Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion (37 page)

Members of the House of Commons were mostly affiliated to parties, as were the majority of peers in the Upper House. After the 1710 election a list was compiled for the Elector of Hanover of all MPs returned. The Elector’s agents in England accompanied it with a breakdown of political loyalties, marking each name with a ‘W’ or a ‘T’ to indicate party allegiance. Very few individuals were marked with a ‘D’ for ‘doubtful’. Perhaps fifty or so placemen could be relied upon to vote for the government whatever the issue, but other office holders proved difficult to control. Some had been awarded their places for life, and even those with less job security tended to put party loyalty first and defy the ministry on the rare occasions when intense pressure was applied to make them vote as the government wished. Although relatively few division lists survive, those that do exist show that individuals voted with astonishing consistency along party lines.
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In the case of the Whigs, strong leadership and party discipline were partly responsible for their cohesion. The party was headed by a ‘Junto’ (a corruption of ‘Junta’, the Spanish word for council) of five peers: Lords Somers, Halifax, Orford, Wharton, and the third Earl of Sunderland; the latter a new arrival in late 1702. They were a formidable political force, holding meetings at their country houses to coordinate strategy, and maintaining close links with backbenchers. The Tories were less well led, but had an automatic electoral advantage, largely because their views upon the Church commanded wide support. When the Tories did badly in elections during Anne’s reign, it was only because some overriding issue had eroded their natural majority. While the Tories dominated in the House of Commons, the Whigs were stronger in the Lords where their numbers had been increased by bishops made in the reign of William III, most of whom were Low Church in outlook and Whiggish politically.

Party groupings complicated the task of the executive. Ministers could no longer expect Parliamentarians to support measures simply on the grounds of national interest. In return for providing majorities in Parliament, party leaders now demanded employment for their members
not just at ministerial level, but through every echelon of government, with opponents being dismissed from office and replaced by their own party stalwarts. The most dedicated party men would not even accept high ranking positions for themselves unless their associates were given power. In the summer of 1708 an attempt was made to split the Junto by dangling a Cabinet post before Lord Wharton, but he declined it because his chief colleagues were not included in the offer. While Wharton was exceptional in showing such firm party solidarity, the development of such attitudes had fearsome implications for the Crown, of which Anne was well aware. As one non-partisan politician remarked, ‘if a man be turned out or put in for being of a party, that party is the government and none else’. Though Anne objected strongly at having ‘to make bargains with either party to persuade them to do that which a sense of their duty alone ought to lead them to’, political realities sometimes proved too strong for her.
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The challenge facing the government was made greater by the fact that for most of Anne’s reign the country would be engaged in an appallingly expensive war. Whereas Anne’s uncle Charles II had not summoned Parliament at all during the last five years of his reign, the current high level of public expenditure made this quite out of the question. During Anne’s reign, Parliament met annually, usually in the autumn, with sessions lasting about five months.

In 1678–88 government expenditure had averaged £1.7 million a year. In William III’s reign it rose to between £5 and £6 million, but during the War of Spanish Succession it averaged £7.8 million, of which approximately two thirds went on military expenditure. It has been estimated that from 1702–13, the war cost £64,718,000, with total government spending in the same period amounting to £98,207,000. As well as paying for British troops and seamen, the government paid the wages of foreign troops contracted to serve in the forces of the Grand Alliance, and gave subsidies to allied powers. In 1703 England bound itself by treaty to pay annual subsidies of £150,000 and £160,000 to Portugal and Savoy respectively. This sum increased in subsequent years, so by 1706 Savoy alone was receiving £300,000 a year. By 1710–11 Britain was paying for 171,000 troops in various theatres of war. 58,000 of them were Anne’s subjects and the remainder were foreigners in British pay.
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The main method of raising the money for this was a twenty percent tax on landed incomes. This was supplemented by customs revenue and excise duties imposed on a myriad of commodities. Both luxury items such as spirits, fine paper and parchment, and gold and silver wire for
embroidery, as well as the necessities of salt, malt, hops, soap, coal, and leather were subject to duties. In 1710 additional imposts were put on pepper, raisins, wax candles, oil and vinegar, sugar, tobacco, whalebone, snuff, and East India goods. Between 1711–14 the list extended further as Lord Treasurer Oxford placed taxes on coffee, tea, books, playing cards, calicoes, silks, and hackney coaches. As one indignant consumer lamented, ‘Everything was taxed, nothing was spared’.
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Unfortunately this produced insufficient sums to finance the war. The average annual revenue raised from tax during the war years was £5,355,583, and most of the shortfall was found by resorting to loans, mostly from the Bank of England and the East India Company. In 1689 England had not had a national debt, but William III’s wars saddled Anne with a debt of just over £14 million at her accession. At the end of her reign it had more than doubled to £36.2 million, meaning that huge sums had to be set aside each year just to keep it serviced.
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Persuading Parliament to vote the necessary funds to maintain the war effort inevitably required the most careful political management, and the party system only added to the government’s difficulties.

