Agents of the People

Agents of the People

Studies in the History of Political Thought Edited by

Terence Ball, Arizona State University Jörn Leonhard, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg Wyger Velema, University of Amsterdam Advisory Board

Janet Coleman, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Vittor Ivo Comparato, University of Perugia, Italy Jacques Guilhaumou, CNRS, France John Marshall, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, USA Markku Peltonen, University of Helsinki, Finland

VOLUME 4

Agents of the People Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in British and Swedish Parliamentary and Public Debates, 1734–1800

By

Pasi Ihalainen

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2010

On the cover: The House of Commons 1793–1794, by Karl Anton Hickel, oil on canvas, 1793–1795. Given by Francis Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, 1885. On display at the Palace of Westminster, London. © National Portrait Gallery, London. The Prime Minister, William Pitt, is speaking, probably in connection with the outbreak of war with France. The opposition leader Charles James Fox is seated, wearing a hat, on the right side of the Speaker. This book is printed on acid-free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ihalainen, Pasi. Agents of the people : democracy and popular sovereignty in British and Swedish parliamentary and public debates, 1734–1800 / by Pasi Ihalainen Brill. p. cm. — (Studies in the history of political thought, ISSN 1873-6548 ; v. 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-18336-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Representative government and representation—Great Britain—History—18th century. 2. Representative government and representation—Sweden—History—18th century. 3. Great Britain. Parliament—History—18th century. 4. Sweden. Riksdagen—History—18th century. 5. Great Britain—Politics and government—18th century. 6. Sweden—Politics and government—18th century. I. Title. II. Series. JN539.I43 2010 321.8–dc22 2010000468

ISSN 1873-6548 ISBN 978 90 04 18336 0 Copyright 2010 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

For Sari and in memory of Fridolf

CONTENTS Acknowledgements ............................................................................ Abbreviations .....................................................................................

xi xv

Introduction ........................................................................................

1

Chapter One British and Swedish Parliamentary Debates in a Comparative Study of Political Vocabularies ........................ The Significance of Parliamentary Debates for the History of Political Vocabularies .......................................................... Practical Arrangements and Argumentation ............................ Special Features of Parliamentary Rhetoric .............................. Ceremonial Speaking and Dialogues Between the Powers of the State ...................................................................................... Methodological Challenges Posed by the Use of Parliamentary Reports and Minutes ..................................... Chapter Two Variations in British Parliamentary Conceptions of the People, 1734–1771 ..................................... The Political Role of the People in the Septennial Act Debates of 1734: Walpole’s Definition of the Limits of Democracy ................................................................................. The Standing Army and the Rights of the People in the Late 1730s .................................................................................. The Prime Minister Challenged by a “Popular Government” in 1741–1742 ............................................................................. Views on the Excessive and Insufficient Power of the People in the 1740s ............................................................................... Consensual Conceptions of the People as Subjects during the Seven Years’ War ............................................................... Wilkes and America: The Increasing Relevance of ‘the People’ in Political Argumentation, 1763–1769 .................. Redefinitions of the Relationship between the People, Parliament and the Crown in the Aftermath of the John Wilkes Case, 1770–1771 ..........................................................

29 31 36 41 45 50

59

67 78 89 104 119 127

139

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contents

Chapter Three The Swedish Case: Did Popular Sovereignty and Representative Democracy Exist in Sweden before 1772? ................................................................................... Interpretations of the Age of Liberty as a Watershed in the Progress of Democracy ............................................................ The Relationship between the Nobility, the Nation and the People at the Beginning of the Riksdag of 1769–1770 ....... The Concept of the People in Printed Literature and the Reactions of the Estates to Publicity in the Autumn of 1769 ............................................................................................. The Concept of the People in Debates on the Constitution ... The Noble Estate and the Meaning of ‘Democracy’ in the Autumn of 1769 ........................................................................ Increasing Contestability of the Concept ‘the People’ during the Riksdag of 1771–1772 .......................................... The Concept of Democracy in the Rhetoric of the Deadlocked Parties ................................................................... The Political Role of the People in the Accession Charter and the Nomination of Senators ........................................... The Concept of the People at the Time of the Coronation and the Royal Coup of 1772 ................................................... Chapter Four The Re-Evaluation of the Representation of the People and Democracy in Westminster, 1772–1789 .............. The American Crisis, Representation and the British People, 1772–1780 .................................................................................. Enter Pitt and Fox: Democracy of the Pure Swedish and Mixed British Types Debated in the Early 1780s ............... Prospects for a Parliamentary Reform and the People’s Ministry, 1782–1783 ................................................................. Further Debates on Parliamentary Reform, 1784–1785 ......... Positive Understandings of Democracy before the French Revolution .................................................................................. The Rise of a Representative Republic in America: no Comment from Westminster ...........................................

157 160 175

184 190 203 209 220 226 239

245 246 269 289 306 325 337

contents Chapter Five Reactions to the Revolutionary Concepts of Democracy and Popular Sovereignty in Westminster, 1789–1800 ....................................................................................... Initial Responses to the Revolution in Britain ......................... The Heated Debate on Democracy in 1790 .............................. Strengthening Criticism of the French Model of Democracy in 1791 .................................................................. Proper British and Extreme French Democracy Contrasted in 1792 ........................................................................................ Combating both French and Domestic Conceptions of Democracy in 1793 .................................................................. Reactions to Robespierre’s Redefinition of Democracy in 1794 ............................................................................................. The Political Rights of the People in a Time of Crisis ........... Calls for Representative Government and Defences of Democracy 1796–1797 ............................................................. Post-Revolutionary Visions: the Sovereignty of Parliament Becomes the Sovereignty of the People ................................

ix

343 348 352 364 375 392 409 423 447 457

Conclusion ..........................................................................................

471

Bibliography ........................................................................................ Index of Persons ................................................................................ Index of Subjects ................................................................................

497 517 523

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS If there is a political forum in which things are done by using words, it is definitely Parliament. After analysing the linguistic construction of national identities in Protestant parliamentary sermons in Protestant Nations Redefined: Changing Perceptions of National Identity in the Rhetoric of the English, Dutch and Swedish Public Churches, 1685–1772 (Brill, 2005), I felt a need to look at the more secular debate in the plenary sessions of the same institutions. Likewise, having analysed how and why ‘the nation’ began to supplement and even bypass religion as the major definer of political identity in one genre, it seemed necessary to analyse the changing uses of references to ‘the people’ in connection with the actual decision-making process. This change of emphasis took me from the study of the roots of modern nationalism to the study of the emergence of the modern concept of democracy in the context of late-eighteenth-century parliamentary institutions. In both cases, I was studying conceptual evolution that took place in traditional institutions—not revolutionary change, which has previously received much more scholarly attention. Several organizations and individuals have made this exploration of the early modernization of political references to the people, popular representation, democracy and the sovereignty of the people not only possible but also a pleasant experience. First of all, I need to thank the anonymous panelists and members of the Research Council for Culture and Society of the Academy of Finland for allowing me to concentrate on the preparation of this project as a Research Fellow in 2004–2006 and for providing me with supportive research funding during my work as a Professor in General History in 2006–2009. I am likewise grateful to the Department of History and Ethnology at the University of Jyväskylä for providing me with the latter position and a convenient research environment. I am particularly grateful for Professors Petri Karonen, Jari Ojala and Seppo Zetterberg for freeing me from much of administrative work and allowing me to focus on research and teaching. The other members of staff of the Department deserve an apology for my occasional absent-mindedness caused by the writing of this book and thanks for their help in solving various practical problems I have come across when working on it. Research on European history is by no means a lonely or disciplinebound adventure. Special thanks are due to Charlotta Wolff and Jouko

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Nurmiainen, who cooperated with me in 2005–2007 in the Academy of Finland project “Enlightened Loyalties” and whose knowledge of the eighteenth-century Swedish Diet and critical comments on previous versions of some of the chapters have contributed significantly to the final result. I have also benefited considerably from the methodological inspiration provided by the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in Political Thought and Conceptual Change (CoE PolCon), its research team “Political Thought and Conceptual History” and more particularly by Academy Professor Kari Palonen. A shared interest in parliamentary discourse in Political Science and General History has brought the two areas of scholarship closer together, leading to the enrichment of the methodological and source basis of the research carried out in both. Papers given in conferences organized by CoE PolCon, the Department of History and Ethnology, the History of Political and Social Concepts Group, the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions, the Institute of Historical Research and the British and Finnish Societies for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Jyväskylä, Helsinki, Uppsala, Härnösand, London, Oxford, St Andrews and Istanbul have provided forums for testing some of my ideas. I would like to thank Alex Barber, Pim den Boer, Martin Burke, Piia Einonen, Michael Freeden, Taru Haapala, Jonas Harvard, Irène Herrmann, Helge Jordheim, Jussi Kurunmäki, Jörn Leonhard, Bo Lindberg, Jani Marjanen, Raymonde Monnier, Jonas Nordin, Kyösti Pekonen, Markku Peltonen, Kari Saastamoinen, Paul Seaward, Quentin Skinner, Marie-Christine Skuncke, Willibald Steinmetz, Henrik Stenius, Henrika Tandefelt, Adam Tomkins, Tapani Turkka, Timo Turja, Anthony F. Upton, Nadja Urbinati, Wyger Velema and Patrik Winton for their comments. It has been an equally motivating experience to supervise master and doctoral students who are working on parliamentary discourses and to receive feedback from them. CoE PolCon has strengthened the infrastructure of this research by funding access to key databases, employing temporary research assistants and financing first-class copy-editing. Timo Särkkä helped me in database searches and the compilation of background information on speakers in autumn 2007. Oili Pulkkinen, Ph.D., as a co-editor, critically pointed at weaknesses in my argumentation in autumn 2008. For those that remain, after our excellent cooperation, I alone am responsible. The same holds for my English language, which has at times

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been considerably reformulated by Gerard McAlester, whose sensitivity for historical discourse is remarkable. My wife and family have loyally supported my never-ending writing of the “dissertation” beyond reasonable working hours. As a demonstration of my deep gratitude, I am dedicating this book to Sari and to the memory of my grandfather Fridolf, who tirelessly debated with me on interpretations of the past.

ABBREVIATIONS Roman numerals given in brackets without any preceding abbreviation always refer to Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England: From the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the Year 1803 (London 1806–1820), indicating the volume number and column number(s), e.g. (XII, 397–398). BdP BrP ECCO HPHC MOMW PR PrP PSUSJD

R SPL SRARP SUP SUBP

Bondeståndets riksdagsprotokoll Borgarståndets riksdagsprotokoll Eighteenth Century Collections Online The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons of Great Britain The Making of the Modern World The Parliamentary Register; or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons Prästeståndets riksdagsprotokoll Protocoller, hållne vid 1769 års Riksdag uti Sammanträdet mellan Secrete Utskottet samt Secrete och Justitiae Deputationerne angående Lagarnes Verkställighet Riksdagsarkivet, Riksarkivet, Stockholm Sveriges periodiska litteratur Sveriges ridderskaps och adels riksdagsprotokoll från och med år 1719 Sekreta utskottets protokoll Secreta Utskottets Beredrings Protocoller och Handlingar Rörande Svea Konunga Försäkran

INTRODUCTION The rise of democracy is one of the great narratives of Western history. The principle of political power originating from the people is so widely held an assumption in modern democratic states that we do not necessarily come to think about the far from self-evident rise of such a notion even in the history of countries that now regard themselves as leading democracies. “Popular sovereignty and representative democracy emerged with the Enlightenment and the American and French Revolutions,” we are apt to think, without delving any deeper into an analysis of the problematic aspects of the rise and association of these originally separate concepts in the eighteenth century. The rise of democracy has also been a constant object of interest for political scientists and philosophers, sometimes also for historians.1 This book does not follow a conventional approach to the history of political philosophy; it does not focus on the contextualization and analysis of the thinking of individual political philosophers. Instead, I suggest that the histories of the concepts of popular sovereignty and democracy should also be studied by analysing the debates in which leading political decision-makers were involved. I am thus interested in the practical everyday use of political language and the recycling and creation of new meanings for political concepts by their active use in political arguments. What is of special interest here is the use of references to the people to legitimate political order in the past, not some philosophical or sociological concept of ‘the people’. While the conceptualizations of past political phenomena by individual thinkers provide the starting point of the analysis, our main interest will rather lie in how entire political communities understood the political role of the people in a wide variety of ways. The object of study is the use of references to the political role of the people in eighteenth-century parliamentary debates by a large number of leading politicians. This is also a comparative study in that the debates are analysed not only in their relevant political contexts at the national level but also through

1 For an attempt to write a total history of the events of the late eighteenth century as a “democratic” movement, see Palmer 1959, 4, and Palmer 1964, 572.

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comparisons with parallel debates in the representative institution of another country. The main question is how—and to what extent—the political establishments of two Western European countries with inherited representative institutions adopted the notions of democracy and the sovereignty of the people in the eighteenth century, which is when such concepts received clearer expression, recognition and acceptance in parliamentary and public debates. What was the actual reception of the notions of democracy and popular sovereignty—as formulated by philosophers—in parliamentary debates? And what kind of interaction was there between political thinking and the practical everyday use of the language of politics? After all, by the mid-eighteenth century, significant debates on the political role of the people were emerging both within representative institutions and in the expanding and increasingly free published literature. It is worth considering the importance of the different types of political discourse in moulding prevalent notions of democracy and the sovereignty of the people: was the agenda of political discourse set by the published literature or by parliamentary debates? And if both of them set it, did they do so separately or in interaction? Britain and Sweden have been chosen for comparison for three reasons. Firstly, the people of the time felt that the constitutions of the two countries had a lot in common and differed from those of the rest of Europe. Both were countries with a mixed constitution of some sort: Britain was a kingdom in which Parliament had enjoyed considerable financial and legislative power ever since the 1690s, while Sweden was a kingdom in which royal political influence had been taken over by the Senate and a Diet controlled by the higher estates since the 1720s. Secondly, Britain and Sweden are countries in which there exist significant comparable records of parliamentary debates at the national level. The third reason for choosing Britain and Sweden is that relatively little work on such evolutionary representative governments is available in comparison with the monumental amount of work done on the American and French Revolutions. The reception of ideas from these revolutions in systems that experienced no open revolution themselves yet contributed to the modernization of European political cultures deserves more attention. Research has quite recently suggested that the British opposed rather than contributed to the formation of a modern concept of democracy in the 1790s, whereas the suggestion with regard to Sweden has been that an early

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democracy was already emerging there by 1772. Both claims call for qualifications. The representative institutions from which the debates analysed here have been selected are the Houses of Parliament in Britain and the Swedish four-estate Diet. Although these institutions differed significantly in structure and procedure, as we shall learn in Chapter One, the debates which took place in them had surprisingly many subjects, popular arguments and cross-border references in common so that a contextualized comparison of the use of political language in them seems highly applicable. Indeed, the contemporaries themselves carried out such comparisons. Thus there should be no impediment to describing the debates of the British House of Lords and discussions in some joint committees of the Swedish Estates under the umbrella concept ‘parliamentary debates’ or to studying them side by side, albeit in their own particular contexts.2 Naturally, such a procedure is not intended to imply that the estate system of the Swedish realm constituted a “parliament” entirely like the British one. The relative importance of the British House of Commons certainly grew towards the end of the eighteenth century, whereas the Swedish Diet lost most of its political significance with the Gustavian coup in 1772. Both were representative institutions, however, and in both the leading statesmen of the time debated the issues of the day and, as a side effect, defined the classical political concepts of the people and democracy and adapted to new political ideas such as the sovereignty of the people. The contemporaries were happy to view the two constitutions as comparable, although they did tend to regard their own constitution as superior to the other one. The Dutch estate system was also occasionally seen as comparable in some respects. A possible subject for future research would be the comparative analysis of the concepts of democracy and popular sovereignty in

2 For corresponding comparative research on the use of concepts in debates in the present-day British and Swedish parliaments, see Ilie 2004a, 1–3, which analyses the “cross-institutional conceptual features” of “the roughly comparable discursive uses and argumentative functions” of British and Swedish “key words (and their collocates)” as used in parliamentary debates. Ilie has been particularly interested in “the shifting semantic properties, as well as the discursive and argumentative functions” of two nearly synonymous English and Swedish words and in “the connotations that they acquire in connection with their respective collocates in [. . .] parliamentary debates.” The comparative study of the semantics of parliamentary debates thus turns out to be highly relevant from the point of view of present-day linguistics as well.

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parliamentary speaking in all late eighteenth-century representative assemblies. Such a study should include not only Britain and Sweden but also the United States, France and the Batavian Republic, and perhaps also Poland and some regional assemblies of the German-speaking countries, including Switzerland. The people of the time occasionally regarded Poland as a free state alongside Britain, Sweden and the Dutch Republic, though almost always referring to it as a warning example rather than a model instance of such a state. Poland has been excluded from this study on the basis of its weakening political situation as a country subject to divisions and because of the more limited availability of records on the debates. The German regional assemblies lacked equivalent national contexts with a free public debate. There was free debate in Denmark for some time after 1770, but Denmark had no representative estates. There are no extant minutes of the debates of the General Estates or the Estates of Holland, and the debates of the Batavian National Assembly are perhaps better compared with those of the French revolutionary assemblies. Immediate democracy was realized in Switzerland only at the local and cantonal levels, not at the national level. Debates in the assemblies of the early United States certainly came to play a role in the long run, but their influence on contemporary Europe remained limited and was communicated mainly through published literature. As far as France is concerned, this book utilizes the existing research on the political language of the Revolution rather than embarking on an analysis of the distinctly innovative revolutionary assemblies. Focusing on the British Parliament and the Swedish Diet, therefore, I shall address the following questions: how was the notion that all political power is derived from the people expressed in these traditional representative institutions, and how strong was it at different times in the eighteenth century? The emergence of neologisms such as “the sovereignty of the people” deserves extra attention here. It is also worth considering whether the idea of the popular origin of power led to calls for the active participation of the people in politics. This question can be extended to concern the limits of such participation and attempts to solve the contrast between original and active sovereignty of the people through the concept of representation. I am also interested in finding out at what point the people of the time began to view “democracy” in a positive way that differed from the pejorative classical concept of democracy. It is not evident that they yet used the concept to define their political system, their political

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conceptions and their future goals. The various old counter-arguments used against democracy and the emerging anti-democratic arguments need to be addressed. As we shall see, existing research supports both the interpretation that democracy became a positive, progressive and future-oriented concept during the course of the eighteenth century and the view according to which only the French Revolution introduced this change. Perhaps both interpretations have a point: the French Revolution affected an already ongoing modernization of the meanings of democracy in countries with older representative institutions. Perhaps indeed—by demonstrating that the classical notion of democracy as just another form of anarchy was correct—it delayed a more evolutionary modernization of the concept. The combination of the notions of the sovereignty of the people and democracy also deserves attention. It may have been a result of the innovative political ideas of philosophers, radical writers and revolutionaries writing for the public, but it is also possible that major reformulations in the vocabulary of democracy emerged within traditional systems of representation as a result of creative parliamentary deliberation on various political phenomena of the day. The latter modifications, too, truly changed political cultures. There may be a history of democracy within parliamentary debates that has gone unnoticed as a result of the fact that most attention has been paid to political philosophy proper and to the more dramatic events of the American and French Revolutions. The main argument of Agents of the People is that there is such a forgotten history, and that its exploration helps us to understand the formation of the more modern concepts of democracy and the sovereignty of the people as a process of interaction between tradition and innovation, parliamentary debates and revolutionary ideas expressed in published literature, Britain and France and other countries. This study shows that there was not only an intense debate on the political role of the people taking place in both the British Parliament and the Swedish Estates from the 1760s on but also a period of revaluation of the concept of democracy in connection with the British parliamentary reform debates of the early 1780s. The French Revolution brought new dimensions to this debate by providing an alternative, more radical, definition of democracy, which led to fierce confrontations between the supporters of different understandings of the concept in the British Parliament. Even though this conflict seems at first to have led to the defeat of both the pre-revolutionary and

