1
Part 1. Representation and the Public.
‘The word “representation” is one of the most difficult of all the words used by the historian because its meaning may reflect deep-seated historical changes’.[1]
'we ought … to be prepared to ask ourselves quite aggressively what is supposed to be the practical use, here and now, of our historical studies'.[2]
‘The best lectures in politicks are deduced from occurrences of moment, that have hapned either within the compass of our own memories or those of our predecessors. These we are furnished with from history…’[3]
- Chapter 1. Introduction.
B. The Argument.
This is a book about later Stuart political culture. The central theme is an examination of the concept and nature of representation at a key period in its history. I argue that in the later Stuart period England witnessed a significant shift towards a representative society. This was the result of the conjunction of several factors. General elections were held, on average, every two and a half years in the period between 1679 and 1716. A huge and expanding electorate voted more regularly than ever before. Pre-publication licensing lapsed, temporarily in1679 and then permanently in 1695. Political parties - Whigs and Tories- were born and flourished in bitter conflict with one another. Men and women engaged in an ideological struggle about the nature of the church, the state, authority and obedience. And there was a financial revolution that created a publicly-funded national debt for the first time. These factors combined to produce a partisan political culture that was truly national and in which the public became a routine, participating, part of the political process. Yet the involvement of the public, and its expanded role as a source of authority, raised questions about the capacity of the people to make informed, rational political judgements. The partisan press, clubs, coffee-houses, electioneering, addresses and petitions were a means of informing and involving a reified public, but also potentially a means of subverting its rational judgement through mendacity, impartiality, passion and even rage. The period thus witnessed an experiment in representation but also, in the eyes of many contemporaries, one in misrepresentation through slander, political lying and partisan fictions.
To be sure, many aspects of the later Stuart political culture can be seen earlier, particularly in the 1640s, and it is easy to exaggerate the 'Glorious Revolution' as the key turning point. There was a coup in 1688-9, but a revolution process spanning at least 1640-1720. We can therefore find instances of the anxieties that have just been outlined well before the 1670s. Indeed, one can find continuity across the early modern period (and before and after it) between periods of great political and religious tension. Polemic, an appeal to popularity, a fear of the effects of print, anxiety over truth-claims can all be found in the sixteenth and earlier seventeenth centuries, as well as in the eighteenth. Contemporaries were particularly aware of the role that the mid-century revolution played in changing the political culture. From the 1670s onwards, when the failures of the restoration settlement of the 1660s became apparent, explicit reference was made to 1641 and to a lesser extent 1648, in order to warn against repeating earlier mistakes. Yet, as this focus on the 1640s suggests, alongside the perceived continuities there were also recognised shifts over the seventeenth century. The mid-century revolution was certainly one such period of change. But this book focuses on the second half of the 1640-1720 revolution, partly because it has been much less well studied than the first, but also to emphasise the importance of innovations in the later phase that have sometimes been overlooked.
The shifts over the seventeenth century were quantitative. Whereas the 1584 bond of association was a relatively circumscribed affair, subscribed for the most part by men of substance and amounting to about two dozen sets of parchments, the parallel 1696 oath of association was signed by men of all social levels and about 430 were collected.[4] Similarly, whereas the irreverent satire of the ‘Martin Marprelate’ controversy ran to about 15 or 16 tracts in the late 1580s, there were about 128 polemical titles a century later, debating the revolution of 1689-90.[5] One important difference between the late sixteenth and the late seventeenth century had therefore to do with scale. There was a wider, more consistently invoked, public.
This shift in scale was accompanied by a qualitative shift. Although the later Stuart period was in many ways the culmination of trends over a ‘long seventeenth century’, spanning from the 1580s to the late 1710s, the nature of the later appeal to the public and of public politics was different. This was the result of changes brought about during the mid-century revolution but also by the later-seventeenth one. As a result, whereas scholars of the early seventeenth century have seemed reluctant to embrace the notion of a 'public sphere' based on early capitalism, new communicative practices and public rational discourse, such a model seems far more suited to the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. This book therefore examines the two key components of this qualitative shift. First, it seeks to demonstrate the centrality of the public to politics: as voters, as readers, as a legitimating authority, as umpires and judges of state and church. Second, it explores attitudes to the public and identifies public judgement as one of the key issues causing concern. Part one focuses on the first of these, and part two on the second, although both themes will recur throughout the following chapters.
