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POLITICS, RELIGION AND
SOCIETY IN ENGLAND
1679-1742

GEOFFREY HOLMES

THE HAMBLEDON PRESS

LONDON AND RONCEVER TE
Published by the Hambledon Press, 1986

35 Gloucester Avenue, London NWl 7AX (U.K.)

309 Greenbrier Avenue, Ronceverte

West Virginia 24970 (U.S.A.)

ISBN O 907628 75 3 (cased)

ISBN O 907628 76 1 (paper)

© Geoffrey Holmes 1986

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Holmes, Geoffrey, 1928-

politics, religion and society in England,
1672-1742.
1. Great Britain - History - 1660-1714
2. Great Britain - History - George I-II 1714-1760
I. Title
942.06 DA435

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Holmes, Geoffrey S., 1928-

Politics, religion, and society in England, 1679-1742

Includes index.
1. Great Britain - Politics and government -1660-1714 -
Addresses, essays, lectures. 2. Great Britain - Politics and
government - 1714-1760 - Addresses, essays, lectures.
3. England - Church history - 17th century - Addresses,
essays, lectures. 4. England - Church history - 18th
century - Addresses, essays, lectures. 5. England -
Social conditions - 18th century - Addresses, essays,
lectures. 1. Title.
DA435.H615 1986 941.07 85-30571

Printed in Great Britain by WBC Print Ltd, Bristol

 CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii

Introduction ix
Acknowledgments xviii
PART!
1 The Electorate and the National Will in the First
Age of Party 1
"' 2 The Attack on 'The Influence of the Crown', 1702-16 35
3 The Fall of Harley in 1708 Reconsidered 57
(with W.A. Speck)
4 The Hamilton Affair of 1711-12: A Crisis in
Anglo-Scottish Relations 83
5 Trade, the Scots and the Parliamentary Crisis of 1713 109
(with Clyve Jones)
6 Harley, St. John and the Death of the Tory Party 139
7 Sir Robert Walpole 163

PART II
8 Religion and Party in Late Stuart England 181
• 9 The Sacheverell Riots: The Church and the Crowd
in Early-Eighteenth-Century London 217
10 The Achievement of Stability: The Social Context
of Politics from the 1680s to the Age of Walpole 249
(with Colloquy, ed. by H. T. Dickinson)
11 Gregory King and the Social Structure of
Pre-Industrial England 281
12 The Professions and Social Change in England, 1680-1730 309
Index 351
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Queen Anne Frontispiece

1 Thomas, 1st earl and 1st marquess of Wharton 34

2 Queen Anne in Parliament, c. 1710 after 141
3 Robert Harley, earl of Oxford, as Lord High
Treasurer, c. 1714 before 142
4 Sir Robert Walpole, K.G., as First Lord of the 161
,,
Treasury
5 The sacking of Daniel Burgess's Presbyterian
meeting-house and the burning of its contents
in Lincoln's Inn Fields during the Sacheverell
riots of 1710 209
6 Dr Francis Atterbury, dean of Carlisle and Christ
Church and bishop of Rochester 216
7 Sir Thomas Parker, Lord Chief Justice of the
Queen's Bench, 1710 280

PERMISSIONS

The illustrations are reproduced by the kind permission of the following:

The National Portrait Gallery, London (Frontispiece, 1, 3, 4, 6); The
House of Lords Record Office (2); The Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (7).
 t
FOR BILL SPECK
 INTRODUCTION·

The articles, essays and lectures brought together here, along with one
pamphlet, were written and published over the course of twenty years
between 1962 and 1982. Warts and all, they are reproduced without
major amendment, although I have taken the opportunity, occasionally,
to update some bibliographical and archival information, where this
could be done with minimal disturbance of the typeface. I have also
altered cross-references in the notes which would otherwise have been
meaningless, and changed a handful of other unhelpful references. A
short postscript has been added to paper 6, to clear up an ambiguity
which has long troubled me. A few manuscript collections referred to
ii:i the notes are now no longer in the locations where I originally con-
sulted them. By far the most important migration has been that of the
Blenheim MSS, cited extensively in Paper 9 and used to document
important points elsewhere. They are now in the British Library, em-
bodied in the Additional Manuscripts ( 61101-61710). The Marlborough-
Godolphin Correspondence, a substantial component of the Blenheim
archive, has been edited by Henry L. Snyder (3 vols, Oxford, 1975).
The Nicolson diaries, which I consulted in manuscript at Tullie House,
Carlisle, and cite in that form, have been published as The London
Diaries of William Nicolson, Bishop of Carlisle, 1702-1718, ed. Clyve
Jones and Geoffrey Holmes (Oxford, 1985).
The twelve pieces selected for this volume reflect, on the one hand,
a continuing interest in the political life of England under the later
Stuarts and early Hanoverians, which was originally focused mainly on
Anne's reign but which in time extended to the whole of 'the first age
of Party', from the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81 through to the period
of Walpole's administration; and, on the other hand, a developing,
parallel concern with both the religious climate and the social order of
the country over this same period, for their own sake as well as for their
importance in conditioning political activity.
The book falls logically into two parts, equal in length. The seven
papers in Part I (which are arranged chronologically) are concerned ex-
clusively with fPolitics or politicians?\Part II, however, though contain-
ing a substantial ·poht1cal overspill, has other priorities. In paper 8, for
 X Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679- 2
instance, I consider how the religious loyalties and animosities which
had been the cause of so much division in Early Stuart, Civil War and
Republican England - especiall alle iance to the Established Church
~u.~ °'> of England, devotion to th. Puritan ideal and the( passionate of roi:§
tw- <,_,.,__,__,_
anti-Popery - remained almost as great a source of 1ension_and political
.f--t- 1 ""-, disturbance for thirty years, at least, after the 1688 Revolution as they
had been between the Restoration and the fall of James II; and this,
despite the illegalising of Catholic monarchy by the Bill of Rights in
1689 and the institutionalising of Protestant Dissent by a Toleration
Act in the same year_ Years of friction between Anglicans and non-
coformists and between High Churchmen and Low Churchmen, as well
as between Tories and Whigs, inevitably created an atmosphere that
became dangerously overcharged. Since it was rendered even more un-
stable by persisting fears for the security of the Protestant Succession,
it could hardly fail ultimately to cause a spectacular political explosion.
This explosion duly occurred in the winter of 1709-10, after a High
Anglican clergyman, Dr Henry Sacheverell, had laid andITi!Jliefusey
Its shock waves rocked Parliament and undermined a strong and able
government. But they also disturbed the normally inert substratum of
the English political nation, provoking in the process the second worst
London riots of the 18th century; and these effects are examined in
detail in a separate study (9), in which, among other things, a social
profile of the London 'crowd' in 1710 is constructed.
A prominent subject of debate for almost twenty years has been the
growth o~ political stabilit2_ in early-18th-century Britain.!D And while
historians may still not entirely agree as to why this took place, nor in-
deed as to how far it went, or how lasting it proved, few have seriously
challenged the importance of continuing religious conflict in perpetuat-
ing the chronic instability which had beset the 17th-century political
system and constitution. Likewise, few have failed to recognize the
tranquillising effect on politics after circa 1720 when religion became -
partly as a result of deliberate ministerial policy - a matter of lower
parliamentary and electoral priority. The isolated eruption of the old
fears and antagonisms which occurred thereafter - as in 1736 - only
served to emphasise the political acumen of Walpole's normal Church

1. Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (1973). Unless otherwise stated,
London is the place of publication of all books cited in the footnotes to this Introduction.

