The Spirit of the Union

Popular Politics in Scotland

Gordon Pentland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781851961535
• eBook ISBN: 9781317316534
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Pentland's study has 3 aims: to place the uprising in a wider context by exploring the modes of extra-parliamentary politics between 1815 and1820 as well as the situation outside Scotland; (ii) to provide the first full account of the rising itself; and (iii) to examine the legacies of both the politics of 1815-20 and the Radical War.

1 The Forging of Post-War Politics

The first step in reconstructing the politics of the early nineteenth century is to acknowledge the sheer impact of the end of the war. The transformative nature of the long French Wars (1793-1815) can scarcely be underestimated. It was an unprecedented conflict in terms of the scale of participation of manpower (and indeed womanpower), something conveyed in part by simple but striking figures. The participation rate of men of military age was one in sixteen for the War of the Austrian Succession (1740-8); one in eight for the American Revolution (1776-83); but rose to one in five or six at the height of the French Wars.¹ The peacetime army of 1789 had stood at 40,000 – by 1814 it had reached 250,000. One of the most remarkable features of the period is the manner in which the British state proved capable of mobilizing manpower at those points at which French invasion seemed credible and imminent. In particular, the extraordinary mobilization of 1803-4, which saw volunteering on a huge scale, vastly increased the numbers of Britons with some military experience. While it avoided recourse to the novel French levée en masse the British state nevertheless managed to create the 'armed nation'.² As J. E. Cookson has demonstrated, the participation rate of Scots in all of these various forms of martial endeavour was out of proportion to the small size of their country. As well as providing more men, proportionately, for both the officers and the rank and file of the army, they were the United Kingdom's most enthusiastic volunteers.³

This mobilization of manpower was matched by the ability to raise resources through borrowing, and especially through taxation. Britain was the only state in Europe which, under the pressure of the French Wars, successfully transformed itself into a 'fiscal state', able efficiently to tax a large proportion of the nation's wealth and combine this with large-scale borrowing. The great innovation here was, of course, the income tax, which provided a source of direct taxation between 1799 and 1816. While there were worrying signs for ministers, in attacks on corruption and 'tax-eaters', that the legitimacy of the public revenue was increasingly being questioned towards the end of the war, it was successfully maintained.⁴

No society could have snapped from a war demanding such a level of participation and commitment and returned to the status quo ante. Britain's elite was faced with challenges common to the post-war experiences of other states and, indeed, other periods.⁵ An economy geared to war, in which prices for marginal agricultural land had risen, was thrown into competition with Europe and became subject to repeated economic crises. Adding to this profound problem was the fact that thousands of men with military experience were thrust back into a turbulent civilian life and countless more people with exposure to years of military spectacle considered how best to promote and defend their interests in peacetime.⁶

The impact of demobilized soldiers, in particular, was dramatic and formed an oft-stated anxiety of contemporary observers. Between 300,000 and 400,000 ex-servicemen were demobilized in the years following Waterloo. In 1819, according to F. C. Mather, there were 61,397 out-pensioners registered at Chelsea, fully three times the 1792 figure. This continued to rise to a peak of 85,834 in 1828 and then steadily diminished after that point.⁷ Military recruitment, of course, had been strong in populous areas and the army had been a destination for many from the manufacturing communities of the north of England and south of Scotland, as well as from increasingly landless and proletarianized rural communities. These men were thrust back into an economy which was contracting as it adjusted to post-war realities, with the predictable outcome of spiralling unemployment.⁸ As Mather pointed out, to the ruling elites and nervous middle classes these ex-servicemen represented at one and the same time a threat and an opportunity. The opportunity was slowly but, in the end, successfully grasped and men of military experience were co-opted into the peacetime law and order establishment. This was, however, a gradual and uneven process with marked success only after 1819. Even if, as Cookson has argued, 'military service more obviously produced civil officers and "magistrates' men" than it did insurrectionists', it did create both, and before the 1820s ex-servicemen were a threat to the social order as much as they were a guarantor of it.⁹