The public acquired new prominence and importance as a collective fiction with an enlarged role as a legitimising power and as an umpire. The vacuum of authority resulting from the undermining of traditional authorities such as the crown and church during the mid-century crisis was thus partly filled by the public. This becomes clear when we examine frequent electioneering, the proliferation of cheap political print, and the expansion of public petitions and addresses. In each case the scale of such appeals to popularity was either unprecedented or matched only (and then temporarily) during the 1640s. Such appeals worked to create a national political culture, with labels and structures recognised in every borough and in which every borough was expected routinely to participate. The public was asked repeatedly, and consistently, to judge. It had to decide how to vote, whether it believed what it read and whether or not to sign petitions and addresses.
Much of this debate was carried out in public, and in print. The expansion of the political press had a transformative impact on the 1640s but also on the later Stuart political culture. Thus although the genre of printed electoral advice literature had emerged in the 1640s, it is a reflection of the later development of mid-century innovations that such literature flourished only when electioneering became frequent and routine after the 1670s. Moreover, by then the short cooling-off time between elections ensured that print had become a decisive player in the new political culture. Print was not only a means to communicate but also a political tool. Printed interventions became an intrinsic part of the political contest. Finally, and in part facilitated by print debates about political economy and printed news about stocks and trade, the public acquired new importance because of the revolution in public finance. After the 1690s it was the public that supported the national debt and conferred the 'public credit' necessary to fight a large-scale, and semi-global, war with France. Public opinion gave value to stocks and even to money itself. The fiscal revolution after 1689 was a public, representational one.
Greater stress on the public and the role of public judgement nevertheless led to anxieties about popularity and public reason. Again, these were not new; but they were writ large in new ways. We can find anxieties about the seditious nature of print, the irrationality or credulity of the multitude and the subversion of truth well before the age of party. Yet parties, a new development characteristic of the late restoration period, intensified these anxieties and gave them a new context. Party was symptomatic of, and fostered, state zeal, political heat or 'rage'. Such vehement partisanship was thought to transport men and obscure their ability to discern what was true. Truth became relative to partisan conviction and party institutionalised a system of rival truth-claims. Anxieties about the abuse of language and the public’s inability to discern right reason and truth thus became embedded into the structure of politics. Partisans championed, or admitted, the public as an umpire, and yet feared that many might not have the capacity for rational judgement and to discern the truth. Knowledge and truth were thus political issues. In that sense, the period is important in stressing the early stages of a political enlightenment that coincided with the religious and scientific ones. Moreover, such debates were routinely fought out at a local level, and spilt far beyond the religious sphere - into matters of political economy, electioneering and personal credit, and into the nature of language itself.
Contemporaries across the political spectrum had, by the accession of the Hanoverians, come to fear a paradox at the heart of publicly competitive politics: an appeal to the public was an integral part of such politics, but it was through such an appeal that truth could become subverted. Political knowledge was both conveyed by public discourse; but also potentially undermined by it. This was no abstract problem. A failure on the part of the public to judge properly threatened defeat by the most powerful military force in Europe, the destruction of civil and religious liberties, and the destabilisation of an emerging capitalistic economy. Once again, the means by which partisanship corrupted public discourse were not particularly new, but they were certainly intensified. Contemporaries across the political spectrum feared deliberate and systematic campaigns of propaganda designed to mislead. They worried that slogans, words and phrases were routinely being given different meanings by each interest-group so that a shared language was dissolving, replaced by cant and jargon. Contemporaries thought their age had perfected the art of political lying, with each side seeing the other as based on a series of lies. Partisanship thus ensured that everything political could be seen in two ways - the same words, phrases, people and events were routinely represented differently according to party allegiance. As a result men and women of all stripes saw themselves surrounded by a world of ambiguities, misrepresentations and fictions. Such a culture could be highly creative, with imaginative fictions embedded in partisan polemic, so that the political and the literary were fused. Even so, later Stuart political culture intensified, embedded and made routine representational phenomena and anxieties associated with earlier crises.