2. The debate was initiated in Professor Sir John Plumb's l.965 Ford Lectures, published as
The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675.J 725 (1967).
 Introduction xi
policy, which was that quieta non movenda. 3 In the present volume,
besides an essay on Walpole, there are two contributions to the debate
on stability. The first paper discusses a major destabilising force in
the situation, the influence in the years between 1679 and 1722, during
which 17 General Elections were held, of an energetic electorate which
was as volatile in composition as it was in conduct; and this discussion
concludes by offering some explanation of when and why a body
which, in its rough and ready way, had succeeded for more than half
a century in broadly reflecting the National Will through the represent-
atives it sent to Westminster, fell captive to a relatively small clique of
Whig ruling families, who had managed by the 1720s to monopolize the
influence of the Crown. The second contribution to the debate (10), by
examining the social context of politics between the 1680s and the
Walpole era, attempts( a revisio_ri)of accepted orthodoxy concerning the
relationship between political stability and social stability in this I~//f!u,,sh1"t
period{_!>artyzeal ]unquestionably caused rifts withii:t every social group, i.,ft'~
from dukes down to the humbler small farmers and artisans; and with-
.out doubt, too, thousands of heavily-taxed country gentlemen genuine-
ly felt their status threatened by the boost which almost twenty years
of war gave after 1689 to certain (mostly Whiggish) business and pro-
fessional interests, and above all to the 'monied men' of the City of
London. None the less, it is argued that over the same period most non-
political and non-religious developments were workin directl counter
to those fissiparous pressures: a emographic and economic tren~ ~,ft:JL;f{i'.IV\
for instance, together with rising livmg standards and rapidly improving d eo.use
employment opportunities imparted (for all appearances to the con- 5~""~1-1,,-.,,
trary) an underlying stability to English society which helped to

3. Walpole, like most of his Cabinet colleagues in the 1720s and 1730s, was well aware that
the powerful anti-clericalism still prevalent among many Whigs, the organized pressure of
Dissent for further relief, and the unabated concern of the Tories for the interests of the
Established Church, remained potentially disruptive forces: which makes his temporary
aberration in supporting the Mortmain and Tithes bills in 17 36 all the more puzzling. See
I Norman Sykes;)Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London, 1669-1748 (Oxford, 1926);~
Hunt, Two Early Political Associations: The Quakers and the Dissenting Deputies in the
Age of sir Robert Walpole (Oxford, 1961); Linda Colley. Jn Defiance of Oligarchy: the
Tory Party, 1714-60 (Cambridge, 1982), chs. 4, 8; Stephen Taylor, 'Sir Robert Walpole,
the Church of England, and the Quakers Tithe Bill of 1736', Historical Journal. 28, 1985.
The example of England's largest county suggests, nevertheless, that by the 1730s the
iron hand of government patronage in the velvet glove of conciliation had wrought a remark-
able change in the political attitudes of the parish clergy. In the 1734 shire election the
pqisons of Yorkshire abandoned their traditional Tory allegiance in droves, and by 1742
barely qiore than a quarter of the 346 who polled voted for the candidate of the 'Church
Party'. J.P. Quinn, et al., 'Yorkshiremen go to the polls: County contests in the early
eighteenth century',Northern History 21, 1985, p. 173.
 xii Politics, Religion and Society in_England, 1679-1742
confine the fury of party conflict within bounds that were - or in time
became - acceptable and respectable. 4 Hence the decline of popular
radicalism for decades after 1688 and, at the other end of the spectrum,
the minimal involvement of politically proscribed members of the
English social elite in the conspiracies and rebellions of the years from
1683 to 1722, with the partial exception of the Revolution of 1688.
Two of the distinguishing features of late Stuart and early Hanover-
ian English society which did most to ensure that the achievement of
social stability both antedated and assisted the restoration of stability ({j)
f(et1,,i{J 1 to the political system and the constitution, were the flexibility of th -

w., t.i "-'I

ix social structure and the degree o upward mobility which that struct-
d ure, and the social conventions of the day, permitted. Both features
were the exception rather than the rule in contemporary Europe. Both
are touched on in paper 10, and linked with other trends of the day,
such as the significant growth of towns and the superimposition of
urban on rural or 'county' values in the century before the Industrial
Revolution. But each figures much more prominently in the two closing
studies in this collection. Many of the assumptions made for so long
z-~ about the 18th century social structure were deeply influenced by the
f-ttt[<1_{(fi)[static view pf it taken in 169-6by the pioneer statistician, Gregory King.
0
1-.,.. i-e_o\
"" The celebrated social table, inserted by King into the 'Natural and
~ ,7 ~-cXc
Political Observations' which he wrote in that year, ostensibly
\/1€AN'·
subjecting the England of 1688 to what we should now call 'quantitat-
ive analysis', exercised until recently a mesmeric effect on historians;
and the discovery by Professor Mathias that King's only l 8th-century
counterpart, ~( 1760), was also under his spel:fVmade
exorcism no easier for us. Paper 11, by seeking to demonstrate that
Gregory King's 'Scheme of the income and expense of the several
families of England ... for the year 1688' was largely coincidental to his
main purpose in writing his Observations, and that his estimates alike
for the size of social groups and for their average annual income and

4. It may be that a further factor was the strengthening of traditional bonds of deference at a
time when the aristocracy was rebuilding its social and political, as well as its economic
dominance. This is an important theme of recent work by John Cannon, Aristocratic
Century: the Peerage of Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge, 1984), and J.C.D.
Clark, English Society, 1688-1832 (Cambridge, 1985). On the other hand, the limitations
of 'deference' in the preservation right through to 1742 of a non-radical but vigorous
tradition of popular politics, are revealed by H.T. Dickinson in a masterly essay, 'Popular
Politics in the Age of Walpole', in Jeremy Black, ed., Britain in the Age of Walpole (1984).

(J} Peter Mathias, 'The Social Structure in the Eighteenth Century: A Calculation by Joseph
Massie', Economic History Review, 10, 1957.
 Introduction xiii
expenditure were based on highly dubious evidence as well as shaky
methodological foundations (in sharp contrast to some of his rightly-
praised demographic calculations), support the conclusion that King's Krj5 Jr;..Lz,
value to social, P.conomic or political historians is strictly [nnitecll - l /A'v--Ku'l)
6

-Furthermore, by setting some of King's more widely-used social ·

statistics against other figures and estimates for the 17th and 18th
centuries, which have stemmed from the independent work of modem
scholars, it suggests a model for a pre-industrial social structure which
was susceptible to organic change and receptive to the operation of
mobile elements within it.
The traditional rungs of the ladder of rural society up which many
ambitious and successful families had clambered to social prominence,
or at least 'gentility', in the 16th and early 17th centuries ( tenant
farmer or freeholder - substantial yeoman - parish 'gentleman' -
squire- and sometimes higher) do seem to have grown more difficult of
access and more slippery between 1660 and 1750. 7 Yet this was com-
pensated for by the fact tha(other avenues of mobility grew wide~and yv,,,),'~) "">
attracted an increasing volume of upward traffic. Such was clearly the tk Y(',dn.,
case with the trade and industry avenues, especially after the 'Commer- •f ~Tes> 1-lld :
cial Revolution' began to gather momentum from the late 1660s on-
wards. 8 But even more enticing were the social opportunities presen-
ted by the remarkable expansion and diversification of the English
professions from around 1680 onwards. The final contribution to this
volume (12) examines this phenomenon over the following half-century,
analyzing some of its causes and effects, and stressing two aspects, in
particular: on the one hand, the important part played by formal

6. In an illuminating article Colin Brooks has since explained that it was an integral part of
the social and political philo'sophy of King and of other political arithmeticians, that 'the
social order had to be stabilized, if not "frozen"'. C. Brooks, 'Projecting, Political Arith-
metic and the Act of 1695',English Historical Review, 97, 1982.

