of the old poor law and moderate parliamentary reform. This political economy both drove and justified a series of state policies but was tempered by an awareness, visible from Pitt's earliest days in office, that compromise is the essence of statesmanship. Where Pitt learned this is not clear: possibly from Chatham though it is more likely, knowing Pitt's private fondness for systems of theory, that some system of expediency constituted a formal part of his political thought. The principle of utility had many advocates, amongst whom David Hume and William Paley (before 1800) were highly regarded by Pitt, though, in the absence of a felicific calculus, he cannot be described as a utilitarian (PH, 1792: xxix, 816-38; PR, 1792: xxxi, 216-17; Mori, 1997b: 39-43).

Both Pitt and his cousin Grenville have been described as conservative Whigs though neither was a disciple or friend of Edmund Burke. Grenville, a pious Anglican who believed in the divine ordination of social order, liked the Reflections on the Revolution in France from the day of its publication but Pitt, who cared litde for religion and possessed a taste for cultural relativism, did not (Derry, 1981: 126-7; Jupp, 1985: 464; Wilberforce, 1838: i, 282, 315). All three men were, in general terms, Establishment Whigs. During the 1780s it mattered litde: Pitt could claim to be leading a liberal administration, many of whose policies were more adventurous than those of the Opposition. The Foxite Whigs, who had rallied under the leadership of Fox following the death in 1782 of their old leader, the Marquis of Rockingham, never forgave Pitt or George III for ousting them from office in 1783. Because Pitt had taken office as the leader of a minority government, all Foxites concluded that he was a creature of the crown. The central tenet of Rockingham Whiggism - opposition to the royal prerogative — had made the Whigs ardent economical reformers but they had no other coherent policies to promote as alternatives to Pitt's government during the mid-1780s.

Economical reform for the Rockingham Whigs had always been fixated on real or perceived abuses of royal and ministerial power (Mitchell, 1971, 1992). Edmund Burke's Civil Establishment Act of 1782 abolished the Board of Trade and the Colonial Office whilst rooting out sinecures in the royal household and civil administration, but did not address questions of bureaucratic professionalism and accountability, even to the limited extent that they were dealt with by Pitt (Christie, 1970: 296-8). The Foxites expressed no interest in state finance except to bemoan the growth of the national debt, a case that was difficult to sustain following Pitt's establishment of the Consolidated Fund in 1786. For die Foxites, Parliamentary reform involved the reduction of ministerial influence in Treasury and Navy boroughs rather than an end to electoral corruption, much less any redistribution of parliamentary seats or widening of the franchise. As aristocratic Whigs, the Foxites relied upon the politics of oligarchy in town and country to maintain their party status. Starting in 1787, Fox would begin to move his party to the left by taking up the Dissenter cause for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. This would begin to give the Whigs a new identity.

Foxite Whigs always saw Pitt as a Tory, by which they meant a supporter of a strong crown, and had used the same term of abuse against Lord North during the American War. The nomenclature of Toryism was a peculiarity of Foxite ideology. Finding self-professed Tories at Westminster before the 1800s is difficult because the term was still synonymous with Jacobite treason and therefore not willingly adopted by contemporaries. In 1924 Keith Feiling claimed that a 'new' Tory Party based on support for a strong crown and church had emerged amongst the King's Friends who formed the core of Lord North's parliamentary majorities during the 1700s, adopting a formal Tory identity under Pitt's leadership in 1792 (Feiling, 1924: 165-209). This claim had always been difficult to accept in the absence of any clear Tory identity, if not vestigial Tory principles, in Lords or Commons (Langford, 1980; Bradley, 1990). In 1804, the second Lord Kenyon described himself as an adherent to Tory principles 'on the subject of Emancipation and everything relating to the Church and State' and, in 1805, the future Lord Liverpool would call upon 'the Tories, the firm, steady and persevering supporters of the monarchy and the established church' to defeat an emancipation bill in the Commons (cited in Harvey, 1978a: 204; PD, 1805: iv, 691). By 1800 the partial rehabilitation of divine right and passive obedience, those original Tory principles of the seventeenth century, by loyalist authors during the 1790s had given some new respectability to old Tory ideas in the context of the war against revolutionary France. By 1815, Toryism would stand for the royal prerogative, traditional High Churchmanship, powerful executive government, militant hostility to radical reform and conservative patriotism (Harvey, 1978a,b: 2 4; Cookson, 1982: 12—16; Clark, 1985: 275-6; O'Gorman, 1989a: 7, 27-8; Sack, 1993: 49 50). Kenyon and the High Churchmen were unusual in openly calling themselves Tories during the 1800s, for the vast majority of politicians still defined themselves as Whigs.

