The double standard flourished. A thousand bordellos served tumescent men, but those men branded female unchastity as a crime for which only death could atone. So the gentle Goldsmith:
When lovely woman stoops to folly
And finds too late that men betray,—
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?
The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover
And wring his bosom, is—to die.21
Early marriage was advised as a preventive of such calamities. The law allowed girls to marry at twelve, boys at fourteen. Most women of the educated classes married young, and deferred their deviations; but then the double standard checked them. Hear Johnson on adultery (1768):
Confusion of progeny constitutes the essence of the crime, and therefore the woman who breaks her marriage vows is much more criminal than a man who does it. A man, to be sure, is criminal in the sight of God, but he does not do his wife a very material injury if he does not insult her; if, for instance, from mere wantonness of appetite, he steals privately to her chambermaid. Sir, a wife ought not greatly to resent this. I would not receive home a daughter who had run away from her husband on that account. A wife should study to reclaim her husband by more attention to please him. Sir, a man will not, once in a hundred instances, leave his wife and go to a harlot, if his wife has not been negligent of pleasing.22
In Boswell’s own circle it was taken as quite ordinary that men should occasionally go to a prostitute. In the aristocracy—even in the royal familyadultery was widespread. The Duke of Grafton, while chief minister, lived openly with Nancy Parsons, and took her to the opera in the face of the Queen.23 Divorce was rare; it could not be obtained except by act of Parliament, and as this cost “several thousand pounds,” it was a luxury of the rich; only 132 such grants were recorded in the years 1670-1800.24 It was generally supposed that the morals of the commonalty were better than those of the aristocracy, but Johnson thought otherwise (1778): “There is as much fornication and adultery amongst farmers as amongst noblemen,” and “so far as I have observed, the higher in rank, the richer ladies are, they are the better instructed, and the more virtuous.”25 The literature of the day, as in Fielding and Burns, pictured the peasant as celebrating almost every weekend with a carouse, spending half his pay in taverns, and some on tarts. Each class sinned according to its ways and means.
The poor fought one another with fists and cudgels, the rich with pistols and swords. Dueling was a point of honor in the nobility; Fox fought Adam, Shelburne fought Fullerton, Pitt II fought Tierney; it was difficult to get through a titled life without at least one puncture. Many stories attest the sang-froid of British gentlemen in these encounters. Lord Shelburne, having received a wound in the groin, assured his anxious seconds, “I don’t think Lady Shelburne will be the worse for it.”26
Worse than the looseness of sexual morals was the brutality of industrial exploitation: the merciless consumption of human life in the grasp for profits; the use of children six years of age in factories or as chimneysweeps; the reduction of thousands of men and women to such destitution that they sold themselves into payless bondage for passage to America; the governmental protection of the slave trade as a precious source of England’s wealth ...