7. The evidence is not, however, overwhelmingly one-sided, as the case of Lincolnshire shows;
and the opportunities denied in some areas may still have been present in others, where
taxation, for example, was less burdensome and a different type of farming prevalent. E.A.
Holderness, 'The English Land Market in the Eighteenth Century: The Case of Lincoln-
shire', Economic History Review, 27, 1974; cf. J.V. Beckett, 'The Pattern of Landowner-
ship in England and Wales, 1660-1880',Econ. Hist. Rev., 37, 1984; C.G.A. Clay,Economic
Expansion and Social Change: England 1500-1700 (Cambridge, 1984), vol. I, pp. 92-101,
158-64.

8. See, for instance, Richard Grassby, 'Social Mobility and Business Enterprise in Seventeenth-
Century England', in D.R. Pennington and Keith Thomas, eds., Puritans and Revolution-
aries (1978); Marie B. Rowlands, Masters and Men in the West Midland Metalware Trades
before the Industrial Revolution (Manchester, 1975); also below, p. 266.
xiv Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679-1742
apprenticeship in the rise of the professions, especially in the develop-
ment of the legal and medical professions, and the significance of that
for young men of talent and good fortune from relatively disadvantaged
backgrounds; and on the other hand, the exceptionally favourable
climate for advancement in some professions 9 created by a quarter of a
century ( 1689-1713) that was dominated by warfare. 10
Politics in the years from 1679 and 1742 have intrigued modem
historians, and will doubtless continue to do so, not merely because of
their vigour but because of the many dimensions they present for
investigation. Inevitably a number of very important facets are not
explored in the papers which follow. Prominent absentees, some of
which have attracted notable attention since most of my early work on
politics was published in the 1960s, include the politics of the press, of
the city of London and its clubs, and of Jacobitism. 11 Nor is there any
hint here of the struggles in the provincial corporations either in the
1680s or thereafter. 12 Nevertheless readers of this miscellany should
acquire some insight into the working of late 17th and early 18th
century politics at very different levels: from tlj.e high politic:s)_ofcourts
and ministerial power struggles (3, 6) and the propaganda and pro-
selytising( politics of the pulpits\and of their Anglican and dissenting
occupants 18, 9) to the~rass-roots politics of the constituencies (1) and
the low politics of the streets (9). Even when focusing on the par-

9. The armed services, the bureaucracy, and those branches of teaching involved in mathe-
matical and technical instruction.

10. Cf. my Augustan England: Professions, State and Society, 1680-1730 (1983), some of
whose arguments and illustrations are, of course, anticipated in the 1979 Raleigh Lcture
with which the present collection closes.

11. See, inter alia, J .A. Downie, Robert Harley and the Press: Propagandaand public opinion
in the age of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge, 1979); Michael Harris, 'Print and Politics in the
Age of Walpole', in Jeremy Black, ed., Britain in the Age of Walpole (1984); Gary S. De
Krey, A Fractured Society: The Politics of London in the First Age of Party, 1688-1715
(Oxford, 1985); H. Horwitz, ed., 'Minutes of a Whig Club, 1714-1717', in H. Horwitz,
W.A. Speck and W.A. Gray, eds., London Politics, 1713-17 (London Record Soc. Publica-
tions, vol. 17, 1981); I.G. Doolittle, 'Walpole's City Elections Act (1725)', and Nicholas
Rogers, 'The City Elections Act (1 725) reconsidered', English Historical Review, 97, 1982
and 100, 1985; Bruce Lenman, The Jacobite Risings in Britain, 1689-1746 (1980); D.
Szechi, Jacobitism and Tory Politics, 1710-14 (Edinburgh, 1984); Eveline Cruickshanks,
Political Untouchables: the Tories and the '45 (1979), chs. 1 and 2.

12. See R.G. Pickavance, 'The English Boroughs and the King's Government: A Study of the
Tory Reaction, 1681-5', Univ. of Oxford D. Phil. thesis, 1976; John Miller, 'The Crown and
the Borough Charters in the Reign of Charles II', English Historical Review,. 100, 1985;
Judith J. Hurwich, '"A Fanatick Town": the Political Influence of Dissenters in Coventry,
1660-1720',Midland History, 4, 1977.
 Introduction xv
liamentary arena the perspective is not artificially narrow. It is doubtful
whether the House of Lords has ever been more directly influential over
the course of political events and fortunes than in the years between
the defeat of the second Exclusion Bill in 1680 and the rise of Walpole
to power in the early 1720s. The Upper House is put under the micro-
scope here in two essays (4, 5) which illustrate how important the
balance of forces in the Lords could be to the prospects, and in some
cicumstances the very survival, even of a seemingly well-entrenched
administration like the last Tory ministry of Queen Anne ( 1710-14 ). 13
And the same two studies - one of them written in conjunction with
Clyve Jones - also reflect my interest in the serious political teething
troubles of the Union of England and Scotland, established in 1707,
and in the way the world of Westminster was forced to adapt itself
thereafter to the replacement of the separate Parliaments of England
and Scotland by the united Parliament of Great Britain.
Another revealing perspective on Westminster politics is the view
J from the back benche0 of the House of Commons. Such a view, even
\Vhen taken, as it is here (2), over a period - from 1702 to 1716 -
when the rivalry and struggle for supremacy between Whigs and Tories
was at its most intense, reminds us that many M.P.s had other pre-
occupations and that there were times when these became major
priorities. A tradition of 'Country' suspicion of the Court, and the
associated conviction that it was the duty of independent members of
Parliament to act, when it seemed necessary to do so, to preserve the
purity of the constitution from taint, had taken root in Restoration
Parliaments some years before the formation of the Whig and Tory
parties during the Exclusion Crisis. The persistence of this Country
tradition after the 1688 Revolution and the Revolution settlement,
and the bipartisan coalitions which this produced from time to time
against the Crown (notably in William III's reign) or against the
aggrandisement of ministerial influence in the Crown's name, has been
illuminated by a number of recent writings 14 . And it is in this context

13. For discussion of the problems and methods involved in the government's management of
the House of Lords in these years, see my British Politics in the Age of Anne (1967), pp.
382-403 passim, and Clyve Jones, "'The Scheme Lords, the Necessitous Lords and the
Scots Lords": the Earl of Oxford's management and the "Party of the Crown" in the
House of Lords, 1711-14', in idem, ed., Party and Management in Parliament, 1660-1784
(Leicester, 1984).