The Foxites, bound by a heritage of aristocratic Whiggery, regarded themselves as the only true Whigs in parliament. They were unique amongst eighteenth-century politicians in their determination to view themselves as a party but, during the 1780s, commanded only 130—140 votes in the Commons. Without independent support, the Foxites could not defeat the ministry on any issue. Their one chance at government office came in 1789, when the possibly permanent madness of George III raised the prospect of a regency under the Prince of Wales. Fox, however, overplayed his hand by asserting the royal rights of an unpopular prince against a House of Commons that preferred to limit the powers of the crown, as stipulated by Pitt's Regency Bill, until the prince had proved himself in office (Derry, 1963; O'Gorman, 1967: 7-12, 32-7; Ehrrnan, 1969: 644—88; Mitchell, 1971: Ch. 4; Smith, 1975: 103-7). The recovery of the king in March 1789 scuppered the plans of the prince and the Whigs, in so doing exposing a rift that had been developing since 1787 amongst the Commons leaders of the party. The establishment of close relations between Richard Brinsley Sheridan and Garleton House, in addition to his growing influence over Fox, was alienating Burke from the Whig leadership and, when the Opposition Whigs began to differ in opinion over the meaning of the French Revolution, these personality conflicts would contribute to the splitting of the party between the disciples of Burke and the followers of Fox (O'Gorman, 1967: 40-69; Mitchell, 1971: 149-51).

Party Politics during the French Revolution, 1790-1799

On 18 April 1791, Fox and Burke would disagree during the Commons debates on Pitt's Canada Bill about the threat (or lack of it) that the French Revolution posed to western Europe and the British empire. Burke's opinions, no secret since the publication of the Reflections the previous November, saw in the ideas, actors and policies of the revolution a bourgeois Enlightenment conspiracy against all social order in its assaults upon the institutions of the ancien régime through which social order, both literal and metaphysical, was maintained in France. For Fox the revolution represented a welcome assault upon absolute monarchy and tyrannical government analogous to the 1688 Glorious Revolution. The dispute between the two men was exacerbated by the publication, in August 1791, of Burke's Appeal from the Old to the New Whigs, a tract which denounced Francophile Whiggery as a naive and dangerous creed that stood to undermine Britain's political and social stability by encouraging criticism of the establishment. Backbench Whigs, asked to choose between Fox and Burke, would remain in a state of embarrassed and divided limbo until the end of 1792, when Burke and his chief disciple, William Windham, offered to support Pitt in the pursuit of 'vigorous Measures at Home and abroad' for the suppression of radicalism and the containment of French military expansion (Burke, 1958—78: vii, 291). When war broke out in February 1793, the Opposition was divided between radical Whig supporters of Fox, a Third Party of conservative Whigs headed by Burke, and the main body of the party led by the Duke of Portland. Over the course of 1793, the Pordand group would join forces with the conservative Whigs, leaving Fox isolated with a rump of 60 Commons supporters and, in July 1794, the united Portland Whigs' would join the Pitt ministry in a coalition government, thus completing the disintegration of the Whig Party (O'Gorman, 1967; Mitchell, 1971; Smith, 1975; Derry, 1989).