Although assessments for tax purposes were often generous to landowners, the squirearchy resented the fact that whereas a fifth of their income from agriculture went into government coffers, financiers, whose assets were more liquid, escaped lightly. In the last reign attempts had been made to introduce a non land-based form of income tax, but it proved too complex to administer and had to be abandoned. The predominantly Tory landed interest came to feel that they were bearing an unfair share of the war’s cost, while the ‘monied men’ were profiteering out of it and not contributing anything. One fierce Tory declared that by going to war, ‘You certainly ruin those that have only land to depend on, to enrich Dutch, Jews, French, and other foreigners, scoundrel stock-jobbers and tally-jobbers who have been sucking our vitals for many years’.
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Tory resentment was sharpened by the fact that the Whigs were intimately connected with the world of finance, having been instrumental in setting up the Bank of England in 1694.

It was not just the financing of the war that caused party friction, for its strategy and objectives also proved divisive. The Whigs favoured a continuation of the policy pursued by William of making the Low Countries the major theatre of war, whereas the Tories begrudged expending resources to protect Holland. Preferring to see a bigger role for the navy, they wanted amphibious operations to be mounted in the Spanish peninsula or the Caribbean. When the war went badly, Tories
were swift to blame the Dutch for failing to provide their agreed share of naval quotas, or for undermining the war effort by trading with the enemy.

Although the war widened the rift between the parties, the question that aroused the greatest political passions was religion. For the Whigs, hatred of Catholicism took priority, but the Tories focused more on the perceived threat posed to the Established Church by dissenters. It was said that many worthless individuals used the freedoms newly conferred by the Toleration Act of 1689 as an excuse not to attend any form of worship, resulting in rising levels of godlessness. But the Act was also detested by High Churchmen because it revealed the strength of dissent in the country. The newly licensed nonconformist meeting-houses had proved more popular than anticipated when the Act was proposed, and according to one Tory ‘their conventicles are now fuller than any of our churches’. An additional concern was the large number of dissenting academies that had sprung up, described by a diehard Tory as ‘nurseries for rebellion’.
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Tory hostility towards dissenters had a purely political dimension, for almost all dissenters with the vote automatically supported the Whigs. The Test Act of Charles II’s reign remained in force, and stated that all holders of public office must take Anglican communion or face removal. A sizeable number of dissenters fulfilled this requirement through the practice of what was known as ‘Occasional Conformity’ whereby they took the sacrament once a year. In this way men who usually attended meeting-houses ensured they were not debarred from becoming MPs, or voting in elections. While relatively few dissenters actually stood for Parliament, they exercised political power in other ways. Large numbers sat on the boards of town corporations, or served as JPs or mayors, and in those capacities acted at elections as returning officers, who were able to influence the outcome.

The Tories maintained that, as well as being ‘anarchical, atheistical, and anti-monarchial’, the Whigs were shockingly depraved. There was some truth in this. The Earl of Wharton was said to have defecated in a pulpit as a young rake during Charles II’s reign, and remained in the view of one contemporary ‘intrinsically void of moral or religious principles’. He was not the only member of the Junto believed to have an irregular private life, and even a supporter of the Whigs acknowledged ‘there never was a set of men that so avowedly and upon principle declared for irreligion and immorality, and [who] seemed to take great
pains to debauch all the young nobility and gentry they could lay their hands on’. Yet the Tories were far from immaculate. Although they made much of their veneration for the Church, a Whig alleged ‘most of their leaders were seldom seen within the doors of it’. Certainly Edward Seymour, one of their West Country stalwarts, was said to have admitted it was ‘seven years since he had either received the sacrament or heard a sermon in the Church of England’.
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Henry St John, a noted libertine and rising political star in the Tory firmament, took communion once a year to qualify for office, just like those dissenters his party excoriated.

