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Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World Page 6


  If things cooled somewhat with the less controversial reign of Queen Anne, her own failure to produce a surviving heir reopened the succession sore. Questions of principle – who was the legitimate successor, and on whose say-so? – became inseparable from the jockeyings of Whigs and Tories to gain and retain the ever fatter spoils of office.18 The post-1688 years hence brought the ‘rage of party’ in a ‘divided nation’ split over the fundamentals of Church and State, King and Parliament, Whig and Tory, High and Low Church, subject and citizen – satirized by Swift in terms of Big and Little Enders. And all these controversies were occurring amid momentous institutional and economic change at home, with the foundation of the Bank of England (1694), the new money markets and the Stock Exchange, and the mushrooming of the ‘fiscal military state’19 – all against a backdrop of a ravaged, war-torn Europe in which the Protestant cause sometimes seemed close to ruin at the hands of the dreaded Sun King.

  These times of crisis brought pamphlets, prints and other propaganda galore, from all sides and slants, penned by brilliant polemicists. It was this crescendo of religio-political controversy from the 1680s that formed the catalyst of enlightenment, unleashing volleys of polemics damning tyranny and priestcraft in the names of freedom, property, autonomy and reason,20 advanced especially by those militant Whigs who formed the ‘Country’ faction.21 To appreciate the momentous intellectual consequences of these developments, it will be helpful first to examine the radicalization of John Locke.22

  The Restoration found Locke holding a ‘studentship’ (in effect, a fellowship) at Christ Church, Oxford. Somerset-born in 1632, he had been ten years old when his father had taken up arms against Charles I and twenty-one when he thus saluted Oliver Cromwell: ‘You, Sir, from Heav'n a finish'd hero fell.’23 Though of Puritan stock, he hated the Interregnum turmoil, and his early thinking took a conservative turn, prizing order above all, as is evident from his ‘Two Tracts on Government’ (written in 1660–61 but not published), which championed passive obedience and upheld the magistrate's right to impose religious uniformity.24

  Declining to take holy orders, Locke became physician and secretary to Lord Ashley (later Shaftesbury), serving on the Council of Trade during his master's chancellorship of the Exchequer in 1672. Inescapably entangled in exclusionist politics, he may have helped Shaftesbury cook up the ‘Popish Plot’. Under surveillance after the Rye House Plot (1682), he burned or buried his papers and fled to the United Provinces, his studentship being withdrawn on royal command. In Rotterdam he fell in with conspiring Whig refugees and the Remonstrants, those liberal Dutch Nonconformists who upheld a minimal religious creed; moving to Utrecht, he was again at the thick of intrigues, probably advising Viscount Mordaunt on the Monmouth Rebellion, and being ordered out of town in 1686 when James II sought his extradition along with other suspects.

  Returning to England after the Glorious Revolution, Locke played a central role in its vindication, publishing anonymously the Two Treatises of Government (1690), a radical work written at the time of the Exclusion Crisis in order to legitimize rebellion in terms of a contractual theory of government (see chapter 8).25 He exerted considerable sway as adviser to the Junto Whigs, Somers, Halifax and Mordaunt. As an Excise commissioner, he became active in the growing fiscal bureaucracy; serving on the Board of Trade, he was energetic in commercial policy; he was also an original subscriber to the Bank of England, while, together with Halifax and Isaac Newton, he presided over the ‘great recoinage’ of 1694–6. Enlightened thinkers liked to view philosophers as piloting the ship of state: Locke provided the perfect prototype.

  Over the course of forty years, the habitually watchful philosopher had undergone a profound radicalization, one indicative of how bold minds were driven by darkening times into enlightened convictions. Back in the early 1660s, fearing religious turmoil, Locke had been a champion of order and obedience in Church and State. Responding to circumstances, he turned into the leading theorist of toleration: Locke unfolded anti-innatist arguments in the Essay concerning Human Understanding (1690) (see the discussion in chapter 3); his Two Treatises on Government spelt out theories of government accountability and the right of resistance; and his religious orthodoxy crumbled as he became, almost certainly, a closet Unitarian (see chapter 5). In short, the Restoration conservative turned into a philosophical radical. ‘I think that both Locke and my Lord Shaftesbury were as arrant atheists as Spinoza,’ an informant told Dr Charlett, master of University College, Oxford, in 1706, while Locke was also damned as a man of ‘very bad principles’ by the Oxford Tory Thomas Hearne.26