14. J.A. Downie, 'The Commission of Public Accounts and the Formation of the Country
Party', English Historical Reivew, 91, 1976; Colin Brooks, 'The Country Persuasion and
Politicai" Responsibility in England in the 1690s', Parliaments, Estates and Representation,
4, 1984; David Hayton, 'The "Country" interest and the party system', in Clyve Jones,
xvi Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679-1742
that the study I made twenty years ago of one of the most important
and persistent of Country campaigns - that designed to limit drastic-
ally the number of government office-holders allowed by law to sit in
the Commons - should now be set.
A prime mover in the emergence of a 'New Country' interest in the
Lower House in the early years of William III was Robert Harley,
elected M.P. for Tregony in April 1689. Although elected as a Revolu-
tion Whig, Harley went on to become, first, the kingpin of the Country
opposition to William and his Whig Junto ministers in the later 1690s,
and then under Anne, when he served the Court for all but two of the
Queen's twelve years, the acknowledged rallying point for the moderate
wing of the Tories and finally head of the Queen's last ministry from
1710 to 1714. Harley, created earl of Oxford in 1711, was in many
ways the most significant figure and certainly the shrewdest mani-
pulator in politics in the first twenty-five years after the Glorious
Revolution, and it was, of course, Robert Walpole who took over that
mantle, wearing it a good deal more flamboyantly, over the next
twenty-five years. The former was as determined an opponent of party
government - or, at least, of government by party extremists - as the
latter was an exultant advocate of it, a fitting chief architect of the
long Whig oligarchy after 1714. It is altogether appropriate, therefore,
that both these political master-craftsmen should figure prominently in
the gallery of personalities assembled in this volume Walpole is the
subject of a study in his own right, briefly assessing his achievements
and appraising his methods (7). Harley's presence is more pervasive,
especially in Part I; but in particular he is brought into'the spotlight at
the two most critical junctures of his career, in 1708 and 1714 (3, 6).
On both occasions, Harley's distinctive concept of the proper relation-
ship between the Crown, the parties and the administration under the
post-Revolution constitution was put to a searing test. Each time,
the immediate future of the two political parties and the whole com-
plexion of the government hinged on the outcome of his relations with
the Queen and with his chief rivals in the power struggle at Court:
Earl Godolphin and the duke of Marlborough in 1707-8, and Henry St
John, Lord Bolingbroke, from 1711 to 1714. On the other hand, as I

ed., op. cit. In 'Whigs and Tories dim their glories: English political parties under the first
two Georges', his essay in John Cannon, ed., The Whig Ascendancy: Coiloquies on
Hanoverian England (1981), William Speck argues that "'Court" and "Country" had be-
come more meaningful terms [than Whig and Tory] to describe the realities of English
politics by 1742'. For reservations expressed about his case, see the 'Colloquy' on this
essay, ed. Geoffrey Holmes, ibid. pp. 71-5; Linda Colley, Jn Defiance of Oligarchy, pp.
90-101.
 Introduction xvii
argued in 1969 (6) and as has since been conclusively proved (see 259-60
below), Oxford's success down to the autumn of 1713 in beating off
the challenge of Bolingbroke and of his full-blooded, exclusive brand of
Toryism, and the long rearguard action he fought then until his fall,
only a few days before Queen Anne's death, did not in themselves con-
demn the Tory party to the lasting inferiority it was to suffer under the
first two Georges. For that, the ineptitude, misjudgments and mis-
fortunes of the Tories themselves after August 1714, and the combina-
tion of ruthlessness and luck with which the Whigs exploited them,
were mainly responsible 15 •

15. For a brief elaboration of this point, see my review article 'Eighteenth-Century Toryism',
Historical Journal, 26, 1982, pp. 755-60.
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The contents of this volume first appeared in the following publica-

tions: (1) The Electorate and the National Will in the First Age of
Party (privately published, Lancaster, 1976, an expanded version of an
inaugural lecture delivered at Lancaster University, 1975); (2) Bulletin
of the Institute of Historical Research, 39, 1966; (3) English Historical
Review, 80, 1965; (4) English Historical Review, 77, 1962; (5) Parlia-
mentary History, 1, 1982; (6) G. Holmes, ed., Britain after the Glorious
Revolution 1689-1714 (1969); (7) H. van Thal, ed., The Prime Ministers,
vol. I, 1974; (8) Religion and Party in Late Stuart England (Historical
Association, Pamph. G86, 1975); (9) Past and Present, 72, 1976; (10) J.
Cannon, ed., The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England
(1981 ); (11) Transactions Royal Historical Society, 27, 1977; (12) The
Professions and Social Change in England, 1680-1730 (1981), British
Academy Raleigh Lecture, 1979.
For permission to reprint matter originally published by them, the
Hambledon Press and I are indebted to Messrs Macmillan, Allen and
Unwin and Edward Arnold; to the British Academy, the Royal
Historical Society, the Historical Association, and the Institute of
Historical Research, University of London; and to The English Historical
Review, Past and Present and Parliamentary History. Professor Bill
Speck and Mr Clyve Jones have most generously agreed to the inclusion
in this collection of two pieces of which they were, respectively, joint
authors with me; and Professor Harry Dickinson to the re-publication
of the 'Colloquy' which accompanied paper 10 at the latter's first in-
carnation. Alasdair Hawkyard's assistance with the index is gratefully
acknowledged.

November 1985 G.S.H.

PART ONE
 1

THE ELECTORATE AND THE NATIONAL WILL

IN THE FIRST AGE OF PARTY
F THE 'INAUGURAL LECTURE' HAS A RATIONALE AND I HAVE HEARD
I -
suggestions to the contrary - it is, I suppose, as an opportunity
for the incumbent to pass on some of those 'mature thoughts' of
academic middle-age which professors are assumed to harbour. The
subject I have chosen for this lecture is certainly one I have been
thinking about, on and off, for a very long time. Whether the wine,
in this case, will be mature is not for me to prophesy; but at least I
can assure you the bottle is old. My initiation into historical
research, twenty-five years ago, was through a study of the
electioneering activities of the English peerage in the early years of
the eighteenth century.
Parliamentary elections, of course, have been a national addiction
of the English for at least 350 years: they have always appealed to
their inbred gambling instincts. And while infinite time and money
have been expended in the indulgence of this pastime, successive
generations of our countrymen have bet on the outcome, and argued,
rejoiced, groaned and, in more recent times, goggled over the
results. This common mania, together with a resurgence of interest
lately in the reform of our own electoral system will, I hope, go some
way to justify choosing this subject for a public lecture.
My own renewed concern, after a gap of many years, with the
electoral history of my period has been largely stimulated by a change
of focus. Originally I studied those whose aim it was to influence
elections; now it is those whom they sought to influence, the voters
themselves, who interest me most. Over the last decade or so the
behaviour of the late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century
electorate has attracted much attention: through general studies,
from J. H. Plumb, William Speck and John Cannon,1 and from
students of particular areas or particular Elections. 2 And in this work
1
J. H. Plumb, 'The Growth of the Electorate in England from 1600 to 1715',
Past and Present, 45, 1969; W. A. Speck, Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the
Constituencies 1701-1715 (;i:970); J. Cannon, Parliamentary Reform 1640-1832
(Cambridge, 1972); R. Sedgwick (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of
Commons 1715-1754 (1970), i, II5-21 (Contested Elections), 189-381 (Constit-
uencies), hereafter cited as Sedgwick. Derek Hirst's The Representative of the
People? (Cambridge, 1975), subjecting the electorate of early Stuart England
to masterly scrutiny, was published after this lecture was written.
2
E.g. R. Hopkinson, 'Elections in Cumberland and Westmorland 1695-
1723' (Univ. of Newcastle, Ph.D. thesis, 1973); W. A. Speck, 'The General
Election of 1715', E[nglish] H[istorical] R[eview], 90, 1975; P. Langford, The
Excise Crisis (Oxford, 1975), pp. 101-171 [1734 Election].
2 Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679-1742
that fashionable tool the computer has at times been brought profit-
ably into play. 3 -

My debt in this lecture to all this research is indeed a heavy one.