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revolutionary concepts of democracy, when the British government declared itself the main opponent of French democracy internationally and at home, this is not the whole story. The debates between the advocates of the more traditional and the modified understandings of democracy led to arguments in which the British parliamentary system was redefined as one based on the previously rejected revolutionary principle of the sovereignty of the people. This reconsideration of the character of the political system in Parliament took place in interaction with the published literature. Above all, the redefinition opened possibilities for the further democratization of the representative system in the course of the nineteenth century. Of course, the principle of political power being derived from the people already played a role in classical political thought—in one way or another—and was widely recognized by natural law theorists in the seventeenth century. These philosophers, however, did not necessarily associate the origin of power in the people with some distinct concept of ‘popular sovereignty’, as we might be inclined to do in reading their texts. The history of the concept ‘democracy’ is likewise full of conceptual change and contestation. We need to take care not to misinterpret “democracy” when we either encounter the term or wonder about its absence in early modern texts which we regard as “democratic”. Furthermore, we easily assume that everyone knows what democracy is even if the meaning of the concept has altered radically since the eighteenth century, changing from being completely negative to uncritically positive, and even if we ourselves continue to hold a variety of conflicting understandings of the concept. The pejoratively understood concept of democracy had existed in a quite stable form from 500 BC to the late eighteenth century— that is from the criticism of Athenian democracy to the days of the French Revolution. In general terms, we can say that well into the last decades of the eighteenth century, democracy was viewed as just one of the three classical theoretical forms of government. In its pure form, on the other hand, it was considered obsolete; ever since the time of Aristotle, democracy had been viewed pejoratively as the form of government that entailed the greatest number of potential risks, because power would be given into the hands of the self-interested common people. Democracy—still generally understood in the sense of direct democracy of the Athenian type—was not only considered impractical but was also seen as leading to the despotism of the poor and uneducated, and ultimately to utter anarchy. The characteristics

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of the classical model of democracy included the principle of equality among citizens, their direct participation in popular assemblies, the capacity of the assemblies to decide on any matters of the citystate and exclusive criteria of citizenship. Despite the long survival of Athenian democracy, democracy was understood by most members of eighteenth-century political establishments as a stage in an inevitable cycle of forms of government derived from a cyclical conception of time. Because of its supposedly inherent degenerative characteristics, democracy could only be considered acceptable as one of the three controlled elements of a balanced mixed constitution as recommended by Aristotle and Polybius.3 The mixed constitution had been adopted as the ideal form of government among the political elites in early-modern aristocratic “republics” like Venice, Britain, the Dutch Republic, Poland and Sweden. In all of these countries, theoretical debates on ‘democracy’ and the political power of ‘the people’ continued to be dominated by the classical pejorative understanding of democracy well into the latter half of the eighteenth century. In this period, conventional notions of mixed government were increasingly challenged by revolutions, first in America and then in France. It would take a long and complicated process before eighteenth-century politicians distanced themselves from the Aristotelian tradition of viewing democracy pejoratively. Yet the political establishments did reconsider their concept of democracy in important ways as a reaction to the revolutions—and even independently of them. These reconsiderations and revaluations are the major topic of this book. One factor that enabled the reconsiderations was the fact that the political elites of countries with representative institutions had also inherited a positive classical understanding of the people as distinct from the pejorative concept of democracy. In the course of the eighteenth century, some thinkers also started to combine positive Roman notions of res publica with the initially separate Greek concept of democracy. According to Margaret Canovan, the extraordinary example of the Roman Republic supported a positive understanding of the people as holders of political power that ‘democracy’ lacked until the end of the eighteenth century. The Roman legacy provided a chance to view the people (populus) either as the political community and

3

Held 1989, 34; Hanson 1989, 70–71.

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the mixed constitution as a whole (populus Romanus), or as a name for the plebeian citizens. By the fifteenth-century, the classical concept of the people was already being used in European political thought to support theories according to which all forms of political power were based on popular consent. Late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theorists developed the idea of popular consent further. They claimed that the people had at some time in the past surrendered all their power to the rulers or, alternatively, that the popular origin of all power implied the possibility of popular authority being restored at times of revolution. The latter assumption suggested that monarchs were accountable to the people and could be resisted, that the people could remould their constitution, and finally even that the people were entitled to permanent self-government.4 A major problem with the Roman tradition was that while the political elite could invoke the accountability of the rulers to the people in the sense of the political community, they usually avoided appeals to the people in the sense of the population at large. The aristocracy rather saw themselves as the representatives of the people.5 This double meaning of the concept of the people continued to be a major challenge in political discourse throughout the eighteenth century: it remained unclear whether the common people belonged to the political community or whether they were merely represented by the higher orders. Disagreements were unavoidable because of the indefinite, amorphous and essentially contested meaning of the concept of the people.6 The principle of the representation of the people had also been articulated in a number of countries before the eighteenth century.7 The concept ‘the people’, although increasingly popular in political arguments as a description of the political community, was often still used in a vague sense, rather as it had been in classical political thinking. Often it was only the most politically active estates that were seen as constituting the true people, not all the inhabitants of the country. Alternatively, the people could mean specifically those not belonging to the political elite, ‘the common people’.8 Whenever the concept of the people appears in early modern political texts, we thus

4 5 6 7 8

Canovan 2005, 11–12, 15–17. Canovan 2005, 69. Canovan 2005, 140. See Pitkin 1989, 139–140, 142; Urbinati 2007, 17. Canovan 2005, 5.

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have to consider the variety of meanings that this amorphous concept could carry and its exact reference. Representation was, after all, not yet “democratic” in any modern sense in the eighteenth century; the democratization of representation and the extension of the suffrage to whole adult populations would only take place much later, ultimately not until the twentieth century. The concept of sovereignty, as understood in the aftermath of Jean Bodin’s writings in the late sixteenth century, referred to the permanent power of the state, which was independent of all other powers. Over the course of the early modern period, the meaning of the concept was secularized and sovereignty was increasingly understood as referring to the state as a collective and not to any particular person. However, it continued to be the convention to refer to the reigning monarch as “the sovereign”; most theorists and practising politicians still regarded the monarch as the nucleus of political power. The key question was whether this power of the monarch originated directly from God, or whether it had been given to him or her by the subjects through a contract. Another question concerned the practical implications of such a contract: to what extent did it allow the people to be involved in the political process?9 Generally speaking, sovereignty was not associated with the people. Expressions referring to “supreme power” occurred more frequently and could at times—at least metaphorically and with reference to the origin of political authority in the past—be associated with the people. A long history of the theoretical concepts of democracy, the people, representation and sovereignty thus already existed. Its continuation in the eighteenth century can be studied from a number of points of view. In the history of political philosophy, it has often been the overall development of political theory as reflected by the texts of some selected canonical theorists that has interested scholars. The concepts of democracy and popular sovereignty have often been connected in political theory, and scholars have located them in early modern texts regardless of the fact that clear expressions for these concepts may have been lacking, that the concepts have separate histories, and that they were associated with each other only after the French Revolution, or even the 1830s.10 Although such an analysis of the overall history

9 10

Hunter & Saunders 2002, 3−4; Lindberg 2006, 88–89, 92. Rosanvallon 1995, 140, 150, 152; Rosanvallon 2000, 32; cf. Monnier 2001, 3, 18.

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of political theory is an entirely legitimate field of inquiry, it may also direct attention away from the examination of the wider contemporary use of the language of politics in the past.11 We can legitimately ask whether ‘popular sovereignty’ or ‘representative democracy’, for instance, could exist before the people of the time had exact words to express such notions. The histories of the concepts of democracy and popular sovereignty in their modern, self-evidently positive senses have been previously studied from a number of perspectives, particularly in countries which have long traditions of representative institutions, such as the Dutch Republic, Poland,12 Britain and Sweden. It is necessary to emphasize the distinction between the conceptual history of democracy and that of the sovereignty of the people, particularly as this distinction has sometimes been ignored in previous research. The principle of political power being ultimately derived from the people is a classical one, to be sure, and it has been asserted by natural law theorists since the seventeenth century. However, some confusion may have arisen from the tendency to use the later universal concept ‘popular sovereignty’ to refer to any ideas emphasizing the role of the people in political decision-making and to teleologically associate demands for the strengthening of the popular element in the mixed constitution with the post-French Revolution meanings of the concept of democracy. For much of the period studied, the principle of political power as originating initially from the people (however defined) was supported by many members of the parliamentary establishments but not associated with some explicit concept of the sovereignty of the people and even less with the word “democracy” as an independent form of government by the people. The practical implications of the contract between the people and the rulers, concluded in the immemorial past at the time of the foundation of the political community, remained debatable as well. Not even John Locke, the foremost late-seventeenth-century advocate of the popular origin of political power and generally regarded as a radical defender of popular sovereignty, connected the concepts of sovereignty and the people in his Two Treatises of Government. Locke did write about “the Consent of the People” as marking the founda-

11 12

Cf. Hanson 1989, 76; Edelstein 2003, 47. Jedruch 1998; Greśkowiak-Krwawicz 2002.

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tion of all forms of government and about “a delegated Power from the People” possessed by the legislative assembly. He argued that the people had “reserved to themselves the Choice of their Representatives” and that “there remains [. . .] in the People a supream Power to remove or alter the Legislative”.13 He also referred to the “Doctrine of a Power in the People of providing for their Safety a-new, by a new Legislative”. The last two expressions come closest to what we customarily call “popular sovereignty”, although even here, “the supreme Power” was returned to the people, or “the People become Free and Superiour”, only in cases when the government had been dissolved during an interregnum.14 While Locke’s book strongly implies that the majority of adult male people were the ultimate source of political authority,15 to view this as a fully formulated and universally held doctrine of the sovereignty of the people would be an oversimplification. While Lockean political theory recognized the role of the people as the original source of power, the post-revolutionary concept of popular sovereignty should perhaps not be automatically used to interpret early eighteenth-century ways of thinking. Instead, the actual language used to refer to the political roles of the people by the contemporaries should be investigated with a view to writing a “pre-history” of the revolutionary and more modern senses of the concepts ‘the sovereignty of the people’ and ‘democracy’. This study explores the means by which, and the extent to which, the inherited notions of political power as originating from the people were expressed in eighteenth-century parliamentary debates and in public debates related to them. This will be a history of the formation of the concepts of democracy and popular sovereignty, not an application of some established and generally accepted concepts to the interpretation of early modern sources. Some historians have recently suggested that the concepts of popular sovereignty and democracy emerged even before the eighteenth century. In the Dutch case, Martin van Gelderen and Wyger Velema have shown that ideas concerning the supreme power of the provincial estates and the representation of the people by them already began to

13 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, (London 1713), 271, 295, 300, 322, 358; The last statement entailed a distinction between Parliament and the people. Canovan 2005, 103. 14 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, 1713, 301, 361, 373, 379. 15 Canovan 2005, 24.

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appear during the late sixteenth century. Van Gelderen has suggested that the principle of “popular sovereignty” was already beginning to emerge and the concept of democracy to be advocated by leading Dutch political writers in the mid-seventeenth century. According to Velema, Pieter De la Court and Baruch Spinoza advocated “a more democratic type of republic”.16 Jonathan Scott has also pointed out that Spinoza understood democracy as inherently positive and argued that sovereignty was something which should belong to all members of society.17 These interpretations are, no doubt, based on frequent references to the political role of the people in the texts of the studied writers; however, it is by no means certain that the explicit concepts of democracy and popular sovereignty figure prominently in them. Defences of the democratic element in a mixed constitution undoubtedly already appeared in seventeenth-century discourse. We must remember, however, that Spinoza, a Jewish dissident from Amsterdam, was and remained an exception in the sphere of European political thought and that the above mentioned Dutch writers were predominantly political thinkers whose ideas were not necessarily widely shared among practising statesmen. Despite the tradition of advocating the political influence of the people in the Dutch Republic and some other farreaching seventeenth-century republican ideas, it was, according to Velema, “during the revolutionary years of the late eighteenth-century” that Dutch republicanism “came to mean the permanent and active sovereignty of the people”.18 Searches in Dutch library databases also suggest that the term “popular government” (volks-regeering) did not begin to appear in book titles until the Patriot period of the 1780s and that the French Revolution led to a dramatic increase in the use of references to “democracy” there. In the case of England, several historians have maintained that the Levellers of the late 1640s not only developed the radical idea of ‘popular sovereignty’ but were also the first “modern democrats”. The same scholars admit, however, that while the Levellers were in favour

16 Velema 2002, 11, 14–15; Velema 2005, 200; Van Gelderen 2002, 200–201, 215; for an even more extensive interpretation of the concept ‘democracy’ independently of seventeenth-century usage as well as for the conclusion that the Dutch invented democracy, see Mijnhardt 2005, 82. 17 Scott 2002, 78–80. 18 Velema 2007, abstract.

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of the political influence of “the people”, they certainly did not refer to themselves as “democrats” but were rather condemned as such by their critics.19 One question any historian interested in the authentic political language of the people of the time must ask is whether the much later content of the concept ‘democrat’ can be applied at all to seventeenth-century actors without producing teleological interpretations and leading to anachronisms.20 After all, we know that the first positive uses of the term “democrat” as a form of self-identification only began to appear from the late 1780s onwards.21 After the French Revolution, to be sure, the seventeenth-century radical republicans were readily given the name “democrats”. As for France, historians have been in general agreement about the importance of the Revolution as a turning point in the history of democracy, but they have also sometimes made Enlightenment thinkers the earliest defenders of democracy. D’Argenson’s statements in the 1730s in favour of complementing monarchy with democracy are the best-known example of this prehistory of democracy.22 Generally speaking, in French, the concept of democracy still stood for some of the political systems of the ancient world.23 Among those Enlightenment philosophers who provided the basis for much of the eighteenthcentury theoretical debate, Montesquieu defined ‘republic’ as a political system “in which the body or only a part of the people are possessed of the supreme power”.24 Montesquieu viewed democracy as a possible form of republic, although he detested it, especially in what he saw as its English form, as he made a distinction between representation and democracy. He was among the first to argue that “when the body of

19 Morgan 1988; Hanson 1989, 73, 75; Wootton 1992; Worden 2002; Canovan 2005, 35; Urbinati 2006, 19. According to Urbinati, revealingly, the Levellers identified the problems of popular sovereignty “before any doctrine of popular sovereignty was formulated”. 20 Skinner 2003, 76. 21 Palmer 1953, 205–207; Hanson 1989, 72. 22 Palmer 1953, 205; Rosanvallon 1995, 143; Rosanvallon 2000, 24; Dunn 2005, 93–96. 23 Rosanvallon 1995, 140–141. 24 Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws. Translated from the French of M. de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu. With Corrections and Additions Communicated by the Author. Vol. 1 (London 1750), 11, cited here from the first English translation which was most likely to be read by British parliamentarians. Cf. Wright 2002, 293, who refers to “sovereign power” in a modern translation.

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the people in a republic are possessed of the supreme power, this is called a democracy”.25 In later French Enlightenment debates, the concept of democracy occasionally took on positive meanings, which highlights the French origin of much of the ongoing conceptual change. However, even Rousseau continued to view democracy in its classical sense as ill-suited to any contemporary government larger than that of a tiny city state. Rather than arguing in favour of the active sovereignty of the people, he warned of its potential consequences. According to Rousseau, the community as a whole could not run the government. At the same time, his writings contained references to “the people collectively in quality of sovereign”.26 This was a creative combination of these terms that provided an idea that the French revolutionaries would take much further, but Rousseau himself consistently distinguished between representation and sovereignty.27 The early development of a positive concept of democracy in Sweden has been recently advocated by Bo Lindberg. Lindberg has located evidence of there having been at least some sympathy for the principle of democracy in seventeenth-century Swedish political theory. He has interpreted the so-called Age of Liberty (1719–1772), when the fourestate Diet in practice ruled the country, and particularly its final phase, as revolutionary with regard to the breakthrough of certain modern ideas. These ideas included a view of the Swedish people as a political agent and democracy as a positively understood phenomenon that began to define the Swedish political system at that time. We do, of course, have plenty of statements from the higher estates in the 1760s emphasizing the necessity of securing the rights and liberties of “the people” and the need to serve their interests, but these rights and liberties often constituted merely an empty phrase that was not given any definite meaning other than the rule of law or the right of the estates to be heard. It may hence be an exaggeration to suggest that Swedish authors were arguing for “a representative democracy as opposed to a direct one” or that fully developed “popular sovereignty” had been 25

Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, 1750, 11; Urbinati 2006, 7. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, An Inquiry into the Nature of the Social Contract; or Principles of Political Right. Translated from the French of John James Rousseau (Dublin 1791), 159, 163, 168, 188, 190–191, 287; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia: or, a New System of Education, Vol. 4 (London 1763), 247–248; Hampson 1983, 4; Rosanvallon 2000, 23. 27 Urbinati 2006, 7. 26

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established in Sweden.28 In the Swedish case, too, we encounter the risk of post-French Revolution meanings of democracy and popular sovereignty being applied in the interpretation of mid-eighteenthcentury texts which could not yet have advocated such ideas. This study focuses on the long-term formation of political concepts through debates in representative bodies and in published literature. It is not my intention to provide normative definitions of democracy or popular sovereignty and apply them to an interpretation of the sources. Instead, I analyse the content of original arguments in which references to the political role of the people were made, focusing on the exact choice of words and the moulding of language referring to the people through time. There is no doubt that the political influence of the people was defended by early modern authors in countries with mixed governments and representative institutions. However, some problems arise out of the trend in current research to apply the postFrench Revolution concepts of democracy and popular sovereignty to the interpretation of eighteenth-century texts without sufficient attention being paid to exactly what the contemporaries said and to the nature of the concepts that they actually possessed. Most studies that emphasize a break with the classical concept of democracy prior to the French Revolution have been carried out in the context of a single nation state. Indeed, one cannot avoid getting the impression that the context of the nation state has led historians to compete in trying to find the appearance of democracy and popular sovereignty first in the sources of their own mother countries and thereby prove that these were pioneers of the rise of democracy. They do refer to research in other countries, but they have not used comparable primary sources from several countries, which may give rise to semantic confusion in this seemingly comparative history of democracy and popular sovereignty. By the eighteenth century, as we shall see, the key concepts had already taken on different connotations in different languages. There is also the risk that a historian will base his or her conclusions regarding the history of democracy on texts written either by philosophers who have been later widely studied or by individual political polemists pursuing some particular purpose. As a result, defences of democracy and popular sovereignty may be found in texts in which

28

Lagerroth 1934, 5/1, 170; Lindberg 2006. See Chapter Three for detailed references.

