The Strange Birth of Liberal England: Class, Religion, & the Market in the Making of the British...

8/4/2019 The Strange Birth of Liberal England: Class, Religion, & the Market in the Making of the British Political Tradition (W

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THE STRANGE BIRTH OF LIBERAL ENGLAND:I Ii

CONSERVATIVE ORIGINS OF THE LAISSEZ-FAIR!; STA TE, 1780-1860I i

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by Peter Mandler I IiDepartment of History, Princeton University

Working Paper Series #19 IiI

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(Draft only: please do not cite or quote.)I 'i

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I ITh e consequences of th e persistence of aristocratic power into the nineteenth century for th e development of th eBritish economy have been much discussed; this paper sketches ou t the less -kell-explored consequences for th edevelopment of the British state, its ideology an d functions. It examines th J absorption of liberal ideas by th e

landed elite in some extra-Parliamentary spheres-religion, science an d education, political economy-and showshow a distinctive reading of liberalism as supportive of th e "natural order" in lsociety an d politics emerged in th eearly nineteenth century. It concludes with an outline of how this conservative reading of liberalism-rather thansome of the better known versions (the Manchester School, for examplej-lcame to predominate in Britain'spolitical development. Mandler is Associate Professor of History, Princeton University.


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The Strange Birth of Liberal England.I I'I "

Conservative Origins of th e Laissez-Faire S t ~ t e , 11780-1860":

Labour history aside, the most important revision of ih e I'last generation of earlyI'

nine,eenth-century studies has surely been the unpacking of that old portmanteau

c a l l e ~ "liberalism". The connection between industrialization, 1 ising middle class, theI,

extension of civil liberties an d Parliamentary democracy -- an air.' ticle of faith forJ 1 I,

TrevFlyan, Halevy, for that matter Karl Marx - had alreadylcome under severe scrutiny

before the Second World War, when doubt began to be cast on Ithe concept of anI

Ind1slrial Revolution, th e material underpinning for th e libi,ral superstructure. Soonthereafter, by spotlighting the economic durability and diversity of th e landed estate in

the Jarly nineteenth century, David Spring an d F.M.L. T h o x h p ~ o n postponed theecoIl,lomic displacement of the British landed elite by an indhsJial bourgeoisie at least

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until the agricultural depression of the 1870s.1 W.D. Rubinstein 's much later discovery

thatf,[U]ntil about 1880, more than half of th e really w e a l t h ~ m ~ n in Britain werelandowners" came only as a satisfactory confirmation of Spring's and Thompson's

I I .thes,s.2 From these soda-economic revisions it seemed a simple enough step torevisionist political history, and as early as 1962 George Kitson Clark could dismiss th e

idea that "the middle class came to dominate politics and the country immediately afterI .

the Reform Bill of 1832" as a "curious legend."3 III j

However, the whig interpretation has proved more durable in political than inI I:

SOCirl or economic history: it explained too many too obviouslfeature s of the early-

nineteenth century political landscape too well. The emergence of the modern twa

parr'y system before 1830 is still commonly read as the b r e J r i n ~ of a titanic struggle. . I:

be t Ieen political opposites: land vs. industry, protection vs. ~ r e e trade, privilege vs.meIi1itocrac y, Ol d Corruption vs. economy, oligarchy vs. liberal.ism. The political crises

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of 1827-32 saw those struggles emerging aboveground, struggles which one-by-one

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were resolved - nearly 1lwlys in "Liberalism"'s favor - in the period between th e. i \ 'I

Great Reform Act of 183 a ~ d the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. I f party deliquesced

somewhat in the decade'lafter 1846/ it was only because Liberalism's triumph had Jeeni I

so complete: the s t r u g g l ~ ~ a s over. 4I

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Modern r e v i s i o n i ~ mras resorted to two unsatisfactory devices to chip a w a ~ at

this at tractive explanatoIiIY package. The first is the "concession" interpretation, thel:.I I '

political analogy to David Spring's assertion tha t great British landowners respond, d toII I .

the "bourgeois-industrial" assaul t by becoming bourgeois themselves and I!II I !

industrializing their e s t a ~ e s ' l No perfect analogy is possible here - one can more earily

. 1an owmng agranan capita ist tli h an an 0 igarc hiC d b "mocrat -- I 1 . ut It IS argue dnvisage a I', I I

that landed politicians skilfully conceded economic an d political reforms and just theIi I I

degree of power-sharing.\necessary to maximize landed control and leach away middle-I I I

class political energies at,\least until 1867.5 The concession analysis also has a popular

marxisant variant, W h i c ~ 1 a r ~ e s that "the functional combination of 'bourgeois ~ t y aristocratic state'" can be t o ~ n d throughout Western Europe, though opinions diffet as

to whether this combinati. on: was indeed functional for capitalist development. 6 Ji,I I

More parochially, the l"concession" analysis has been taken to task by a seco d1 'revisionist current, the high politics school. High-political argument criticizes the I

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lingering whiggish a s s u 1 P ~ o n s of the concession school. I f there wa s no rise of a

middle-class an d no liberal challenge to ancien regime structures an d ideology, whit

need or call wa s there fori c o ~ c e s s i O n ? High-political argument assumes that l a n d ,

politicans were so powerful.iso insulated, and so skilfull that outdoor pressure O n l ~

sporadically an d d i s C O n t i ~ U ~ U S l Yintruded on "the politicians' thought-world."? Threanalyses appear to give a 'densely-textured and profoundly historical view of e v e n ~ ' l

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but they often abandon entirely the attempt to conceptualize and particularly to ex lain,I i !

change. An account of t h ~ repeal of the Corn Laws, for example, ma y be only asI !


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conlsing as the event actually appeared to c o n t e m p o r a r i e s ~ b ~ ! t that alone does not

make it good history. i III

In his day, Kitson Clark could justify the high-political approach as a short -termI '

e n t e ~ p r i s e

by insisting tha t "the revision of history cannot~ a i t

Iluntil the newgentalizatiOnS appear ...the results of detailed research m ~ t bf used even if their only

result is to destroy."8 Kitson Clark was clear that the middle class had been dethroned,I i i :ut te was not prepared to say who or what sat in its place;i a ruddy, detailed pictureresulted. I IITwenty-five years later, it is high time for the ne w g ~ n e f a l i z a t i o n s . Here I wouldlike Ito try putting early nineteenth-century political h i s t o r Y l i n ~ p a framework consistent

witH "unwhigged" social an d economic history, without ass,unpng that the rise of British

libelalism entailed the rise of a middle class. In other word,s, Ilwant to talk about the

pOlil,ical common ground shared by aristocrat an d bourgeois in the first half of theI I

nineteenth century, which emerged not as a compromise o ~ asl:a concession but as a

corrlmon project crossing class lines. I I

Certainly, there is little trace either of the middle c l a s s e ~ or of liberalism in theI I:

governments of the younger Pitt an d his heirs in the perio9 of Iiwa r up to 1815. These

golmments were pledged to a policy of political a u t h o r i t ~ r i ~ n i s m an d supported forthaj very reason by the "thick-and-thin-men" - th e massedir"'lks of great landlords and

courtry squires -- in the House of Commons. However, these,were no ancien regime'I

gOViI'ernments, either; they were no t even "Tory" in the eighteenth-century meaning ofI Ii

the term. I II

The landed classes were in this period undergoing a great transformation.I Ii

COljlcentratinglandownership ha d shaken ou t the finely-grade.d social hierarchy of pre-L i I~

moti ern England an d a wealthier, more coherent landed elite ha d emerged. MembersI I

of r iS elite owed their social an d economic standing to thiir ,tewardshi P of what were

no w great capitalist enterprises, basically landed enterprises to be sure, bu t increasingly

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' 1 ' d d di .If' d Th hi h i 1688 h d di id d T .. th1commercia ize an I v ~ r s l l ieu. e gap w IC in a IVI e ory sqUIres ~ n e

provinces from Whig f i n ~ n J i a l magnates in London was narrowing rapidly as theII I

eighteenth century pulle6 to a close.