Nevertheless, by setting some recent arguments and conclusions,
along with work of my own, in a particular context; by approaching
the evidence with a few fresh questions in mind; most of all by re-
lating political evidence to other species of evidence - especially
demographic and social evidence of a sort which too often tends to
be undervalued by political historians - in all these ways, it seemed
to me, one might hope to offer something more, and something with
a difference.
* * *

The importance of studying the English electorate in what I have

called 'the first age of Party' is not hard to demonstrate. One major
reason why the political stability which had eluded England right
through the seventeenth century was not achieved for over three
decades after the 1688 Revolution was, self-evidently, the novel
division of Parliament and of the whole political nation into parties;
and the apparent powerlessness of Englishmen, for over a generation
after 1688, to come to terms with the bitter rivalry of these parties
and their leaders' struggle for supremacy. But a second and equally
important explanation for the acute political stresses which wracked
post-Revolution England unquestionably lies in the emergence of the
electorate as a decisive force in politics.
These were the two inescapable features of the political system of
the day - party, and a dominant electorate. Each had its origins
before 1688, and from first to last they were closely linked. - To
illuminate both the title and the time-span of my paper, may I remind
you that the first genuine political parties known to historians, Whigs
and Tories, took clear shape in England during the Exclusion crisis
between 1679 and 1681; while the faction-based oligarchy of the
eighteenth century became firmly established in the 1720s. Now
this same period of just over forty years between 1679 and the early
1720s, the period which I would call 'the first age of Party', also saw
in England an astonishing number of Elections; seventeen General
Elections in forty-three years, or one on average every two and a half
years. (In the next forty-three years there were six, an average of
one every seven years).
8
E.g. by Hopkinson (see n. 2): W. A. Speck and W. A. Gray, 'Computer
Analysis of Poll Books: an Initial Report', B[ulletin of the] I[nstitute of]
H[istorical] R[esearch], 43, 1970, and 'Londoners at the Polls under Anne and
George I', Guildhall Studies in London History, I, 4, 1975; Speck, Gray and
Hopkinson, 'Computer Analysis of Poll Books: a Further Report', B.l.H.R.
48, 1975.
 The Electorate and the National Will 3
For students of the electorate, however, it is the second half of this
period, from roughly 1700 onwards, which is by far the more fruitful;
and it is these years which yield a good deal of the evidence on which
my paper is based. This is partly because in those two decades the
general political context of the electorate's activities is more·clear-cut
than either before or after. There were fewer cross-currents to
disturb the clear flow of its Whig and Tory loyalties. But in the
main it is a simple matter of evidence. Just before, or around, 1700
three springs of evidence can begin to be tapped which are either not
available at all, or only briefly available, to historians of any
previous period.
One is demographic evidence; and this I shall come back to later
in my paper. The second is newspaper evidence,. with the London
newspapers for the first time since 1681 beginning to cover certain
contested elections in reports which become indispensable from 1710
onwards. And thirdly there are the poll-books, those records of all
who voted in particular elections, and of how they voted. These
remain a peerless source for investigating the electoral behaviour of
our ancestors, right down to the introduction of the secret ballot in
1872. Yet they survive in any numbers only after 1700; for it was
as late as 1696 that returning officers were first obliged by law to
take a copy of the poll at elections held under their jurisdiction and
produce it on request. 4 The first printed poll-book I know of, how-
ever, resulted not from the passing of this Act but from the
ghoulish public interest two years earlier in the suicide of the member
for Essex, John Honywood. After a succession of unsuccessful
efforts, involving 'thrusting the rump of a turkey down his throat',
forcing 'tobacco-pipe ends into his mouth' and, more conventionally,
throwing himself downstairs, he finally succeeded at the fourth
attempt with the help (we are told) of 'an old broken garter, fastnd ...
to the curtain rod of his bed', plus 'the assistance of the Divil, for
both the garter and the curtain-rod else could not have held a quarter
of his weight'. 5
The poll-book for the resulting Essex by-election, printed in
London, must have opened the eyes of many politicians to the
possibilities for their own electioneering of such a mine of informa-
tion; and I suspect it played its part in the proposal embodied,
almost casually, in the 1696 Act. At all events, from 1698 onwards,
first in a trickle, finally in a spate, 6 we have at our disposal this
4
By a clause in 7 & 8 Wm. III, c. 25, 'An Act for the further regulating
elections of members to serve in Parliament, and for preventing irregular
proceedings of sheriffs, and other officers'.
6
The Autobiography of Sir John Bramston (Camden Soc. 1845), pp. 377-8.
6
By 1970 Dr. Speck had located 148 (60 for counties, 88 for borQughs) for
the period Dec. 1701-1715 alone: Tory and Whig, pp. 132-5. In the past five
years many more have come to light, even for that short period.
4 Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679-1742
marvellous new source for studying the English electorate at a
period of unique dominance.

* * *

Ample work has been done of late to demonstrate this dominance:

to show how this rampaging electorate, for all but a few of the
forty-three years from 1679 to 1722, controlled the political fortunes
of the so-called governing classes, toppled, buttressed or embarrassed
governments, held at times the fate of the succession, and once that
of the monarchy in its hands. 7 Likewise the main reasons for this
dominance are by now, I think, generally agreed: notably, after the
Revolution, the patent unwillingness of two monarchs and of some
leading ministers to deploy the interest of the Crown in elections,
following the scandal caused by Stuart attempts at borough
manipulation in the 1680s; 8 and above all the passing of the
Triennial Act, which from 1694 to 1716 put a three-year maximum
on the life of Parliaments, and became the chief .contributor to that
frequent exercise of the voters which helped to build electoral
muscle.
The principal question I want to pose in this lecture, however, has
not so far been squarely confronted. It is this:
Granted that the votes of the electors in these years were immensely influential,
how accurately did these votes, and the great political changes they wrought,
reflect what we should call the 'public opinion' of the day? Was there such ·
a thing as a National Will in the first age of Party? And if there was, how
can we possibly be sure that the vote~ of a small, in some ways random,
section of the population was transmitting this Will into the instruments of
political action at Westminster?
On the face of it, one must admit, it seems rather absurd to ref er
in the same breath to 'public opinion, and 'to an electorate which was
still manifestly 'unreformed'. 9 In the r 72 years between the
Restoration and the first Reform Act the representative system in
England and Wales remained unchanged in its essential features :
the two-member constituency norm, outside Wales; the universal
forty-shilling freehold qualification for a voter in each of the 52
counties, 10 yet the utterly fortuitous distribution of seats between
7
Even James II in the late 1680s dared not put his attempts to tame it to
the test.
8
For some of the manyinstances, see (for 1690) Salop R.O. Attingham MSS.
u2/3: Carmarthen to [Abingdon], 15 Feb.; (for Dec. 1701) Add. MSS. [Brit.
~ib.] 7074,f. 72; (for 1702) Add. MSS. 29588, ff. 47, 93; H.M.C. Cowper MSS.
m, 13-14; (for 1707-8) P.R.O. 30/24/21/141,144: Sir J. Cropley to Lord
Shaftesbury, 30 Dec. 1707 (reed.), 15 Jan. 1708.
9
E. and A. G. Porritt, The Unreformed House of Commons, i (Cambridge_,
1903).
10 Unchanged since 1430.
 The Electorate and the National Will 5
counties; above all the bewildering variety of franchises in the 215
cities and parliamentary boroughs. Even in 1700 these made up a
mosaic of astounding intricacy, all the more surrealistic because the
number of voters within boroughs of the same type of franchise could
vary so enormously: there might be 40 inhabitant householders
(alias 'potwallers') or 1500; 50 freemen or 2000; 60 'Scot and Lot
men' (or ratepayer voters) or 6000; 40 holders of burgage tenements
or nearly 300.
Such features were as much a condition of electoral politics in the
first age of Party, therefore, as they were of its second age, prior to
1832: apart from the fact that the Scots arrived to add their own
weird eccentricities in 1707 (I have left them out of account in this
paper) the system - if such it can be called - remained the same.
Many of the 'rotten boroughs!· of later eighteenth-century notoriety
already disfigured the scene in 1680 or in 1700;11 indeed sightseers
were virtually encouraged to go and gape at them by superior guide-
book writers of the early part of the eighteenth century. 12 Two
members were regularly returned for a huddle of decrepit little Cornish
fishing villages. Dunwich, up what East coast seamen called 'a
lousie creek' in Suffolk, was already confidently said to be dropping
into the sea: and Defoe, on viewing it in the 1720s, was moved to
recall a couplet of stunning bathos:
By numerous examples we may see
That towns and cities die, as well as we. 13

At Old Sarum it was a moot point, even in Queen Anne's reign,

whether there was a single farm-house there or not, and if there was,
whether anyone lived in it. 14 Assuredly there was little to be expected
of any 'public opinion' in, say, the Yorkshire borough of Aldborough,
where Browne Willis found in 1736 'a poor village of very mean.
cottage houses', whose sole claim to distinction apart from the beer
at the Duke of Newcastle's Arms was that it contributed half of the
four M.P.s sent to Westminster from a single parish, which also
included Boroughbridge. And if little could be expected of Ald-
borough, how much more could be expected of the voters of
Winchelsea, where they were said in the 1720s to 'have made good
cornfields of the streets', and where, John Caryll told a prospective
property-buyer, 'I question not but a stranger may be chosen there

11
Most of them already decayed at the time of their original enfranchisement"
Plumb, 'Growth of the Electorate', Zoe. cit. p. 98 and n. 23.
12 D. Defoe, A Tour through the whole £sland of Great Br£ta£n (Everyman

edn.), i, 130-1, 155-6, ii, 219; J. Macky, A Journey through England (1714-
22), i, pp. 91-2, 109-10, ii, 233-5.
13
Defoe, Tour, i, 54-5.
14
Cf. £b£d., i, 188 with Bodl[eian Library], MS. Willis 15, f. 82.
6 Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679-1742
att any time for £300, and as the markets now run, I believ few
Borroughs are cheaper'. 15
Inevitably, then, the electioneering politicians of post-Revolution
England already had to bargain for the small venal boroughs in the
system, the 'whores', in the duke of Richmond's words, 'that [were]
anybody's for their money': 16 Hindon, a single street of thatched
houses, whose only amenities were the elm trees growing in the street,
serving in wet weather in lieu of a market house; and Bramber,
whose vicar, recuperating from his pastoral labours in Oxford,
confessed to a friend he had no difficulty squeezing all his
parishioners into a minute church only 25 feet long. 1 7
Inevitably, too, there were a few of these small boroughs which had
already fallen captive to some big landlord before the Revolution;
so that even the storms of party failed to ruffle their placid
docility. And there were others whose independence was being
eroded over the next thirty years, while the party battles were actually
at their height. Burgage boroughs were particularly vulnerable,
provided borough mongers were prepared to pour enough money
into them, as the Whig chieftain Lord Wharton - 'Honest Tom' to
his friends - did at Richmond. In 1705 alone he laid out £1293
on buying just 21 of the 250 burgages in this quite populous
Yorkshire borough. 18 Yorkshire indeed was peculiarly susceptible
to such tactics as _these. Thirsk was sewn up late in William's reign
by its formidable neighbour, Sir Thomas Frankland, and its 48
bur gage tenants (all their properties being incongruously confined to
one street in 'Old Thirsk') were allowed no further contest after
1695.19
Yet, although the unreformed representative system as it operated
in the first age of Party allowed no little scope for such abuses, it had
its other and very different face. This face shows us, for one thing,
many party strongholds in 'popular' constituencies - places which
despite a lot of voters or a broad franchise, remained consistently
loyal, or nearly so, to either Whigs or Tories, and quite frequently
15
Bodl. MS. Willis 15, ff. 123, 128; Defoe, Tour, i, p. 130; Add. MSS. 28227,
f. 67; Caryll to Sir Nathan Wright, draft, 8 Dec. 1708.
18
Add. MSS. 32688, f. 46 (quoted in Sedgwick, i, 338).
17
Bodl. MS. Willis 15, ff. 27, 62. There were barely 20 cottages in the whole
of Bramber parish, and so far as John Macky could see, when he passed hastily
through in 1714, scarcely one 'fit for a stable'. Journey, i, 108.
18
Huntington Library, California, Stowe MSS. 'A Perticular of the Severall
Burrough Houses bought by the Right Honble. the Lord Wharton at
Richm[on]d ... in order.to Mr. Dunches Election in 1705'. I am obliged to
Dr. John Beckett for this transcript. MS. Willis 15, f. 130, for Richmond
'borough ho:is~s' (271 out of c. 800) in the 1730s.
19
MS. Wilhs 15, ff, 123. 126. Nearby Northallerton lost its last chance of
independence in 1722. North Yorks. R.O. Pierse MSS. 24/4/25 (reference
kindly supplied by Mr. John Quinn). '
 The Electorate and the National Will 7
demonstrated this in a series of contests, like the town of Bedford or
the county of Wiltshire. These were the rough equivalents of the
'safe seats' of our own day: there were approximately 133 such seats
in 86 popular constituencies between 1702 and 1715. 20 Even more
crucial to the outcome of Elections in the first age of Party were the
very large group we may call the 'weathervane constituencies'.
There were in Anne's reign about 69 counties and boroughs, with
electorates from 10,000 down to 250, or in one or two cases a little
lower, whose returns of members could be seen by contemporaries as
·reliable (often infallible) indicators of the way the wind of electoral
opinion was veering from one Election to the next. Frequently
both their seats would be equally sensitive to change; but sometimes,
where there was an extremely powerful family or party hold over one
seat, 21 it would be only the second seat which was volatile. In all
I estimate rr3 seats were at stake each Election from 1702-15 in this
way, out of a total of 513.
Now it was of course in these two large groups of 'open' con-
&tituencies, with their 246 safe seats and 'weathervane' seats, that the
opinions of the Augustan electorate chiefly made themselves felt.
Together they probably embraced roughly ninety per cent of the
whole electorate, and it was, in the end, the 'weathervane' con-
stituencies, the most sensitive reflectors of the electoral will of the day,
which chiefly held jn their hands the fate of Whigs and Tories
throughout virtually the whole period from 1679 to 1722.