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neither term actually appears, or in which they are not used in positive and universal post-French Revolution senses, or which were not generally accepted by practising statesmen or by the public at large. Sources reflecting the more actual use of political language, such as parliamentary debates, differ from such theoretical debate and tell us about the real pace of change in the language of democracy at the level of entire political communities. Studies which have viewed democracy from a more global and theoretical perspective also provide a foundation for doubts about the full reliability of certain conclusions locating the rise of ‘democracy’ and ‘popular sovereignty’ in a period before the late eighteenth century. The most recent contributors to this debate include Margaret Canovan’s book on language referring to the people, John Dunn’s interpretation of the history of democracy and Nadia Urbinati’s analysis of the genealogy of representative democracy. The approach of these scholars is that of political theory; however, the late eighteenth-century transformation from classical to more modern forms of democracy plays a dominant role in their interpretations. Canovan focuses specifically on the use of language referring to the people in Anglophone countries, emphasizing the separate nature of the histories of the concept of the people in various European languages. She regards the American Revolution rather than the French as the turning point in the history of the concept of the people. Like Edmund Morgan, she argues that the American revolutionaries developed “the characteristically modern understanding of the sovereign people”, building on the idea of the people as wielders of political power in reserve, activated only in times of emergency. Claiming that these ideas had initially been put forward by the Levellers during the English Civil Wars and the Whigs of the Glorious Revolution, Canovan calls them “popular sovereignty” and “the sovereignty of the people” without regard for the time of their appearance. The impetus for modernization came from America, but the British constitution had already been previously reinterpreted as a limited monarchy and mixed constitution of the Roman type. While there were suggestions that all political authority originated from the people and that the House of Commons represented the people, the strengthening official view in mid-eighteenth-century Britain was that the collective entity of the King, Lords and Commons was the representative of the people and that Parliament alone practised sovereign power on behalf of the people. According to this view, every member of the people was

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present in Parliament, and whatever Parliament did was done by the people. The people in reserve, on the other hand, became an alternative argument used by the opposition.29 Canovan sees the American Republic as a revolutionary model for the redefinition of the political role of the people and has little to say about the British late-eighteenth-century debate on the political role of the people. She regards the French Revolution as no more than a warning instance of anarchy of the common people for the British and suggests that thinking in Britain only changed with the reforms of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.30 However, parliamentary sources show that, while the American challenge influenced the British debates indirectly in the 1780s, French democracy became an important point of comparison in the 1790s. Dunn, who focuses on the concept of democracy, argues that only in the most radical phase of the French Revolution did a provocative redefinition of the concept of democracy take place. At the beginning of 1794, Maximilien Robespierre challenged the traditional meanings assigned to democracy. He linked the originally Greek concept of democracy with the Roman concept of republic and argued in favour of the establishment of a ‘republic’ that was simultaneously a ‘democracy’. In Dunn’s view, Robespierre’s monumental speech act made it possible to reject the classical notion of democracy as an essentially direct form of government and to replace it with the concept of representative democracy. ‘Representation’ and ‘republic’ had been connected in the American Constitution (1789), but it had still rejected ‘democracy’. Robespierre’s innovation was to bring ‘democracy’, ‘republic’ and ‘representation’ together and set them as the goals of the Revolution—both in France and internationally. This latter move turned the new French type of ‘democracy’ into an expansionist concept that was seen as threatening the established order around Europe.31

29 Canovan 2005, 10–11, 20–22, 35, 69, 106. Some mention of eighteenth-century popular governments in Poland, Sweden or the Dutch Republic might have been useful here; Morgan 1988. Morgan’s essential contribution is the notion of popular sovereignty as a deliberate fiction invented by political elites to legitimate their rule in the name of the people. See Canovan’s criticism of this interpretation in Canovan 2005, 130–133. 30 Canovan 2005, 33–34, 70. 31 Dunn 2005, 115–118; cf. Urbinati 2006, 66, according to whom the idea of representative democracy already emerged in France during the second half of 1792.

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In Dunn’s view, it needed a radical revolution before the history of the modern concept of democracy could begin. Urbinati, like the other two theorists, makes use of eighteenth-century political thinking in her contribution to the theoretical debate on the nature of popular sovereignty, representation and democracy today. She actually turns eighteenth-century authors into participants in a universal debate and objects of criticism in her defence of representative democracy. Urbinati’s work demonstrates that there were several competing ways of conceptualizing sovereignty, representation and democracy in the late eighteenth century. Thomas Paine and Condorcet first combined these concepts and opened the way for an understanding of representation as democratic and not merely as a substitute for democracy proper. Both distanced themselves from the classical model of direct democracy and from the new model of representative government. Their claims about the incompatibility of democracy and representation followed from Montesquieu’s and Rousseau’s unwillingness to connect democracy, sovereignty and representation in an era when no positive notion of democracy had yet emerged.32 In this study, I suggest three possible ways of writing a more precise history of democracy and popular sovereignty in the late eighteenth century. Instead of the history of political philosophy or theory in a conventional sense, what is offered here is a contextualized conceptual history of the reception of the notions of democracy and the sovereignty of the people based on the analysis of past political language exactly as it was used in the primary sources. I am also suggesting that we proceed from studies carried out in national contexts to international comparisons. Such comparisons based on parallel primary sources from several countries aim at creating a post-nationalist historiography in which both the specific features of individual political cultures and the shared characteristics of different yet in some ways related political cultures are taken into consideration. The purpose of the inquiry is not to “rank” political cultures according to their innovativeness in conceptualizing politics, but to better understand the gradual transition towards a more modern concept of democracy. Transnational influences feature prominently in such a study, as the contemporary political elites were educated in classical political

32

Urbinati 2006, 4, 6–7, 11, 54.

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thought and rhetoric and often eagerly compared the forms of government of their respective countries, both when speaking in representative assemblies and when writing their publications. References to other countries are considered in this study in order to locate possible conceptual transfers between political cultures. A transnational reading of the debate forces us to pay attention to phenomena of individual political cultures that might otherwise be viewed as self-evident or simply overlooked. They relate national debates and individual speech acts to a wider pattern of European conceptual change in the Age of the Enlightenment and the Age of Revolutions. They also show how more modern notions of democracy and popular sovereignty emerged as a result of encounters between various national ways of viewing democracy. In particular, this concerns the influence of English political thought on Sweden and the mutual influence of French and British political thought and everyday political debates. I also see it as important that the study of the history of political thought should move from the exegeses of political theorists and summaries of somewhat unstructured debates in the published literature to an analysis of actual political debates connected with decision-making processes. Parliamentary debates, above all, provide us with source material enabling the study of how political key concepts were used by the decision-makers. Parliamentary debates have been used in the study of the political history of events, but they have been ignored by many scholars of eighteenth-century political cultures. This important aspect of past political debate needs to be brought more into to the limelight of the linguistic study of political cultures. In eighteenthcentury studies, the tendency has been to emphasize the role of the growth of published literature in changing the world of politics. Without questioning the significance of the expansion of printed literature and the connected rise of the public sphere, this study defends the importance of the forums which already had established practices of deliberation, in which political decisions were really made, and which may hence have played an equally or even more significant role in changing the conceptual world of each political culture than the sometimes ephemeral debates in the published literature. The debates within representative institutions and in the published literature became, of course, increasingly interconnected in the late eighteenth century. Publishers were becoming more interested in the content of parliamentary debates, and the representative institutions also began more frequently to discuss the content of controversial

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publications of the day. Many parliamentarians themselves published actively, addressing a wider audience with their pamphlets. Parliamentary debates were thus integrated into public debates in several ways. Their significance within the published literature was quite considerable in comparison with what it is today. Parliamentary debates thus need to be contextualized against the publicity of the day and the interaction between the two arenas of political discourse must be considered. The public debate could either repeat the same points or offer alternative, more radical, understandings of the political role of the people. This study concerns political discourse which took place both inside and outside representative institutions, concentrating on cases where the two were explicitly interconnected. The main emphasis will, however, be on the parliamentary debates, using comparative references to parallel debates in the published literature to contextualize them. The third strategy followed here emphasizes nominalism in the analysis of past political cultures. This means that we endeavour to avoid the excessive use of modern analytical terminology, which can lead to teleological interpretations about just how “democratic” (in some modern sense) eighteenth-century political actors considered themselves to be. The reconstruction of this kind of past political vocabularies is far from easy given the temptation to look for the modern concepts of democracy and popular sovereignty in historical sources. In searching for an answer to the question of when it became legitimate to speak about democracy and popular sovereignty as recognized and approved principles in their modern senses, we should concentrate on establishing when expressions that can unarguably be seen as having modern meanings actually begin to emerge in the historical sources. Earlier arguments that seem to contain related ideas need to be distinguished and their different nature emphasized. This study will thus explore references to the political role of the people and democracy, attempting to estimate the timing of the evaluative shifts in the use of such references as they occurred in parliamentary speaking. The contextualized contemporary uses of language will thus be at the centre of the analysis throughout. The methodological approach I follow combines conceptual analysis at the macro and micro levels. I use linguistically oriented research strategies of past political thinking by applying methodological tools provided by various continental conceptual historians and by the Cambridge School of the history of political ideas. After carrying out

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the contextualization of quotations in which a particular political key term or metaphorical expression appears and deducing its basic meaning in those contexts, some historians proceed to the more abstract level of historical semantics at which comparisons not only within one political culture over an extended period of time but also between several political cultures become possible.33 Other historians concentrate on the analysis of individual speech acts and the intended meanings of the language users as revealed by the person speaking, the audience, the conventions of speaking and the context in which the speaker operates.34 An approach combining the study of these semantic and pragmatic aspects of past political languages with a comparative analysis provides the most balanced methodological solution. Such a study begins with a basic contextualization of each reference to the people, the nation, sovereignty, representation and democracy in particular arguments and debates in order to deduce whether the concept was used in a conventional or a potentially innovative sense. Next it proceeds to an analysis of the long-term developments in the meanings of these terms within an individual political culture on the macro level, and finally extends to a comparison between two political cultures. This approach aims at finding answers to the basic question of how the meanings of the concepts have emerged and changed through their history as a result of their repeated use in a wide variety of texts and contexts. It is inspired by Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte, although it is not my intention to build on the same hypotheses of the changing character of concepts during the late eighteenth-century transition to modernity or to write a mere history of words. The analysis must return to the micro level particularly when macro-level comparisons reveal unusual speech acts in which the analysed vocabulary has obviously been used to achieve particular political goals in contemporary contexts and in which new meanings have accordingly been assigned to them. Further contextualization must follow, applying the methods advocated by Quentin Skinner and his pupils. The basic question that this part of the study attempts to answer is how the meanings of the concepts changed as a result of their

33

See Leonhard 2001 and Leonhard 2008, for example. For an analysis of parliamentary speech acts with an emphasis on the unreflecting use of language, see Steinmetz 1993, Steinmetz 2002 and Chapter One below. 34

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unconventional and innovative use by individual speakers doing things with words in particular contexts. As Iain Hampsher-Monk has rightly pointed out, “Redefinitions of ‘the people’ [. . .] are classic examples of this kind of tactical speech act, in and through which political change is effected through verbal agency.”35 This part of the analysis brings the individual language-user back into the picture. Both entire communities of language-users and their individual members played significant roles in conceptual change.36 An individual speaker was often responding to what some preceding speaker had just said. The mere analysis of the meanings assigned to political concepts in individual arguments would not, of course, reveal the developmental trends of the vocabulary of democracy and the sovereignty of the people at the level of an entire political culture. We should, in the end, extend our study to include at least a degree of international comparison and combine conceptual analyses of a single political culture over an extended period of time with comparisons between different contemporaneous political cultures. Such comparisons can reveal both common European and specific national features in conceptual change. This comparative research strategy can stimulate new research questions, reveal interesting special cases, demonstrate interaction between various political cultures, produce hypotheses on the shared and individual cultural factors and make us question conventional historical interpretations of the studied phenomenon.37 Comparisons are particularly relevant in the case of late-eighteenth-century references to the political role of the people, as the vocabulary was common to a number of political cultures and representative institutions. Furthermore, the key concepts were sometimes defined in debates where foreign political cultures were explicitly commented upon. I am thus suggesting an alternative approach to writing the history of democracy and popular sovereignty based on the close analysis of a large number of political arguments in which related vocabulary was used. Such an analysis entails the elucidation of the group of words

35

Hampsher-Monk 2007, 149. On the duality of linguistic approaches in French and German history writing on the one hand and in Anglophone historiography on the other, see Hampsher-Monk 2007, 136; Note also Conal Condren’s point that the system and agency are interdependent, i.e. while an agent can make points only just by making use of the linguistic system, the system is created through the action of agency. These two aspects of political language are hence inseparable, not mutually exclusive. Condren 2007, 325, 336. 37 Haupt & Kocka 1996, 12–14; Leonhard 2001, 67. 36

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used in a past natural language to discuss the political role of the people, with a particular focus on linguistic associations between the people and power, i.e. on expressions such as “democracy” and “the sovereignty of the people”. It also entails the contextual investigation of the use of these words in a wide variety of political arguments, which could reflect either the recycling of their already existing meanings or the introduction of new meanings intended to change the political reality and prevailing conceptions of it. Finally, it also involves comparisons between such political vocabularies in two natural languages in order to find the common and particular features of the political cultures. The concepts used to describe and discuss the power of the people are thus analysed in several contexts: in their immediate context as part of particular arguments and debates, in their context as part of the long-term discourse on the people as a political agent and democracy as a form of government both within a representative institution and within a general political culture, and in an international context provided by the use of related concepts in another representative assembly and public discourse at around the same time and in similar circumstances. All the selected parliamentary debates are analysed from two perspectives. On the one hand, the debates are seen as records of how speakers recycled political concepts whose meanings were assumed to be familiar to, and shared by, all the members of the respective political establishments. On the other hand, speeches by individual politicians are taken as examples of the use of political concepts in innovative speech acts aimed at influencing the views of the audience and changing the political reality. Writing a comparative history of political vocabularies has entailed the study of parallel primary sources originating from two northwest European political cultures side by side. It has involved the explication of the range of the meanings of particular key words on the basis of the primary sources, without excessive reference to social scientific theories or previous research. While many existing studies facilitate the contextualization of individual debates and arguments, placing too much faith in previous research from individual countries might produce confusion with regard to the exact meanings of past concepts. I have considered it essential to read political texts in the broadest possible sense so as not to exclude some as “non-political” or “practical” and therefore less relevant. From the point of view of conceptual change, even less significant parliamentary debates and contemporary pamphlets written by anonymous writers can be revealing about how

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the key concepts were defined through their uses. Such a broad source basis renders the use of technical solutions a prerequisite for this type of analysis. In the search for the debates and publications to be analysed, I have used electronic databases, bearing in mind the fact that search strategies must be constantly updated on the basis of instances already found. The full text databases that have been used in this study include various versions of records of the parliamentary debates found in The Making of the Modern World (MOMW) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), as well as the extensive collections of public debates contained in the latter. The body of the analysed primary sources is comprised of selected debates held in the two British Houses of Parliament between 1734 and 1800 and in the four estates and the Secret Committee of the Swedish Riksdag in the period 1769–1772. The analysed debates have been selected on the basis of their constitutional topics or on the basis of the occurrence of utterances combining words such as “the people” and “representation”, “the people” and “power” or “the people” and “sovereignty” or direct references to “popular government” or “democracy”. In each of the chosen debates, all references to “the people” and “the nation” with a political meaning have been taken into account. The annual Speeches from the Throne and the Addresses of Thanks of the two Houses—as well as debates on the formulations of the Addresses—have been analysed as a continuous series of sources, and all references to the people or nation in them have been taken into consideration. The special character of these primary sources is discussed more extensively in Chapter One. As already pointed out, the use of concepts in parliamentary debates must be contextualized by comparing them with parallel uses in related public debates. In the case of Britain, the comparison can be carried out using ECCO. The example public debates have been selected from contributions to the discourse on democracy and the political role of the people. As it is not possible to carry out an entirely comprehensive analysis of the uses of the vocabulary referring to the people and democracy in British public discussions, these have been used primarily to contextualize the parliamentary debates. The late 1760s and early 1770s constituted an exceptional period in Swedish history, too, in that an act allowing the freedom of the press was passed in 1766 and remained in force until 1772, enabling the rise of an unprecedented volume of debate in the public sphere. By 1769 at the latest, political journals were taking up the same issues as the concurrent debates of the Estates. The press debates tended at times

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to be highly polemical and radical. I have read the books and periodicals mentioned by the members of the Estates during the debates as well as a wide selection of political pamphlets containing the keyword folket (the people) in their titles. In 1772, Swedish published literature once again came under strict regulation, and the Diet lost much of its political significance after a royal coup, which is why I have limited my examination of the Swedish case to the period 1769 to 1772. The body of the book is divided into four chapters. The focus is on the Westminster Parliament in the years 1734−1800—from the debates on the need to change the Septennial Act in the aftermath of the Excise Crisis of 1733−1734 to the point at which the French Revolutionary Wars were turning into the Napoleonic Wars. The period begins with the first ever recorded references to democracy in British parliamentary debates, originating from the first minister (Walpole), and ends with the first explicit claims that the existing British parliamentary system was based on “the sovereignty of the people”, a concept propagated by the French revolutionaries only ten years earlier. For much of the early period before the early 1770s, studied in Chapter Two, a classical sceptical notion of democracy predominated on those rare occasions when the concept was discussed in Westminster. Democracy could only be recognized as a controlled element in the mixed constitution, and even then only with reservations. Nevertheless, language referring to the rights of the people, the representation of the people, the sentiments and voice of the people and even popular government were used by both the opposition and the government. After the challenges to Robert Walpole with this language, a period of calm of some twenty years followed. Towards the end of the 1760s, however, the concept of the people began to acquire an entirely new potential in parliamentary debates, thanks to Wilkite radicalism. Not only the extra-parliamentary opposition but also the parliamentary majority increasingly represented themselves as the spokesmen of the people. The case of the Swedish Diet in the period 1769−1772 has often been passed over in international accounts of eighteenth-century political thought and culture, despite the fact that Sweden (and hence also present-day Finland) had for its time an exceptional political system based on the rule of the Estates. At the same time, there has been a tendency among historians to emphasize the unique role played by the Swedish Estates as forerunners of what has sometimes been characterized as “popular sovereignty” and even “representative democracy”. The international comparisons in this field are limited, dated and mostly

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not based on the analysis of parallel sources from Sweden and a comparable country like Britain by the same historian. The analysis offered in Chapter Three differs from the mainstream of Scandinavian history writing and produces findings that give us reason to reconsider interpretations regarding the degree of radicalism in the late Age of Liberty in Sweden. It shows that the concept of democracy was rarely used at the Riksdag and was employed by individual noblemen mainly to oppose undesired phenomena or sometimes to make radical points. The use of the political concept of the people was growing in frequency, but the concept by no means dominated the debates. Its radicalized meanings were to a great extent determined by the particular purposes of the competing parties and estates. An explicit expression equivalent to “popular sovereignty” remained inconceivable in the Swedish language of politics. Some radical descriptions of the power of the people did occur in the press, but the concept of the people seems to have been predominantly used in the Diet to legitimize the existing system, based on estate privileges as it was. Most of the meanings given by different groups to “the people” in various debates are explained by contextual factors; no “democratic” reform was being propounded. Chapters Four and Five return to the British debate after 1771. British parliamentarians’ conceptions of the political role of the people were challenged in this period by the American War of Independence, by domestic calls for parliamentary reform in which representation would be more equally distributed between constituencies and finally by the French Revolution. The influence of the American war is traceable in the calls for parliamentary reform in the 1780s, although the influences remained implicit. Definitions of the proper form of the representation of the people and increasingly positive revaluations of democracy within the mixed constitution were characteristic of the debates of the early 1780s, when William Pitt the Younger, Charles James Fox and Edmund Burke constituted a trio who repeatedly redefined the classical concept of democracy in a manner that has escaped the attention of previous research. Their redefinitions of democracy and the counterarguments these provoked are analysed in Chapter Four. We shall never know what the result of this revaluation of democracy within the mixed constitution would have been without the French Revolution. The Revolution ensured that the vocabulary of democracy and the sovereignty of the people became increasingly

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common in the debates of the British Parliament and that the two available understandings of “democracy” led to a fierce but in the long run fruitful conceptual confrontation. Clashes between the emerging new understanding of ‘democracy’ within the mixed constitution and the French revolutionary notions of ‘democracy’ and ‘the sovereignty of the people’ as the basis of all government are analysed in Chapter Five. The Revolution thus forced the British members of parliament to engage in further conceptual redefinitions. The British parliamentarians were no mere opponents of French democracy but discussed the two alternative concepts of democracy intensively. The reception of these French revolutionary concepts in Westminster was varied and changed over time. Whereas many initially welcomed the idea of the people taking power, the political establishment took a much more reserved stand and gradually became major critics of the Revolution. Even those politicians who considered the strengthening of the popular element in the French monarchy to be a good thing tended to denounce the French type of democracy. At the same time, we find numerous vindications of the British political system as representing a proper version of democracy; the parliamentarians participated in the conceptual struggle not only by denouncing the French version of “democratic tyranny” as a dangerous innovation but also by defining the contested concept in ways that suited the defence of the established order. By the late 1790s, on the other hand, some speakers were prepared to go as far as to claim that the British Parliament, too, was based on the sovereignty of the people. This conceptual change would not immediately become widely accepted, adopted or implemented, but it did lead to a transition towards a more modern understanding of the popular legitimacy of the political system. There was no need for a revolution if the British system could be regarded as already sufficiently democratic and based on the sovereignty of the people. The main hypotheses of this book can be summarized as follows. Firstly, the originally classical meanings of the concept of democracy continued to be upheld to a considerable extent throughout the eighteenth century. The ideas of representation were still primarily based on the medieval traditions of estate representation, and before the French Revolution notions of a representative democracy existed only in a very limited sense. Secondly, political systems based on estate representation must not be interpreted from an excessively teleological perspective. They did not constitute any evident evolution towards

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democracy. Thirdly, even an emerging parliamentary system was capable of conceptual revision. Quite significant redefinitions of democracy can be found in the period preceding the French Revolution, not only among radicals and abstract theorists but also among the leading political actors who participated in parliamentary debates. Fourthly, the French Revolution forced the political establishments of countries with older forms of representation to re-evaluate their conceptions of democracy and finally to adopt at least some of the ideas involved in the principle of the sovereignty of the people. The political elites were forced to either totally oppose these notions or to redefine the existing systems in a way that would permit them to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing and modernizing world.