Though unde niably outpacing them in wealth an d power, the landlords of

England were not n e c e s s i ~ r i l ydrawing away from the "middling sort". Until th e mid

nineteenth century, the J . i d ~ s t and most lucrative outle ts for entrepeneurial and. I

professional energies r e ~ a i A e d in agriculture an d its ancillary businesses. 9 Tenant-

farming wa s both the safl,,;t lind most accessible investment for anyone with a little bit

of working capital and sdme basic managerial skills.10 Landed magnates were

undoubtedly in this peridd Also th e chief employers of engineers (for their canals,

. docks, mines and drainage ~ o r k s ) an d of solicitors and surveyors (for estate agen

and management). Alth4ugh landownership remained beyond the reach of these J r a l

bourgeois, and the econobic gulf between them and their landowning masters jcontinued to widen well inti> the nineteenth-century, agriculture became a genuine lY

. i l , . , . , . .I I kcooperative venture bet i ien financier and manager in a way that British industry, - las,never did, i \ '

The capita list count rylgentleman also embraced a politics which was, in earliereighteenth-century terms! bdth Whig and Tory. I t was Whig in rejecting the old T o t

prejudices against monied a ~ d commercial wealth and against the social mobility and

diversity of great towns. r ~ i l e the new country gentleman continued to feel that

"common husbandry is infinitely superior" to other productive enterprises - the words

are Arthur Young's - " [ t l ~ e r f follows," he wrote in 1784, "no rejection of manufactuf '

nor any slight upon their * e a ~ importance... : ' Agricultural productivity made POSSi,epopulation growth and t h ~ s home demand for manufactured goods. 11 Manufactures

returned the favor by s t i r J u I ~ t i n g"a spirit of exertion" in all endeavors, encouraging

agriculturalists to I I

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[g]et rid of that dronish, sleepy, and stupid indifference, that lazynegligence, which enchains men in the exact paths of their forefathers,without enquiry, without thought, an d without ambition.... 12

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We are very far here from the early eighteenth-centuiY sltereotype of the Tory

squh1ie, narrowly patriarchal and traditionalist. On the other hand, the new capitalistI II

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landlord did retain many of his old Tory notions in Church and State. Though moreI I II

~ i k e l l ~ t e r than earlier in the century to m a i n t a i ~ a L o n d ~ n t e s l l i d e n c e ~ n d take ~ s s ~ a t

m Parliament, the new country gentleman remained SUSplOOUS of Parliamentarism inI I IIpracrce and in theory. Practically, he distrusted P a r l i a m e n ~ a l meddling in his private

an d local affairs, an d objected particularly to the metropolitan log-rolling which, he felt,I II

ha d Iiven special preferences to bankers and traders. Theoretilrally, he ha d no time for

the llibertarian posturing favored by metropolitan Whigs and Dissenters. His ow nI II

statUI;s no longer secured solely by local standing an d tradition; bu t no w also by dint ofI I. r and productivity, he took a dim view of attempts to, leg.islate civic equality:I I

thesr seemed to him short-cuts to mobility which might be deservingly attained by

effort an d investment. This view dimmed further as Whig ~ a l ~ d e e s , their supportII II

waning among the political classes, began in the 1760s and 11780s to make appealsI I

outdoors: and, of course, it dimmed to opacity after 1789,when the view that legislatedeqUllity amounted to a power-grab by undeserving m a r g i ~ a ~ 1 appeared vindicated byI I Iievents across the Channel. I i II

This mixture of Whiggism and Toryism i n c r e a s i n g l ~ prrvalent in landed circles

wa y no means unpalatable to the middle classes. Those iattiched to landed estatesfed eedilyon the new spirit of exertion and enterprise. Tenant-farmers, rural

I IItrofessionals, coal and iron masters were all overwhelmin?ly liAnglican an d were no t

easi1lYmobilized by campaigns for religious liberty; Dissentets remained highlI I

insfated in urban and manufacturing centers, an d even thlere a majority of cottonl

masters conformed to the Established Church.13 Nor di d exclusion from the polityI II

rankle as much as we might assume. The country g e n t l e m : a n ' ~ suspicion ofI I

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Parliamentarism was shirel by many of his bourgeois brothers. It was precisely in the

period between the 1 7 6 0 ~ arid the 1780s that David Hume and Adam Smith were linveighing against " v u l g ~ r " : w h i g g i s m - the idea that liberty stemmed from the vi r ous

lexercise of political r i g h ~ --Ias a vacuously aristocratic notion. Instead, they argued, theemergence of commercidl s6ciety ha d endowed free citizens wi th far more preciou!

liberties, "the freedom of1a ,han to enjoy his property an d his intellect." C o m m e r ,

progress wa s for the moJt part a natural process; though nature could be assisted @yI i

laws, any group of me n Csic]'I

guided by correct principle could write those laws. "[T[he

happiness of mankind dlpehdS," wrote Smith's disciple Dugald Stewart, "not on t h ~

share which the people JosJess, directly or indirectly, in the enactment of laws, bu

the equity an d expedienJe olf the laws that are enacted."14

In the half c e n t u r ~ be1tween 1780 an d 1830, in short, political liberalization c ,uld

be staved off by a p r o g r e k s i ~ e extension of the property an d intellectual freedoms

which the middle classes'and the landed elite valued alike. A landed government

promoting equitable andi!expedient laws might be indefinitely insulated from calls for

power-sharing. This f o r t h u l ~ was first explicitly e m b ~ a c e d in the 17805 by the youJger

Pitt. Pitt called himselfa l \ W ~ i g

(while his supporters called him a Tory); heacknowledged Adam Smiith las his master; he promoted purposefully a cadre of

moderate country gen tletheJ to peerages and departmental responsibilities; an d this

ne w administrative cadrJ s e ~ about the task of making government more professioJal,

more accessible, an d (ecohothically, at least) more liberal. Although the Pittite foJu la

was temporarily derangea b ~ the exogenous shocks of revolution and war between

1789 an d 1815, it was nevbr Iorgotten by either Pitt or his successors and it wa s more-or-

I ' 'less restored by so-called tliberal Tory" governments after 1815.Indeed, it was posJiblk for a kind of liberalism to develop in extra-Parliamentary

spheres even while a u t h o h t ~ r i a npolicies -- the proscription of Methodism, the

suspension of civi11ibertiJs -+were pursued in Parliament: that is, an extra

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Parliamentary liberalism in which landed and bourgeois elites converged in civil

s O c i e l ~ Y ' This extra-Parliamentary give-and-take enabled l a ~ d i ~ r d and bourgeois to riseI I

abovj their remaining Parliamentary differences an d even ( i v ~ r t u a 1 l y ) to put them

aside, constructing instead whatI

will call a politics of "naturalI

order" where theimplrtance of constitutional arrangements wa s deliberatelY: s o ~ - p e d a l l e d .

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Let me single out three of these arenas of extra-Parliamentary, cross-classI I

liberrlism before an d after 1815 -- religion, science, an d political economy - in which

this politics of "natural order" was gradually constructed. ;, IFirst, religion, which in this context means the C h u r ~ h . liThe modernizing

cou1try gent leman craved a moral sanction for his venturesomeness and the ol d prayer-

J I Iboof no longer sufficed: thus the ne w pietism of the e v a n g f l i ~ l a l revival. I t was onceusural to portray evangelicalism as the epitome of landed/PlateFalist revanchism. In

this ortrayal, the rise of evangelical irrationalism and i n t o ~ e r a . n c e , the proscription ofI I'

Dis lent, and the anti- industrial rhetoric of a Wilberforce or a Shaftesbury all go hand-I I

in-h,:and. But, as Boyd Hilton has now brilliantly shown, evangelicalism can be moreI II

piau sibly understood as a system for comprehending and accepting social andI

ecoI'omic change (much as E.P. Thompson understood Methodism).151 Ii

Doctrinally, evangelicalism was simple and c o m p r e f e n l ~ i v e : it perceived the

hand of a testing, guiding Providence in every moment of ~ u 1 f a n existence. But thisI

di d not mean that human existence was unpredictable and.apocalyptic, On theI II, I

contrary, the coun try gentleman needed reassurance that his world was stable andI I I

predictable, an d that his gent le innovations were part of the pr ovidential plan.I lI Morerate evangelicals provided this reassurance.

