Crown, Church and Constitution

Popular Conservatism in England, 1815-1867

Jörg Neuheiser

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785331411
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

Much scholarship on nineteenth-century English workers has been devoted to the radical reform politics that powerfully unsettled the social order in the century's first decades. Comparatively neglected have been the impetuous patriotism, royalism, and xenophobic anti-Catholicism that countless men and women demonstrated in the early Victorian period. This much-needed study of the era's "conservatism from below" explores the role of religion in everyday culture and the Tories' successful mobilization across class boundaries. Long before they were able to vote, large swathes of the lower classes embraced Britain's monarchical, religious, and legal institutions in the defense of traditional English culture.

Chapter 1

CELEBRATING THE MONARCHY

LOYALISM, RADICALISM AND THE CROWD, 1820–1832

At the end of January in 1820, the news of George III’s death reached the English public amidst a deep political conflict raging between conservative loyalists and radical reformers. Just a few months earlier, in August 1819, a large demonstration in favour of democratic reforms with a crowd of up to 100,000 had erupted on St Peter’s Field near Manchester and ended in a veritable bloodbath. After the local magistrates had issued the order to disband the demonstration, the yeomanry charged wildly into the crowd, leaving eleven dead and hundreds of wounded in their wake. Liberals as well as radicals reacted with outrage and staged protests against the ‘massacre of Peterloo’ across the country. Meanwhile, the government, under Lord Liverpool, sought to prevent further protests by enacting repressive laws in short succession. These so-called Six Acts were designed to put a damper on the rights of assembly and the freedom of the press. The Peterloo incident thus marked the apex of a crisis that had developed after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. After years of fiery debate, the gap between the interests of the conservative establishment and the demands of radical reformers seemed to have become irreconcilable. Both sides claimed to speak for the majority of ‘the people’.¹

And so it came that a new king was to be crowned during this period of constrained peace that reigned in early 1820. Only a few days after the death of his father, celebrations proclaiming George IV as the new king took place in all the cities and villages of the kingdom. Whereas this situation presented an opportunity for demonstrations of loyalism and affinity for the monarchy, it was also overshadowed by the question of whether these festivities might open a forum for voicing further demands for reform that might lead to renewed protests against the government.

Even after the celebrations were over, the situation was still ambiguous. Although the proclamations themselves were not marred by any incidents and large crowds participated in the festivities across the land, there was not a great outpouring of enthusiasm for the new king and the monarchy.² Accordingly, both conservatives and radicals could call individual celebrations a success. For example, the conservative newspaper Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle reported on the festivities in Manchester with a measure of relief, noting that ‘the most zealous loyalty pervaded the conduct of the people, and the air rang with acclamations and applause’.³ A crowd of a few thousand assembled as the municipal authorities, accompanied by the army regiments and militia stationed in Manchester, officially celebrated the proclamation of George IV as king at St Anne’s Square with a gun salute and the singing of the national anthem. Afterwards, they paraded through the city to the neighbouring town of Salford. Along the way the proclamation was read, to the cheers of the crowd, several times over. Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle reported that there was just one attempt to disrupt the procession, which was quickly put down by the assembled crowd and only served to increase the jubilation. It claimed the day as a ‘complete triumph of loyalty’.⁴ The liberal Cowdroy’s Manchester Gazette, on the other hand, maintained that hardly anyone had celebrated the parade as only ‘a very small portion of the people assembled joined the authorities of the town and the soldiers in giving nine cheers’.⁵

Given such contradictory accounts of the celebrations of the monarchy, historians have repeatedly cautioned against judging the general political inclination of these crowds merely on the basis of their large numbers and rushing to the conclusion that the cheering masses reported as having attended these kinds of celebrations attest to a fundamental conservative spirit among the people. In particular, Mark Harrison emphasizes the complex character of these celebrations of proclamations and coronations in the early nineteenth century, using Bristol as his primary example. He argues that, on the surface, the public expression of loyalist feeling could blanket over local conflicts, but when looked at more closely, these moments actually underscored these very issues.⁶ Harrison rightly describes the general emptiness of such loyalist rituals and calls for more detailed analyses of their specific local contexts because of the difficulties in assessing the meaning of such events. Yet his own examination of the festivities surrounding the proclamation and coronation of George IV in Bristol, Liverpool, Norwich and Manchester still provides a rather simplified view. For example, he sees the lack of planning to symbolically involve the people in the official celebrations in 1820 and 1821 as a conscious act of exclusion on the part of the municipal authorities. Similarly, on the basis of liberal and radical press reports on the lack of cheering among the crowds, he concludes that there was an ideological antagonism between city leaders and the local population.⁷ Correspondingly, Harrison interprets the reverse signs that appeared in 1831, with the coronation of William IV, along class lines, and re-emphasizes the opposition between the conservative leaders who were reluctantly involved in the planning of the celebrations and the crowds who cheered the king while harbouring demands for reform.⁸

Yet an examination of lower-class participation in the celebrations of the monarchy in other years, in which a political crisis did not loom so largely overhead, effectively questions the rather oversimplified assumption that there was a fundamental conflict between the political interests of the crowd and the goals of the ruling political classes. A look at Leeds, Bolton and London, for example, reveals that even as early as the 1820s, there was no clear-cut conflict between the municipal authorities and the cheering crowds. Moreover, by extending the perspective beyond the 1820s, a more complex picture of the political positions of those who participated in the celebrations of the monarchy emerges. Rather than a one-sided opposition between ‘upper class’ and ‘lower class’, there were a variety of opinions and changing identities apparent among the crowds. Correspondingly, elements of popular conservatism can be detected in the celebrations of the monarchy that attest to the circulation of conservative political attitudes within the English lower classes. At the same time, the popularity of conservative political thought among plebeians undermines assumptions that English society was divided along insurmountable lines of conflict as well as the notion that a fundamental social consensus reigned in England at this time.