* * *

However, this still takes us only a small part of the way towards an
answer to the main question I have posed in this paper. For the
electoral will was not necessarily the same as the National Will. We
may agree that up to 1722 the representative system, for all its mani-
fold faults, did by and large express the. opinion of the electorate,
rather than the will of the electoral manipulators. But the problem
remains: did it equally reflect the opinion of the wider public?
It may be objected that 'public opinion' is an anomalous concept to
apply to the seventeenth or to the eighteenth century. It is true that
the phrase itself is relatively modern. Yet it is abundantly clear that
thinking Englishmen of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
were perfectly familiar with the concept of a National Will: they

20
I include here constituencies where the representation was normally
shared between one Whig and one Tory, either in a series of contested elections,
as at Worcester or Evesham, or with little contest (e.g. Cumberland and
Lancashire).
21
E.g. that of Sir John Pakington in Worcestershire.
8 Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679-1742
recognised its political validity (that is to say, that what the majority
of English people desired, at this time or that, on this matter or that,
was both a legitimate and a necessary concern of politicians), and they
had their own vocabulary to express their notion of 'public opinion'.
When they spoke of 'the temper of the people', or 'the disposition
of the nation', or, as they most frequently did, of 'the sense of the
people', they articulated their own mental image of the National Will.
This was what Halifax meant when he claimed in 1684 that it was in
acting through Parliament that an English king gave 'sanction to the
united sense of the people'. It was likewise in Swift's mind when he
considered in 17II how 'the Dispositions of the People' could be most
truly judged at the polls. 22
However, the recognition that there was a National Will does not
imply an automatic assumption that the peculiar methods of choosing
English Parliaments allowed this Will to express itself. After the
country had just experienced three Elections in two years a pamph-
leteer of 1681 preferred to leave this question open. 'If elections of
members to serve in Parliament be the best standard to judge the
disposition of the Kingdom by', he cautiously argued, 'it is not so
long since we had an opportunity of feeling the pulse of the nation'. 23
On the face of it his caution seems justified. We may well wonder
whether a system which for over sixty years before the first Reform
Bill was to be raked with criticism could at any time have allowed 'the
sense of the people' to make itself understood. Even the post- .
Revolution generation, which did (after all) take a special pride in the
advance of Reason, never pretended the system was rational. And
yet, criticism of the mechanics of parliamentary representation at that
time was muted, and most of what there was, academic. Locke
uttered some pious platitudes in 1689. 24 Toland urged the rationali-
sation of the electoral process in 1701: as the most maverick intellectual
of his day, his support was tantamount to the kiss of death for any
cause. Moles.worth went on record in 17n as believing that 'a
waste or a desart has not right to be represented, nor by our original
constitution was ever intended to be'. 25 And tucked away among
the working notebooks of Gregory King 26 one finds a scheme for
28
J.P. Kenyon (ed.), Halifax: Complete Works (1969), p. 65; The Examiner,
No. 24, 18 Jan. 17u.
23
Quoted in C. S. Emden, The People and the Constitution (2nd edn. Oxford,
1959), p. 178.
24
Toland in The Art of Governing by Parties, Locke in An Essay concerning
the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government, eh. 13, sections 157-8.
25
Robert Molesworth, The Principles of a Real Whig (17rr). See H. T.
Dickinson (ed.), Politics and Literature £n the Eighteenth Century (1974), p. 27.
26
'A Proposition for Electing Parliamt. men'. Greater London Council,
'Bums Journal', p. 250, reproduced in P. Laslett (ed.), The Earliest Classics:
John Graunt and Gregory King (1973). ·
 The Electorate and the National Will 9
reorganising the whole representative system, of such hair-brained
ingenuity and such terrifying complexity that if it had ever been
adopted the electioneering country gentleman of England would have
been forced to give up in despair, and devote himself exclusively to
his claret and his foxes. ·
As for the practical parliamentary politicians, apart from a few
half-hearted moves before 1703, which we shall notice later, there is
concern only with attempts to 'clean up' the existing system, through
bills aimed against corruption and blatant gerrymandering.27 I
agree it is naive to deduce from an absence of reforming ideas, or
intentions, a widespread satisfaction with any institution. Men
are always reluctant to reform what they have a vested interest in
preserving: who should know that better than we? That the Whig
oligarchs of the Walpole-Pelham age had an interest in the
preservation of their electoral system is beyond any doubt. But I
am by no means convinced that before the 1720s, in a period not of
oligarchy but of frequent elections and fluctuating fortunes, the
element of self-interest is anything like so obvious. It would have
been no difficult matter for any Tory of Anne's reign to make a
convincing case, on grounds of interest alone, for increasing county
· representation at the expense of small boroughs; and likewise there
were quite a lot of unrepresented towns, by then noted strongholds of
Dissent, which it would undoubtedly have profited the Whigs to
enfranchise. Nor was '1688' yet the sacred cow it was to become by
the Walpole era: it was still thought possible to tamper with the
'Revolution constitution' without sacrilege. Can it be, therefore,
that the total absence of root and branch reform schemes between
1689 and 1720 ought to be taken at face value? Can it be that,
despite all the flaws of which they were aware, Englishmen in the
first age of Party were at bottom satisfied with the way the
representative system worked in practice; above all with the way it
expressed what they called 'the sense of the people'?
My main question, therefore, resolves itself into two parts : did
they believe that this was so? And, even if they did, can we agree
it was so?
I
First let us look at what the men of the late seventeenth
century and of the eighteenth believed, or professed to believe. In
1681 when Court spokesmen in the third Exclusion Parliament
opposed a Whig motion to print the Votes of the House, on the
ground that this would be 'a sort of Appeal to the People', Sir
Francis. Winnington exclaimed: 'pray, who sent us hither? ... the
27 G. Holmes, British Politics in the Age of Anne (1967), pp. 143-4.
10 Politics, Religion and Society in England, 1679-1742