CHAPTER ONE

BRITISH AND SWEDISH PARLIAMENTARY DEBATES IN A COMPARATIVE STUDY OF POLITICAL VOCABULARIES Historians have traditionally used the records of eighteenth-century parliamentary and estate debates to write the political history of the respective states and representative institutions. Particular speeches have occasionally been summarized in analyses of political thought and action.1 However, there have been few analyses of eighteenthcentury parliamentary debates as such. As Christopher Reid has pointed out: Parliamentary discourse—by any reckoning one of the central elements of British political culture—has never been systematically surveyed. Most studies of British political history make extensive reference to parliamentary debates, without paying much attention to their formal and rhetorical qualities.2

Peter Jupp has pointed out likewise with reference to interaction between print culture and Parliament: The impact on the substance of parliamentary debate of the flowering of political and moral philosophy, the increased public knowledge of parliamentary speeches, and the exponential growth of information about all aspects of actual or potential policy has never been the subject of the research that it deserves.3

Relations between the printed literature and Parliament are, however, a field that has recently gained increasing attention among historians of political culture.4

1 Christie 1962; Pole 1966; Dickinson 1977; Goodwin 1979; Morgan 1988; An earlier version of this chapter has been published in Ihalainen 2008. 2 Reid 1985, 96–98. The strategy chosen by Reid for studying Edmund Burke’s selected parliamentary speeches is that of dramatic criticism, paying attention not only to the text but also to the conditions and conventions governing its production, in the same way as the stage, the prevailing styles, the expectations of the audience and so on govern a dramaturgical text. See also Reid 2000. 3 Jupp 2006, 207. 4 Peacey 2007, 2.

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It is evident that parliamentary records constitute much more than mere documents recording the actual actions of certain leading politicians. They provide an extensive record of the practical language of politics in the past, and a contextual analysis of the language of parliamentary debates enables an understanding of long-term continuities and changes in the meanings of key political concepts at the macro level of each political culture. This concerns particularly concepts that were frequently used in representative institutions and which actually constituted part of the justification for the existence of these institutions in the first place. For this kind of analysis, the parliamentary and estate records provide hundreds of instances of how leading political speakers and decision-makers used concepts in the most respected political forum of each country. At the same time, they reveal a number of individual speech acts in both their long-term and their temporary contexts. Furthermore, parliamentary debates provide us with sources that are directly comparable and which can be used to write comparative long-term histories of key political vocabularies in emerging parliamentary regimes. Such simultaneous case studies make it easier to reveal both common European trends in the development of political cultures during the modernization process and the context-related features peculiar to each political culture. Even though there were considerable differences in the procedure, content and recording of parliamentary debates, similar questions were discussed and the concepts used in them were interrelated. It is possible to carry out analyses of nearly simultaneous debates or debates involving parallel conceptual changes in different national contexts. Such analyses increase our understanding of both universal European and specific national conceptual developments. More particularly, they add to our knowledge of the language of politics ‘below’ abstract political theory, in the practical everyday use. Records of parliamentary debates provide us with sources which permit a considerable degree of contextualization of individual uses of key political terms—or of the performance of speech acts—within specific debates and particular arguments. The political context of the speaking situation, the background of the speakers and the potential reactions to the speeches expressed in the published literature are reasonably easy to reconstruct on the basis of existing research. The presence of the reactions, counterarguments and conceptual moves of the other speakers in the chamber make it possible to reconstruct the

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range of meanings that could be assigned to a particular concept by the leading statesmen and major political groups of the time. It is also possible to analyse the intentions of individual speakers, particularly when the speaker was using a concept in an unconventional, surprising or innovative way with the obvious intention of achieving certain specific goals in the context concerned. Such speech acts often become visible only within the macro-level context of a long series of debates. The Significance of Parliamentary Debates for the History of Political Vocabularies In an article written together with Kari Palonen, I have suggested that historians of political cultures should consider making parliamentary sources a major object of study in tracing the history of key political concepts in Europe. We propose an examination of both the new political vocabulary created by parliamentary procedures and speaking and the older political vocabulary used with traditional and new meanings in connection with parliamentary debates.5 The latter vocabulary includes the concepts of popular sovereignty, democracy and representation. The suggested notion of parliaments as central forums for the formation of the language of politics complements the widely held assumption that it was the pre-political public sphere rather than parliamentary speaking that was vital for the formation of the language of politics and political culture more generally. Historians of political cultures have carried out important studies of political debates in printed literature in the late eighteenth century. They have often emphasized the role of the press as a provider of an alternative forum for political education and politicization that would later be used by radical movements to present their claims. These studies, though invaluable in many ways, have tended to ignore a closer analysis of parliamentary records as indicators of an equally, or possibly more, important dimension of past political debate.6 Any simplistic categorization of sources into those belonging to ‘political history’ and those proper for ‘the history of political thought’ should be dismissed in the comparative study of political vocabularies. Both practising politicians using 5 6

Ihalainen & Palonen 2009. See Brewer 1976; Wilson 1995; Skuncke 2002, 1–22; Barker 2002, 93–112.

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the language of politics in everyday debates and political thinkers of various levels of abstraction publishing their views in printed literature contributed to the formation of the language of politics. An excessive stress on the role of the public sphere in political discourse may lead to over-generalizations about how the political values of past political cultures changed. Jeremy Black has pointed out that in eighteenth-century Britain, the agenda of the public debate was set by Parliament more than by the press or popular politics at the hustings. Parliamentary debates were always intimately linked to decision-making processes, giving rise to discussion even if they did not necessarily change the policies that were adopted. On the other hand, the influence of debates in the press on political decisions remains uncertain and indirect. In principle, parliamentary debates were supposed to communicate the views of the people to the government. In practice, of course, this was not always the case, even if both the ministry and the opposition eagerly used terms referring to the people to legitimate their points of view. Yet the debates allowed diverging opinions between the government and opposition and also within the government to be expressed, which was equally important in that they reveal the different values held by the various groups in the governing establishment. As Black puts it: Parliament was important not so much as a forum where the government could be defeated, a relatively rare occurrence, but as one that encouraged a change in the nature of political debate, by creating a regular agency for publicly representing political views. [. . .] the importance of Parliament to discussion and contention within government has been underrated, or, more commonly, neglected. And yet, its role in this field was of major significance. [. . .] This helped to make Britain a functioning parliamentary monarchy, one in which, despite problems, Parliament and Crown sought to operate in harmony. As Parliament was the public forum in which the ministry formally presented and defended its policy and was criticised in a fashion that obliged it to reply, it was Parliament where the public debate over policy can be seen as most intense and effective. There was an obligation to respond that was lacking in the world of print, and an immediate linkage between the debates and the taking of decisions, the debates themselves being occasioned by the discussion of these very decisions.7

7

Black 2001, 212–221; Black 2004, 1, 6–7.

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Following Black, I argue that the practice of continual parliamentary debate as such supported a change in political culture and the language of politics by providing a forum for the expression of political opinions through the use and definition of concepts in both conventional and innovative ways. Arguments for and against a particular motion, which Jeremy Bentham regarded in his analysis of late eighteenthcentury parliamentary procedure as consistent with the “natural instinct” of men,8 revealed differing understandings of the political reality not only between the government and the opposition but also within these groups. As all participating sides were forced to present their points of view clearly when replying to each other,9 the central political concepts of the day inevitably entered the debates, and disagreements over their meanings came to the fore. These conceptual differences were by no means ‘mere rhetoric’ but reflected differing ideological points of view and could really affect the decision-making processes. Black has seen the eighteenth-century British Parliament as a successful institution which became a real forum of first-rank political debate. According to him, the status of Parliament in the British political system was—despite restrictions on parliamentary influence in a system that was essentially oligarchic—unique and not really comparable with other eighteenth-century national representative bodies. The Swedish Estates, the Dutch General Estates and the Polish Diet were all characterized by conflicts, delays and a loss of status in the course of the century. No other representative body was as universally admired as the British Parliament.10 This emphasis on the uniqueness of the British Parliament as a forum of intense political debate has some justification, but it goes too far. We should not overemphasize the incomparability of Britain with the rest of Europe in this respect. The other representative bodies in mixed constitutions also played key roles in the political debates of their respective countries, and they have—at least in the case of Sweden from the 1720s to the early 1770s, France in the 1790s and the Batavian Republic in the late 1790s—produced records of 8 Jeremy Bentham, An Essay on Political Tactics, or Inquiries Concerning the Discipline and Mode of Proceeding Proper to be Observed in Political Assemblies; . . ., James, Michael et al. (eds). Oxford 1999 (partly printed in 1791, this edition in 1838−43), 127−128. 9 Bentham, An Essay on Political Tactics, 1838−43, 128. 10 Black 2001, 217–218; Swann draws the same overall conclusion but suggests that the Hungarian Diet was somehow equivalent. Swann 2000, 35–36.

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parliamentary debates that are eminently suitable for a comparative study of the history of concepts like ‘the people’, ‘popular sovereignty’ and ‘democracy’.11 In Sweden during the Age of Liberty from 1719 to 1772,12 the fourestate Diet was the leading forum for political debate when it was in session—it convened once every three years and then often sat for over a year. Particularly as no unregulated public debate was allowed before 1766, the Diet was the arena in which information was obtained and distributed and where the representatives formulated and articulated opinions in order to influence the members of their own and the other estates. It was also a forum where not only legislative but to some extent executive decisions were made. The sessions of the Diet produced a mass of records, including detailed discussion minutes. These, undeniably the best records of any eighteenth-century representative body, are—particularly in the case of the Noble and Burgher Estates— highly comparable with British reports of parliamentary debates.13 Furthermore, the debate over the political power of the people and democracy was, because of the classical tradition on which much early modern political theory was based, transnational to the highest degree. Even the etiquette of debating questions like these was closely related as a result of the common education of the political elites in classical rhetoric. There was lively political, economic and intellectual interaction between the two countries, and comparisons between them were constantly drawn by contemporaries themselves. Hence, a transnational comparative perspective offers the most opportune approach for analysing the debates. Records of parliamentary and estate debates in countries such as England and Sweden enable us to locate, date, contextualize and compare both gradual and sudden, unconscious as well as intentional changes and revisions in the vocabulary of political concepts—perhaps

11 Some records on debates in the Polish Sejm are also extant, but it has not been possible to integrate them into this study. 12 The only comparative accounts of the national representative institutions in eighteenth-century Sweden and Britain are Roberts 1973 and Roberts 1986. These are mainly based on older Swedish studies, contain few references to British primary sources and use a limited selection of printed primary sources for Sweden. Roberts argued that the Swedish constitution was in many respects more advanced than that of England, even though it too was beset by some major problems. 1973, 3, 26; 1986, 91. 13 Cf. Steinmetz 1993, 45, who also sees the British debates as unique.

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better than most of the sources found in published literature would allow us to do.14 The records show us what types of actual speaking situations the concepts were used in and what sort of concrete political points they were used to make. Unlike much published literature, we can often find the immediate responses of the other speakers (as practical ‘political thinkers’) belonging to the parliamentary elite. This makes it possible to draw conclusions about what kinds of conceptual choices and speech acts were generally acceptable to the participants and what aroused criticism. This kind of interactive debate demonstrates the range of meanings that could be assigned to a particular concept among the different groups of the political establishment in the context of a particular debate. In the British Parliament, in particular, regular debate with views expressed from a variety of competing perspectives had been an integral part of the decision-making process for centuries. In its houses, differences of opinion between the government and the opposition could be very clear, and these are also reflected in the conceptual choices of the speakers. In the records of these debates, we can locate changes in the meanings of concepts caused by speech acts that either intentionally reinforce the original significances or introduce new ones. Much more frequently, however, we can find choices of words that merely unreflectingly repeated current ways of speaking among the political elite as a whole or some part of it. In most cases, the speakers just wanted to express some meaning of a concept that would be easily shared by their audience. Parliamentary debates were, of course, only one dimension of political debate. Together with them we need to study other forms of public discourse—particularly those directly linked to current debates in Parliament. Such contextualization with other primary sources ensures the consideration of a wider range of the meanings assigned to the key concepts in the period studied. The relative importance of the two types of sources is quite apparent in this study. The public debate intensified considerably in the course of the eighteenth century, but as Black has reminded us, public opinion certainly did not determine the policies that eighteenth-century governments followed. It rather provided a forum for the expression of a greater plurality of opinion—and hence further uses of political concepts—and it also

14

Ihalainen & Palonen 2009.

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increased nationwide political awareness of these opinions. There was an obvious link between the two debates, particularly as parliamentary reporting became, certainly after the 1770s, a regular feature of the British press.15 Reporting linked Parliament and the public sphere and led in Britain to what Charles Tilly has seen as the increasing parliamentarization of popular politics.16 According to Peter Jupp, too, Parliament became a major producer of political information, particularly in the form of printed debates, and thereby influenced the formation of the strengthening public opinion.17 As the following chapter will show, British parliamentarians adapted to the circumstances of increasing publicity, made efficient use of printed literature to distribute their views to wider audiences and set the agenda of public debate to an extent that is quite unimaginable today.18 A similar tendency, though on a more modest scale, was evident in Sweden in the period 1769−1772. On the other hand, using parliamentary records in the reconstruction of the conceptual world of past political cultures does have its methodological challenges, which will be addressed here with reference to eighteenth-century British and Swedish sources. We shall look at the practical organizational framework of the debates, which has to be taken into account in their analysis, some special features of parliamentary rhetoric in the late eighteenth century and the implications of the methods used to make parliamentary records in different countries for this type of research. Practical Arrangements and Argumentation The ways in which the debates were conducted within different parliamentary and estate traditions affected the structure of arguments and hence the use of concepts. The choice of discussion topic and the order of the debate effectively structured what could be argued by

15

Black 2001, 225–226. See Tilly 1997, 246–248. According to Tilly, Parliament became the object of ordinary people’s attention, and the same issues could be debated by Parliament and the people. 17 Jupp 2006, 226, 229, 264. 18 Cf. Steinmetz 1993, 65, and Reid 2000, 122–134, according to whom it was rather the rise of the public sphere that affected parliamentary discourse so that negotiations were replaced by a new form of public speaking. 16

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the speakers in the first place. In the British Parliament, the subjects could either be determined by an Order of the Day or sometimes be initiated freely by an individual member. The order of speaking was in principle free and decided by the Speaker during the debate.19 The Speaker controlled the subjects which the speakers discussed, and the prevalent manner of arguing for and against the motion usually forced them to stick to the topic of the day.20 Even so, speeches sometimes contained various arguments that diverged from the original subject of the debate, particularly in connection with regular debates of a general character. These occurrences were unpredictable, and consequently it would be almost impossible to find the most interesting instances of usage in the entire corpus of reports without the help of the search engines provided by modern databases. Even though the titles do not yield all those debates in which the political role of the people was discussed, we can note that debates concerning parliamentary representation and the French Revolution, for instance, were among those in which the relevant vocabulary was most likely to occur. Thus a combination of various constantly updated search strategies has been used to locate these debates. In Sweden, debates were initiated in a number of ways. In principle, any authority or individual could raise a question at the Diet. The most important practical limitation on the topics to be discussed was time,21 which became a scarce resource with the complicated estate system and the procedure of the Diet, where a discussion of the same question in a number of special committees and the four estates could last for a considerable time, particularly when communication between the estates was carried out by inter-estate delegations. Much of the debate concerned procedure rather than the subject being discussed as such. The positive side of this complicated process is that we have a plethora of debates offering potentially interesting material. In Sweden, the speaker of an estate determined the subjects for debate in each plenary session, the goal being that the four estates would all discuss the issues simultaneously. In practice, decision-making was far from synchronized, as the influential Noble Estate did not

19

Thomas 1971, 187–188. John Hatsell, Precedents of Proceedings in the House of Commons; under Separate Titles. With Observations, Vol. 2, London 1818 (reprinted Shannon 1971), 107; Steinmetz 1993, 44. 21 Lagerroth 1934, 6/2, 71, 74–78, is based on Lagerroth 1915. 20

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want its timetable to be dictated by the other estates and the fact that its sessions were attended by perhaps a thousand members, dozens of whom were highly conversant with the subject, meant that a considerable amount of time was needed before a decision could be reached.22 The other estates also took their time, particularly as motions could be amended only by the original proposers, and much time was spent reading out reports and minutes and receiving delegations from the other estates. Each member also had the right to speak as many times as he wanted to.23 In the Burgher Estate, this meant that a member might make as many as fourteen speeches during a single debate. In Sweden, the division between the Senate and the opposition was not quite clear-cut, even though party divisions did guide the allegiance of individual speakers, and this meant that a wide variety of viewpoints were expressed in the debates. In Britain, the procedure was less complicated, and the contrasts between the government and the opposition more distinct and stable, which led to more exhaustive and sometimes openly ideological debates. As a consequence, the alternative ways of conceptualizing questions can be recognized more easily in British debates. Members of the representative bodies were free to speak at least once in each debate,24 but there were always those who hardly ever participated in the debates, lacking the special interest, knowledge, electoral pressure, courage or linguistic abilities to do so, or who were ignored by the recorders because of their lack of fluency.25 The number of particularly active speakers was low both in the Westminster Parliament and at the Swedish Diet. It is also evident that the reports and journals do not include every contribution. Speeches that were not considered significant were cut out, especially by British journalists

22

Lagerroth 1934, 6/2, 79–86. Lagerroth 1934, 6/2, 114; Roberts 1973, 30; Roberts 1986, 69, 91, 96. 24 Generally speaking, only one speech per debate was allowed in Britain. See Hatsell, Precedents, Vol. 2, 1818, 105. 25 True silent members can be found among the Finnish-speaking peasants at the Swedish Diet; often not understanding Swedish, they were set apart by the language barrier. They usually intervened only to ask for a postponement in decision-making so that the interpreter would have time to translate and explain to them what the debate was all about. This extra time was usually granted to them, which shows that the representatives of the Finnish peasantry were regarded as an organic part of the system: they were made part of the debate by their mere presence and their understanding of the main points. It was unthinkable for a decision to be made at the Swedish Diet without their at least formal consent. 23

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who only attended a part of a debate. They may also have favoured the best speakers, even though it is obvious that most debates were anyway dominated by a few leading members.26 The British assembly was undoubtedly dominated by the best speakers and those whose position in the ministry gave them special authority. The true orators also knew when to enter a debate, aware that the order of speaking could affect the outcome. The principal goal of speaking was, after all, to make the opponents change their minds, and hence the last speech before a division was considered potentially the most telling.27 The Speaker could always manipulate the order of speakers, although the ideal practice was to let the advocates and opponents of the motion take the floor alternatively. This practice led to a constant exchange of opinions and, consequently, to interestingly different uses of the key terms of the debate. The British opposition, despite its minority in the House, often had more active and eloquent speakers than the government,28 even though the oratorical ability of leading British ministers was also considerable, including the ability to make effective use of language referring to the people. The ministry always considered it essential to attend and participate in debates in Britain.29 As a consequence, the differing policies advocated by the head of government and the opposition received clear expression, particularly as the common academic rhetorical model encouraged both sides to carefully respond to all the arguments presented.30 In Sweden, only the presence of some senators in the Noble Estate created similar circumstances for debate at the highest level. The question of the spontaneity of the speeches and the influence of this on the use of concepts deserves particular attention. Longer speeches were obviously prepared beforehand, whereas shorter ones were spontaneous interventions in the debate. Interruptions occurred and were sometimes recorded in reports, but they have only a marginal role in this analysis. In Britain it was not acceptable to simply read a speech from a script, but preparation was certainly needed to

26 27 28 29 30

Thomas 1971, 192, 202, 230–231. Thomas 1971, 198–199; Jupp 2006, 208. Thomas 1971, 240–241. Thomas 1971, 201, 234. Mack 2002, 250.