Analysing Crowds and the Popularity of the Monarchy

Mark Harrison’s analysis of crowds in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century aims to free the historical interpretation of mass phenomena in England from the all too rigid definitions of the masses proposed by Eric Hobsbawn, E.P. Thompson and George Rudé. In their studies, these three Marxist historians sought to replace the strongly negative image of the threatening and unpredictable ‘masses’ associated with a fear of revolution, which had come to characterize many sociological and socioanthropological analyses of crowds by the time Gustav Le Bon’s La psychologie des foules appeared in 1895, with a perspective shaped by well-founded sociohistorical analyses. Correspondingly, they wanted to overcome the blanket equation of ‘the masses’ with ‘the people’ or the ‘lower classes’.⁹ Rather than focusing on the psychological disappearance of the individual in the crowd and the dissolution of individual sociomoralistic standards in the behaviour of a group, they analysed the immediate social context within which crowds appeared, as well as their entirely rational, coordinated and clearly goal-oriented behaviour. Within this framework, it was Thompson in particular who developed the concept of the ‘moral economy’ of the crowd that has been so often cited.¹⁰ At the same time, these three scholars limited the scope of their interpretations to phenomena that were directly connected to social protests, civil disturbances and riots. Rudé, for example, explicitly excluded crowds that assembled to celebrate ceremonial, religious or carnivalesque events as well as those attending public performances.¹¹ Despite the rather pragmatic focus on protest culture, the perspective developed by these historians greatly influenced further scholarship on crowds and disturbances in England for quite some time.¹²

In contrast, drawing on continental scholarship on the culture of celebrations, Harrison has developed a broader concept of the ‘crowd’, which he defines as a large group of people assembled in an open space. He also adds a further criterion, namely that of proximity, as he maintains that crowds must be concentrated in such a way that the people involved influence one another in terms of their behaviour and actions; they must be close enough to each other so that they could appear to contemporary observers as an assembly. At the same time, Harrison proposes an exemplary analytical framework for examining the behaviour of crowds that takes into consideration systematically collected data on a given event such as the date, the time of day (general working hours or rather leisure time), the location of the assembly and/or the route taken by the group or the parade as well as the weather at the time. He then evaluates this information using a ‘thick description’ method drawn from Clifford Geertz.¹³ In his study, he also consciously includes crowds that took part in ceremonial events that may have at first seemed to be merely a group of spectators. Moreover, he questions the depth of the ideological convictions of agents within crowds.

Despite these methodological innovations, however, Harrison hardly strays from the rather one-sided, protest-oriented tradition within scholarship on English social history. This can be seen in his – quite legitimate – rejection of the idea inspired by Emile Durkheim that patriotic rituals are events in which societies debate shared values and beliefs or celebrate a moralistic consensus in a quasi-religious way.¹⁴ It is also reinforced in his argument that almost exclusively binds an analysis of celebrations and ceremonial events to a reconstruction of subversive attitudes, which effectively traces a fundamental opposition between the English lower classes and the social elite along the lines of the old labour history. Especially in his examination of the celebrations of the monarchy in the early nineteenth century, Harrison neglects to discuss the changing moods as well as contradictory positions and attitudes that could emerge within a crowd.

Harrison’s study is not merely interesting because of its interpretative methods, but also because its assessment of the popularity of the English Crown supports the idea that the popular loyalist Church and King attitude disappeared around 1800. Even today, scholarship on the subject of the popular opinion of the monarchy is still heavily influenced by the works of Linda Colley and David Cannadine that outlined the idea that the monarchy under George III developed into a popular national institution up to 1815, but then became unpopular and controversial under his successors before transforming into a symbol of British dominance and national identity under the flag of imperialism toward the end of the nineteenth century.¹⁵

Colley, for example, describes the transformation of George III from a young king who seemed to endanger England’s constitutional compromise of the seventeenth century by stressing his own political role into a figure of national identification who stood at the centre of a new ‘anti-democratic brand of patriotism’. This change, she argues, was connected to an increasing amount of royalist self-staging and public celebrations that touted the king as the personification of the political order. The king’s birthday and the anniversary of his coronation became firmly entrenched in the calendar of public celebrations. Events such as the Golden Jubilee in 1809 or the king’s recovery from his first phase of madness in 1789, for example, sparked a wave of rejoicing and elaborate festivities across England.¹⁶

Although George III’s popularity during the war against France helped to unify the nation and turn the monarchy into a symbol of national greatness, Cannadine describes the story of the monarchy after 1820 as the decline of a national institution. Even before the death of George III, Cannadine maintains, the popularity of the royal house had begun to wane as the Prince Regent, George IV, de facto replaced his ageing father; the image of the king as the devoted father of the nation was effectively shattered as the crown passed from father to son, especially because the prince was rather known for being sexually promiscuous and having sparked a series of scandals involving the royal family. Cannadine also links the sinking reputation of the royal family following the Queen Caroline Affair¹⁷ in 1820 to the dwindling of public celebrations of the monarchy and efforts to mould the public image of the Crown. The largely unpopular image of the English monarchs, he suggests, remained firmly in place even under William IV and Queen Victoria. It was not until the last decades of Victoria’s reign that the royal family consciously took advantage of celebratory events involving the Crown to re-establish the monarchy as a national symbol by the ‘inventing of ...