This profoundly altered socio-economic landscape was matched by an utterly changed context for the practice of politics. First, new groups emerged with novel claims on the state or with old claims strengthened and given a new validity, while at the same time governments ran the risk of becoming victims of those rhetorical and political strategies they had employed to sustain the war effort. The end of the war entailed a major shift in the political languages open to different groups. Most importantly, war had been the crucial glue that kept patriotism and loyalism in close proximity. The fit had never been exact and patriotism had remained contested throughout the war. Radicals had largely lost this contest by the mid-1790s, but there were attempts to rebuild a reform consensus around a patriotic critique of the war effort after 1805.¹⁰ The language of patriotism was, however, far more open to radical appropriations after 1815.

In existing accounts of popular politics in Scotland, the changed political context after 1815 has been overshadowed by the changed social and economic context as an explanation for the emergence of a radical political movement. A generation of historians has, however, worked with Gareth Stedman-Jones's intellectual case for assigning political causes to political phenomena.¹¹ This chapter will argue that a similar approach might be used within the Scottish context, and that the reasons for the form and content of the radical movement ought to be sought in the profoundly altered post-war political culture. First, popular radicalism did not emerge in isolation and cannot be removed from its immediate political context and reduced to a function of its social base. It was the result of responses to and interactions with other groups seeking to adjust to post-war problems and opportunities. Especially important were the relationships between developing popular radicalism and three other groups: a ministry, which needed to address problems within the public finances; a Whig and radical opposition in Parliament that sought opportunities to develop a distinctive critique of the Liverpool administration; and an emergent middle class which had been encouraged to believe that property taxes were a wartime expedient. Secondly, this chapter will explore post-war radicalism as in part the product of a continuous presence within Scotland. The idea that radicalism was destroyed by 1799 only to re-emerge after 1816 cannot be taken seriously and this chapter will point to some possible arguments for continuity. Thirdly, it will explore the form and the content of the reform movement itself, placing particular emphasis on the language of those petitions and meetings which sustained it.

I

The idea of radical politics emerging ex nihilo after 1815 ignores the dynamic post-war context provided by both a Whig opposition exploring the new opportunities offered by the cessation of hostilities and a middle class which had been politicized by issues of war and taxation. A pronounced Scottish dimension to this revival and reshaping of Whiggism was apparent in the Edinburgh Review, the hugely influential publication launched by a group of young, briefless Whig lawyers in 1802. It was established after a decade of considerable challenges for the small but significant number of Whig activists in Scotland, whose very political survival was no small achievement.¹² The party-political complexion of the Edinburgh Review was confirmed in 1808, with the 'Don Cevallos' article penned by Francis Jeffrey and Henry Brougham. The article, which praised the Spanish patriots and used events in Spain to call for reforms in Britain, alienated contributors and subscribers of a Tory hue and inspired the establishment of a rival journal, the Quarterly Review.¹³ From its establishment to the 1830s the Edinburgh Review developed a global reputation and played a crucial role in both shaping and reflecting the intellectual culture of Whiggism.¹⁴

While acknowledging its dynamic role in the revitalization of Whiggery, the Edinburgh Review should not be focused on to the exclusion of other dynamic developments within the Scottish press. A key phenomenon in the early nineteenth century was the emergence of a provincial press embracing a range of political positions. In this developing press 'liberal' opinion – which questioned the war and established institutions, called for retrenchment and the abolition of taxation and was at least willing to discuss reform – was marked. While radicals and reformers in the 1790s had been largely dependent on London newspapers and would, to an extent, continue to look to English publications, there was a rash of 'progressive' newspapers established before 1815.¹⁵ For many, such as the Greenock Advertiser and the Dundee Advertiser (1802), the Berwick Advertiser (1808), the Dumfries and Galloway Courier (1809) and the Montrose Review (1811) this path to reformist credentials was stuttering and uneven, but the emergence of this local press was a marked feature of the early century.¹⁶