From Liverpool, Bristol, and London—as from Holland and Francemerchants sailed to Africa, bought and captured Negroes, shipped them to the West Indies, sold them there, and returned to Europe with lucrative cargoes of sugar, tobacco, or rum. By 1776 English traders had carried three million slaves to America; add 250,000 who died in passage and were thrown into the sea. The British government granted an annual subsidy of £ 10,000 to the African Company and its successor, the Regulated Company, toward the maintenance of their forts and posts in Africa, on the ground that they were “the most beneficial to this island of all the Companies that were ever formed by our merchants.”27 George III (1770) forbade the governor of Virginia “to assent to any law by which the importations of slaves should be in any respect prohibited or obstructed.”28 In 1771 there were in England about fourteen thousand Negroes, who had been brought in by their colonial masters, or had escaped from them; some were used as domestic servants with no right to wages;29 some were sold at public auction, as in Liverpool in 1766. 30 In 1772, however, an English court ruled that a slave automatically became a free man the moment he touched English soil.31
Slowly the conscience of England awoke to the contradiction between this traffic and the simplest dictates of religion or morality. The finest spirits in Britain denounced it: George Fox, Daniel Defoe, James Thomson, Richard Steele, Alexander Pope, William Paley, John Wesley, William Cowper, Francis Hutcheson, William Robertson, Adam Smith, Josiah Wedgwood, Horace Walpole, Samuel Johnson, Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox. The first organized opposition to slavery was by the Quakers in England and America; in 1761 they excluded from their membership all persons engaged in the traffic; in 1783 they formed an association “for the relief and liberation of the Negro slaves in the West Indies, and for the discouragement of the slave trade on the coast of Africa.”32 In 1787 Granville Sharp formed a committee to advance abolition; in 1789 William Wilberforce began his long campaign in the House of Commons to end the English trade in slaves. The merchants repeatedly persuaded the House to defer action; it was not till 1807 that Parliament enacted that no vessel should carry slaves from any port within the British dominions after May 1, 1807, or to any British colony after March 1, 1808.33
In political morality England now touched nadir. The rotten-borough system flourished, and the nabobs outbid all other purchasers. Franklin deplored the American war for a peculiar reason: “Why did they not let me go on? If they [the colonies] had given me a fourth of the money they have spent on the war, we should have had our independence without spending a drop of blood. I would have bought all the Parliament, the whole government of Britain.”34 Corruption ruled in the Church, the universities, the judiciary, the civil service, the army and navy, and the councils of the King. Military discipline was more rigorous than in any other European country35 with the possible exception of Prussia; and when the men were demobilized nothing was done to ease their transition into a useful and law-abiding life.
Social morality hovered between the essential good nature of the individual Englishman and the irresponsible brutality of mobs. Between 1765 and 1780 there were nine major riots, nearly all in London; we shall see an example presently. Crowds ran to a hanging as a holiday, and sometimes bribed the hangman to be especially thorough in flogging a prisoner.36 The penal code was the severest in Europe. Language in nearly all classes tended to violence and profanity. The press engaged in orgies of vituperation and calumny. Almost everyone gambled, if only in the national lottery, and almost everyone drank to excess.
The faults of the English character were allied to its basic quality—a hearty, lusty vigor. The peasant and the factory laborer expended it in toil, the nation showed it in every crisis but one. Out of that vigor came the voracious appetite, the high spirits, the resort to prostitutes, the brawls in the pubs and the duels in the park, the passion of parliamentary debate, the capacity for suffering silently, the proud claim of every Englishman that his home was his castle, not to be entered except by due process of law. When, in this age, England was defeated, it was by Englishmen who had transplanted to America the English passion for freedom. Mme. du Deffand noted the diversity of individuals in the Englishmen whom she met, and most of whom she never saw. “Each one,” she said, “is original; there are no two alike. We [French] are just the opposite; when you have seen one of our courtiers you have seen all.”37 And Horace Walpole agreed: “It is certain that no other country produces so many singular and discriminate characters as England.”38 Look at Reynolds’ men: they agree only in their pride of country and class, their ruddy faces, their bold confronting of the world. It was a po
werful breed.