P r o v i d e r c ~ ( they said, operated

uniformly an d naturally, punishing impious innovators wilth ratural retributions

po,ert y, disease an d famine -- an d rewarding pious i n n o v a t o ~ s with natural

enr.uragements - wealth, health an d abundance. "SocieJ ~ in fact a piece ofrna, hinery," sermonized Bishop Howley of London in AP11li26, a virtue-producing

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manufactory of divine design an d purpose.1 6 (My only criticism of Hilton is that lj\e

overstresses the penal tiel, ah d neglects the rewards promised by this system, rendering, I I

it too illiberal an d p e s S i I ~ i S t i can d thus incompatible with mid-Victorian growth.)

Within this piece bf rhachinery, the social hierarchy was "natural" bu t no t stltic.

The individual was, w r o ~ e rlishop Sumner of Chester, "the artificer of his ow n ranklin, I i

the scale of beings", his J o r ~ l earnings inevitably rewarded with material success.11',7

Far from being paternalist, ~ h e n , the predominant strain of evangelicalism was III " I

profoundly i n d i v i d u a l i s ~ . The "responsible" landlord left his subordinates to reap ~ e

rewards of their ow n l a J , r s ~ the "responsible" politician likewise, for, wrote the f u r e

Bishop Copleston of LlaJdaff in 1819, "all endeavours to embody benevolence in !atand thus impiously as it t v e ~ e to effect by human laws what the Author of the system of

nature has not effected b ~ hts laws, must be abortive."18

I t should be clear Jhaithis moderate evangelicalism was moralistic but no t'I 'irrational or exclusive. If nature - that is, Providence - taught moral lessons, then

exploring its workings w ~ s Js much a piety as attempting to improve upon them was

. . Th II 1 I 1 1 b h . h . . 11 1 Impious. e new evange ica Ism consequent y roug t Wit It a new mte ectua Ismfrom which the offspringi'\of country gentlemen could benefit in their formative yea Is atI IOxford an d Cambridge. Scholarly revivals at both ancient universities followed on the

heels of the religious revivalin the first decade of the nineteenth century. These ,

revivals, isolated in a f e w ~ cotteges at first, were assisted by landed politicians WhO-\

much to the disgust of th! dirical ol d guard - heaped Church preferment on the Iouts tanding Oxbridge scJolJrs. This creaming-off of the moderate evangelical clergy

into deaneries and e p i s c o ~ a d e sma y even have triggered the ritualist reaction of thJ,Oxford Movement. 19 But i t klso meant that the episcopal bench, the Church's I leadership, would for a g ! n e ~ a t i o n be dominated by moderate evangelicals like H O ~ l l

and Sumner. 20 II

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In the early nineteenth century, then, both at Oxbridge and in the hierarchy, the

ChUfh wa s evolving into a forum in which landed g e n t 1 e m ~ nl! nd professionals couldI II

mee on equal terms in a common moral, rationalist project. ~ o u g h retaining

distii ctively Anglican traits - for instance, acknowledgemert i f secular authority and

the Jeed for a National Church - this project was also r e s p q n d ~ l : n g to impulses formerlyI I Iconfined to the more extreme rationalist Dissenting sects like the Quakers an d

Unitarians. Th e Broad Church was in birth, and, while it mjghf bear within it the seeds

of a 1ebelliOUSlY independent, aggressively secular intellectUallelite - what Noel Annan

has lalled "the intellectual aristocracy" -- it ha d a more i m m ~ d i ~ t e l Y conservative effect:

harriessing the great engines of education an d science to a J,,1+cal l Y quietist moral

J .order,I I.I, I

As the Church progressively annexed education and science to the cause ofI II

mor.j.I order, educational an d scientific movements -- the second of my three spheres ofI III

extra-Parliamentary liberalism - inevitably became moralized Iand Anglicanized. I f the

c h a ~ a c t e r i s t i cscientist of the 1780s was a Dissenter in the provinces - say, Josephp r i e k ~ t l e y at Birmingham - then the characteristic scientist ~ f tJe 1820s was an Anglican

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cleri yman at Oxbridge -- say, the Rev. Baden Powell, eldes11n of the high sheriff ofKe1t, at Orie l College, Oxford, "a gentleman of science," to i i Arnold Thackray an dJaCM , Morrell's term. Modernizing country gentlemen, setting up chemistry labs in the

1 t sw i f th . h . h . I .11 hei . . lds e n ~ l a n s wmg 0 ei r country ouses WIt . g t err gram Ylen eye to I m p r ? V I ~ s,I II

mi,ht have shucked off their ol d prejudices against the di'US)On of useful knowledge

unarsisted; bu t the evangelical revelation of divine approialior these pursuits cannot

hale hurt. I IIEarly nineteenth-century science was bold an d innovative precisely because it

I IIwas, firmly deductive , employing a set of safe and certain moral principles as a giant

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sprrgboard. Gentlemanly scientists were confident that their scrutinies would reveal

"chl racterist ics of the legislation of the universe", as " p r e ~ a n ~ with the proofs ofI III Ii

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! Iwisdom an d omnipotence in their common creator" as the uniform laws discovered in

God's moral universe b y i e v ~ n g e l i c a l theologians. I t is this latter emphasis on the

specifically human and ~ o ) a l message of Providence's "natural order" which

disti . h i ' I I h . fr th 11 chanistisnnguts es ear y mneteent -century soence om e more casua y me anistic

science of the preceding ~ e ~ t u r y . Providence necessarily applied the same principles-

of gradual, uniform an d bre1dictable change within a fixed, hierarchical structure - to

the natural an d to the s O ~ i a l l o r d e r . Human constructs like constitutions an d

governments which se t t te kcial order at odds with the natural order were impious

I Thi I . d 1 . . 1 . ki\an d foot mg. 15 precept was arme not on y against SOCIa utopians see mg

unnaturally accelerated 1. l ,ge , like the French Revolutionaries, but also against s f a !

reactionaries seeking to i b p ~ d e natural change, like Britain's ow n Ultra-Tories. "[TIJhe

barriers between man a n ~ Jan , between rank and rank," argued the CambridgeII I

geologist Adam Sedgwick, "should not be harsh, an d high, an d thorny" - that is,

artificial defenses of privilege -- bu t rather "a kind of sunk fence, sufficient to draw lines

of demarcation between lne lan d another."21 IThe pursuit of s c i e ~ c J , in short, could be shared by men of different classes

without upsetting the soJlialbrder - indeed, it would set a seal on that order byrevealing it in all its e x q u ~ s i t ~ detail. Early-nineteenth century landed gentlemen t l k

up science quite explicitl) in10rder to tame political passions. Lord Althorp, for Iinstance, threw himself iJto ~ r a c t i c a l sciences after his wife's death in 1818, e q u i p p

his rooms in the Albany l i t J a chemistry set an d commandeering the moribund

Smithfield Club of c a t t l e - ~ r e ~ d e r s to teach his fellows some primitive genetics. Though

himself a Whig, he saw h ~ ~ S ~ i e n t i f i c exploits as part of a wider project to re-knit thel

rural fabric rent by constJuti6na i conflict, to bridge the ga p which separa ted Whig Jrom

