‘To hinder
insurrection by driving away the people, and to govern peaceably by having no
subjects, is an expedient that argues no great profundity of politics. It
affords a legislator little self- applause to consider that where there
formerly were an insurrection, there is now a wilderness.’ – Samuel Johnson
We are habituated to think of exploitations something that occurs at ground
level, at the point of production. In the early 18th century wealth
was created at this lowly level, but it rose rapidly to higher regions,
accumulated in great gobbets, and the real killings were to be made in the
distribution, cornering and sale or goods and raw materials (wool, grain, meat,
sugar, cloth, tea tobacco, slaves), in the manipulation of credit, and in the seizures
of the offices of State. The patrician banditti contested for the spoils of
power, and this alone explains the great sums of money they were willing to
expend on the purchase of parliamentary seats. Seen from this aspect, the State
was less an effective organ of any class than a parasitism upon the backs of
that very class (the gentry) who had gained the day in 1688. And it was seen as
such, and seen to be intolerable, by many of the small Tory gentry during the
first half of the century, whose land tax was transferred by the most patent
means to the pockets of courtiers and Whig politicians – to that same aristocratic
elite whose great estates were, in those years, being consolidated against the
small. An attempt was even made by this oligarchy, in the time of the earl of
Sunderland, to make itself institutionally confirmed and self-perpetuating, by
the attempted Peerage Bill and by the Septennial Act. That constitutional defenses
against this oligarchy survived these decades at all is due largely to the stubborn
resistance of the largely Tory, sometimes Jacobite, independent country gentry,
supported again and again by the vociferous and turbulent crowd.
. . .
. . .
. .
As we move backward from 1760 we enter a world of theatrical symbolism which is
difficult to interpret: popular political sympathies are expressed in a code
quite different from that of the 1640s or of the 1790s. It is the language of ribbons, bonfires, of
oaths and of the refusal of oaths, of toasts, of seditious riddles and ancient
prophesies, of oak leaves and of maypoles, of ballads with a political double-entendre, even of airs whistled
in the streets. Edon’t yet know enouh about[popular Jacobitism to assess how much
of it was sentiment, how much was substance, but we can certainly say that the plebs
on many occasions employed Jacobite symbolism successfully as theater, knowing
well that it was the script most calculated to enrage and alarm their Hanoverian
rulers. In the 1720s, when an intimidated press veils rather than illuminates
public opinion, one detects underground moods in the vigor with which rival
Hanoverian and Stuart anniversaries . . . it was a wat of nerves, now
satirical, now menacing. The arrows sometimes hit their mark.
[2] Despite the substantial advances in Jacobite historical studies, the evidence as to the dimensions of popular support remain slippery. AN excellent assessment is in Nicholas Rogers, ‘Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early Hanoverian England’; in Eveline Cruikshank (ed.) Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh, 1982). Professor Rogers shows that a considerable volume of anti-Hanoverian and Jacobite manifestations ( especially between 1714 and 1725) cannot be taken as an indication of organized commitment or of insurrectionary intent but should be considered as a symbolic taunting of Hanoverian rulers – ‘ provocative, defiant, derisory’ – and not less important for that reason. Rogers has developed these insights in Whigs and Cities, passim, and he speculates on the reasons for the marked decline in the Jacobite sympathy of English urban crowds between 1715 and 1745.
. .
. . .
. . .
. .
Every society has its own kind of theater, much in the political of contemporary societies can be understood as
a contest for symbolic authority. But I am saying more than that the symbolic
contest in the 18th century were peculiar to that century and require more
study. I think that symbolism, in that century, had a peculiar importance,
owing to the weakness of then organs of
control: the authority of the Church is departing, and the authority of the
schools and the mass media have not yet arrived. The gentry had four major resources
of control –m a system of influence and preferment which could scarcely contain
the un-preferred poor, the majesty and terror of the law: the local exercise of
favors and charity; and the symbolism of their hegemony. This was, at times, a
delicate social equilibrium, in which rulers were forced to make concessions.
Hence the contest for symbolic authority may be seen, not as a way of acting
out ‘real’ contests’, but as a real contest in its own right. Plebian protest,
on occasion, had no further objective than to challenge the gentry’s hegemonic
assurance, strip power of its symbolic mystifications, or even just blaspheme.
It was a contrast for ‘face, but the outcome of the contest might have material
consequences – in away the poor law was administered, in measures felt by the
gentry to be necessary in times of high prices, in whether Wilkes was imprisoned
or freed.
At least we must return to the 18th century, giving as much attention to the symbolic
contests in the street as to the votes in the House of Commons. These contests
appear in all kinds of odd ways and odd places. Sometimes it was a jocular
employment of Jacobite or anti-Hanoverian symbolism, a twisting of the gentry’s
tail. Dr. Stratford wrote from Berkshire in 1718:
Our bumpkins in this country are very
waggish and very insolent. Some honest justices met to keep the Coronation day
at Wattleton, and towards evening\ when their worships were mellow they would
have a bonfire. Some bumpkins upon this got a huge turnip and struck three
candles just over Chetwynd’s home . . . they came and told their worships that
to honor King George’s Coronation day a blazing star appeared above Mr.
Chetwynd’s house. Their worships were wise enough to take their horse and go
and see this wonder, and found, to their no little disappointment, their star
to end in a turnip.