III. FAITH AND DOUBT
The English masses remained faithful to their various forms of the Christian creed. The most widely read book, next to the Bible, was Nelson’s Festivals and Fasts , a guide to the ecclesiastical year.39 Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations , published after his death, went through four editions in four years. In the upper classes religion was respected as a social function, an aid to morals, and an arm of government, but it had lost private credence and all power over policy. The bishops were named by the king, and the parsons were appointees and dependents of the squires. The deistic attack on religion had so far subsided that Burke could ask in 1790: “Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and that whole race who called themselves Freethinkers?”40 But if no one rose to answer him it may be because those rebels had won the battle, and educated men shrugged off the old questions as settled and dead. Boswell in 1765 (forgetting the commonalty) described his time as “an age when mankind are so fond of incredulity that they seem to pique themselves in contracting their circle of belief as much as possible.”41 We have seen Selwyn mocking religion at Oxford, and Wilkes at Medmenham Abbey. The younger Pitt, according to Lady Hester Stanhope, “never went to church in his life.”42 And one did not have to believe in order to preach. “There are,” Boswell wrote in 1763, “many infidels in orders, who, considering religion merely as a political institution, accept of a benefice as of any civil employment, and contribute their endeavors to keep up the useful delusion.”43 “The forms of orthodoxy, the articles of faith,” said Gibbon, “are subscribed with a sigh or a smile by the modern clergy.”44
Private clubs offered relief from public conformity. Many aristocrats joined one or another of the Freemason lodges. These condemned atheism as stupid, and required of their members a belief in God, but they inculcated toleration of differences on all other doctrines of religion.45 In the Lunar Society of Birmingham manufacturers like Matthew Boulton, James Watt, and Josiah Wedgwood heard without horror the heresies of Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin.46 Nevertheless the furor of deism had passed, and nearly all freethinkers accepted a truce by which they would not interfere with the propagation of the faith if the Church allowed some latitude to sin. The English upper classes, with their sense of order and moderation, avoided the reckless radicalism of the French Enlightenment; they recognized the intimate union of religion and government, and were too economical to replace a supernatural morality with an infinitude of police.
Since they were now servants of the state, the Anglican bishops, like the Catholic cardinals, thought themselves entitled to a measure of worldly enjoyment. Cowper satirized in bitter lines47 the clergymen who scrambled like politicians for richer or additional benefices; but many others led lives of quiet attention to their duties, and several were scholarly and able defenders of the faith. William Paley’s Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy (1785) displayed a generous spirit of doctrinal latitude and toleration, and his Evidences of Christianity (1794) persuasively presented the argument from design. He welcomed into holy orders men of freethinking tendencies so long as they preached the essentials of religion and served as moral leaders in their communities.48
Dissenters—Baptists, Presbyterians, and Independents (Puritans)—enjoyed religious toleration provided they adhered to Trinitarian Christianity; but no one could hold political or military office, or enter Oxford or Cambridge, without accepting the Anglican Church and its Thirty-nine Articles. Methodism continued to spread among the lower classes. In 1784 it broke its tenuous ties with the Established Church, but meanwhile it had inspired the “Evangelical movement” in a minority of Anglican clergymen. These men admired Wesley, and agreed with him that the Gospel, or Evangel, should be preached precisely as handed down in the New Testament, with no concessions to rationalist or textual criticism.
England’s memory of the Gunpowder Plot, the Great Rebellion, and the reign of James II still kept on the statute books the old laws against Roman Catholics. Most of these laws were no longer enforced, but many disabilities remained. Catholics could not legally buy or inherit land except through a subterfuge and payment of a double tax on their property. They were excluded from the army and navy, from the legal profession, from voting or standing for Parliament, and from all governmental posts. Even so, their number was growing. In 1781 they included seven peers, twenty-two baronets, 150 “gentlemen.” Mass was celebrated in private homes, and only two or three arrests for this offense are recorded in the sixty years of George Ill’s reign.
In 1778 Sir George Savile offered Parliament a bill for “Catholic relief,” legalizing the purchase and inheritance of land by Catholics, and allowing Catholics to enlist in the armed forces without renouncing their religion. The bill was passed, and met with no serious opposition from the Anglican bishops in the House of Lords. It applied only to England, but in 1779 Lord North moved that it be extended to Scotland. When news of this proposal reached the Lowlands, riots broke out in Edinburgh and Glasgow (January, 1779); several houses inhabited by Catholics were burned to the ground; the shops of Catholic tradesmen, were looted and wrecked; the houses of Protestants—like Robertson the historian—who expressed sympathy for the Catholics were likewise attacked, and the outbreak ended only when Edinburgh magistrates announced that the Act for Catholic Relief would not be applied to Scotland.