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formulate articulate arguments.31 This practice of not writing down entire speeches is an explanation of the limited number of scripts of what exactly was said in Parliament. The number of scripts produced by the Swedish Estates was overwhelming by comparison. There were no restrictions on reading from paper at the Swedish Diet; indeed, the speaker could pass his script to the secretary to have it copied in the minutes and sometimes even to be read aloud by the latter in place of the author. Written memoranda might also be seen as a type of speech that was read aloud by the officials, but they did not constitute actual debate and have been excluded from this analysis.32 Nor are entries of dissent in the minutes included owing to their monologic character. Scholars have suggested that the use of pre-planned rhetoric may have decreased and spontaneity risen towards the end of the century. The suggestion is that the speakers regarded their speeches as ephemera, for use in Parliament on one particular occasion. They would not have seen themselves as speaking to the people. It has been argued that Charles James Fox, for instance, was not keen on addressing the public through the press, while Edmund Burke made use of this medium especially in the early 1790s to educate and influence his audience.33 It is not quite clear, however, that Fox definitely avoided pre-planned speaking to the people. In fact, we find long speeches by both members of parliament that were issued separately in printed form after a considerable amount of preparation.34 The texts differ little from the records written down during debates, which suggests that the use of political language in all of them was well-planned. It has been further suggested that the tendency to deliver speeches ex tempore in Britain explains the sometimes unclear content of the surviving records.35 However, it is difficult to find any such inconsistencies in those arguments that dealt with the political role of the people. Many speakers were highly educated masters of logic, and anyway the editors could leave out the most glaring blemishes caused by spontaneity. It goes without saying that speeches for solemn occasions were particularly

31

Thomas 1971, 203; Steinmetz 2002, 89; Black 2004, 177. Cf. Bentham’s point on the necessity to exclude academic written discourse from a political assembly. Betham, An Essay on Political Tactics, 1838−43, 132−133. 33 Thomas 1971, 203; Reid 1985, 118–119; Barker 2002, 96; Harris 2007, 112. 34 Burke had been the first member of parliament to publish one of his speeches in 1775. Bullard 2005, 325. 35 Thomas 1971, 205; Steinmetz 2002, 89. 32

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carefully prepared, taking into consideration all the conventions to be observed—or, if the occasion warranted it, flouted. At the same time, the British records demonstrate that spontaneity, wit and humour were highly valued in that political culture. This may have decreased the number of pre-planned speech acts aiming at conceptual redefinitions, but it by no means ruled them out. Spontaneity could also produce slips of the tongue and unintended conceptual modifications. As Willibald Steinmetz has argued, much was said in Parliament without the choice of words being carefully considered either by the speaker himself or by his audience. On the basis of his analysis of British debates between the 1780s and the late nineteenth century, he suggests that semantic innovations that challenged conventional concepts seldom occurred in deliberate contributions to the debate. Indeed, they may be evident only to an historian in the context of mainly conventional arguments. Sometimes they were recognized by another member of parliament, who adopted the innovation in his own speeches. Even this could happen without the speaker noticing that a change in the language of politics had taken place.36 Another important source of transformation was in the elaboration or answering of previously presented points. Conceptual change could thus emerge in a variety of ways, and it was by no means always intended. Special Features of Parliamentary Rhetoric Surprisingly little historical research on eighteenth-century parliamentary speaking exists, either for Britain or Sweden. The lack of entirely trustworthy records of parliamentary debates is undoubtedly one reason for this. Source problems are less evident in relation to twentiethcentury and present-day parliamentary speaking, and this has been a subject of comprehensive study in fields such as linguistics and political theory. Admittedly, some important historical work on past parliamentary debates is available. We have excellent analyses of English parliamentary rhetoric in the late Tudor and early Stuart periods, when debates were recorded even more sporadically than in the eighteenth century, by David Colclough and Peter Mack.37 We also have an analysis of 36 37

Steinmetz 2002, 88–89. Colclough 2002; Mack 2002.

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British political argumentation between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries by Willibald Steinmetz, who has focused on the rules of parliamentary language and the linguistic moves and shifts that made it possible for the Commons to accept parliamentary reforms in the nineteenth century. Steinmetz has pointed out that parliamentary debates not only reflected conceptual change within the political community but also caused it. According to him, the debates also became increasingly interactive with public discourse in the period studied.38 The late eighteenth century, which has often been presented as the golden age of British parliamentary speaking, has rarely been subjected to more extensive analysis. There are, however, some studies of individual speakers and their relation to the public sphere.39 Palonen, a political theorist whose interests focus more on the rhetorical aspects of parliaments in general than on any particular historical period, has argued that politics in parliamentary regimes has always been essentially rhetorical. Together with the present author, he has pointed out that parliamentary debates provided possibilities for the recycling of conventional concepts and also for conceptual revisions and modifications. This was particularly true after politics became increasingly competitive as a result of the parliamentarization and democratization of politics from the late eighteenth century on.40 An empirical study of late eighteenth-century parliamentary speaking will provide an important backdrop to the history of democratization, which is currently being actively studied by political scientists in a number of countries.41 Cornelia Ilie has studied parliamentary debates as a sub-genre of political discourse, seeing them as “an institutionalised deliberation ritual”42 occurring in “basically confrontational settings”.43 She views the debates as communicative interaction taking place in a dialogical form and analysable by a pragma-rhetorical approach that focuses on linguistic strategies in specific contexts at the micro-level and on people’s intentional use of language in such contexts.44 Ilie has created a comparative dimension by combining a semantico-pragmatic analysis 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Steinmetz 1993; Steinmetz 2002, 86–87. See, for example, Bullard 2001; Reid 1985, 122–134. Ihalainen & Palonen 2009. Palonen, Pulkkinen & Rosales 2009. Ilie 2001, 242. Ilie 2004, 5. Ilie 2007.

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with institutional discourse analysis. The former means “the mapping of the semantic fields” of the terms and analysing their “semantic associations, collocational distributions and semantic roles.” She sees the pragmatic functions and implications of the uses of a concept as objects of further study. Ilie argues, not unlike historians of ideas, that “the connotations associated with key words are often interpretable in terms of the political allegiance of the members of parliament, ideological convictions and personal commitments.”45 In other words, the political and personal context of speaking opens up the senses of a concept used in a particular context. This kind of linguistic research on modern parliamentary speaking is also inspiring from the point of view of the historical study of the political vocabularies used in parliaments. Thanks to the available research, we already know about some of the enduring conventions of parliamentary rhetoric in the British Parliament. In the eighteenth century, Parliament was, and had been for several centuries, the most important forum for a political elite that held debate and disputation in high regard. Ever since the reign of Elizabeth, the skilful use of words in Parliament had been considered an indispensable professional attribute of any successful statesman. The purpose of speaking in Parliament was to secure and win votes in a possible division, to convince one’s own side and perhaps to persuade individual members of the other side. This basic function meant that the debate could easily turn into a heated dispute and into what Ilie has characterized as “interpersonal verbal duelling”. The debates were also fierce as a result of the widespread recognition within the political community that the speakers, protected by their parliamentary immunity, had a right, indeed a duty, to give an expression to ideas that were not favoured by the government. They were entitled to speak freely pro et contra on any matter under discussion, and this allowed them to use the entire conceptual arsenal that was available to them. One of the essential points of parliamentary debates was that, even if the government would almost always win the division in the end, every member of parliament had a free opportunity to express his opposing views. Quite a number of members used this opportunity skilfully, and it was even possible for the opposition to win the argument even if they lost the division. If they argued well enough, they might also

45

Ilie 2004a, 3–4.

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persuade opponents to change their opinions, introduce changes into the legislation, and initiate new measures. On the other hand, it is evident that the tendency of members of parliament to seek confrontation between the parties often created two distinct debating sides, which reinforced the existing political polarization rather than changed it.46 It was above all in such argumentation that different understandings of the meaning of key political concepts became manifested. Parliamentary speeches were also acts. As Colclough has pointed out, they were certainly not just mere preamble for decision-making or a commentary on political action; rather they themselves constituted a form of political action. The debaters were practising politics through their use of words. They were actively involved in the formation of the political reality through their uses of concepts rather than merely reflecting some separate political reality independent of the language of politics.47 Steinmetz has gone even further in emphasizing that speaking was action. According to him, every single sentence of a parliamentary speech should be interpreted as an action. This notion follows from the fact that it was the only form of action available to most members of parliament in the first place. Despite this emphasis on the speeches as acts, they should not, according to Steinmetz, be analysed as highly intentional texts of the type found in abstract political philosophy.48 Both genres of political debate can be used for historical research, but we need to remember that the degree of intentionality varied between these. There were likewise differences between parliamentary and forensic speaking, which had been the object of interest of much classical rhetoric. It follows, therefore, that rhetorical models originating from judicial contexts may not have been directly applicable to parliamentary debates. The emphasis in this study will be throughout on the use of concepts rather than on rhetorical strategies as such. Nevertheless, classical rhetoric did constitute an important context for speaking, particularly as it seems to have become fashionable again during the last decades of the eighteenth century and was present in the parliamentary procedure as well.49 Classical rhetorical theory had been part of the education of practically every speaker, and its precepts for speaking and persuasion 46 47 48 49

Mack 2002, 215, 251; Ilie 2004b, 19, 23. Colclough 2005, 125. Steinmetz 2002, 88–90. Jupp 2006, 208; Palonen 2008, 150.

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affected the content and techniques of parliamentary discourse, the ways in which the audience was approached and the organization of the arguments. Classical rhetoric was also influential because members of the British Parliament and the Swedish Noble Estate regarded their roles as identical to those of the Roman Senators. The speakers were familiar with the rhetorical principle of strengthening their ethos, authority, in order to make their arguments more persuasive. They knew that logos, the appeal to reason, and pathos, the appeal to emotions, needed to be skilfully combined in speaking. The speaker might also try to question the ethos, and hence the authority, of his opponent. All these elements appear in the speeches, although they will not be specifically analysed below. Both the countries studied here also had long domestic traditions of parliamentary speaking. Precedents were given considerable weight, and the parliamentary tradition led to the development of new conventions of speaking. Thus instances not only from the ancient Greek and Roman traditions but also from domestic history could be invoked. Academic models of dialectic might be followed in debating speeches. The conventional strategy was to first summarize the arguments of some previous speaker and then to reply to them point by point. Previous points were customarily rejected by the means of logical contradiction, enthymemes and hypothetical syllogisms and by making distinctions between the various ways in which the key words could be understood. At the end of his speech, the speaker was supposed to state his views clearly and perhaps add a further argument to support them.50 Such a dialectic approach made it possible for the speaker to define concepts in different ways or to replace those used by previous speakers with more appropriate ones. This model thus needs to be borne in mind in analysing the use of concepts in individual speeches. Ceremonial Speaking and Dialogues between the Powers of the State Parliamentary speaking was not always persuasive, aiming at winning votes in divisions; it also had ritualistic and ceremonial purposes aiming at the consolidation of the political community51 through the 50 51

Mack 2002, 232, 250. Mack 2002, 215, 251; Helmrath & Feuchter 2008, 10–11.

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formulation of presumed shared values and concepts. Ceremonial speaking may at first sight appear to be the mere reiteration of old formulas that lacked any concrete political content, but this is not the case. Speeches made in connection with the opening ceremonies of the British Parliament and the Swedish Diet provide examples of political arguments and concepts that could be used without arousing opposing reactions among the majority of the audience. A minority might not agree, but that usually made little difference. It was usual for the speakers to invoke histories and arguments which were already generally accepted by the audience. This recitation of arguments and concepts was an effective means of reinforcing a shared history, interests and identity and of creating unity among the political elites.52 Ceremonial speaking can thus be as interesting as innovative speech acts as it reveals which concepts were generally or officially held and what meanings were usually associated with them. Moreover, when concepts and their meanings changed in ceremonial speaking, the change was most likely to have already taken place at the macro level. In Britain, the opening speeches of the King and his ministry and the Addresses of Thanks of the two Houses constitute an unusually uniform series of repeated speech acts that contrasted with the variable and spontaneous parliamentary debates. Embracing every session from 1734 to 1800, they enable the study of long-term continuities and changes in official formulations of the political role of the people in the context of votes of confidence in the ministry.53 The texts of the Royal Speeches were formulated by the ministry well in advance54 and the Addresses by the houses, in principle collectively, after a proposal, possible discussion and sometimes proposed amendments. They can thus hardly be interpreted as mere individual speech acts. They were

52 Mack 2002, 216, 251; for a parallel analysis of ritualistic speaking which, despite continuity in form, went through considerable transformations in content, see Ihalainen 2005 and Ihalainen 2008d. 53 Jones 2006, 232–262. 54 During the debate of 1734, William Shippen said: “I believe it has always been taken for granted, that the Speeches from the throne are the compositions of ministers of state; upon that supposition we have always thought ourselves at liberty to examine every proposition in them; even without doors people are pretty free in their remarks upon them.” (IX, 189) In 1754, Thomas Potter similarly stated: “The speech from the throne at the opening of a session is the speech of the ministers.” (XV, 342) It is, of course, most likely that it was the Prime Minister who finally formulated or at least made decisions about the content of these texts. As the Duke of Argyle put it, the speech was “composed by the minister” (XII, 283); Jones 2006, 235.

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undoubtedly influenced by a number of political considerations which need to be taken into account but which are not always discernable. These carefully considered, discussed and mutually negotiated official documents convey what the majority of the British political elite considered to be the most relevant political terminology on each occasion. They are particularly revealing about the constitutional relationship between the monarch, the government, parliament and the people.55 The unwritten constitution provided constant possibilities for a fruitful debate on the exact nature of this relationship, and that debate took place through these documents as well. Despite the party political background of the speeches and addresses, they were officially seen as texts expressing the will of the King himself or the House as a collective, which increased their authority. Horace Mann appealed to this authority in 1781: [. . .] he thought the House were most dutifully complying with the words of his Majesty from the throne, on the opening of the present session of Parliament, in proceeding to pass a bill like that before them. His Majesty had expressly desired to know the wishes of his people; and in the speech immediately subsequent to the late disgraceful outrages [the Gordon riots], had declared, that he wished to make the happiness and the welfare of the people his own. What could more immediately or more forcibly convey to the royal mind an authentic proof of the sentiments of the people, than the Commons of England agreeing to pass a bill, the avowed objects of which were public reform and public oeconomy? (PR, II, 32).56

The speeches authored by the ministry obviously defined the agenda of at least the majority of the House of Commons. From our point of view, it is important that practically every speech and address made use of vocabulary referring to the people or the nation. Taken together, the royal speeches and the parliamentary addresses create a series of sources that enables the study of long-term changes in constitutional terminology. An analysis of the language used to refer to the people at the macro level also provides a necessary counter-balance to the more micro-level analyses of the uses of the concept of democracy and related terminology in individual parliamentary 55 As Dowdeswell pointed out on 13 November 1770: “Parliamentary Addresses, are considered not only by this nation, but by all others, as the best criterions of the confidence which the House reposes in the king and his ministers.” (XVI, 1055). 56 The Parliamentary Register; or, History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons, (London, 1782–1796), Vol. 2, 32.

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debates. Together, these two strategies of analysis provide a more balanced account of conceptual change at both the collective and the individual levels. There is little doubt as to the accuracy of the representations of these speeches and addresses in the records. Official royal and parliamentary documents were not intentionally misrepresented but were published by a parliamentary decision.57 The contemporaries considered these documents important despite their ceremonial and repetitive nature. They were always reported in great detail in papers, as were most of the related debates. John Campbell, the Duke of Argyle, described the weight of the addresses by stating in 1741: “[e]very address [. . .] ought to be considered as a public record, and to be drawn up, to inform the nation.” (XII, 283).58 In the Royal Speeches and in the Addresses of Thanks of the two Houses, the different powers of the British state were speaking in and about their constitutional roles, searching for ways to express their mutual relationships in a manner acceptable to all sides. This was the only occasion when the monarch—or his ministry who had compiled the speech—and the representatives of ‘the people’ (or, theoretically in Aristotelian terms, ‘aristocracy’ and ‘democracy’) officially met and communicated with each other. While the speeches and addresses may generally seem to use conventional language, times of crisis brought about some noteworthy changes in its content and connotations, including the frequency, applications and meanings of vocabulary referring to the people. Different strategies were used by the government side to persuade Parliament (seen as ‘the people’) or ‘the people’ (seen as separate from Parliament). The two houses, for their part, looked for appropriate ways to express the loyalty of the people or sometimes to demonstrate the role of Parliament and the people together as a political agent independent of the monarchy. Some opposition members might suggest during the debates that the voice of the people and that of Parliament were not in accord in the first place. The speeches and addresses were thus effectively used to communicate messages to the other powers of the state. The Crown was likely to appeal to ‘the people’ to different degrees and in different

57

See Black 2004, 157. Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England: From the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the Year 1803 (London 1806–1820), Vol. 12, column 283; abbreviated (XII, 283). 58

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ways depending on its relative position at the time of the opening of the session. The House of Lords was usually cautious in its formulations, seeing itself as the mainstay of the monarchy, but the House of Commons did occasionally send implicit (and at times actually quite explicit) messages to the monarch and the ministry emphasizing its own constitutional role. A considerable amount of diversity in the responses can be found in the Commons debates on the Addresses of Thanks. Regular parliamentary debates such as those on the Address of Thanks in Britain—or those on the constitution in Sweden—provided opportunities for making unexpected political points, as the subject was such a broad one. The intensity and length of the debates in both houses can be considered an indicator of the degree of crisis in which the political community was felt to be at the time of the opening of each session. During the debates on the Addresses of Thanks, the members of parliament felt freer to discuss any question, however tenuous its relation to the Royal Speech; in this they differed from the usual debates, which had clearly defined subjects. This created opportunities for dissenting opinions on the political role of the people to be put forward. As the debates took place on the opening day of the session every seven years after general elections, some members of parliament, having recently returned from their constituencies, may have wished to voice the views of their electors. It was, after all, the very purpose of Parliament to bring “the sense of the people” to the knowledge of the monarch and the government, and what better forum to do so than the debates on the Addresses of Thanks to the King.59 We have several instances of amendments to the text of the Address being proposed by the opposition, of debates on the messages conveyed by alternative formulations and of divisions, in which the original text was almost always accepted. The address was delivered with nominal unanimity and usually according to the original proposal. This being the case, some speakers merely used the opportunity to make particular political

59 Note on references: The direct citations have been furnished with exact references in brackets, including the number of the volume and column of Cobbett’s Parliamentary History. These should enable the reader to locate the full text of the royal speeches, the addresses of the two Houses, the debates on the addresses and the royal answers without it being necessary to refer to every single one of the hundreds of documents individually.

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points in which they disagreed with the ministry even if they knew that no amendment would be passed. Methodological Challenges Posed by the Use of Parliamentary Reports and Minutes The documentation of parliamentary debates will always remain to some extent imperfect, distorted and possibly partisan in one way or another. Each record of parliamentary speaking needs to be interpreted in the context of its production. The Swedish Estates, for instance, produced very extensive official records, which makes the location of relevant speech acts challenging. In Britain, the records were more selective, but they were unofficial and thus at least potentially subject to distortions. A contrast between these two types of records raises some methodological issues that deserve further consideration. The approved discussion minutes of the Swedish Noble and Burgher Estates are very detailed. Whatever was written down in the Swedish minutes was approved in conjunction with some later plenary session. This probably affected them in two ways: on the one hand, it increased correspondence between the intended key arguments of the original speeches and the record, as the speakers had a chance to correct ‘mistakes’ in the minutes; on the other, the practice may have led to speakers remembering their points differently or changing their minds after the debate, so that a new formulation was recorded.60 Conscious manipulation of the records must have been rare, however, as the other members were able to monitor all changes during the official approval of the minutes. In many ways, and despite the indirect nature of political argumentation in the consensual language that was used, the Swedish records are the best we have for much of the eighteenth century. The Swedish Nobility was the dominant estate; it had numerous members and interests to defend, and it contained articulate speakers who had no fear of expressing their views. Because of their social and political superiority and their over-representation in committees the members of the estate played key roles.61 They were the most highly educated of the estates, and their political thinking was influenced by 60 61

See also Winton 2006, 53. Roberts 1973, 12; Gustafsson 1994, 50.