The turnip was of course the particular emblem of George
I as selected by the Jacobite crowd, when they were in good humor; in ill-humor
he was the cuckold king, and horns would do instead of turnips. But other
symbolic confrontations in these years could become vey angry indeed. In a Somerset village in 1724 an
obscure confrontation (one of a number of such affairs) to place over the
erection of a maypole. A local land-owner (William Churchey) seemed to have
taken down ‘the Old Maypole’, newly dressed with flowers and garlands, and then
to have sent two men to the bridewell for felling an elm for another pole. In
respionse his apple and cherry orchard were cut own, an ox was felled and dogs
poisoned. When the prisoners were
released the pole was re-erected and May
Day was celebrated with ‘seditious’ ballads an derisory libels against
the magistrate. Among those dressing the pole were two laborers, a maltster, a
carpenter, a blacksmith, a butcher, a miller, an inn-keeper, a groom and two
gentlemen.
As we pass the mid-century the Jacobite
symbolism wanes and the occasional genteel offender (perhaps pushing his own
interests under the cover of a crowd disappears with it [2]. The symbolism of
popular protest after 1760 sometimes challenges authority very directly. Nor was
symbolism employed without calculation
or careful forethought. In the great strike of seamen on the Thames in 1768,
when some thousands marched on parliament, the fortunate survival of a document
enables us to see this taking place. At the height of the strike (7 May 1768),
when seamen were getting no satisfaction, some of their leaders went into a dock-side
pub and asked a publican to write out in good hand and in proper form a proclamation
which they intended posting on all docks and river-stairs. The publican read the
paper and found ‘many Treasonable & Rebellious Expressions’ and at the bottom ‘No W-,Nn K,”
i.e ‘No Wilkes, No King’ . . .
[2] As the maypole episodes remind us, the Tory tradition of paternalism, which
looks backward to the Stuart ‘Book of Sports’, and which extends either patronage or permissiveness, remains
extremely vigorous even into the nineteenth century. This theme is too large to
be taken into this chapter, but see R. W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700-1850; Hugh Cunningham,
Leisure in the Industrial Revolution;
E. P. Thompson, page 76 note 2, Customs
in Common
. .
. . .
. . .
. . .
. . .
The price which aristocracy and gentry paid for a limited monarchy and a weak
state was, perforce, the license of the crowd. This is the central structural
context of the reciprocity of relations between rulers and ruled. The rulers
were, of course, reluctant to pay this price. But it would have been possible
to discipline the crowd only if there had been a unified, coherent ruling
class, content to divide the spoils of power amicably among themselves, and to
govern by means of their immense command over the means of life. Such coherence
did not, at any time before the 1790s, exist, as several generations of
distinguished historical scholars have been at pains to show.
The tensions – between court and country, money and
land, factions and family –ran deep. Until 1750 or 1760 the term ‘gentry’ is
too undiscriminating for the purposes of our analysis. There is a marked divergence
between the Whig and Tory traditions of relations with the crowd. The Whigs, in
those decades, were never convincing paternalists. But in the same decades there
developed between some Tories and the crowd a more active, consenting alliance.
Many small gentry, the victims of land tax and the losers in the consolidation
of great estates against the small, hated the courtiers and the moneyed interests
as ardently as the plebs. And from this we see the consolidation of the
specific traditions of Tory paternalism – for even in the 19th century, when we
think of paternalism, it is Tory rather than Whig which we tend to couple it
with. At its zenith, during the reigns of the first two Georges, this alliance
achieved an ideological expression in the theatrical effects of popular
Jacobitism. . . . By the ‘fifties this moment is passing, and with the accession
of George III we pass into a different climate.
. .
. . .
. . .
. . .
The 18th century crowd was protean: now it employed Jacobite
symbolism, now it gave full-throated endorsement to Wilkes, now it attacked
Dissenting meeting houses, now it set the price of bread. It is true that
certain themes repeat themselves: xenophobia (especially anti-Gallicanism) as
well a fondness for antipapist and libertarian (‘free-born Englishmen’)
rhetoric. But easy generalization should stop at that point. Perhaps in
reaction to overmuch sympathy and defensiveness which was shown by crowd historians
of my generation, some younger historians
are willing to tell us what the crowd believed, and (it seems) it was also
nationalistic and usually loyalist and imperialist in disposition. But not all
of these historians have spent much time in searching the archive where enigmatic
and ambivalent evidence will be found, and those of us who have done so are
more cautious. Nor can one read off ‘public opinion’ in a direct way from the
press, since this was written by and for the middling orders; an enthusiasm for
commercial expansion among these orders was not necessarily shared by those who
served by land or sea in the wars which produced this expansion. In contrast to
the populist tone of the 1960s it is very much the fashion of our own time for
intellectuals to discover that working people were (and are) bigoted, racist,
sexist, but/and at heart deeply conservative and loyal to Church and King. But
a traditional (’conservative’) customary consciousness may in certain conjunctures
appear as a rebellious one; it may have its own logic and its own solidarities
which cannot be typed in a simple-minded way. ‘Patriotism’ itself may be a
rhetorical stratagem which the crowd employs to mount an assault upon the corruption
of the ruling Hanoverian powers, just as in the next century the Queen Caroline
agitation was a stratagem to assault King
George IV and his court. When the crowd acclaimed popular admirals it might be
away of getting at Walpole or at Pitt.
Customs in Common, see the index.
No comments:
Post a Comment