  Appraising these decisive decades, the distinguished American historian Margaret Jacob has claimed that enlightened thinking first found voice in the contexts of these domestic politico-religious broils and of the Sun King's imperial ambitions. Naming 1689 as its nativity, she has declared that ‘the Enlightenment at large, in both its moderate and radical forms, began in England’ with the Glorious Revolution, following hard on the heels of Isaac Newton's Principia (1687).27 While finessing her formulations over the years,28 Jacob has consistently situated the movement's onset in that conjunction of political crisis and intellectual revolution, buoyed up by the stimulating social atmosphere provided by swarms of refugees, pamphlet wars, coffee houses and clubs, and the international web of the republic of letters.

  Luck and logic meant that with George I's succession in 1714, the subsequent botched Jacobite invasion and the resulting entrenchment of the Hanoverian dynasty, progressive ideologies triumphed. Constitutional and politico-religious liberties were vindicated, and the personal powers of the Crown and the pretensions of High-flying bishops were curbed in what proved an unshakeable commitment to the quadruple alliance of freedom, Protestantism, patriotism and prosperity.29 This chain of events produced strange kinks, however: progressive thinkers, hitherto automatically oppositional, now found themselves brokers of power under the new dynasty.30 No longer did they have to fear constant harassment, for most opinions could be published with impunity once the lapse of the Licensing Act (1695) put an end to pre-publication censorship. Though laws against blasphemy, obscenity and seditious libel remained on the statute book, and offensive publications could still be presented before the courts, the situation was light years away from that obtaining in France, Spain or almost anywhere else in ancien régime Europe – or that faced by Locke in exile.31 This exceptional freedom of expression sparked print wars which gave the battles for minds their enduring energies, and which led enlightened activists ultimately to devour their own parents.

  In these circumstances, enlightened ideologies were to assume a unique inflection in England: one less concerned to lambast the status quo than to vindicate it against adversaries left and right, high and low. Poachers were turning gamekeepers; implacable critics of princes now became something more like apologists for them; those who had held that power corrupted now found themselves, with the advent of political stabilization, praising the Whig regime as the bulwark of Protestant liberties. These are paradoxes which have been brilliantly teased out by the historian John Pocock.

  In a series of distinguished writings, Pocock has analysed the advanced discourses which vindicated the post-1688 and post-1714 settlements against the motley mix of Jacobites, High-flyers, Dissenting enthusiasts and ‘Good Old Cause’ republicans seemingly threatening to drag Britain back into civil strife and wars of faith. Sights trained on the school of Peter Gay, he challenges ‘the paradigm of Enlightenment as radical liberation which has made it so hard to speak of an English Enlightenment at all’.32 The English, in his view, were uniquely able to enjoy an enlightenment without philosophes precisely because, at least after 1714, there was no longer any infâme to be crushed.33 Since a broadly liberalized regime was already in power, what was chiefly required was its defence against diehards and the ghosts of Laud, Strafford (‘Black Tom Tyrant’) and Cromwell. Hostility to religion as such would have been misplaced because, after the Act of Toleration (1689
), faith functioned within the framework of what Locke memorably dubbed ‘the reasonableness of Christianity’. There was no further need to contemplate regicide because Great Britain was already a mixed monarchy, with inbuilt constitutional checks on the royal will; nor would radicals howl to string up the nobility, since they had abandoned feudalism for finance. What Pocock tentatively calls the ‘conservative enlightenment’ was thus a holding operation, rationalizing the post-1688 settlement, pathologizing its enemies and dangling seductive prospects of future security and prosperity. The Enlightenment became established and the established became enlightened.34

  A seemingly paradoxical instance of an intellectual vanguard vindicating the status quo, the English Enlightenment derived its identity, Pocock holds, from the reaction to the traumatic experiences of the Stuart century; it was the ideology of a post-Puritan ruling order which made England both the most modern and (eventually) the most counter-revolutionary state in Europe.35 Or, more provocatively, being ‘too modern to need an Enlightenment’, England ‘was already engaged upon the quarrel with modernity itself.’36 Especially after 1714, enlightened ideologues thus enlisted in defence of the new Whig order, one perpetuating certain features of the ancien régime,37 but notably unlike the other great monarchies.