Tory landlord, and landldrd ~ r o m tenant or professional. I t was an ambition recognIzedby Elizabeth Gaskell in w l ~ v e ~ and Daughters, a novel unfinished at her death but sJt in

the 1820s. In this novel t ~ ~ J h i g Lord Hollingford, a cosmopolite an d amateurI


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scientist, sponsors Roger Hamley, Cambridge-educated son of the local Tory squire, onI 1 . 1 di . Wh H 1 ~ '1 hi n ov1erseas zoo ogica expe i t ion. en young am ey returns, It 15 to reconci e s

I Ifathelf to long overdue agricultural improvements an d to heal the historic

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HOlirgsworth-Hamley political rift in the county. In this caie if is the Tory Hamley

whose political fires are banked by science. In the case of the 8th Duke of Argyll, it wasI I II

an aIij'dent Whig who threw himself into the study of mechanics an d natural history I II

along the wa y becoming surely the only skilled l a t h e - o p e r a ~ o r jn the peerage - and

emeJged with a "tendency to eclecticism in my opinions" whic\, drew hi m out of party, 1. 22 I I

1po IblCS. I II

This confidence in the safety and utility of knowledge among the l anded elite can! Ii

be seen, logically enough, in extensive landed participation in the "useful knowledge"I II

movement, Even as notorious a cynic as Lord Melbourne Ja s "quite sure thatI I

knor'lledge and understanding are upon the whole favourable.to tranquility an dI II

Ordl"r."23 The mechanics' institutes which sprang up around the country from the lateI II

1821s were just as likely to be found in rural as in urban arjas'lland to be pat ronized by

pOlificallY moderate landowners as by radical millowners ' l ien the politica l parties at

TotIiIes in Devon quarrelled about the local horse races, their pat ron Lord Seymourtranlsferred his usual 50 pound contribution to the support ~ f 1 ocal mechanics'

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institute on condi tion that it be used "for purposes of i n t e l l i ~ a l improvement"; an d so

he WI' ithdrew his support when i t become "a political club w h e l ~ e they drink an dI i

smo,'ke."24 Even the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, though founded inI II

182(51'by Whigs an d Radicals, was always reliant for funds on great landlords, including

moderate Tories. 25 II

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The founding circles of the S.D.U.K. were also implicated in another supposedI II

aChll'evement of early nineteenth-century bourgeois liberalism, that is, the refinement of! Ii

clarical political economy. I would like to offer political efolomy instead as the th ird

of my three theatres of extra-Parl iamentary cross-class liberalism. With evangelicalI

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theology an d gentlemanly science providing such explicit guides to political condet , it

is no t surprising that the 11tw6should come together to create an actual " s d e n c ~ ofsociety". I t was, of course, Jcountry parson - Thomas Malthus - who firstdisseminated the p r i n d p ~ e s lofpolitical economy to a landed audience. Malthus Wfonce portrayed as a sym!ol6f reaction (his First Essay essentially an anti-Iacobin ~ c t ) ,

of physiocracy (who favdred agriculture over industry), of pessimism an d the steady

state (whose "providencJ" J a s purely terroristic): in sum, an Establishment G O l i a t ~ just

awaiting his David Ricarbo fo bring him down with dynamism and social COnflict.!we

know now, however, t h a l ~ Malthus was if anything a mild Whig, whose First Essay rtay

have been an over-reactiln Jo the utopianism of Godwin but whose subsequent

revisions reflect the mildlr, hepoliticized thinking of Pitt's heirs in the postwar liberal

Tory Governments. 1 ' 1

Furthermore, Malthu1 was by no means the most widely-read Malthusian. Iffe:1 I

had many acolytes at Oxford anxious to shed a more beneficent light upon their lmaster 's corpus. Bishop ~ u J n e r ' s reading of Malthus in the Records of Creation ( l ~ 1 6

his friend Bishop COPlestbn ~ a s pleased to report, "developed the high moral an d Ireligious blessings w h i c h ~ l a ) involved in this [Malthusian] germ." That is, Sumnerplayed up the i m p r o v i n g ~ a s J e c t s of the prudential restraints implicit even in the

supposedly dismal First JssJ y . What was the use of moral individualism, Sumner

argued, if it could no t be ! m ~ l o y e d for good? God gave every person the ability to i f t

themselves out of sin, i f . , ~ u t of rank, and Sumner's school placed great emphasis on

the existence of that latent aJility even among those, the poor, who manifestly were no t

drawing upon it.26

I f the Malthusians were not so pessimistic about the ability of an agricultural

society to develop and i m ~ r J v e , neither were the Ricardians. Ricardo's system

formally more rigidly meJhahistic than Malthus' -- blamed indolent landlords forI[ I

economic stagnation, but it credited improving landlords for breaking the logjam.I


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Ricaldo's exhortations, far from exciting reactionary responrs limong the landed

interjst, di d much there to stimulate the growth of a free trade lobby, once againI I'

connecting sometime Whigs like Lord Althorp (converted by Ricardo in the early 1820sJ I

to moderate Tories like Robert Peel (whose financial reforms were spearheaded by

I I IRicardo and wh o was undoubtedly a theoretic free trader before 1830). Furthermore,Ricatdo shared with country gentlemen a horror of s p e c u l a ~ i o ~ an d "unnaturally" rapid

J i lace ,mulation. Like a good banker, he mistrusted manufacturers who might seek toI .1

expand their enterprises through borrowing, "spendthrifts and prodigals" (as he called

theil in his Principles) whose vain ambition would be p u n i ~ h ~ . l d by the providentialI II

marketplace. 27 It should not surprise us, then, to find that thelrolitical Economy Club

I I .founded by Ricardo's acolytes in 1821 was a haunt rather more of moderate bankersI Iiand landlords than of radical millowners.

II

Let me su m up this politics of natural order which I reelias bridging the party

divire by the 1820s. Evangelical theology, gentlemanly sciincf' and political economy

gavel forward-looking country gentlemen a set of beliefs outside party politics but withI I

definite an d coherent political content. The existing social order was natural,I

susceptible to detailed examination, and divinely-ordained

I

inIr'

wa y visible to humanleyel. It was not static, but a world of constant striving by individuals, each in and

I. hei k.vi ff d d d I Ii biti . h deservmg t err ow n r a n , virtuous e tort rewar e an meanlam iuon PUnIS e .

I I

Thelre was room for doubt as to ho w far any individual could progress, but no doubt

t h a ~ . ! : individuals must be left to their own devices, their p e r ~ o ~ a l struggle, and thatI I I

PUl:),liC benefit would result. All of this sanct ioned the chosen .lifestyle of the moderateI I

country gentleman -- knowledge-seeking, self- an d property-improving - an d itI III I'sanrt ioned, too, a retreat from the partisan politics which ~ a d Irrovoked during wartime

so TUCh antagonism between ranks: it substituted for the artificial man-made barriersI I

of ~ r e s c r i p t i v e law and political privilege the "sunk fences'j of [Iindivi dual moral worth

an d division of labor. In the mid-to-late 1820s, the system ~ e e m e d to be working. TheI II .