In Anne’s reign, party permeated all aspects of life. Bishop Burnet remarked, ‘In every corner of the nation, the two parties stand as it were listed against one another’. London had avowedly Whig and Tory coffee houses, so that, according to Daniel Defoe, ‘A Whig will no more go to the Cocoa Tree or Ozinda’s than a Tory will be seen at the Coffee House of St James’s’. In York, two social assemblies had to be held each week, with the town’s Tories congregating every Monday, while Whig gatherings took place on Thursdays. Passing through Leicester in 1707, Jonathan Swift observed, ‘There is not a chambermaid, prentice, or schoolboy in this whole town but what is warmly engaged on one side or the other’. ‘At Eton, the school is divided, Whig and Tory’, the aunt of one pupil recorded. On one occasion her Whig nephew, Jacky Clavering, was ‘fighting a Tory boy’ when a lady suspected of Jacobite sympathies tried to part them. Angered by the intervention of this ‘popish hussy’, Jacky ‘turned and gave her a severe blow on the face’.
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Inevitably political considerations impinged on social and business concerns. After a visit to Dublin in June 1706, Swift complained ‘Whig and Tory has spoiled everything that was tolerable here by mixing with private friendship and conversation and ruining both’. Four years later Swift wrote regretfully that it looked unlikely that he would remain on cordial terms with Joseph Addison, as ‘I believe our friendship will go off by this damned business of party’.
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Women might not have the vote at this time, but many were passionately interested in politics. Despite avowing that ‘politics is not the business of a woman’, Mary Delarivier Manley became a successful polemicist who wrote hard-hitting tracts on behalf of the Tories. For a time she also edited the Tory newspaper
The Examiner
, and a Whig journalist noted ruefully that that publication was ‘never so scurrilous and impudent’ as when it was written by a ‘poor whore in petticoats and tawdry ribbons’. Swift maintained that ladies put ‘distinguishing marks
of party in their muffs, their fans, their furbelows’, while Addison wrote of their arranging beauty spots on ‘the Whig or Tory side of the face’. Addison’s attempts to deter female readers of
The Spectator
by warning there was ‘nothing so bad for the face as party zeal’ proved unsuccessful. The widow of an English diplomat confided to Sophia of Hanover that ‘our women are full as active as the men and more violent in their expressions’.
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While Anne wanted the monarchy to be considered as being above party, there was no denying her personal preferences were weighted in favour of the Tories. She was suspicious of the Whigs for various reasons. In the words of Sarah Marlborough, ‘the Queen had from her infancy imbibed the most unconquerable prejudices against the Whigs. She had been taught to look upon them all not only as republicans who hated the very shadow of regal authority, but as implacable enemies to the Church of England’.
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This was putting it in exaggerated terms but undoubtedly Anne did fear that the Whigs aimed to undermine her prerogative. While she never tried to lessen the power of Parliament, she did not want the monarchy’s privileges to be diminished. On one occasion she complained of ‘everybody being too apt to encroach upon my right’, believing that the Whigs in particular desired ‘to tear that little prerogative the Crown has to pieces’. After complaints in the House of Commons that the Lords were interfering in matters that were rightfully the Crown’s province, she told Parliament in 1704, ‘I hope none of my subjects have a desire to lessen my prerogative since I have no thought of making use of it, but for their protection and advantage’. Jonathan Swift claimed that when she ousted her Whig ministry in 1710, ‘the fears that most influenced her were such as concerned her own power and prerogative’. The Tories’ attitude on such matters accorded much better with her own beliefs. Anne can only have approved when in 1711 one prominent Tory declared it ‘the duty of every good subject to assist her Majesty to preserve those few jewels which are left to the Crown from being pulled out of it’.
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