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links with the outer world and by a long tradition that regarded the estate as the heart of the nation. It is thus no surprise that conceptual revisions were most likely to receive linguistic expression in the plenary sessions of the Noble Estate as the noblemen debated among themselves. Inside the House of Nobility, the members might make use of radical republican language, but outside it they tended to be rather more cautious, though any such attempts to maintain the status quo seem to have been forgotten during the period of free publication after 1766. The Burgher Estate could talk almost endlessly on economic issues, and creative political thought was often overshadowed by particular interests. There the only radical notions were put forward by individual speakers, while most burghers concentrated on advocating local economic interests. The records of the Clerical and Peasant Estates are more limited, but they also contain reports of some interesting debates. The Peasant Estate had few experienced speakers and favoured consensual decision-making without voting, while the Clerical Estate was the smallest in number and practised collegial decision-making, dissention perhaps being considered unworthy of the estate. Sometimes the minutes of these two estates only report the key points of the speakers.62 However, in this study I have not considered it enough just to consult the records of related debates in the plenary sessions of the Estates. The important Secret Committee, which mostly focused on questions of foreign and economic policy, has also been taken into account, even if the meanings of the concept of the people were rarely discussed there. Some of the most interesting debates were actually found in the manuscripts of a joint committee on the constitution in 1769 and of an extended Secret Committee discussing the royal oath in 1771–1772. In both, all four estates were represented and debated the formulation of the constitution, including the political role of the people. This is very unusual for the eighteenth century. The Peasantry may not have been reformist in its political views, but its demands for representation in the joint committee of 1772 were certainly unconventional.63 It may be

62 Lagerroth 1934, 6/2, 108, trusted the ability of the secretaries to catch even improvised statements, which is quite unlikely to have happened. 63 In theory, the Peasant Estate represented all the commoners of the countryside (allmoge), but in practice they belonged to the well-to-do echelons of the land-owning and tax-paying peasantry, constituted members of local elites and formed a type of

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possible to find further debates between the estates as their members met in deputations and committees to discuss particular questions and further uses of the relevant concepts in memoranda written by the members and in correspondence between and within the four estates. However, my chosen strategy has been to focus on plenary sessions and special joint committees, as we can assume that the most important conceptual changes were reflected in speeches given in them. Anyway, by the 1760s the plena had also regained much of their influence from the Secret Committee. In Britain, the state of the records is quite different. The extant press reports are of diverse degrees of reliability, depending on the circumstances of reporting. There are undeniable differences between what actually was said and what was written down, even though the arguments were generally speaking represented identically and consistently in simultaneous reports. Nevertheless, some passages that were included by some reporters were omitted by others. Some reporters may have misunderstood parts of the text or consciously changed the formulations—and even the arguments themselves. It should also be noted that many of the speeches were recorded in reported rather than direct speech. Some of the potentially most interesting debates were never recorded at all. This needs to be borne in mind if we want to study the use of pre-planned rhetoric and the execution of intentional speech acts in specific contexts.64 From the point of view of reconstructing the meanings of the overall political vocabulary in a macrolevel political culture, such distortion is not necessarily a problem; rather it can actually be regarded as a object of further study. We can ask what the alternative ways of expressing the same argument conceptually in that period were. What kind of vocabulary was available, and what kinds of meanings did they carry at the time of speaking and writing the report? The records tell us what may, could or should have been said in Parliament. We are dependent on the press reports as no official minutes of the debates in Parliament were kept in the eighteenth century.65 In gentry. They did not necessarily share interests with the lowest orders and hence did not speak on behalf of the peasant society at large. Gustafsson 1994, 62, 73. They can thus actually be seen as comparable to the landed interests of the House of Commons, while the Burghers represented the moneyed interests. 64 For the variation in reporting, see Reid 1932, 36. 65 The clerks were forbidden to make any notes on speeches. Hatsell, Precedents, Vol. 2, 1818, 265, 267.

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principle, it was illegal for members of the public to publish parliamentary debates,66 the parliamentary elite considering it their privilege to debate behind closed doors. Even so, parliamentary debates were published despite the restrictions. From the 1740s we have several, not always identical accounts of the same speeches. At that stage, the reports were not always written down during the actual debate but in the reporter’s own chambers possibly after a considerable time lag. In fact, Samuel Johnson reported on the debates in Parliament (or, as he called it, the Senate of Lilliput) without ever attending it. However, there is evidence to suggest that even these accounts were based on trustworthy sources and were reasonably reliable.67 The reports analysed in this study for the 1730s and 1740s were published in London newspapers, collected in Richard Chandler’s History and Proceedings of the House of Commons, and reprinted in Cobbett’s Parliamentary History, which is available in electronic form via the Making of the Modern World/Economy database and the Google Books. In the 1750s and 1760s, debates were rarely reported in the press, which explains the limited extent of sources from that period. The situation changed around 1770, and for the rest of the century Cobbett provides a reasonably good collection of debates.68 Especially for the 1790s, we have alternative records as well, including William Woodfall’s Impartial Report of the Debates, 1794–1803. These sources are so extensive that they can safely be used for a macro-level analysis of the development of vocabulary referring to the people. We shall come back to debates related to the change of 1770 towards the end of Chapter Two. This change is significant from a source critical point of view because it meant that debates could then be published more frequently despite the protests of the Commons. The demand

66 Thomas 1971, 336; A similar kind of secrecy was long maintained in the Swedish Diet as well, where only extracts from the records were made available to the other estates. Nevertheless, in 1756 the Riksdag decided to begin publishing an official Riksdag journal that included notices to the public of matters on which the Riksdag had been able to make decisions. In 1766, Anders Chydenius campaigned for a freedom of the press that could include the possibility of publishing the minutes of the Riksdag so that the electors would be informed about the actions of their delegates at the Riksdag, but this was not approved in such a broad form. Lagerroth 1934, 5/1, 177, 196. 67 Herzog 1998, 71–72. 68 Steinmetz has used the same collection for his analyses of the debates of the early 1780s. Steinmetz 1993, 46; Wahrman, in contrast, has questioned Cobbett as a trustworthy source for the study of rhetoric and argumentation in Parliament. Wahrman 1992, 90–91, 108.

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for more extensive reports was obviously rising, and the reports in turn enabled growing interaction between the Commons and public political debate. The House of Lords also tried to control the publishing of its debates, and hence some records are missing or incomplete. Wider reporting began in the upper house around 1775, as restrictions on strangers attending its sessions were relaxed and opposition to the press disappeared. Even if Cobbett’s Parliamentary History offers far from a complete account of what was said in the two houses,69 we do have a sufficient source basis for studying the language used to refer to the people by the members of the Lords as well. It can at times be complemented by the Parliamentary Register and other collected reports. The reports became increasingly reliable after the American War of Independence. Even in the early nineteenth century, however, members of parliament might still protest against accounts printed in newspapers, some of them claiming that the reports were contrary to what they had argued. In 1798 James Martin suggested: “Those who wrote the reports made gentlemen say just what they themselves pleased.” (XXXIV, 153) Other members of parliament had already started to sell corrected copies of their speeches to the papers in the 1790s or had had them printed at their own cost.70 The attitudes of the members of parliament were divided but obviously changing. By 1798, it was being suggested that publishing reports strengthened the democratic element of the constitution, the word ‘democratic’ being used conventionally in a pejorative sense. William Windham, Secretary at War, opposed reporting as an attempt to turn Britain from a representative system into a democratic system of the French kind: [. . .] the general tendency of publishing the proceedings of that House was to change the government from a representative, to an entirely democratic one. What would be the natural effect of such publication? It must be that of changing the present form of government, and of making it democratical; for it was calling every day on the public to judge of the proceedings of parliament. By these daily publications the people were taught to look

69

Namier & Brooke 1964, 522; Thomas 1971, 141–143, 229, 336; Ditchfield 1989, 204–205; Wahrman 1992, 86; Black 2004, 158–159. 70 Thorne 1986, 368–369; Herzog 1998, 72–74; Wahrman 1992, 88–89; Reid 2000, 127.

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upon themselves as present at the discussion of all the proceedings of parliament, and sitting in judgment on them. The practice of publishing debates was an appeal from the representative body, to the people at large out of doors, of all orders, from the highest to the lowest.71

Windham aptly summarized exactly what was happening in Britain: Parliamentary and public debates were becoming intertwined as a consequence of the publication of parliamentary debates. Parliamentarians became more frequently engaged in public debates, sometimes appealing to the people at large rather than just the chamber. The members of parliament were highly aware of what was published in the name of the people. Political consciousness may also have been increasing among the public in all orders. As Charles Tilly has suggested, popular politics became parliamentarized in the sense that the public became interested in what was going on in Parliament and wanted to actively influence its decision-making.72 Already in 1798, many contemporaries understood just what was at stake in the publication of the debates. William Wilberforce maintained that their publication was both “beneficial to the country” and “perfectly constitutional”, allowing the people to observe the conduct and language of their representatives (XXXIV, 167). Here we have an early statement advocating the active participation of the people in the parliamentary decision-making process as observers informed by the publication of debates. The conceptions of the politicians revealed by their choice of language also came under public scrutiny. Wilberforce’s view of the relationship between Parliament and the public became possible in the aftermath of the French Revolution. We can be sure that these arguments were presented in the Commons, although there may be some variance in the exact wording. Some further reservations need to be made, however. Dror Wahrman has shown how in debates related to class issues in the 1790s, papers supporting opposite political views could summarize the same speech quite differently. He suggests that the newspaper reports were reconstructions of the debates affected by the political stances of the reporters and the rhetorical usage of the reporting newspaper, not facsimile

71

Mr. Tierney’s Complaint against “The Times” Newspaper for misrepresenting the Speeches of the Members, XXXIV, 158–159, 164; misleading reporting was also a subject of complaint during this debate. Black 2004, 159. 72 Tilly 1997, 245–273.

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reproductions of them. The political language of the reports was influenced by the concepts and rhetorical practices of those who produced them, even though this influence may have been unconscious. Parliament could be made to serve the divergent interests of the public.73 Reporters might hear, understand, remember and write down arguments in different ways, perhaps making use of competing political vocabularies. At best, a newspaper could report only selected parts of major debates, simply because of the lack of space in the midst of a variety of topics, and hence the reporters tended to focus on the most famous speakers and omit less interesting ones. The reporters themselves conceded that their reports contained “rather the substance than the circumstance”, “the leading points” or “the substance and purport” of the debates, not every argument or formulation.74 Jennifer Mori has advised scholars not to rely excessively on reports of William Pitt’s speeches from the 1790s, although she and Pitt’s biographer, William Hague, have quoted them. The records were certainly not complete, as Pitt is known to have handed in a script of his speech only three times, but the content of the speeches is relatively well known.75 As we shall see, despite the variety of reporters the reports of what Pitt said about democracy were consistent to a high degree, which suggests that they are reasonably trustworthy. The records are, therefore, not perfect, but they are still extremely useful as historical sources. Different reports of the same speeches usually represent the same basic arguments even though they may differ as to exactly how the arguments were expressed. Despite contemporary claims about misleading reporting, conscious significant distortions were probably rare, particularly as so much political language was shared. The distortions mainly concerned some highly contested concepts.76 The members of parliament carefully supervised the printed reports and were prepared to make complaints about them, and this made reporters careful not to change the content of the speeches on purpose too often or too much (see also Wilberforce in XXXIV, 168). A number of members of parliament also trusted the accuracy of

73

Wahrman 1992, 85, 88, 90, 110. Ditchfield 1989, 206 (first citation); Wahrman 1992, 86–87 (second citation); Black 2004, 138, 158 (third citation); Bullard 2005, 321, 324; cf. Colclough 2005, 129. 75 Mori 2004, 68. 76 Steinmetz 1993, 46; Herzog 1998, 74. 74

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the reports, thanking the newspapers and citing them to attack their opponents.77 The reports reflect contemporary language use even in those cases where reporting modified the exact formulation of the argument. Even if they did not always follow the arguments exactly as the speakers would have liked to see them published, the British reports illustrate the language use that was possible at that time in Parliament. They tell us what was probably said in Parliament, or what may or could or should have been said there. The reports tell us about macro-level conventional language use, and from them we can discern the redefining speech acts executed by individual politicians. Parliamentary speaking in earlier periods has been successfully studied on the basis of much scantier evidence, and thus there is no reason why we should dismiss the extensive eighteenth-century records. The vocabulary constituted by the expressions “the people”, “representation”, “democracy” and later on also “the sovereignty of the people” was, undoubtedly, a contested field in Parliament and potentially in parliamentary reports as well. Yet it remains to be shown that there existed any particular reasons for newspapers to manipulate instances of the use of this vocabulary. The reports reflect the overall change in political vocabulary among the British parliamentary elite and political discourse more broadly. When we analyse past political language using printed reports, we are simultaneously studying both parliamentary and public debates. Even though the individual speaker is always important, it is even more important to understand how the collective body, the British political community as a whole, either continued to represent the political role of the people in conventional terms or changed its language through time, and indeed quite radically as a consequence of the French Revolution.

77

Black 2004, 161–162.

CHAPTER TWO

VARIATIONS IN BRITISH PARLIAMENTARY CONCEPTIONS OF THE PEOPLE, 17341771 Parliaments have had a good Effect on the People, by keeping them quiet; and the People on Parliaments, by keeping them within Bounds.1 I pay no regard whatever to the voice of the people: it is our duty to do what is proper, without considering what may be agreeable: their business is to chuse us; it is our business to act constitutionally, and to maintain the independency of parliament: [. . .] (XVII, 149).2

The early eighteenth-century debate on ‘democracy’ tended to still be limited to learned circles and their deliberations about various forms of government. These were often dominated by an Aristotelian scepticism about the possibility of making the rule of the people, that is direct or “pure” democracy, work in practice. Pure democracy was considered an historical phenomenon that had occurred only in very small and simple states such as ancient Athens. As far as contemporary regimes were concerned, democracy was sometimes seen as applicable to the Dutch Republic, some Swiss cantons and a few German cities.3 In this period, democracy was nowhere yet understood as compatible with the principle of representation. Only within the framework of mixed governments such as England, Venice or Sweden could democratic elements play even a theoretical role, side by side with monarchy and aristocracy. By the early eighteenth century, political principles and practices resembling in some respects later systems of representative government had already emerged in Britain, the Netherlands and Sweden, and to a lesser extent in Poland. In these countries, the original principle of the consent of the subjects being required for new taxation had been

1 Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon Parties; in Several Letters to Caleb D’Anvers, Esq; dedicated to the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole. The third edition, (London 1735), 158–159. 2 Charles James Fox in the Commons on 25 March 1771. 3 Palmer 1953, 204–205; Maier 1972, 839, 842. The Swedish or English forms of government were also sometimes viewed as democracies by critical outside observers.

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extended to concern laws more generally. The principle of representation (the term “representation” was not yet always used) had also been established for practical reasons, as the governing of large areas called for representation when consent for taxes and laws was sought. The principle of delegates or representatives being elected to their posts had also become widely accepted. Free subjects thus met in elected representative legislatures every now and then at local, regional and national levels.4 In some countries, the relationship between national representative institutions and the people had already become quite strong and mutual, as suggested by Viscount Bolingbroke in the quotation above. In principle, the British members of parliament paid attention to what they understood to be the sentiments of the people, and parliamentary proceedings were followed by the public, as far as that was possible under limits set by strict parliamentary privilege. Generally speaking, the parliaments and estates of the early eighteenth century continued to defend the existing privileges of the higher orders, particularly those of the nobility and the clergy. The representatives of the common people still constituted only a minority in representative assemblies. The delegates of the so-called people thus actually represented the higher orders. Even when the Swedish peasants, for instance, sent their representatives to the Diet, the spokesmen of the common people did not always have full participatory rights in decision-making. The British House of Commons, for its part, was dominated by the gentry rather than by freeholders. Furthermore, the representatives of the people in the House of Commons represented no more than five percent of the population over the age of twenty in the period preceding the Reform Act of 1832. Despite these limitations to representation, a balance of power had been reached in the British constitution, after the conflicts of the seventeenth century, in which the monarch and Parliament limited each other’s power. Also within Parliament itself, a much admired balance between aristocratic and democratic elements of the constitution had been achieved in that the power of the hereditary aristocracy of the Lords was countered and often bypassed by the Commons, which could, in principle, be interpreted as representing the power of the people. Parliament met annually, held lengthy sessions and influenced governance, particularly

4

Dahl 1998, 22.

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through its power to decide on economic and financial matters.5 The relative significance of the Commons rose in the period 1734–1771, but the influence of the Lords also remained considerable. Marilyn Morris has summarized the seventeenth-century background of the political role of the people in the terminology of modern political theory—something that the following analysis replaces with an analysis of contemporary uses of language. According to Morris, even in republican political theory “the sovereignty of the people rested in the gentry.” The republicanism of the Levellers derived “popular sovereignty” from natural rights, but even “they were not true democrats”. In the Leveller case, “sovereignty” was considered to have remained with the people and not to have been transferred to their representatives. The interpretation of the majority of the Republicans who abolished the monarchy, by contrast, was that they themselves constituted the people and hence “the sovereignty of the people rested in the people’s elected representatives.”6 The republican tradition, as incorporated in English political thought in the eighteenth century, taught that the people had a political role, but that the members of parliament constituted the people who were politically significant. While the principle of political power being derived from popular consent had been reinforced by the Revolution of 1688 and had become generally recognized by the British political elite by the 1730s, excessive involvement of the people in the political process continued to be treated with suspicion. Even so, the inheritance of the seventeenth century never disappeared: England had witnessed demands for the liberty and power of the people during the Civil Wars,7 and the Whig party adopted the principle of the consent of the people as the principal basis of its ideology, even though this did not entail an open defence of the sovereignty of the people. The early eighteenth century saw quite an extensive debate on the political role of the people, in which, increasingly, Parliament was seen as the forum in which the voice of the

5

Dahl 1998, 21, 23; Jupp 2006, 54–82. Morris 1998, 82; For a similar kind of “history” of the sovereignty of the people without the history of the actual phrase being taken into consideration, see Goldsworthy 1999, 176–177. 7 Skinner 2006, 156–168. 6

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people was heard, insofar as the existence of this political phenomenon was recognized at all.8 In any case, in the early eighteenth century, the British people possessed relatively wide suffrage. Britain had a comparatively free press after 1695, which supported the emergence, mobilization and expression of the views of the people. The press informed politicians about the sentiments of the people and taught the people about the actions, goals and divisions of the political elite. According to John Markoff, this political culture made Britain “a major pioneer in modern, disorderly politics, in the forms and modalities by which ordinary people have challenged powerholders”.9 Charles Tilly has further suggested that the British system contributed significantly to the parliamentarization of politics more generally. Popular politics was by the 1790s taken into account in Parliament, while the public actively attempted to influence Parliament. As a consequence, Britain became a pioneer in the combination of a national representative parliamentary body with widespread popular mobilization.10 This gives us a good reason to start our analysis with the British case. The self-understanding of this political community was not yet based on any clear concept of democracy, however. To find out how the political role of the people was understood in this period, it is not only the word “democracy” but also the language referring to the people as a whole that we need to construct, analyse and compare with that used in other eighteenth-century representative bodies. For much of the period 1734–1771, language alluding to the people rose to a position of major political significance in only a few particular parliamentary debates. Ceremonial definitions of the people were characterized by continuity. Around 1770, however, the concept of the people gained a new degree of political importance in parliamentary and public debates in both Britain and Sweden. Before proceeding to a more detailed analysis of the evolving use of references to the people, democracy and, later on, to the sovereignty of the people in British parliamentary debates, let us summarize some of the main arguments on democracy put forward by European political theorists in the period which preceded the outbreak of the

8 9 10

Dickinson 1977, 130; Gunn 1983, 73–79, 271–272. Markoff 1999, 684, 686. Tilly 1997, 245−273.