  Supplementing such views, Margaret Jacob has further shown how the Newtonian universe was recruited to bolster the new constitutional order against its foes.38 Repudiating alike the scandalous materialism of Hobbes and Spinoza and also the outmoded occultism of the sectaries, Newtonian cosmology afforded the perfect paradigm for a modern, stable, harmonious Christian polity ruled by law, not caprice.39 God and the Georges were the constitutional monarchs respectively of the universe and the nation. A garden laid out at Richmond by George II's consort, Queen Caroline, rooted these new teachings in busts of Newton, Samuel Clarke and Locke, planted there because ‘they were the Glory of their Country, and stamp'd a Dignity on Human Nature’; they would serve as expressions of faith in the trinity of experimental science, rational religion and Revolution principles.40

  This realignment of enlightened propaganda so as to validate the Georgian order naturally sparked fierce divisions among advanced thinkers.41 Dissenting voices came from ‘country’ or ‘true’ Whigs, ‘Good Old Cause’ radicals alarmed and outraged at the pestiferous growth of patronage, placemen and politicking, adamant that 1688 and 1714 had not gone far enough in muzzling throne and altar. Ideological affinities ironically emerged between such agitators and the Tories, who had been so deftly outflanked after 1714. Cornered by Walpole into long-term opposition, Tory wits sported a libertarianism of their own: Jonathan Swift, otherwise the great scourge of the trendy literati, could carve as his political epitaph: ‘Fair liberty was all his cry’.42 Such a pilfering of liberal clothes does not, of course, turn the Tories into Enlightenment men, it merely reveals the quick-change masquerading of an age when enlightened propagandists providentially found themselves, for once, calling the shots.

  Rancorous in the extreme, late Stuart and early Hanoverian ideological enmities did not then just peter out: there was no ‘end of ideology’ slumber. Throughout the century, self-styled progressives continued to wage war – sometimes phoney – on darkness and despotism; indeed, there continued to be droves of dyed-in-the-wool Non-Jurors, Jacobites, Tories, anti-Newtonians and anti-Lockeans, while Oxford remained a den of disaffection (its classic lost causes were not all born losers).43 Moreover, enlightened publicists inevitably made new enemies – not just peppery wits, congenital naysayers and doomsters, but Methodists and Evangelicals convinced that rational religion in a mechanical universe was the slippery slope towards unbelief and anarchy. Meanwhile, enlightened critics continued down the decades to target the citadels of power, as with Jeremy Bentham's exposures of the arcana of the law. For some, the logic of rational religion did indeed inexorably lead to rejection of Christianity, while the radical distrust of power authorized by Locke and others might teach that government itself was an unnecessary evil. Later chapters will explore how the sleuths of enlightenment continued to track new monsters.

  *

  As the new century dawned and the Act of Union was signed (1707), the Moderns could thus pride themselves upon living in the light, because Great Britain's constitutional and ecclesiastical framework seemed to guarantee fundamental freedoms. There were other grounds, too, for self-congratulation. The times seemed pregnant not just with change but with improvement, and halcyon days beckoned: would not trade, industry, enterprise and the new science spell a sparkling contrast to all that was passé, vulgar or rustic?

  The civilizations of Greece and Rome were still, of course, revered; nearer home, however, lay the conspicuous success story of the Golden Age Dutch republic, acclaimed by such respected figures as Sir William Temple;44 and, though progress was far from uniform, many declared that England, too – if not yet Scotland – was enjoying rapid and remarkable commercial changes and bourgeois self-enrichment, developments driven by and especially visible in London, headquarters of print, pleasure and politeness.

  London dominated Britain as no other European capital: ‘This city is now what ancient Rome once was,’ boasted the London Guide; ‘the seat of Liberty, the encourager of arts, and the admiration of the whole world.’45 And not only was enlightenment overwhelmingly a metropolitan bloom but, within the city itself, the axis of culture was itself shifting.