I


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I , 14

events of the English J iPr lmier jahr of 1827, for instance, were widely seen as a

prelude to all-party or n J n - ~ a r t y government , a revival of the 18th-century ideal of

broad bottom. Lord H O l ~ a n b . , one of the few enthusiastic Whigs remaining, practically

abandoned political life ih t ~ e s e years. "Political parties are no more," he mournedJ allthe propertied classes wJre ~ n the same boat, although, he worried with some

prescience, now perhaps I l a r r ~ y e d more plainly against the unproper tied. 28

This is not to suggkst Ithat the legislator had no tasks remaining, simply that I, I

contemporaries felt increasingly, particular ly after 1815, that government had become

non-partisan; that the l i J r t ~ r i a n and constitutional issues of the great days of part t

had been superseded by lhe ladvent of commercial society. In addition to public o r ~ e r

and foreign policy funct ilns l the enlightened legislator ha d a great pre-modern weikht

of legislation and corruption to strip away in order to let Providential mechanisms

work freely. Ho w to ens!re Ithat what government remained would harmonize with

Providence's intent? It wks ~ o p e d that theology, science and political economy w 01 dprovide the answers. C l e ~ g ~ e n ,scientists and economists came together in the 1810s

II . Ito advise government on h o ~ best to pare away impious customs and regulations, an d

to put in thei r place aut01haclc mechanisms which would emulate and assist - or atleast no t impede -- th e automat ic mechanisms of natural order. In public bureaux and

. . d i .11 I ' d ' h bcommissions an m rrurusters rawmg rooms, t en, government, too, ecame an eJ!tra-II 'I

Parliamentary arena of collaboration between landlords an d professionals, between

sometime Whigs and Tori1es. I, Undoubtedly, some of the professionals newly recruited

to government service resbntbd the tacit assumption that the landlords must hold thb

. thi II I . f h di li . hil hi 1eins: IS resentment was a prImary source 0 t era ica Ism in p 10SOP ica

radicalism. But that r a d i c ~ l i J m was contingent, no t essential: for James Mill,

Parliamentary reform . , p r ~ m a r i l y a wa y to turn civil servants into civil masters, n t ad . d f i ts If If th ll I. . . d nri 1 foo In an O l e . e e ~ l s t I n g masters were promoting soun prmclp es 0

II '


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I,

legis ation (as Peel and Huskisson evidently were), then perhaps Parliamentary reformI I I

was not even a good, period. I II

Mention of Parliamentary reform reminds us that this cozy coalition of landedI II

granfees and bankers, rural and urban professionals, Tories an d Whigs an dphilosophical radicals, reached a peak in the mid-to-late 18Jos;l! an d that soon thereafterI I Ii t had a mighty fall. How could this happen? An obvious reicourse is to point to the

I IIsimultaneous upris ing of all those groups excluded from thf PflitiCS of natural order:

IrisJ Catholics, English Dissenters, an d the massed ranks of the unpropertied. But is itI i

so obvious that they were all excluded? Anglicanism ha d been striving mightily toI I II

beco1me less exclusive; most of the moderate Churchmen I've been citing wereI II

advocates of Catholic Emancipation an d a latitudinarian Chur& which might embraceI I Ii

rational Dissent. Furthermore, the virtues of discipline, frugality, self-help an d self-I I I!improvement promoted by natural order advocates - the vF11notion that the

indi,lidual wa s "the artificer of his own rank in the scale of beih.'gs" - were no tI II

unaltractive to the great mass of the unproper tied, as the subsequen t history of thei

Eng!; ish working class testifies.I

I To explain the bust-up of 1830,we would have to add at least one further

i II

element, an ideological one. The advocates of "natural order" had, I think, too quickly

abahdoned the political field. In attempting too quickly to rert the language ofPOI;/tics in a more naturalistic, non-Parliamentary, non-libertarian form, they ha d tacitly1 I ,Igranted to popular radicalism a monopoly on some great English political tradit ions-I I Iconrractual, Parliamentary, libertarian traditions; an d this fa le popular radicalism a

powerful historicity to set against the moderates' use of scifnttfic and religioussanbtions. As Gareth Stedman Jones has recently demonstr.ated, i t was this command of

l ! Iia libertarian and Parliamentar ist idiom which allowed Chartism to spread its nets so

I I Iwi1e, to encompass a "working class" no t yet born as SUCh29 liTO Dugald Stewart's

1

argument that the people should prefer the accumulation of wealth an d knowledge toI III I

II


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II

16I

II I

that useless aristocratic fetish, the Par liamentary franchise, popular radicals couldI I

effectively counterpose t a ~ n a Carta, Oliver Cromwell, John Wilkes and "the rights of

the free-born Englishman." ~ h i s radical argument ha d not been so easy to make in the

1760s or 1780s, when a l a ~ g J body of landed Whigs also claimed to stand for political

rights and liberties. 1 jAs a result, when ihelconstitutional debate revived after 1830, a much smallerbody of enthusiastic Whiks l e r e swept along by a much stronger popular tide. E v ~ n

some of the participants i ~ the "natural order" coalition of the 18205 were caught u ~ inthe flood: philosophic radicals, who put their toe in the Reform waters and came l ~ t e r

to regret it; Althorp, whJ r e ~ u c t a n t 1 y took office with the Whigs in 1830, hoping to Imake the Reform episodJ a Jhort one by quickly enacting a broad franchise extensiln.

. II I IThe episode was not to be snort, however: the Reform Act wa s followed by calls forII I

greater reforms of the House of Lords an d the Church and by the Six Points of the

People's Charter. But the1old. enthusiastic Whigs rode the wave with glee; Lord JoHn

Russell, for instance, a l m ~ s t bade a specialty of taunting the advocates of natural o ~ d e

Citing Lord Liverpool's gbvJrning motto, "How small, of all that human heartsII I

endure/That part which ~ a w s or kings can cause or cure," Russell sneered,II I

They are very pretty Ipoetry , but they are no t true in politics....it is upon Ila w an d government, that the prosperity and morality, the power andintelligence, of every nation depend. 30

Under popular pressure, government grew: factory workers who cared little for

God's "natural order" wanted a legislated ten-hour-day, and go t it; Catholics an d!I I

Dissenters wanted not a Broad Church, bu t no church, and nearly go t that, too; the

Whigs added a few of their dw n private enthusiasms, talking of State normal schoo

like Prussia's and public Jbmbteries as in France. IA whole book coulb bb written about the extraordinary plans and ambitions ~ f

the Whigs in the '305 and roJ- in fact, I have just writ ten it31 - but that is no t my Itopic here. What of the a d v o ~ a t e s of "natural order" after 1830? The picture wa s n o ~


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entirely grim. The Whig majority of the 1830 was, after all, made up in part ofI I II

temFl10rar y defectors wh o played a restraining influence on t h e . ~ . g o v e r n m e n t , or simplyI II

continued to pursue a "natural order" track while the enthuiiaslitic Whigs were kept

busy! with Reform. Thus Althorp assembled at the Treasur 1a ~ e a m of junior ministersand bureaucrats wh o continued after 1830 the chain of f r e e - t r a ~ e reforms inauguratedby Juskisson before 1830. A major coup was the appointmr,of a commission to re

examine the poor law -- that last great "unnatural" right -- packed with moderateI I II

clergymen an d safely philosophic radicals. The outcome of this coup was theI lI II

enaditment of a Ne w Poor Law which stripped away rights a n ~ substituted disciplinary

mechanisms designed to replicate the "natural order." II

But this dual-track s trategy -- allowing the enthusiastic Wh igs to carry on theirI I

l

love affair with the people while moderates strove practically to continue theI II

retrenching work of the 1820s -- was inherently unstable. With one hand, the

I . 1 h 1 (R c fl Ii l ' l ' dgovernment wa s scattering argesse to t e peop e erorm, I a ~ o r y egis anon, an soon) ~ n d raising popular expectations; with the other, it waf iafing away (notably withthe New Poor Law) an d seeking to dampen them. Chartism --IIgovernment by the

I I ,people, rather than for them -- was the inevitable product. I II

And gradually the "natural order" coalition - what the diar ist Greville called "the1 II

Coriservative interest,...broken up by party divisions" - began to re-knit itself, again at

firs,! in extra-Parliamentary arenas. 32 If the Whigs ha d b r o ~ e J up the coalition byI I

embracing reform too enthusiastically, Peel's Tories ha d played into their hands by

hjnoi VI . . c G I l l II.. d .w ] pmg up tra sentiments agamst rerorrn. ent eman Yscientists an economists1 Ii

did their best to shore up the non-partisan sector. The formerl.held the inaugural1 I

meetings of the British Association for the Advancement of Science at the height of theI I IIconstitutional crisis in October 1831. The British Association's founders hoped to