House of Commons is by the choice of the People'. 28 The

conviction that 'the whole Kingdom', or 'all the people of England'
had repeatedly shown through two previous Parliaments that only
Exclusion could save the nation was voiced again and again: and
after the dissolution of this Oxford Parliament a Whig newswriter
clinched the point. 'The general choice of the same members in the
last Parliament that had served in the two former, sufficiently shews
the sense of the nation'. 29
Not impartial witnesses, perhaps? And in any event, the borough-
rigging of the Stuarts after 1681 had by 1688 aroused widespread
fears that the National Will could be completely distorted now by
'packed' Parliaments. The cry of the political nation in 1688,
therefore, was for 'a free Parliament'; and immediately after the
Revolution the elections to the Convention appeared to satisfy
William of Orange that they had produced not only a free Parliament
but one that was (he said) a 'true representative of the Kingdom'.
Not every Tory agreed with him. Sir Robert Sawyer, very much
a man of the 'right' and a long-standing opponent of any notion of
popular sovereignty, challenged the Whigs to resort to a
referendum or to new elections on a broader franchise, if they truly
wished the settlement of the crown to have the people's
endorsement; for less than a quarter of the people were represented
in the present Parliament. Yet most members of the Convention,
tacitly at least, accepted William's view, and that of one of his advisers .
who had prophesied before the elections of January 1689 the same
outcome as the King, and in virtually the same words. 30
The professions which precede elections naturally impress us more
than those which follow them. And as William's reign went on, in
spite of much talk of different threats to 'free elections' - from the
fat purses of the 'monied men', for instance - a growing underlying
confidence can be detected in the capacity of the existing system to
transmit the pulse of the nation to Westminster. 31 'Your choice
now', the electors were told in 1701, 'will be the best standard by
which to judge the present disposition of the Kingdom'. Thirteen
28
Anchitell Grey, Debates of the House of Commons from the Year 1667 to the
Year 1694, viii (1769), 294. Cf. Boscawen's speech, ibid. 293: 'the People you
represent will have a true account of what you do'.
29
Ibid. 313-17 passim; The Impartial Protestant l\Jercu1y, 12 May 1681
(cf. Vaughan's speech, in Grey, Debates, viii, 327).
so G. Burnet, The History of my own Time (Oxford, 1833), iii, 394; Grey,
Debates, ix, 21-3; Hardwicke State Papers (1778), ii, 403-4; Burnet to Admiral
Herbert, 25 Dec. [1688], in E.H.R. r, 1886, p. 535.
31
Likewise, growing acceptance by those to whom the pulse-beat was
unwelcome that there was little, electorally, they could do about it. See
Charles Montagu and Lord Somers to Shrewsbury, II Aug., 25 Oct. 1698:
W. Coxe, Private and Original Correspondence of Charles Talbot, Duke of
Shrewsbury (1821), p. 551, Hardwicke State Papers, ii, 435.
 The Electorate and the National Will 11
years later, when the Whigs had just recaptured the administration
before the first Election of George I's reign, Atterbury reassured
discouraged Tories with the reminder of 'several elections formerly,
and one or two of late', where the issue had been decided by 'the
temper of the people'. 3 2 Above all, I have no doubt, Atterbury had
in mind the epic Tory triumph of 1710. It is worth our attention
for a moment too.
In the early summer of 1710 the most powerful Whig ministry
England had known since the Revolution found itself low in the
esteem of a war-weary nation, and of a nation further antagonised
by the notorious trial of Sacheverell. As the Whigs faced a probable
dissolution of Parliament, the duchess of Marlborough canvassed
two experienced M.P.s for their views on the party's prospects. One
of them., Hugh Boscawen., was inclined to be optimistic. Not so
James Craggs. 'I think he is extremely mistaken [Craggs wrote]
when he supposes that if this present Parliament be dissolved, we shall
be able to deal with the adversary in the next elections. I will be
bold to foresee, as the common people are now set, they [the Tories]
will get at least three for one' :33 and how right he was, in his
judgment if not in his mathematics.
'As the common people are now set': what remarkable words -
especially as they were not written for public consumption. Craggs
did not fool himself into wishfully thinking that an election held then
could be decided by magnate influence, or by venal .self-interest, or
by the manipulations of the Crown. Rather it would reflect the fact
that, in Atterbury's words, 'the Kingdom took fire' in 1710 against
the Whigs. However, if the 1710 Election plainly mirrored 'the
sense of the people', what politician could have said less, in
retrospect, of that of 1715, when the boot was very much on the
other foot, when the Tories were damningly tainted in popular eyes
by their equivocal attitude to the Succession, and when the Whigs
gained 22 county seats and lost only one. After all, the Tories
themselves had always contended that the county vote was the purest
expression of public opinion. 34
But now let us move on another twenty years or so, twenty years in
which a Whig oligarchy strove with consistent government help to
tame the electorate and to 'play' the system. Paul Langford's new
32 The Best Choice of Parliament Men (1701), quoted in Emden, op. cit.
p. 178; Francis Atterbury (Bp. of Rochester), English Advice to the Freeholders
of England (1714), repr. in Somers Tracts (1815), xiii, 522-41.
,~ 33 Private Correspondence of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough (1838), i, 318;

18 May 17IO.
H W. A. Speck, 'The General Election of 1715', E.JI.R. 90, 1975; Swift,
The Examiner, No. 24, 18 Jan. 17II; [Abel Roper], The Post-Boy, Nos. 2421,
287r, 16-18 Nov. I7IO, r-3 Oct. 17r3.
12 Politics,Religion and Society in England, 16 79-1742
study of the Excise crisis of 173335 shows vividly that passions ran
almost as high against Walpole at the 1734 Election as they had
against the Whigs at the Sacheverell Election of I7IO. After the
Walpole government had won the Election, its supporters were treated
to a King's Speech early in the new Parliament which once again
smugly professed that 'the sense of the nation is best learned by the
choice of their representatives'. But now these words had a hollow
ring. Even before all the results were in in 1734, the opposition
journal The Craftsman, elated by the swing against the government
in the counties and large boroughs, but aware that they alone could
not defeat it, had advised 'the Court-writers' to be 'so modest for the
future, as not to insist on the general Sense of the People'; for as
regards the Excise, 'the late Elections are sufficient to convince them
that it is neither forgot nor forgiven by the Body of the Nation'.
The anonymous writer of a treatise of 1747 expressed the view, now
gaining in currency as the Walpole regime was perpetuated by the
Pelhams, that the growth in authority, and above all in wealth and
unscrupulousness in using it, of successive post-Revolution
governments had at last equipped the ministers of the Crown with
the power 'to subvert and destroy the honour and integrity of the
popular representation'. 36
By 1761, when one of the earliest 'radical' M.P.s, William Beckford,
spoke of public opinion to the House of Commons after the Election
of that year, he did not conceal his view that it was no longer
reflected on the benches around him. 'When I talk of the Sense of
the People [he said], I mean the middling people of England - the
manufacturer, the yeoman, the merchant, the country gent[lema]n,
they who bear all the heat of the day ... '; 3 7 and as Beckford and his
associates continually stressed in the first major reform campaign
in the late 1760s, many of those 'middling people', especially 'the
manufacturer' and 'the merchant', could now only make their voice
heard 'without doors' and no longer through the so-called
'representatives' of the people in the Commons. By 1774, although
the force of this first campaign had spent itself, the time was ripe for
the past and future case for reform to be classically set out by James
86
See note 2 above.
The Craftsman, 25 May 1734, quoted in Langford, Excise Crisis, p. 131;
88

[John Campbell?], Liberty and Right (1747), extracts printed in Dickinson (ed.),
Politics and Literature, pp. II5-19.
87
Add. MSS. 38334, f. 29, 13 Nov. 1761, quoted in P. Langford, 'William
Pitt and Public Opinion, 1757', E.H.R .. 88, 1973. For a radical Whig's
surprisingly conservative definition of 'the people' in the 1690s, see James
Tyrrell, Bibliotheca Politica (1694), p. 156. For both radical and conservative
definitions in the 1760s, cf. J. Viner, 'Man's Economic Status', in J. L. Clifford
(ed.), Man versus Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1968),
p. 29.
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