The consequences were profound. In order to try to control and order such phenomena contemporaries developed a series of informal and formal controls. The languages of politeness and reason were prized because they appeared to offer an antidote to the incivility and passionate irrationality of partisan discourse. As ideals they were increasingly articulated in response to partisanship. The language of moderate, rational politeness was thus the inverse of how contemporaries characterised partisan polemic and discourse. But as well as a stress on an idealised way of talking, there were also shifts in attitudes to the press. Printed vindication or rejoinder, rather than censorship, was recognised as the best means of countering an opposing viewpoint - an implicit recognition that the mind could not be forced in politics any more than in religion. The press was thus regarded not just as a corrosive influence but also as an antidote to partisan poison. For this to happen readers had to read rightly. And they were encouraged to learn how to become critics capable of deconstructing a political text in order to learn its true meaning. Literary style duly became part of the political contest. More formally, the triennial act of 1694, that had guaranteed frequent parliaments, was repealed in 1716 in favour of a provision for elections only once every seven years. This was defended in terms that drew on anxieties about a decayed public discourse and public judgement that had been mounting over the previous forty years. In other words, the later Stuart period not only offers us a culmination and in part a resolution of the preoccupations of the seventeenth century, but also an explanation of the concerns of the eighteenth century. The later Stuart period helped to place on the agenda matters to do with partisanship, politeness, sociability, public opinion, political economy, truth, fiction and reason, together with the means available for the construction of individual, group and national identities.
The book thus studies how diversity of opinion - seemingly made dangerous by its public nature in an age of extensive print, new communicative practices, frequent elections, civic conflict, a financial revolution and religious division - could be accommodated peacefully within the state. It argues that partisanship shaped the political culture in innovating ways but also that such a culture explored means of containing the resulting passion and party rage. The book pursues the relationship between the style, language and content of public discussion between the 1670s and 1720, with a particular stress on the reign of Anne, during which division was both intensely bitter and widespread. It aims to connect a number of different strands - political, intellectual, literary, economic, social and religious - by focusing on how public discourse operated to legitimise or undermine authority and allegiance. My analysis situates the political culture of the later Stuart period as one of transition, towards new ways of talking and acting, towards new anxieties about how the abuse of words imperilled political choice. It is thus part of a larger narrative about the development of a representative society. By that I mean a society (not democratic) in which public representation, definedbothas a political concept and as a mode of communication, was key to the justification and exercise of power. This involved a curious re-blending of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, the combination of which produced something rather extraordinary, centered around a representational form of politics. As Montesquieu recognised when trying to classify it, the British system that emerged in this period, particularly after 1689, was a fascinating, delicately-balanced hybrid, reliant for the preservation of its liberty on a potentially tyrannous public that nevertheless checked itself through the party system.[6]
By studying both the inventiveness of, and anxieties heightened and created by, the publicly partisan political culture the book also seeks to engage with problems inherent in all representative societies: how are voters best informed? How, if at all, does the language of politics aid or enlighten public choice? How can political judgement best be inculcated? Is partisanship a positive or negative force? Later Stuart political culture thus posed and sought to answer timeless questions about the nature of representation.[7] It explored the relationship between the represented and their representatives, the claims of minorities to represent the whole, the means by which opinion could be determined, and how misrepresentation might be avoided.
- Rethinking Periodisation.
The study of later Stuart political culture gives us an important piece of a historiographical jigsaw that so often has the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century pieces missing. The period saw the culmination of trends that had been evolving over the long seventeenth century (1580-1720) but also offers a starting point for our study of the long eighteenth century (1689-1832). And the period is crucial not just for our understanding of Britain, but also of Europe. In that context this book also seeks to contribute to the ongoing debate about the nature of the enlightenment.[8] Although the European enlightenment is often characterised (or caricatured) as confident in rational truth, unity, ‘progress’ and objective knowledge – virtually everything that postmodernism sets itself against – the early, English enlightenment displayed considerable scepticism about the nature of truth, about the possibility of unity, and about the nature of progress. And it did so not (or not only) through grand philosophical texts but through the cut and thrust of everyday politicking that affected nearly every borough in the country. Questions about knowledge and human understanding were routinely explored in partisan political literature that offered rival versions of the truth to the public. As a result, it was an age of uncertainty about how to discern truth, an era obsessed with the nature of language, anxious about the degradation of politics and about the absence of universal frameworks that gave common meaning. In other words, the study should make us question not only how we periodise the past but also where we look for 'enlightenment' debates.[9]