I I IdiSti",ract attention from the shaky Parliament at Westminster by erecting an itinerant

I II

"Parliament of Science" in the provinces. This Parl iament would have a fixed agenda- I I

I i


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il

Ireflecting the fixity of th J n1tural order. Power in the Association lay in the hard

sciences - Sections A ( p J y s ~ c s an d mathematics) and B (chemistry), which closely

supervised the doings oAhJ soft Sections C (geology) and D (natural history) and 'I

actually crushed attempts t ~ form a section for the inductive science of statistics. 33 As

Dickens insinuated in hiJ wtcked parody of the "Mudfog Association for the

Advancement of E v e r y t ~ i n i , " one purpose of the Association's meetings wa s toI

stimulate mingling between' enlightened landlords and professionals in an a tmosphere

of consensus and convivi'alii y. Another, suggested a BAASfounder in 1831, was to.

allow "all honest men to lay aside all factious spirit of party an d to rally strongly around

real conservative principles.\ Of course I don't use that tenn in the narrow sense of b e

Tories whose ignoran t oJstinacy I fully believe to have been the main cause of this

present crisis."34 i I 1 II j doi hei bt A . 1 P 1" 1E

Sub-Committee of the S o ! i e ~ for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge wa s set up in 1830

to fight political enthusialm 1- in the form of Swing riots an d R ~ f o r m agitations -- ~ : i t h

political economy. S U d d J n l ~ hundreds of clergymen an d magistrates around the Icount ry were distribUtinJ thk literature of a society which ha d lost completely its Wmg-

Th e po 1inca economists were omg t err It, too. speaa 0 itica c o n o ~ y

. I iRadical taint. Lord AshlJl y _.1 the future Earl of Shaftesbury - strewed copies of its tractsaround the tap-rooms of b U ~ l i c hourses in the West Country; an d the erstwhile RachCal

James Mill found himselfll:editing a series of "Illustrations on Political Economy" so ~ toeliminate unnecessary B e h t h ~ m i t e an d deistic overtones which might offend the

Society'S pat rons. 35 II 'II I

Such efforts di d mi't, However, halt or even slow the Reform juggernaut.

Moderate country g e n t l e ~ e ~ like Althorp who had adhered to the Whig governmentwere by the mid-'30s begihnib g to feel distinctly uncomfortable, Althorp so much s

that he retired altogether } r o ~ politics in 1835. In that year, the Whigs crossed the

Rubicon by aligning themselves openly with the Irish and the Radicals - that is, wrote

II

II


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one Tsgruntled moderate , "the ignorant section of the radicils'IILe. those who are not

Benthamites"36 -- an d the dual-track strategy ground to a halt. IModerates began toI I

dri ft ack to Peel an d the Tories. IPeel accelerated this drift by apologizing in the

T a m ~ o r f h Manifesto for his

alarmist language in the Reform crisis an d pledging to be " ~ o n r e r v a t i v e " in future. By

18411 he ha d overcome the united Whig, Irish and Radical forces and forged a newI I II

maj1rity. Included in that majority were a set of Ultra landllor1s seeking revenge for the

"defeats" of the 1830s. But Peel himself - and, I think, a very large body of opinionI II

~ : d ~ t :I

: s ~ : : ~ : : : ~ ~ : : r l : : ~ : : : : : ::::::::J:2. Udti::s::::::,: uI IiSeni r agreed that party no longer meant anything; "the well-Informed an d business-

l I IIlike middle Classes", as well as the vast majority of the landed Iinterest, looked to Peel asI I "thelablest of our public men".37 ,

For some years, Peel was permitted to govern p a r t e i f r e i ~ Whig opposition wasI II

listless, his Ultra element obedient; the Parliamentary a g e ~ d a liwas occupied with

financial an d tariff reforms acutely reminiscent of the 1820s. Although the Corn LawI I Icrist suggeststhatPeelhadnotyetsolvedhisUltra proble!",rls conductin thatcrisisindi"cates a willingness to bite the bullet, to smash up his ow n party in the short run to

I I

p a v ~ . the way for an openly broad-bottom government in the long run. The long ru n

di d ot take very long, bu t it was too long for Peel; he died, Journed by moderates ofI II

b o t ~ parties, in 1850; the Liberal-Conservative Coalition was no t finally assembled untilI I

185:3 , with Peel's lieutenant Lord Aberdeen in his chief's sejt. ,But, as Greville pointed

1

out, there was "an immense preponderance of conservatisrr--Ii

liberal or illiberal" in thecour. try long before it manifested itself in Parliament. There is no better proof of the

I I

differenee in political mood between 1831 and 1848 than the fact that in 1831 the middlel I II

clasises clamored for a National Guard to ensure constitutional reform, an d in 1848I II

clamored for a National Guard to prevent it.
http:///reader/full/cour%E7%AE%B4ryhttp:///reader/full/cour%E7%AE%B4ryhttp:///reader/full/cour%E7%AE%B4ry


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I iI have, therefore, arghed that one odd kind of liberalism - call it economic or

"natural order" liberalisJ _Iw as dominant before 1830; that i t wa s challenged an d ,

temporarily eclipsed by ~ n o : t h e r kind - call it political or "natural right" liberalism - in

the 1830s an d '40s; but t ~ a t it reasserted itself after 1846 or at least by 1853. The 18$05II .

do look remarkably like the 11820s. Constitutional questions are laid to rest an d

government growth is hJltea. In fact, many of the Whig innovations of intervening

decades are dismantled: !lthJ Board of Health is dissolved, the ten-hour da y a b r o g a ~

the few activists at the Pdor taw Board dismissed. "Economy is the order of the d a ~ inall the publ ic departments," wrote the Peelite-turned Whig-turned Peelite C.C. L e ~ s in

1848.38 As many Ricardians had predicted, Corn Law repeal had stimulated a S P i ~ t ofI

. Iimprovement among landlords: the 1850's an d '60s were widely perceived bycontemporaries as the goldeh age of capitalist agriculture. Landed power was

maintained with the supJori or at least the consent of the rural and Southern middle

classes. I f the Northern, ~ i s l e n t i n gbourgeoisie remained recalcitrant, they were 1 x e din, isolated. There were Aorhore millowners in Parl iament after 1846 than there had

II I

been before 1830. Even Huddersfield and Manchester rejected the candidacies of

Richard Cobden an d JohJ Biight respectively in 1857. As for the laboring classes, tli-ey"appear to have discoverJd,,,l Bishop Blomfield of London wrote in his 1854 vtsitation

address, "that in every s t r l ~ J l e against the established laws of social order they are ~ u r e

to be the chief losers."39 I II I jIn segregating so d l e t e ~ m i n e d l y the 1830s and '40s from the years which precded

and followed, I do no t mJan lito suggest that the uppper and middle class partisans df"natural order" were e n t i r ~ l y l u n m o v e dby what intervened. In his 1854 address,

'I

Blomfield noted that the "Ihigher classes," too, ha d learned something: "the duty and

advantage of exerting t h e b s ~ l v e s to promote the real interests, temporal and spiritual,of the lower."40 Efforts J , e r ~ 1 made in the 1850s to file down the excessively fatalistil

Ian d individualist edges o ~ t h ~ "natural order." The "high moral an d religious blessings"

I I

i


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emphasized by Bishop (now Archbishop) Sumner in his earlier Idepictions of the

provldentiai Order were underscored: that is, the e x t r a o r d i ~ a r ~ potentia l for self-I I 'II

imPflovement accorded by God to each individual was fullYI re:ealed. Whereas earlier

econpmists had been reluctant to admit the possibility of universal abundance, p lentyI I IIwas no w accepted more easily as the natural outcome of d u ~ . t 1 Furthermore, the

middle and upper classes now accepted one collective duty, tha t is, the duty to put in

the fillands of every individual regardless of class the means ~ f ~ e l f - i m p r o v e I I

knoiledge and morals. Thus the great flowering of p h i l a n l h r ~ p y in the 1850's,

carefully organized in obedience to natural laws, became yet another arena of extra-I I I

Parliamentary cooperation between landlords and the middle classes.I I!

