A History of Britain, Volume 3 by Simon Schama Read Free Book Online Page B

Swarley’s Club in the Black Boy in Newcastle, or listening to the reverends John Horne Tooke, Richard Price or Joseph Priestley denounce ‘Old Corruption’, it was less the facts of the unreformed parliament that stuck in their craw than the fantastic and self-serving mythology by which this state of affairs was defended. Much as the modern fantasy of the well-ordered, benevolent country estate, with all its tenants and labourers toiling and tilling in the land of plenty, hid the ugly realities of rural poverty, so the endless recitation of how very fortunate Britons were to be living in the free-est, most wisely managed, just and prosperous of all states came to grate on the nerves of the manifestly unfortunate and unrepresented.
    The window-dressing of power came in two versions: Tory and Whig. The Tory version categorically laid down as a divinely ordained truism that the ‘people’ had no claim whatsoever to determine the ordering of their government; and that their natural and proper state was obedience and submission to a benevolent monarch, the Church and a parliament elected by those who, through their property and interest, had a right to be included in the electorate. The Whig version was that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 had been all that would ever be needed to secure the ‘ancient constitution’ against the threat of monarchical tyranny, and that the ‘Revolution Settlement’, with its enactment of toleration and its guarantee of parliaments (elected only every seven years), was enough of a shield for the liberties of the free-born Englishman.
    But the centenary of that revolution – approaching in 1788 – was an unavoidable occasion for looking long and hard at both those justifications of the status quo. Such a critical re-examination was made to seem more urgent by the failure of William Pitt the Younger, first in 1782 as a 22-year-old MP and then in 1785 as a 25-year-old prime minister, to secure even a modest measure of parliamentary self-reform; and by Pitt’s active opposition, in 1788–9, to the repeal of the Test Act. Across the Atlantic, Tom Paine’s
Common Sense
(1775) had already taken an axe to most of the status-quo assumptions by asserting the right, in fact the duty, of the Americans to resist in terms of a defence of natural rights (for the taxed to be represented and free from forced billeting of British soldiers). The American lesson had, of course, not gone unheeded on this side of the Atlantic, especially by those who had always been critics of the war recently fought there. In the 1780s, proselytizing organizations like the Society for the Promotion of Constitutional Information and the Westminster Association, who numbered among their members not just preachers, professionals and artisans but also the radical fringe of the Whigs (the 3rd Duke of Richmond, the 3rd Duke of Grafton and the playwright–politician Richard Brinsley Sheridan, who met at Holland House, home of their silver-tongued leader, that child of a permissive Rousseau-ite nursery, Charles James Fox), began to flirt with a potentially democratic justification of government, one that began with the right of the people to choose or change their own rulers. That right, moreover, was said to be rooted not just in nature but in history. According to that view all governments had originated with the unforced, voluntary agreement of the people to assign their authority to representatives (be they kings or parliaments) for the express purpose of protecting their freedom and security. This agreement had always been understood as a mutual contract. The people would give their allegiance only so long as the government to which they had provisionally entrusted the protection of their rights respected them. Should those same authorities be judged guilty of violating rather than upholding those natural rights, the sovereign people were at perfect liberty to remove them.
    This was heady stuff: part regurgitation of old