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first modern revolutions. Of the Continental debates, the French one was—despite British prejudices against its political system—the most relevant. French treatises on political theory were much more frequently translated into English than those published in any other European language. Their influence on the English language of politics was indirect but still considerable. In early eighteenth-century France, démocratie was still considered a foreign word that was mostly used with reference to ancient history. Democracy was a defined as a “form of government in which the people have all authority” and as one that “only flourished in the republics of Rome and Athens”. Furthermore, the common assumption was that “seditions and turmoil happen often in Democracies” and “the worst of all outbursts is a democratic one”. Democracy was thus seen as no more than an historical form of government that had existed in the classical world, and one that possessed considerable inherent shortcomings.11 The implications were that, in democracy, it was not the most qualified people but those capable of winning the constantly changing favour of the uneducated people who were in charge of public affairs. The impracticality and irrelevance of democracy as a form of government had already been demonstrated two thousand years previously.12 Democracy was not seen as a system for the contemporary world, and particularly not for France.13 However, there also existed an alternative tradition of viewing the power of the people. Jean Bodin’s late sixteenth-century theory on sovereignty suggested that sovereignty could belong to the people as a whole without this necessarily leading to a democracy. Bodin also emphasized equality as the essence of democracy and referred to some contemporary Swiss city states as instances of democracy, in addition to the conventional cases of Athens and Rome. Despite his advocacy of the monarchy, Bodin recommended the inclusion of some democratic elements in monarchy in order to make it more stable.14 Such an approach made it possible to view democracy also as a contemporary element in the constitution that was capable of having some good effects. In the 1730s, the Marquis d’Argenson elaborated Bodin’s ideas in an unpublished text, calling for a “democratic administration” 11 12 13 14

Dippel 1986, 58–59; Markoff 1999, 661, 664. Dippel 1986, 59. Wright 2002, 291. Dippel 1986, 59–60.

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and suggesting that monarchy and democracy could be combined by opening the political system to the “middling sorts”.15 According to him, monarchical regulation and democracy of the Dutch type, which he saw as functioning through deputies elected by the people, would produce the best results. The democratic element, consisting of an assembly of men equal among themselves, would cooperate with the monarchy, decrease aristocratic influence, and help the monarch to deduce what the common good was. The advancement of equality within such a monarchical system appeared as “the fortunate progress of Democracy”, “democracy” standing for the commoner estates. Yet even d’Argenson did not deny that democracy was apt to lead to divisions and revolts.16 It would go too far to interpret d’Argenson’s speculations as a combination of democracy and representation. He still understood democracy in traditional terms as “popular Government, in which the whole people shares equally” and as a form of government which could degenerate into anarchy if it became “the Government of the multitude”. True democracy functioned in d’Argenson’s view through deputies.17 The relevance of d’Argenson’s points is also decreased by the fact that they were first published posthumously only in the 1760s, and disseminated more generally only after the French Revolution. Similarly, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably’s unpublished dialogue (Des droits et des devoirs du citoyen, 1758) which contained a passing reference combining sovereignty and the people and a recommendation for a return to a mixed government in France hardly changed the overall anti-democratic nature of the debate.18 As we saw in the introduction, Montesquieu, Rousseau and the other leading Enlightenment philosophers did not redefine democracy or even consider it a particularly relevant form of government. Even so, we have some evidence of the conception of democracy being modified by the French Enlightenment. One of the first positive definitions of the concept dates from the Encyclopédie (1754), when Louis de Jaucourt described democracy as “that admirable government”. In the edition of 1779, he suggested, much as Montesquieu had done: “A republic in which the sovereignty lies in the hands of the people 15 16 17 18

Dippel 1986, 60–61. Palmer 1953, 205; Rosanvallon 1995, 143; Dunn 2005, 93–96. Dunn 2005, 95–96. Wright 2002, 297.

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is a democracy.” While this form of government had a tendency to degenerate and was unthinkable in large states, some ancient examples demonstrated that it had its virtues and elevated the spirits of the people.19 The customary suggestion has been that it was only the American and French Revolutions that made democracy a relevant alternative in political discourse. Turning this assumption into a hypothesis to be tested, I have divided my analysis of eighteenth-century British parliamentary debates into three parts: debates before the American crisis, debates during and after the American Revolution, and debates in the 1790s during and after the French Revolution. We shall begin in this chapter with the era that preceded the troubles in America and see what kind of continuities and transformations took place in language referring to the people before the constitutional challenge from across the Atlantic. Three previous studies—by Harry Dickinson, Kathleen Wilson and Hannah Barker—provide a good starting point for such an analysis. Dickinson, combining the study of political theory and popular political activism, has pointed out that the aristocratic elite who ruled Britain in the eighteenth century were convinced that they had a natural right to political power over the lower orders. They had been taught to view pure democracy as an inherently unstable form of government likely to degenerate into anarchy, and hence, for them, it remained out of the question to let the people at large meddle with government. Political authority was to be shared by the monarch and a Parliament consisting of wealthy men capable of controlling how the Crown spent the taxes they paid. The parliamentary elite saw themselves as constituting ‘the people’—insofar as they actually used the concept in a political sense at all. Active political rights were limited to the political elite and, during elections, to a patriarchally guided electorate. However, the parliamentary elite had to come to terms with a fast developing and increasingly diversified political culture in which a considerable number of people eager to influence the parliamentary decision-making process participated.20 Within such a popular political culture, various calls for the “the people” to be given a central position in politics

19 Maier 1972, 841; Dippel 1986, 63; This view would be adopted by Charles James Fox, among others. 20 Dickinson 1995, 4–5, 7, 161; see also Gunn 1983, 273; Rogers 1989.

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arose. It is not even quite clear whether the members of the governing establishment were united by “their fear of popular sovereignty”, as Dickinson suggests.21 As we shall see, the parliamentary elite debated the political role of the people quite intensively, using the concept of the people in a variety of senses. According to Dickinson, too, the reference of the concept of the people came closer to that of the electorate in the course of the eighteenth century.22 Wilson has added the suggestion that, as a consequence of both the widely held principle of the monarchy being limited by the voice of the people (or, rather, by that of the governing elite) and the developing political culture of the time, representing the “sense of the people” (a contemporary expression for what was later called “the will of the people”) developed into a central rhetorical strategy upon which a wide variety of political arguments could be based. As a rhetorical tool, the concept of the people referred to a vague community invented for the purposes of political argumentation. This community was often assumed, by the opposition in particular, to exist outside Parliament as opposed to consisting of the members of parliament, and it was seen as potentially supporting views and interests that might differ radically from those of the members of the political elite. Wilson’s own research has mostly focused on the extra-parliamentary political culture of the “sense of the people” as expressed in print and other forums of the public sphere.23 A broad and deliberately ambiguous concept of the people was widely used in various spheres of political discourse, both inside and outside Parliament. Appeals to the people could be used to legitimate very diverse political views both by members of the political establishment and by those challenging the existing political order. Most members of the political elite, including many leading ministers, willingly argued that they were keenly aware of and indeed actually represented—at least in theory—the sentiments of the people outside the establishment. Similarly, many oppositional groups made rhetorical use of the concept of the people in attempts to justify their existence and alternative political views. By using the concept of the people they were able to define themselves as a counter-balance to what they saw 21

Dickinson 1995, 256; cf. Turkka 2007, 28. According to Turkka, “a role for the people in political life was still a thing of the future”. 22 Dickinson 1976, 204. 23 Wilson 1995, 3–5, 17–19.

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as the abuses of those in power endangering the interests of the people. Wilson concludes that a notion of popular sovereignty lay behind much populist political argument in the eighteenth century.24 Barker has added the observation that the terms “the people” and “the public” were increasingly used in the press with reference to wider and vaguely defined sections of the population. The papers liked to claim that it was in their columns that the voice of the people was to be heard.25 Dickinson’s, Wilson’s and Barker’s approaches to, and conclusions on, eighteenth-century British references to the people will be supported by much of what is presented below, although further nuances of the parliamentary concepts of the people and democracy will be added. It is now time to explore the parliamentary dimension of language alluding to the people and democracy in mid-eighteenthcentury Britain, keeping in mind the growing extra-parliamentary political culture with which Parliament was interacting. In this interaction, Parliament was not always as a mere reactionary force. The Political Role of the People in the Septennial Act Debates of 1734: Walpole’s Definition of the Limits of Democracy According to available British parliamentary records, the concept of democracy first emerged in a debate held in 1734 on the proposed repeal of the Septennial Act of 1716. This Act, which remained in force throughout the eighteenth century, had extended the maximum term of each Parliament from three to seven years. It had strengthened the status of Parliament as the centre of political debate and the exercise of political power over the more direct power of the people realized in connection with general elections. In that sense, the Septennial Act had created a wider gulf between the people and Parliament. On 13 March 1734, the Commons debated a Tory motion, supported by a considerable group of Whig Patriots, to repeal the Septennial Act. William Bromley (Jr.), as an experienced Tory critic of the Walpole ministry, had been selected to propose the bill. In his opening speech, he maintained that the people in general disliked long parliaments, whereas triennial parliaments were “supported by the 24 25

Wilson 1995, 19–20. Barker 2002, 94.

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common Voice of the People”. According to Bromley, the people saw the Septennial Bill as an attack on their inherent liberties and thus as a dangerous innovation in the constitution. One of the main purposes of the frequent meetings and limited duration of parliaments since 1694 had, after all, been to balance the power of the monarch and the rights of the subjects by securing the liberties of the people.26 In Bromley’s opinion, frequent elections had enabled the people to change its representatives within a reasonably short period of time, and this right should now be restored.27 Bromley did not build his argument on any sophisticated concept of the sovereignty of the people; such a concept was not yet even available then. However, he connected the concept of the people and the ideal of the people being represented. “Representation” was not yet the exact term for this ideal, but the verb “to represent” and the noun “representative” figured prominently in this kind of discourse (HPHC, III, 140–141). More generally also, those opposing Walpole and the Act appealed to the rights of the people and to the principle of its being represented. According to Sir John St. Aubyn: “The People have an unquestionable Right to frequent new Parliaments by ancient Usage.” And it was “the most indubitable, the most essential Privilege of the People” to choose “their own Representative” and to do so frequently. While frequent parliaments would allow the monarch to receive “the fresh Sense of the Nation” and “the Opinion of his People” often enough to keep him informed about what “the people” felt at any given moment, long parliaments encouraged electoral bribery and increased the ministers’ influence over the ruler to the extent that he could no longer consult “the natural Representation of the People” (HPHC, III, 141, 143–144).

26 Because of differing notions of liberty, what these rights actually consisted of remained a topic of debate through the eighteenth century. Another constant disagreement between the government and the opposition was whether the ministry and Parliament were protecting the rights of the people or endangering them. Dickinson 1995, 162–163. 27 The History and Proceedings of the House of Commons of Great Britain (HPHC) (London 1741), Vol. 3, 137–140 (HPHC, III, 137–140). Bromley himself would lose his seat in the elections of 1734; The dates of the persons are given only in cases where there is a risk of two homonymous persons being confused. If no reference is given, biographical information on the speakers is based on relevant articles in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004), and sometimes on articles in the older Dictionary of National Biography or in The History of Parliament. References to the authors of these biographical works are given only if a major conclusion on the significance of the actions of the political agent is cited.

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From the opposition point of view, the status of the Commons as representing the people was thus threatened by the alleged corruption of the regime. The government side, by contrast, insisted that the people had good reason to be pleased with what their representatives in Parliament—representing the entire body of the commoner estates—had accomplished since the introduction of the Septennial Act (HPHC, III, 150–151, 184). The concept of the nation was used in this and similar debates as a close synonym of “the people”. However, the nation was seen mainly as a community whose interests, welfare, freedom, safety, tranquillity and happiness the members of parliament were safeguarding; the nation was not so much represented as an active political agency which the members were representing, and hence the political potential of the nation did not appear so great as that of the people. The nation remained an object of the actions and control of the members of parliament as opposed to being seen as a primary political agent. Rival groups were often accused of abusing the nation by causing unnecessary ferment within it. Because of the rather passive role of the nation as a political collective, most of our attention below will be focused on the uses of the concept of the people. “The nation” will come up when it is used as a synonym of “the people” in a political sense. While the concepts of the people and the verb “to represent” were combined in the above-mentioned manner, the notion of sovereignty remained one associated solely with monarchical power; this would be the rule at least until the constitutional confrontations with the Americans in the 1760s. The definition of the concepts of the monarchy and sovereignty made by the Duke of Beaufort, Charles Noel Somerset, illustrates the interconnection between them and the distinction of the people from sovereignty. The association between the people and representation was much clearer: [. . .] this House is properly the grand Inquest of the Nation, they are to represent the Grievances of the People to their Sovereign; and the People are always to choose proper Representatives for that Purpose (HPHC, III, 159).

Annual elections would, according to this Jacobite Tory and constant critic of Walpole, ensure that each members of parliament would remain “a proper Representative of the People”. Another influential Jacobite, Watkin Williams-Wynn, emphasized the need for the regime to enjoy the support of the people, which

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would indeed supplement parliamentary support if the people were allowed to express their sentiments through annual elections. Frequent elections would also demonstrate to both the monarch and the entire world “the true Sense of the Generality of the People” and strengthen the monarchical form of government. The very purpose of Parliament was, as Somerset had said, to function as “the great Council of the Nation” and “to represent to his majesty the Grievances of the People”. This could only happen when the members of parliament were the “most proper Representatives of the People” in their communities and were chosen without corruption (HPHC, III, 165, 168–169). The rhetoric of the people functioned here, too, as a means to express Tory, even Jacobite, discontent with the Walpole ministry. Many speakers in favour of more frequent elections rejected the government claims that the members should see themselves as independent of their electors between elections. They thus actually spoke in favour of an imperative mandate, carrying on the old debate on whether members of parliament were representatives who voted entirely freely or delegates who should observe the instructions given by their voters.28 Walter Plumer, a leading opposition Whig with a commercial background, insisted that he always listened to the wishes of those he represented and argued: If those the People chose to represent them in this House, were to continue in that Station only during the Pleasure of the People, the Representatives would, I believe, have a proper Regard for the Interests of the People (HPHC, III, 175; see also 180).

The veteran Tory, Sir William Wyndham, a leading figure of the Whig opposition to Walpole and a close political ally of Viscount Bolingbroke, regarded compliance with the expectations of the people as selfevident: [. . .] this is what the People have reason to expect from Parliament; there is nothing now desired but what the People have a Right to; they have now, they always had a right to frequent new Parliaments (HPHC, III, 189–190).

The people were clearly a core concept in the opposition argument in favour of more frequent elections. These would, of course, enable the opposition to challenge the government more often while simul-

28

Dickinson 1995, 38.

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taneously also making it less easy for the government to manipulate Parliament by corruption. Wyndham saw no problem in holding frequent elections “when the Nation is in a Ferment”, as he considered elections “one of the chief Supports of the Freedom of the Nation” (HPHC, III, 191–192). He maintained, with an implicit reference to the preceding Excise Crisis, that political fermentation occurred only when “the People’s Rights” were violated and would best be solved by the organization of new elections. Without elections, the legal curtailment of the actions of those who threatened their rights would be “out of the Power of the People” (HPHC, III, 192).29 Wyndham’s appeal to the wishes of the people as an argument in favour of the repeal of the Septennial Act and in support of annual elections was clear: [. . .] this is what the People desire; [. . .] The Members of Parliament may for one Year be look’d on as the real and true Representatives of the People (HPHC, III, 197).

No wonder Wyndham was warmly applauded by the opposition for this speech. It shows how central the idea of representation of the people through Parliament—albeit not yet the concept of democracy—was in the language of the opposition already in the 1730s. The defenders of the ministry used language referring to the people in a different way in 1734. First and foremost, these Court Whigs emphasized the need for keeping the popular influence over the government in check. [Thomas?] Robinson warned of the inherent danger of making sudden changes in electoral practices, particularly if “the lower Class of the People” became parties in politics. This was a problem because they did not necessarily represent the interests of the people proper at all. Past experience indicated to Robinson that long-sitting parliaments in particular had been willing to defend the rights of the people vis-à-vis the Crown. He also doubted whether the majority of the electors really wanted to change this practice; it was rather the mob who clamoured for change. In fact, the unenfranchised populace were “fond of Noise and Bustle” and “glad of any Change by which they might have a more frequent Chance to get drunk and idle” (HPHC, III, 149–155).

29

In the Excise Crisis of 1733–1734, urban tradesmen and the parliamentary opposition had successfully, in the name of the defence of liberty and property, opposed Walpole’s proposal to increase the number of armed excise officers. Dickinson 1977, 182; Gunn 1983, 79; Wilson 1995, 124–125.

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In the aftermath of the popular petitions and riots of the Excise Crisis, which could be regarded as evidence of the validity of the lessons of classical political theory concerning the character of the populace, the government side had a deep distrust of the populace at large. Ministry supporters in the Commons did not hesitate to represent the interests of the true people and those of the populace as a whole as potentially conflicting. According to this definition of the people, in its vindication of septennial parliaments the government appeared as a defender of the true interests of the people. The argument of the ministry was put differently by Sir William Yonge, a Lord of the Treasury, who pointed out that a principal reason for opposing the repeal of the Septennial Act was the tendency of the common people to become so provoked by elections that their animosities endangered the safety of the country. Furthermore, “the Desires of the Nation in general” were virtually impossible to determine. Recalling the riots of the Excise Crisis, Yonge likewise believed that it was rather “the Mob, I mean such as have no Business with Elections” who wished to get drunk, to be idle and to riot in connection with annual elections. He maintained that the voters would not want to see the implementation of a change that would so needlessly jeopardize the government (HPHC, III, 185–188). Because the populace as distinct from the people proper would abuse frequent elections, mob rule had to be countered by the power of a well-managed Parliament. Yonge also had a personal reason for opposing frequently contested elections: he had spent considerable sums of money in order to win his seat in every election in which he had stood. Having benefited from offices distributed by the Whig oligarchy, he eagerly defended ministerial patronage and influence in the Commons, frequently suggesting that the opposition was attempting to subvert the constitution.30 Sir John Willes (1685–1761), a staunch supporter of Walpole, also wished to save on election expenses after some costly contests. He emphasized the independence of the members of parliament once they had taken their seats. Though the candidates were dependent upon the people at election time, the power of the people was transferred to them through the elections once and for all, and hence the people themselves were unable to rule the country. If allowed to do so, the people would be easily misled. Furthermore, it was better to keep the

30

Dickinson 2004.