Finally, the advocates of "natural order" learned a political lesson as well,I I

appreciating that their insensibility to constitutional questiinSllshared much of the

res+nsibilily for unleashing the crisis of the 1830s. So l o n ~ asl"natural order" groundrules limiting Parliamentary action were established, Liberal-Conservative politicians of

- I II

the ' Os saw no reason positively to denigrate Parliamentarism. They propounded aI II~

evisionist history of the 1830's an d 1840's -- revising their 0 1 previously held

OPiDl1 ions - which played up such beneficial effects of the J.efJrm Act as the Ne w PoorI IIL a l an d the repeal of the Com Laws. 42 Instead of counte70iing the English

C01stitution to the Providential one, they pictured them as1mttual supports. They

even learned to romanticize the "dignified" parts of the Constitution in order toI I I

disguise the fact that the "efficient" part -- the executive gorel l ment, the Cabinet - was,I ,

as Bagehot pu t it, "decidedly simple."43 I

:II

I Having taken yo u up to 1867,I do not want to say anything more about the

tI IIIst r ge birth of liberalism in Britain, far less take the story rnx further. Let me,

ho ever, just append a few general remarks - perhaps platitudinous ones -- about theI I

IOn!: -term consequences of this odd early nineteenth-century gestation. MostI II

ob iously, what economic liberalization Britain enjoyed was ~ e n d e r e d at the behest of

, I! IiI ,


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I , 22

II i(or at least the pleasure qf) the land. Long before it became the slogan of the Anti-Corn

Law League, "laissez-no!s f ~ i r e " was the epigram of an 1819 pamphlet by Edward

Copleston of Oriel College, huord , addressed to Robert Peel, urging government tpi

remove itself from Cod's lbusiness. et To Copleston an d Peel, laissez-faire wa s a ,

prescription not for i n f i n l ~ t e kbundance and individual liberation, but for o b e d i e n c ~ to

God's law and the p r e s e J v a ~ o n of social order . I am not so sure as is Perry A n d e r ~

however, that this accouAts ~ o r Britain's "current crisis", whatever that may be. Wh1at

Cain and Hopkins have J a l l ~ d "gentlemanly capitalism" - capitalism suffused by

landed values and interests Lcertainly stimulated financial and imperial rather thanII I I

industrial and domestic expknsion, ye t the consequences of that development in thr

post-indust rial intemational economy seem very unclear to me indeed.45 Twenty-five

years ago Anderson c o m ~ l a 1 n e d that the consequence was a reformist wOrking-c1Jsmovement (unlike Francl o ~ Italy); no w he complains that the consequence is

disorganized capitalism ~ ~ n l i k e Germany or Japan); perhaps twenty years hence he

will protest that it is overlorkanized capitalism (unlike Italy or the United States, J o

countries seemingly t a i l o ~ - s J i t e d to the ne w world of flexible and specialized lightI

industry.)46 II

I can point to some pJIitical consequences with more confidence. No section of

the British middle classesl- heither isolated Northerners nor deferential Southerners-I. d dJ I 1" 1 L " he ni th l hmerge d as an in epen nt po inca rorce at an y time in t e mneteen century: nett er

to challenge the land nor I I~ O Jhampion the people. The consequent stifling of BritaiJ.s

rich libertarian an d democratic tradition -- in all classes - is surely the strangest f r J t of'I I J

Britain's nineteenth-cenJry political development. I t is wh y Britain tied with Hun ary

for last place in Europe's ~ n i l e r s a l manhood suffrage sweepstakes, reaching the goAl

only in 1918. It is also w ~ y rJIorman Tebbit and other self-proclaimed "19th-century

liberals" of the late 20th cln4ry are at least being true to their roots in blaming social

discord on the prevalence' of1unearned (that is, political or natural) rights, and in

I


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I

I

staking their faith instead on the "natural order" of economic individualism. There is a

long an d unhypocritical history of British elites wholeheartedly embracing liberal

pieti s, and taking the conservative outcomes to be providentially ordained, whichI Ii

maki s the Thatcherite success (I think) a little less mysterious-I


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Notes

II

I would like to thank participants in the seminars to which I have presented versionsI- , if hi f b II I f ' lati di . 11 h S . . Sod' alr this paper or anum er 0 stimu atmg iscussions, espeaa y t e em ma r I n i

,

I IHistory at the University of IBirmingham an d the British Study Group at the Center for

European Studies, Harvard fniverSity. '

1 David Spring, "The EnkliSlLanded Estate in the Age of Coal an d Iron, 1830-1 j "TournaI of Economic H i s ~ b r ) , xi (1951),3-24; F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Satiety

in the Nineteenth c e n t u r ~ < i ~ o n d o n , 1963). Unlike Thompson, Spring hesitated to Jreak

with the whig paradigm.jarguing that estate diversification entailed a cultural

transformation which arriouhted to the embourgeoisement of the landed elite, a po ition

which anticipated the " c ~ l c J s s i o n " argument discussed below. David Spring,

"Aristocracy, Social struclurt and Religion in the Early Victorian Period", Victoria

Studies, vi (1962-3), 263-8b.I ' '

2 W.D. Rubinstein, Men 0f Property (London, 1981), 60-1. '

3 G. Kitson Clark, The M l k 1 g of Victorian England (Cambridge, Mass., 1962),5.

4 A still respected dist i l l t t i l of this argument can be found in Harold Perkin, The

Origins of Modern English shctety, 1780-1880 (London, 1969).

5 For "concession" a r g u J e ~ l , see Norman Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction inEnglish Politics 1832-1852' (alford, 1965) an d Aristocracy and People (Cambridge,

Mass., 1979).I

,

6 See David Blackbourn and IGeoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History (Oxf0ld,

1984), 135-9. Arno]. Mayir, The Persistence of the Ol d Regime (New York, 1981), and

Perry Anderson, "The F i g ~ r e ~ of Descent", Ne w Left Review 161 (Jan./Feb. 1987), 2J77'


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connect aristocratic persistence with economic backwardness, 9ut the connection is

queried by Blackboum an d Eley an d David Nicholls, " F r a C t i ~ J of Capital: TheArisJocraCy, the City an d Industry in the Development of M ~ d l m British Capitalism",SooJI History 13 (1988),71-83. I ,I

7 Jchae l Bentley, Politics Without Democracy. 1815-1914 lLoLon, 1984), 14. J.C.D.

clark, English Society 1688-1832 (Cambridge, 1985) makes the kame high-politicalI. I II

argulment, but will not press it beyond 1828. Somewhere in:between the concession andI I IIhigltPOlitiCal schools lies the work of D.C. Moore, which argues that landed politicians

di d confront urban/industrial challenges to their political + 1 e r bu t succeeded beyond

condession, i.e. unti11867-72 they "cured" or solved the problem. D.C. Moore,

"cotcession or Cure: The Sociological Premises of the F i r s t l R e ~ o n n Act", HistoricalJournal, ix (1966),39-59, and The Politics of Deference ( H a s ~ o c L s , Sussex, 1976).

