SUPERPOWER BULLIES AND NATIONAL SOVEREIGNTY-6
Created | Updated May 9, 2016
THE AGE OF IMPROVEMENT, EVOLUTION AND PROGRESS
But by 1987, when Arthur Miller wrote this, the world was finally catching up with that English vision of a commonweal of all living things that belong to one interdependent Ecosystem that found expression in Gilbert White’ “Natural History of Selbourne”.
White’s classic work was published early in what the Historian Steven Watson called the Age of “A Civilized Security 1760-1790”: and there was no anomaly in the fact that Dr. Watson started by referring to “The political turmoil” those “thirty years”, or the fact that 1760 was just mid-way through the Seven Years War and only really significant in being the year when George III came to the throne, though contemporaries and subsequent ‘Whig Historians’ made much of the new importance of “North Britons”, with George III’s Scottish favourites, including the ongoing influence of his old teacher, Lord Bute, who he elevated to be his First Minister, giving cause to both to make comparisons with the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne in 1603.
In fact from the observations of Horace Walpole it seems likely that the real “age breaker” was the staggering rise and fall of William Pitt the Elder, the man picked out by the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough for her patronage years before, presumably recognising in him some of the qualities that had made her husband, John Churchill, the architect of Britain’s rise to greatness in the conflict in the War of Spanish Succession against the “Grand Design” of Louis XIV to become the master of Europe: and in 1759 arguably Pitt’s masterly handling of the British effort in a war of almost global scope could be compared with Marlborough’s Blenheim Campaign of 1704. Historians accept that Marlborough’s victory at Blenheim decided the fate of Europe for the rest of the century, and in much the same way Wolfe’s victory at Quebec and Clive’s victory at Plassey could be said to have decided the fate of the world for the next hundred years.
From the land of the Amerindians to the Indian subcontinent British power had triumphed over the ambitions of France to realize that dream of world dominion, and the English were entitled to feel not only a new level of security in their ‘Sceptred Isle’, but also, in an English tradition in which rights should be balanced by responsibilities, just the often lurid and savage details of the Quebec and Plassey campaigns made it apparent that the whole idea of Human Rights implied by Magna Carta back in 1215 and made more explicit by the Bill of Rights in the Revolution of 1688-9 was largely absent in the wider world. As Jean Jacques Rousseau was to assert as a universal truth “All men are born free, but everywhere they are in chains”: and British involvement in, and active responsibility towards, the wider world was now firmly established as one of the conditions of their own “Civilized Security”.
In the short term, however, the accession of a new sovereign brought all the insecurities of a royal apprenticeship and George III hardly endeared himself to his English subjects, when forming his new government, by finding no place for Pitt, now widely regarded as a national saviour, especially as this seemed to be done in order to make room for Lord Bute, one of those Scottish intellectuals who were to achieve as Dr. Watson put it, “primacy…in the intellectual and academic field in this period”. Many of them, like David Hume, were very popular, and ‘at home’, in Paris as an integral part of the French Enlightenment, which no doubt reminded many English people that they themselves were regarded by the Scots as “Auld Enemies” while the their own old enemies, the French, were “Auld allies” of the Scots: and when the Seven Years War finally ended in 1763 Lord Bute was widely blamed for being too soft on his old friends in France and robbing the English, who had largely paid for the war effort, of the just rewards of victory.
For the young Second Viscount Palmerston, however, the end of the war meant the opportunity to complete his education like any young English gentleman of his age and social standing by making the Grand Tour of Europe for 18 months, very much aware, however, of the need to equip himself for his future responsibilities in a changing world. Like many such travellers, who were equipped with letters of introduction, he was invited to stay with Voltaire in his house at Ferney close to the Swiss frontier, writing in one letter: “I passed a day with the celebrated physician and philosopher Haller and had a conversation of some hours on philosophical subjects with him and half a dozen persons of the country, who seemed surprised to hear a young man talk seriously. But notwithstanding their attention and commendation, I could not help feeling sometimes mortified at my own ignorance and thinking that there is a kind of superiority which books give one better than horses.” (page 40)
And the duty of self-improvement was vital to “The Age of Improvement” as exemplified in the life of the Englishman who was the dominant figure of London cultural life, much as Voltaire dominated the cultural life of the European continent, though posterity probably knows about Dr. Johnson largely through the biography written by his Scots friend and admirer James Boswell, who seems to have chosen the end of the war in 1763 to come down south to London.