A Scottish member of Parliament, Lord George Gordon, took up the “No-Popery” cause in England. On May 29, 1780, he presided over a meeting of the “Protestant Association,” which planned a mass march to present a petition for repeal of the Relief Act of 1778. On June 2 sixty thousand men, wearing blue cockades, surrounded Parliament House. Many members were mauled on their way in; the carriages of Lords Mansfield, Thurlow, and Stormont were demolished; some noble lords reached their seats wigless, disheveled, and trembling.49 Gordon and eight of his followers entered the House of Commons; they presented a petition, allegedly bearing 120,000 signatures, calling for repeal, and demanded immediate action as the sole alternative to invasion of the House by the mob. The members resisted. They sent for troops to check the crowd; they locked all doors; a relative of Gordon declared that he would kill him the moment any outsider forced his way into the chamber; then the House voted to adjourn till June 6. Troops arrived and cleared a way for the members to return to their homes. Two Catholic chapels, belonging to Sardinian and Bavarian ministers, were gutted, and their furniture made a bonfire in the streets. The crowd dispersed, but on June 5 rioters looted other foreign chapels, and burned several private homes.
On June 6 the mob regathered, broke into Newgate Gaol, freed the prisoners, captured an arsenal, and marched, armed, through the capital. Nobles barricaded themselves in their homes; Horace Walpole complimented himself on guarding a duchess in his “garrison” in Berkeley Square.50 On June 7 more houses were looted and burned; distilleries were entered, and thirst was freely quenched; several rioters were cremated as they lay intoxicated in burning buildings. The London magistrates, who alone had legal authority over the municipal guard, refused to order them to fire upon the crowd. George III called out the citizen militia, and bade them shoot whenever the mob used or threatened violence. Alderman John Wilkes earned forgiveness from the King, and lost his popularity with the populace, by mounting a horse and joining with the militia in attempting to disperse the assemblage. The militia, attacked by the rioters, fired upon them, killing twenty-two. The crowd fled.
On June 9 the riot flared again. Houses—whether of Catholics or of Protestants—were pillaged and burned, and firemen were prevented from extinguishing the flames.51 Troops suppressed the uprising at the cost of 285 men killed and 173 wounded; 135 rioters were arrested, twenty-one were hanged. Gordon was arrested in flight toward Scotland; he proved that he had taken no part in the riots; he was freed. Burke secured the approval of the Commons for reaffirmation of the Act for Catholic Relief in England. An act of 1791 extended
legal toleration to Catholic worship and education, but no Catholic church was to have a steeple or a bell.52
IV. BLACKSTONE, BENTHAM, AND THE LAW
A learned jurist thought “the publication of Blackstone’s Commentaries … in some ways the most notable event in the history of the law.”53 This is patriotic, but it serves to point the reverential awe with which English-speaking students, till our time, approached the Commentaries on the Laws of England which William Blackstone published in four volumes and two thousand pages in 1765-69. Despite or because of its size it was acclaimed as a monument of learning and wisdom; every lord had it in his library, and George III took it to his heart as the apotheosis of kings.
Blackstone was the son of a London tradesman rich enough to send him through Oxford and the Middle Temple to the practice of law. His lectures at Oxford (1753-63) reduced the contradictions and absurdities of the statutes to some order and logic, and expounded the result with clarity and charm. In 1761 he was elected to Parliament; in 1763 he was appointed solicitor general to Queen Charlotte; in 1770 he began service as judge in the Court of Common Pleas. Addicted to study and hating locomotion, he sank into a gentle but premature decomposition, and died in 1780 at the age of fifty-seven.
His opus maximum had the virtues of his lectures: logical arrangement, lucid exposition, and a gracious style. Jeremy Bentham, his passionate opponent, praised him as the man who had “taught jurisprudence to speak the language of the scholar and the gentleman, put polish on that rugged science, cleansed her from the dust and cobwebs of the office.”54 Blackstone defined law as “a rule of action dictated by some superior being”;55 he had an ideal and static conception of law as serving in a society the same function that the laws of nature served in the world, and he tended to think of the laws of England as rivaling the laws of gravitation in their majesty and eternity.