One paper in particular illustrates how space was made for political discussion during the war years and also provides an example of the links between these publications and political action. The Glasgow Sentinel (which became the Glasgow Chronicle in 1811) was the progeny of reformist political activity during the war. Historians have increasingly taken seriously the revival and reshaping of reformist and radical politics during the Napoleonic wars and a crucial moment has been identified in the scandal that engulfed the Duke of York and his mistress Mrs Clarke in 1809.¹⁷ In the context of a war which was going badly, the revelation that the duke's mistress was corruptly influencing appointments within the army was politically electrifying. There was clear interest in parts of Scotland, but in Glasgow no newspaper would run an advertisement for a public meeting on the subject. The Sentinel was established specifically to fill this gap and to act as an 'independent' newspaper. As a result, a meeting was held and the city sent an address with 4,000 names attached to it.¹⁸

The relationship between Whig politicians and this emerging 'liberal' opinion outside of Parliament was uneasy and episodic. From 1809 links were most formidable whenever the Whigs chose to focus on issues which allowed them to politicize extra-parliamentary discontent and both direct and reflect middle-class concerns. Henry Brougham played a crucial role in developing these strategies of 'petition and debate' and scored a notable success in the campaign to repeal the Orders in Council of 1812. The campaign stimulated petitions from a number of places in Scotland, including Dunfermline, Paisley, Leith and the counties of Lanarkshire and Renfrewshire.¹⁹ The strategy only really came into its own in the changed context after 1815 and over the issue of the property tax. This was the first large-scale reform campaign in post-war Britain, but one which has received scant attention from historians of radicalism.²⁰ Its focus was Pitt's income tax, introduced in 1799 to address acute problems with the maintenance of public credit. Having been repealed at the Peace in 1802 it was re-established at a higher rate after 1803.

The issue of the income tax provides a key example of how post-war realities had changed the nature of political argument. For ministers the principal challenge was that of funding the national debt. Peace had not meant an end to borrowing and, having renewed the income tax for a year in April 1815, Lord Liverpool's government planned to renew it for a further two years in the 1816 session.²¹ While ministers were not keen to contemplate funding the debt without this tax, they were hobbled by the fact that, from its inception, the income tax had been explicitly presented as a wartime expedient. In the deflationary slump that followed the end of the war the tax was unpopular with merchants, traders and landholders and provided a promising issue on which to build an opposition consensus. The Whig leadership was agreed on using the issue and, indeed, Brougham had mooted a campaign on the tax in the immediate aftermath of his success with the Orders in Council.²²

It was a campaign partly initiated by Whigs and partly generated by local middle classes and had an impressive response from Scotland, which sent forty-seven petitions for repeal in the 1816 session.²³ By March of 1816 the Dundee, Perth and Cupar Advertiser could report, 'the whole kingdom is roused – Scotland as much as England'.²⁴ The importance of the campaign in encouraging the culture of public meetings was marked. Henry Cockburn, another founder of the Edinburgh Review, looked back on the Edinburgh meeting to oppose the income tax as a crucial step in the development of a political culture, an 'advance towards the habit of public meeting' and 'a striking indication of the tendency of the public mind'. Such meetings had analogues and precursors in, for example, gatherings in opposition to slavery and the slave trade, but Cockburn identified the income tax meeting as more profoundly important: 'the first respectable meeting held in Edinburgh, within the memory of man, for the avowed purpose of controlling Government on a political matter'.²⁵

If the assault on the tax was partly premised on an appeal to economic self-interest and aimed at the politicization of economic distress, there were wider issues at stake which ensured that the campaign played a crucial role in setting the tenor of post-war politics. Central to the concerns of petitioners was the notion that wartime expedients and policies could not be indefinitely and artificially extended into the very different context provided by peace. Nearly all petitions reprimanded and reminded government, as did the inhabitants of Edinburgh and Leith:

That it was originally proposed merely because the unparallel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Forging of Post-War Politics
• 2 Loyalism and Whiggism in Scotland
• 3 Scotland and the Mass Platform
• 4 The 'General Rising' of 1820
• Conclusion
• Epilogue: The Legacies of 1820
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index