Parliamentary reform was the issue that divided conservative from radical Whigs in 1792. On 11 April, the aristocratic Society of the Friends of the People (FOP) had been formed in London by Charles Grey, the Duke of Norfolk and other Whigs sympathetic to both parliamentary reform and the French Revolution. Grey's reform motion of 29 April split the party openly in the Commons, whereby Pitt moved to lure the conservative Whigs into the ranks of government with an invitation to join the Privy Council and participate in the concert of measures 'for checking any attempts dangerous to public order and tranquillity' (Windham, 1912: 249). Portland Whig participation in this venture would produce the 21 May royal proclamation against seditious writings and the movement of Whig MPs to the government lobby for the Commons vote of confidence for the measure. This set the precedent for future co-operation between the government and the Portland Whigs, who would begin to vote regularly with the ministry at the end of 1792 (O'Gorman, 1967: 84 6; Mitchell, 1971: 177 -84; 1992: 120-1; Smith, 1992: 40-1).

Pitt's opposition to Grey's 1792 motion was preordained by its author s lack of specific proposals and his determination to act in concert with the popular reform societies forming in London and the provinces. The premier had abandoned his old allies but not, as far as we know, his attachment to moderate reform measures, and would say so during his 1797 speech against Grey's second reform bill (PH, 1797: 673—4). By this date, Grey and Fox had emerged as opponents of the war with France and defenders of radical civil rights against government and loyalist persecution. Although the Foxite or radical Whigs continued to support Test repeal and the abolition of the slave trade, they were not at heart democrats and Grey's 1797 bill advocated little more than Pitt's 1785 bill: the abolition of rotten boroughs, an increase of county MPs, the establishment of a household suffrage in the boroughs, and the replacement of two-member constituencies with single-member electoral districts. Neither Pitt nor Fox were innovators in the realm of parliamentary reform because both sought to repair - rather than rebuild - what they regarded as the best system of government on earth (Mitchell, 1992: 252—5, 258—61; Hampsher-Monk, 1978; Smith, 1992: 51-3, 66-7).

Foxite attitudes to radicalism and the French Revolution defy simple explanation. Fox, who loathed the writings of Thomas Paine, was saddened and horrified by the excesses of the revolution from late 1792 onwards, believing that constitutional reform had degenerated into anarchy. The evils of Bourbon absolutism were nonetheless of such magnitude that revolutionary experiments in government, however violent, were preferable to a restoration of the ancien régime monarchy. Fox was at heart a constitutional royalist but saw no merit in either of Louis XVFs brothers and consequently saw republican or Napoleonic government as preferable alternatives. He feared that British radicalism might metamorphose into violent Jacobinism, were not radical grievances given at least a fair hearing. For this reason the Foxites maintained social contact with metropolitan radical leaders throughout the 1790s, offered free legal defence services to radicals awaiting trial on sedition or treason charges, and defended radical rights of free speech in the Commons despite reservations about the wisdom of universal manhood suffrage. In so doing, the Foxites sought to act as mediators between an overmighty state and a potentially rebellious people (Fox, 1853-7: ii, 135-6, 149, 167; Derry, 1989: 43-4, 51-2; Mitchell, 1971: 233-6; 1980: 44-6; 1992: 130-3, 139-41; Mandler, 1990a: 19-21; Smith, 1992: 68).

The Foxites were suspected by Pitt of high treason at intervals throughout the 1790s, though no case could ever be proven against them. By this was meant actual collaboration with revolutionary France or, during the later 1790s, collusion with the London Corresponding Society (LCS) and United Irishmen (UI) in support of a British revolution. Following a public dinner held on 24 June 1798 by the Duke of Norfolk at which republican toasts were drunk, Fox and other leading Whigs were expelled from the Privy Council. Whig friendships with John and Benjamin Binns, John Gale Jones and other metropolitan radicals may have vindicated aristocratic Whiggism in the eyes of the LCS: the abolition of the House of Lords never appeared amongst its reform demands. In the eyes of the government, whose spies were collecting evidence of treason against the UI and LCS, the closeness of Whigs and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• 1. Parties and Politics
• 2. Ideas and Influences
• 3. Radicals and Loyalists
• 4. Individuals and Institutions
• 5. From Orders to Class?
• 6. Ways and Means
• 7. Pragmatism and Policy
• Bibliography
• Index