Palmerston, in fact, said of Voltaire after his stay at Ferney that, if he had to choose between the man and his books, he would chose the man, and perhaps in the same way Boswell, not himself a Scots writer of genius, has given us Dr. Johnson the man, a man who sat down in private meditation every year to take stock of just how much progress he had made as a human being in the last twelve months. Books do indeed tend to give a kind of superiority better than horses: and it is through the collection of Nelson Mandela’s “Conversations With Myself”, written during his 28 years of incarceration, that one discovers that this great man too made exactly the same kind of stock taking.
But this English tradition, summed up in Nelson’s famous message before the Battle of Trafalgar “England expects that every man this day will do his duty”, that each individual must try to develop the skills and competences necessary for not only their personal survival so that they can ‘stand on their own two feet’, but also for the survival of the whole Commonweal in times of both war and peace, had been associated since the times of King Alfred with the idea that the English did not need a permanent war-capable military establishment when there was no actual war. And even while the Seven Years War was being fought John Wilkes became the focus of popular protest against the heavy-handedness of a Crown establishment directed by ‘North Britons’, a succession of ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ conflicts resulting in Wilkes being made an outlaw, one consequence of which was that young Palmerston had to explain in one of his letters to his mother just why his name had come up in reports of Wilkes’ activities in Paris, since indeed, they had ‘bumped into each other as ex-pats abroad often tend to do.
In fact, as one of the witticisms that Palmerston collected put it, Wilkes eventually “out-lawed them all” and established some of the Liberties of the English people more clearly: and Palmerston once back in England, and making his first speech as an MP found himself discussing the question of whether the British Crown had the right to tax the American colonies, since the government argued that the colonists should contribute to the cost of keeping them in their new state of “Civilized Security”. And there was something quintessentially English, and some might say naïve, in the way that Palmerston used his maiden speech to argue that undoubtedly the Crown had such a right, but that it should only be used in emergencies, for no-one possessed of a right to impose on other people should exercise that right when it made other people unhappy.
And, like Englishmen from the time of King Alfred, the American colonists argued that they could take up arms and form themselves into militias that could competently defend their security against any foreseeable threat: and that any larger military establishment, by its very existence as a force that would need to be supplied and equipped, trained would create its own instabilities just because of its access to overwhelming force. Moreover they could claim English rights guaranteed by Magna Carta and the principle of “No taxation without representation”, all of which led up to the Boston Tea Party and, when troops were deployed and, when they came under attack from a crowd of protestors, they opened fire and killed five Bostonians.
In an English context the killing of five people by the forces of law and order was a “massacre”, and as William Cobbett was to write later about his Farnham childhood in the 1760s and 1770s, when he listened to his father and the Scottish gardener in the ‘big house’ debating the rights and wrongs of the Crown’s determination to assert its rights, there were many English people who were horrified when eventually the British Crown went to war. And discontent with a Crown establishment that could use military might on its American subjects led to the troubled year of 1780, with the London Mob taking over the city for almost a week during the Gordon Riots and the House of Commons passed Dunning’s resolution that “This house believes that the power of the Crown has increased, is increasing and ought to be diminished.”
Meaningful change, however, had to await the end of the war: and it was only in 1783, when the Crown had lost an important part of its American Empire for good, that William Pitt the Younger as Britain’s youngest ever Prime Minister, could finally begin to address the chronic need to reform the way that Britain was being governed, launching what Professor Asa Briggs called “The Age of Improvement 1783-1867”.