  The arts had always been watered by ecclesiastical, royal and noble patronage; the pre-Reformation Church had commissioned artworks, and courtly culture had found expression in lavish ceremonial, in exquisite art collections and in splendid edifices like Inigo Jones's Whitehall Banqueting House.46 From the late seventeenth century, however, the cultural centre of gravity was conspicuously migrating away from Court into metropolitan spaces at large – into coffee houses, taverns, learned societies, salons, assembly rooms, debating clubs, theatres, galleries and concert rooms; formerly the minions of monarchy, the arts and letters were to become the consorts of commerce and the citizenry.47

  Between the Restoration and George III's coronation a hundred years later, culture became one of the capital's key growth sectors. Swarms of promoters, publishers, journalists and middlemen looked for openings, employment and profit not only, and certainly no longer primarily, to the King and his courtiers – the first three Georges were either boorish or stingy – but to chocolate house, club and society clienteles. This shift from Court to Town helped make London the metropolis à la mode. Visitors marvelled at the ceaseless throb of activity, the flutter of news, personalities, fashion, talk and diversion to be found from Cheapside to Chelsea. They were astonished by the bustle of the rebuilt post-Fire City to the east, and by the sumptuous display of the developing West End, by the brilliant shops around the Strand and Piccadilly, by theatres and exhibitions, exchanges and markets, the river teeming with shipping and royal parks shimmering with promenaders. The capital became a non-stop parade, bursting with sites for culture-watchers, a festival of the senses offering convivial, culinary and sexual pleasures in its taverns, pleasure gardens and bagnios, places where fame and fortune could be made – and lost.48 London became a lead character in its own right in Georgian art and thought, if often cast in the villain's role:

  Here malice, rapine, accident, conspire,

  And now a rabble rages, now a fire;

  Their ambush here relentless ruffians lay,

  And here the fell attorney prowls for prey;

  Here falling houses thunder on your head,

  And here a female atheist talks you dead.49

  As an addictive imaginary space, London was endlessly praised or pilloried by essayists like Addison, Steele and Defoe, by Pope, Swift, Gay, Fielding and other poets and novelists, and by artists like Hogarth: Londoners evidently could not get enough.50

  Seminal for news, novelty and gossip were the coffee houses. That Restoration innovation spread rapidly, a 1739 survey finding a staggering tally of 551 – ten times
more than in Vienna! – to say nothing of the 447 taverns and 207 inns also in the capital. Initially they sprang up around the Royal Exchange and the Custom House in the City, serving as clearing houses for news, foreign and domestic. Clients of the East India Company and other booming financial institutions (including, from 1694, the Bank of England) clinched their deals amid the smoke. Lloyd's coffee house moved to Lombard Street in 1691 to become the focus of marine insurance, while the tragicomedy of the South Sea Bubble was played out in and around Jonathan's and Garraway's in Exchange Alley.51

  If business provided the initial rationale, the coffee house soon became crucial to cultural networking. Dryden held court at Will's in Covent Garden, where Pope was later an habitué; Addison patronized nearby Button's, and the Tory wits went to the Smyrna in Pall Mall. The Bedford was popular with thespians; Old Slaughter's in St Martin's Lane became the artists' haunt; and, when in London, Edinburgh cronies gathered at the British coffee house, by Charing Cross.52 Newspapers and pamphlets were laid on – the Chapter coffee house even had its own library – while critics held forth and debates raged on the latest opera, political squib, Court scandal or heretical sermon. Taverns, too, functioned as news centres. ‘Ask any landlord why he takes the newspapers,’ pronounced the young William Cobbett, later in the century, ‘he'll tell you that it attracts people to his house.’53 All such institutions thus worked to put their clienteles in the know: ‘We are become a Nation of Statesmen,’ declared The Craftsman magazine; ‘our Coffee-houses and Taverns are full of them.’54 The happy conjunction of culture-seekers and a commercial outlet tailor-made for them was plain to foreigners. ‘What attracts enormously in these coffee-houses are the gazettes and other public papers,’ wrote the Swiss visitor César de Saussure; ‘all Englishmen are great newsmongers. Workmen habitually begin the day by going to coffee-rooms in order to read the latest news.’55 The Irish clergyman Dr Thomas Campbell noted at the Chapter ‘a specimen of English freedom’, when ‘a whitesmith in his apron & some of his saws under his arm, came in, sat down and called for his glass of punch and the paper, both of which he used with as much ease as a Lord’.56