I I I8 Kitson Clark, Making of Victorian England, 17. I II

II

II,

I '

9 There were 350-400,000 tenant farmers in Britain in the 1830t and al though the figureI II

falls off sharply to around 300,000in 1851 it then s t a b i 1 i z e d l f o ~ i t h e next century. Phyllis

Deane an d W.A. Cole, British Economic Growth 1688-1959,2nd ed. (Cambridge, 1962),I : I143 J4 . Charles Booth, working from the same unreliable census figures, calculated anl I Ieven larger number: 450,000 farmers in 1851. This number is roughly equivalent to the

n ' b e r s of all the standard middle-class professions pu t ~ e b e r : publicadnill inistration, army, navy, police, law, medicine, the a r t s , l l i t ~ r a t u r e and science,

edujcation and religion. See Charles Booth, "Occupations or t ~ e People of the United

Kingdom, 1801-81", reprinted in Guy Routh, Occupations of the People of Great Britain,I : II1801-1981 (London, 1987). 4-7. I

10 lxcept for Dissenters, liable to feel uncomfortable in rotal society.

I


27/30

26

'III

'I

':1

11 [Arthur Young], "obJervat ions on the Means of Promoting Russian Husbandry 1"II I

Annals of Agriculture 2 ('1784), 246-8.

I I, .12 [Arthur Young], "A Mrnih's Tour to Northamptonshire, Leicestershire, etc.", Annals

of Agriculture 16 (1791), 5 4 6 ~ 7 . I,I 'I

13 Rubinstein, Men of Property, 75-90, 145-63.I, I

14 J.G.A. Pocock, VirtueJcdmmerce and History (Cambridge, 1985),250-3; Stefan

Collini, Donald Winch, ahd john Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge,

1983),30,36,38-9. ~ I

II ,I15 Hilton makes the distinction between "extremist" evangelicals, wh o were paternalist

and anti-modernist, an d ' ~ m J d e r a t e " evangelicals wh o evince the characteristics III I

describe below. In fact, he c ~ : > u n t s Wilberforce bu t not Shaftesbury among the

moderates. Boyd Hilton, ' ~ e Role of Providence in Evangelical Social Thought," in

Derek Beales an d Geoffrey B ~ s t (eds.), History, Society an d the Churches (Cambrid!e,i I

1985),215-233. See, further, Hilton, The Age of Atonement (Oxford, 1988).II IIII I16 RA. Soloway, Prelates and People (London, 1969),235. Much has been made of the

sum -- evangelicalism + J ~ i l i i a r i a n i s m = Victorianism -- bu t this addi tive perspective

obscures the fact that, lonk b ~ f o r e the accession of Victoria, many evangelicals had

become utilitarians. I, \

' 'I I17 Soloway, Prelates and People, 108, 110.

I, I

I i18 [Edward Copleston], A Second Letter to the Rt. Hon. Robert Peel on the Causes fthe Increase of Pauperism!lana on the Poor Laws (London, 1819),22.

, I

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27

19 The Oxford Movement only gathered steam at Oriel C o l ~ e g ~ after an older

generation -- the so-called "Oriel Noetics", or intellectuals - had been promoted by

gove!rnment. I II

I I II20 Howley, Primate from 1828 to 1848; his successor, Sumner,l,to 1862.I I

. I III21 Jack Morrell and Arnold Thackray, Gentlemen of Science (Oxford, 1981),29-34.I ' I!22 8fh Duke of Argyll, Autobiography an d Memoirs, 2 v o l s ~ (rbndon, 1906), i, SO, 69-70,

269T,277. I ,

23 j i l l iam to Caroline Lamb, 11 Apr. 1827: Bessborough J ~ . , Stansted Park,

Ha'yshire , 182. I I

I I II24 Uord Seymour to Duke of Somerset, n.d.: Ramsden (Bulstrode) MSS.,I I II

BUcl


29/30

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I , 28

II I

27 David Ricardo, On tHe Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, ed . P. Sraffail

(Cambridge, 1951),364. 'I o ~ e this reference to Michael Mandler.

28 Lord Holland in 1 8 2 ~ l r qloted by Keith Grahame Feiling, The Second Tory Party,I I

1714-1832 (London, 1938), 401-2. See also Lord Holland to Lord Grey, 2 Sep. 1825,II I

quoted by Austin Mitch11l, r e Whigs in Oppposition, 1815-1830 (Oxford, 1967), 1r-2 .

29 Gareth Stedman Joneb, "Rethinking Chartism", in Languages of Class (Cambridke,

1983),90-178. I I II

30 Hansard, 3rd ser., iv,il345 [24 Jun. 1831]. The lines are from Johnson's cont ribut ion toI "

Goldsmith's 'Traveller" i17tj3-4).

31 Aristocratic GovenurleJ in th e Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals, 1830-52 (okfurdI I

University Press, forthcoming).I I

. II I32 Lytton Strachey and Roger Fulford (eds.), The Greville Memoirs, 1814-1860, 7 vels.

(London, 1938), iii, 251 del,p. 1835].I 'l II

'I I33 Morrell and Thackray, Gentlemen of Science, 55, 248, 267-76, 491.

II I

34 Quoted in ibid. , 248. II take this to be from W.O. Conybeare to W. Vernon Harcourt,I I

19 Sep. 1831, a letter extrfctjd (though without the above-quoted passage) in Jack

Morrell and Arnold Thackray (eds.), Gentlemen of Science: Early Correspondence ofI I

the British Association fdr the Advancement of Science (London, 1984),64-6.i I

35 Monica C. Grobel, "T11 e ~ c i e t y for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, 1826-1846;'1 I

Ph.D. diss. (University ot London, 1932),254-67,434-42,505-6; Lord Ashley to S.D. .K.,I Il

21 Dec. 1830: S.D.U.K. MSS., 27.

II I

36 G.c. Lewis to Edward Villiers, 3 Feb. 1834: Harpton Court MSS., National Library of

Wales, C/2756.

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29

I'

37 Strachey and Fulford (eds.), Greville Memoirs, v, 262 [19IDilc. 1845]; N. Senior to

Mrs. ~ r a h Austin, 13 Jan. 1846: Nassau Senior MSS.,Nati0rallLibrary of Wales, crt.

38 d.c.Lewis to Edmund Head, 24 Nov. 1848: Sir Gilbert ya1kland Lewis (ed.),LettJrs of the Rt. Hon. Sir George Cornewall Lewis, Bart. (London, 1870).

I . I39 SOloway, Prelates and People, 432.

I .40 mid.

41 Jil ton, Age of Atonement, part three, though exaggerat irg ihe suddenness of the

shift] For a gradualist view, see Mandler, "Christian P o l i t i c ~ l Economy".

42 e g. M.C.M. Simpson, Many Memories of Many People ( ~ J d o n , 1898),234.

43 Ja i le r Bagehot, The English Constitut ion, ed. RH.S. c r r t a n (Ithaca, 1966),65.

44 [lEd ward Copleston], A Second Letter to the Rt. Hon. Robert Peel on the Causes ofI I II

the Increase of Pauperism and on the Poor Laws (London, 1 1 ~ l l ) '

I I 4 5 s r e the brilliant syntheses of P.}. Cain and A.G. Hopkins. "Gentlemanly Capitalismand British Expansion Overseas. 1. The Old Colonial systeJ, 1 ~ 8 8 - 1 8 5 0 , "Economic

Histlry Review, 2nd ser., xxix (1986),501-525, and "II. New ~ m ~ e r i a l i s m ,1850-1945,"

ibid.f xl (1987), 1-26. Though their focus is nominally limit.1 J the impact of Britishliberalism on imperial development , Cain and Hopkins address broader issues of

ecofmic d e ~ e l o p m e n tmore successfully than does M a ~ nIJ. f iener, English Culturean d the Decline of the IndustrIal Splrll, 1850-1980 (Cambrldje, 11981).

46 t r r y Anderson, "Origins of the Present Crisis", Ne w Left Review 23 (Jan./Feb.

1964t 26-53, and "Figures of Descent". I discuss Anderson'sl oJn "descent" briefly in

Disslnt 34 (1987),388-9. I

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