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working people employed than to increase their agitation with more frequent elections (HPHC, III, 172, 174). That would only harm the true interests of the people proper. Then Robert Walpole made one of his most famous speeches before the House. The prime minister was, indeed, the first to introduce the concept of democracy (in the form of the adjective “democratical”) to British parliamentary discourse in this context.31 Walpole was clearly a linguistic innovator: only a month earlier he had also warned the Commons that the opposition was advocating “stratocracy”, the power of the streets. The use of the pejorative classical concept and the description of the proposed innovation as an excessive form of democracy was evidently a conscious speech act partly motivated by Walpole’s personal experience of mob violence the year before.32 It also had a connection with current public debates. The concept of democracy had not appeared that frequently in the public debates of the preceding years. Charles Rollin, for instance, had referred to the risk of tyranny “in a state purely democratical”, as liberty could only survive in such a state if there was complete equality.33 Elsewhere in the public debate, democracy had occasionally been viewed in neutral terms. Ephraim Chamber (1728) had connected ‘the people’ and ‘sovereignty’ and presented the Roman Republic as a democracy. For Chambers, “republic”, “democracy” and “popular government” were nearly synonymous terms, though democracy was essentially a form of government of the past: Democracy, a Form of Government, wherein the Sovereignty, or Supreme Authority, is lodged in the People, who exercise the same by Persons of their own Order, deputed for that Purpose. This is the most ancient Form of Government. The most flourishing Democracies were those of Rome and Athens. The modern Republicks, as Venice, and the United Provinces, are rather Aristocracies than Democracies. The Government of Basil, however, is a Democracy; so are some of the free Cities in Germany.34

31 The uniqueness of Walpole’s speech act can be verified by consulting Cobbett’s Parliamentary History of England in MOMW. 32 Walpole had himself been attacked by a crowd in April 1733. Wilson 1995, 126; Black 2001, 244. 33 Charles Rollin, The Method of Teaching and Studying the Belles Letters . . . (London 1734), 285. 34 Ephraim Chambers, Cyclopædia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences . . . (London 1728), Vol. 1, 184; Vol. 2, 996. Chambers connected the concepts

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Nathan Bailey’s dictionary (1733) represented democracy as a system in which “the Supreme or Legislative Power” was “lodged in the common People, or Persons chosen out from them.”35 According to Thomas Dyche’s dictionary (1740), democracy was “a form of government, wherein the supreme authority is in the hands of the people.”36 A book referring to Walpole had, however, recently taken up the concept of democracy: the Dissertation upon Parties, written by Viscount Bolingbroke, an opposition leader without a seat in Parliament and an old political rival of Walpole, and previously published in the opposition organ The Craftsman, 37 was obviously the text to which Walpole was responding in his speech. No member had spoken about democracy during the preceding debate, whereas the opposition headed by Bolingbroke was seriously challenging Walpole at this time.38 The Craftsman had, indeed, suggested that the people might resist the supreme legislative power in extraordinary circumstances and return to its original, natural right. The result of the Excise Crisis was interpreted as a demonstration of “the original Power of the People, in their collective Body”.39 As far as forms of government were concerned, Bolingbroke defended “this Mixture of Monarchical, Aristocratical and Democratical Power, blended together in one System, and by these three Estates balancing one another”, seeing this as the foundation of a free constitution. Bolingbroke had also advocated “Parliamentary Methods” of governing the British people, arguing that “Parliaments have had a good Effect on the People, by keeping them quiet; and the People on Parliaments, by keeping them within Bounds”.40 Parliament enabled politics to be carried out through deliberation rather than by direct popular action. Consistent with classical notions of democracy, Bolingbroke had rejected “Absolute Democracy” as leading to tyranny and anarchy if it

of sovereignty and the people, which was rare in early eighteenth-century English literature. 35 Nathan Bailey, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary . . . The sixth edition, (London 1733). 36 Thomas Dyche, A New General English Dictionary . . . The third edition, (London 1740). 37 Pole 1966, 415–416; Langford 1989, 25. 38 Skinner 1974, 95–96. 39 Wilson 1995, 134; Goldsworthy 1999, 176. 40 Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon Parties; in Several Letters to Caleb D’Anvers, Esq; dedicated to the Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole. The third edition, (London 1735), 158–159.

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followed “the Will of the whole Community”.41 Instead, he had recommended “the Parliamentary Controul of the Crown” by the combined efforts of democracy and aristocracy,42 a suggestion that was not unlike d’Argenson’s contemporary reasoning in France. In Bolingbroke’s view, there was no threat of the Commons establishing some “Democratical Tyranny”. The problem was, on the contrary, that the ministry impeded the possibilities of the Commons to assert its “independent Share in the supreme, legislative Power” by practising corruption and preventing “the Democratical Power of our Constitution” to act as a balance to the Crown and the Lords.43 In Bolingbroke’s description, a strong democratic element in the constitution was thus present in Parliament. For Walpole, Bolingbroke’s extra-parliamentary writings presented a constitutional challenge that he could not ignore. He gave the Commons his own definition of democracy, providing a model for generations of Whig parliamentarians to come. Importantly, he recognized the existence of a democratic element in the British constitution. This view well befitted a leading parliamentarian with a high respect for the Commons. At the same time, Walpole was highly critical of democracy, accusing the opposition of promoting it in a dangerous and extreme form. The popular protests of the Excise Crisis had recently forced the ministry to give up its taxation scheme, which was certainly a background factor when Walpole outlined the official and conventional understanding of the mixed constitution: It is certain, that ours is a mixt Government, and the Perfection of our Constitution consists in this, that the Monarchical, Aristocratical and Democratical Forms of Government are mixt and interwoven in ours, so as to give us all the Advantages of each, without subjecting us to the Dangers and Inconveniencies of either. The Democratical Form of Government, [. . .] is liable to these Inconveniencies, That they are generally too tedious in their coming to any Resolution, and seldom brisk and expeditious enough in carrying their Resolutions into Execution: That they are always wavering in their Resolutions, and never steady in any of the Measures they resolve to pursue; and that they are often involved in Factions, Seditions and Insurrections, which exposes them to be made the Tools, if not the Prey of their Neighbours: Therefore in all the Regulations we make, with respect to our Constitution, we are to

41 42 43

Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon Parties, 1735, 160. Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon Parties, 1735, 194, 197. Bolingbroke, A Dissertation upon Parties, 1735, 202, 207.

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chapter two guard against running too much into that Form of Government which is properly called Democratical: [. . .] (HPHC, III, 203–205).

According to Walpole, the Septennial Act had managed to keep such excesses of democracy under control in the spirit of the mixed constitution, whereas the advocates of its repeal would open the gates for a form of democracy that should be regarded as undesirable by every true supporter of the British constitution.44 While the first minister might indirectly recognize the existence of some potentially beneficial features in democratic systems, he explicitly rejected pure democracy as a form of rule that was inconsistent with a balanced constitution. He based his argument on the classical tradition of viewing democracy as a potential catalyst for the rise of tyranny. According to him, as a consequence of overly frequent elections, [. . .] there would be so much Power thrown into the Hands of the People, as would destroy that equal Mixture, which is the Beauty of the Constitution: In short, our Government would really become a Democratical Government, and might from thence very probably diverge into a tyrannical (HPHC, III, 207).

The existing level of the democratic element in the British constitution was sufficient; extending the element of the demos by awarding political power to the people by means of constant elections, as the opposition was suggesting, was highly undesirable. More frequent elections would render government less consistent and efficient, as the ministry would need to observe not only “the Pulse of the Parliament” but also “the Pulse of the People” before it could decide on anything—much as in the excise question. Furthermore, the opposition would abuse constant campaigning by rendering all government measures odious in the eyes of the people even before the government had had a chance to make its case—the Excise Crisis once again providing an example. The worst scenario was that the opposition might even win an election by such questionable means (HPHC, III, 205). A number of problems would arise out of the wellknown tendency of “the Populace” or “the People in general” (the two

44 This was well in line with general Court Whig notions of a mixed form of government. Dickinson 1977, 144.

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terms being used synonymously here) to constantly change its mind, thus forcing the government too to change its policy: [. . .] what is called the Populace of every Country, are apt to be too much elated with Success, and too much dejected with every Misfortune; this makes them wavering in their Opinions about Affairs of State, and never long of the same Mind: and as this House is chosen by the free and unbyassed Voice of the People in general, if this Choice were so often renewed, we might expect, that this House would be as wavering, and as unsteady as the People usually are; and it being impossible to carry on the publick Affairs of the Nation without the Concurrence of this House, the Ministers would always be obliged to comply, and consequently would be obliged to change their Measures as often as the People changed their Minds (HPHC, III, 206).

While this statement contained a recognition of the principle of listening to the “Voice of the People” and a formulation of a limited government in that sense, Walpole insisted that the popular voice should not be sounded too often or too attentively. The very strength of ministerial rule combined with a well managed Parliament was, after all, that it was more consistent than the rule of the people.45 A governmentcentred form of parliamentary rule was clearly not the same thing as outright popular rule. The British mixed government, with elections held every seven years, was regarded as ideal by Walpole because it allowed the government to steer the people in a balanced manner: With Septennial Parliaments, [. . .], if the Ministers, after having felt the Pulse of the Parliament, which they can always soon do, resolve upon any Measures, they have generally Time enough before the new Election comes on, to give the People a proper Information, in order to shew them the Justice and the Wisdom of the Measures they have pursued; and if the People should at any Time be too much elated, or too much dejected, or should without a Cause change their Minds, those at the Helm of Affairs have Time to set them Right, before a new Election comes on (HPHC, III, 206).

The Prime Minister won the division, and the motion to repeal the Septennial Act was rejected. This was a significant victory for the Walpole ministry after the challenges to its authority in the preceding year.46 The idea of appealing more frequently to the people had a considerable

45 46

For similar arguments in the government press, see Gunn 1983, 79. O’Gorman 1997, 82.

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number of supporters in the Commons, but Britain remained a mixed government in which the share of the people in the exercise of political power was effectively controlled, among other means, by the organization of elections every seven years. The importance of listening to the voice of the people and the existence of a democratic element in the constitution might be recognized in principle, but the need to keep them in due check was strongly emphasized. In the Royal Speech of 1734, the King’s people was accordingly viewed as the object of the good governance of the King and his ministry. The general elections of that year were described as a chance for “taking again the Sense of my People” so that the new Parliament would communicate “the justice and wisdom of the nation” (IX, 182– 184). The Lords added, interestingly, a passing reference to the “liberties of the people”, using the word “people” with the definite article, and suggesting that they themselves controlled the realization of those liberties (IX, 187), as befitted an aristocracy. This formulation may have been meant to remind the ministry of the political role of the truly relevant people in the aftermath of the crisis of 1733–1734. After all, Lockean references to natural rights had appeared in election propaganda.47 The majority of the Commons, by contrast, underlined the shared interests of the monarch and his people, avoiding all challenges to the King and his ministry. The Standing Army and the Rights of the People in the Late 1730s The Royal Speech of 1735 repeated the formula “my Parliament and people”, reflecting a monarchical notion of both Parliament as an advisory body and the political community as subjects of their King (IX, 671). The Lords responded by representing the liberties of the nation as intimately linked to the government of George II, despite the opposition claim that such uncritical compliments to the ministry would just “dazzle the eyes of the people” or make them suspicious about Parliament’s ability to influence the course of events. The ministerial side replied by suggesting that the people would wonder whether the Lords truly appreciated the royal words if their Address took a form different from the Royal Speech (IX, 642–643, 647, 654, 660). In the

47

Wilson 1995, 133.

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Commons, in words recalling the debate of 1734, Sir William Wyndham insisted that the loyalty of the Commons to both the monarch and the people called for a commentary on the Royal Speech and a censure of the foreign policy of the ministry: This House is the grand inquest of the nation, appointed to inquire diligently, and to represent faithfully to the king, all the grievances of his people, and all the crimes and mismanagements of his servants; and therefore it must always be a breach of our fidelity to our sovereign, as well as a breach of our duty to his people, to approve blindly the conduct of his servants (IX, 673–674).

The opposition also suggested that “the majority of the nation” and “the generality of the nation” had views differing from those of the ministry. Hence the members of parliament should formulate the Address so as to give “our constituents, the people who sent us hither” proper information about the policies of the ministry (IX, 684, 686– 687). The constitutional relationship of the Crown, Parliament and the people thus became a topic indirectly discussed during the debate on the Address of Thanks. In the Royal Speech of 1736, the King’s people (“my people”) appeared consistently as the object of the kind services of the monarch (IX, 971, 985, 990). In the Lords, a noteworthy detail was a discussion on the influence of their Address “upon the minds of the people”, on the lower house and on foreign powers. The suggestion was that the Address should be interpreted as an expression of the support of the nation for the policies pursued by the ministry (IX, 979–980). When toleration for the Protestant Dissenters became an issue dividing the Anglican political establishment during the following year,48 the Royal Speech of 1737 put more emphasis on the joint interests of the monarchical and popular elements of the constitution by emphasizing (without any concretization) the rights and properties of the people (IX, 1273–1274, 1279–1280). The Commons used this opportunity to refer to the need of the Crown to consistently observe “the strictest regard to the rights and properties of your people” (IX, 1277–1280). Against this background, the absence of references to the people in the Royal Speech of 1738 deserves some attention. It is partly explained by the recent death of the Queen, but a threat of war with Spain may also have played a role. The Lords did not hesitate to remind the Crown of 48

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 7.

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their need to maintain not only the welfare of the King’s people but also “the religious and civil rights of your people” (X, 367), the rights being understood collectively, referring perhaps to what the British possessed as a political community when compared with their potential Continental enemies. Likewise, the Commons presented themselves as “representatives of the people of Great Britain”, mainly in expressing the collective condolences of the national community to their King (X, 373–374). However, the opposition also had a message they wanted to convey in opposing spending on a standing army.49 Watkin Williams-Wynn insisted that the Commons should “always look upon ourselves as the trustees of the people, and endeavour to speak their sense in our addresses”. He justified the actions of his group by maintaining that among “the representatives of a free people” there should always be an opposition that protected the freedom of debate (X, 370–371). The second debate in the 1730s which illustrates contemporary parliamentary language referring to the people took place on 3 February 1738 and concerned the size of the standing army, to which the rights of the people were opposed. The issue of a standing army had been debated ever since the seventeenth century, a professional army having traditionally been seen as an engine for extending Crown patronage and even tyranny.50 During this particular debate, some leading speakers also associated the concept of democracy with the issue. The implication was once again that there was a democratic element in the British Constitution—but no more than that. The starting point was a government proposal to grant a supply for a standing army of 18,000 men. Both sides viewed the issue from the perspective of the rights of the people. George Barclay, LieutenantColonel in the Army, suggested that the ministry had decided “to make themselves feared by the people” by proposing an army of a size that was “dangerous to the liberties of the people” (X, 376). On the government side, William Hay declared, by contrast, that the unfounded dissatisfaction among “the people without doors” required the maintenance of a considerable standing army. The army protected the constitution and the parliamentary form of government at a time when the opposition was abusing the freedom of the press, educating 49 50

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 8. Dickinson 1995, 171.

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the lower orders in politics and making the people fear the army and suspect their governors (X, 377–379). William Shippen, a known but isolated Jacobite, reminded the House of the expenses of a standing army and its risks for the people’s liberties and suggested that it was the Tories rather than the Whigs who had become the true defenders of the rights of the people (X, 380–382). This was the context in which Charles Noel Somerset, a sympathizer of the Jacobite cause, set out to explain to the House “the true and genuine form of our government”, and he included a limited democratic element in his description. Though already a defender of the political influence of the people against the Whig oligarchy in 1734, Somerset followed the conventions of the mixed constitution, stating in accordance with classical political theory: [. . .] many sorts of governments have been invented by men, all of which may be resolved into these three, to wit, the monarchical, the aristocratical, or the democratical; for every form of government must either be a monarchy, an aristocracy, or a democracy; or it must be a mixture of some two of these, or of all the three. By experience, Sir, it has been found, that when the supreme power is lodged either in a sole monarch, or in a set of nobles, it often deviates into tyranny; and that when it is lodged in the people in general, there is no possibility of preventing it from running into anarchy; and the next step which follows is commonly a monarchical or aristocratical tyranny; especially, if the people of the society be numerous, and their dominions extensive (X, 384).

Here Somerset was reciting the traditional repudiation of pure democracy together with other simple forms of government. There was, in principle, a possibility of the supreme power being placed in the hands of the people at large, but this appeared to be an absurd scenario in an wide empire like that of Britain. It was best to maintain “an equal mixture of the monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical forms of government” inherited by the British from their ancestors, “the Germans”, so that the three independent elements—“with the assistance of the people”—would balance one another if someone attempted to oppress the people. The Lords, for instance, would not be able “to set themselves up as sovereign and arbitrary masters of our government” (X, 385–386). This statement recognized the democratic element as being equally as important as aristocracy and monarchy in the British constitution. For Somerset, history provided the justification for a representative

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government uniting monarchy and Parliament: among the Germans, the supreme power had belonged to “an assembly of their king or general, their nobles or chiefs of families, and their people or soldiers in general”. The people had had the right to accept or reject the proposals of the King and nobles, and this was the political role exercised by the Commons representing “the people [. . .] in general” (X, 385). The people was also given a supportive and opposing role in case two of the elements should try to remove the rights of the people. In a way, they constituted an independent fourth element in Somerset’s scheme. He further suggested that the ministry had achieved an excessive control of Parliament, which had caused such discontent among the people that the constitution was in danger of being destroyed (X, 386, 391). The solution was to be found in an increased respect for the political role of the people. The government should always [. . .] cultivate and retain the affections of our people; and if our people should, from the folly or wickedness of an administration, become generally discontended, the parliament, while it continues free and independent, will always be able to remove that discontent, by giving satisfaction to the people, [. . .] (X, 394).

Walpole himself responded to this challenge of the Jacobite opposition. He recognized the threat that an excessively large standing army of mercenaries, if abused by “some future ambitious king”, might constitute for the liberties of the people, probably referring to experiences in the reigns of Stuart kings. He acknowledged Somerset’s constitutional views as “a very just description of our constitution”, but he denied the possibility that a small army of British soldiers would endanger the constitution, maintaining that such an army “would never be sufficient for supporting a government against the united force of the whole people of Great Britain”. Quite the contrary, the army would protect the people against both domestic troubles and foreign invasions. Walpole next questioned the motives of the opposition speakers and referred to the threat of Jacobitism, suggesting that “opposition” and “Jacobitism” were identical terms and shared the pernicious goal of persuading the people that the constitution was in danger (X, 395, 398–399, 401).51

51 For similar accusations of Jacobitism in government newspapers, see Wilson 1995, 135.

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George Lyttelton, a favourite of Prince Frederick, who was frequently in disagreement with his father, countered the first minister by emphasizing both the right of the people to legislate and control the administration of a free country and the need to maintain confidence between the King and the people. This might mean that those responsible for the poor state of the nation could lose their offices. The opposition, by contrast, should be seen as “the people’s friends in parliament” who were trying to save the country (X, 407, 411, 413– 414). By the late 1730s, this opposition to Walpole had extended well beyond the Jacobites, including men like Lyttelton and future prime ministers from the Pitt and Grenville families. The reply of William Yonge, the Secretary at War, to the opposition claims revealed the attitude of the Walpole ministry and further increased the heat of the debate: The insolence of the people in all parts of the kingdom is risen to a height that makes it unsafe for the civil magistrate to do his duty without the assistance of the military power (X, 431).

In Yonge’s view, “the meaner sort of our people” should be guided to industry and frugality instead of being so ready to complain (X, 432). John Barnard, a country Whig who had supported a campaign of the London merchants against Walpole’s policies towards Spain,52 responded by arguing that magistrates had a duty to make themselves popular, i.e. serve the interests of the people. If they were not popular and were not obeyed by the people, their governance was at fault (X, 434). This was an argument that the opposition would develop in the coming years, until the fall of Walpole. William Pulteney reinforced the opposition arguments by claiming that there were legitimate complaints among the common people about Walpole’s policies, and that a standing army would never “make a free people quiet subjects” but would rather produce “humble slaves”. This opposition leader boldly declared that only a virtuous opposition could save the country (X, 435, 438). Language referring to the people had evidently become a major weapon in the hands of the parliamentary opposition. Walpole felt a need to rebut the claims that his ministry was unpopular and even anti-popular by deflecting the accusation about the origin of the discontent back onto the opposition. In his view, it was

52

Dickinson 1995, 210.

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the opposition’s propagation of discontent among the common people that caused them to question the current political order and even to rebel against it. Jacobitism was, once again, the driving force of the opposition, who, in the minister’s view, abused any political problem the nation encountered (X, 442–443). The opposition was not yet quite ready to surrender, and the attack was continued by Pulteney, who insisted on the need of every government to preserve the liberties of the people. Indeed, the essence of the constitution was that the interests of the people and those of the establishment were inseparable. If the people were happy with their government, there would exist no chances for the Jacobites to succeed in restoring the House of Stuarts (X, 444). The debate of 1738 illustrates the degree to which the interests and opinions of the people had become a major subject of dispute in parliamentary debates. The opposition presented themselves as defenders of the cause of the people, while the ministry consistently questioned all such claims. The public debates of the time on democracy and the political role of the people differed little from what we find in parliamentary speaking. In 1736, Philip Skelton viewed democracy in highly satirical terms, presenting it as violating the principles of the mixed constitution; democracy would merely allow anyone to behave like a king and to profess whatever religion he liked.53 James Erskine (1679–1754), Lord Grange, an opposition man suspected of Jacobitism, proposed that a free government was preferable to democracy. However, a free government could degenerate into “a pure and simple Democracy, where the People have reserved intirely to themselves, both the Supremacy and the Government of the Society”. Democracy might lead to either a civil war or abuses by overly popular magistrates, the final result being the abolition of all free government because the vulgar were unable to understand the common good and see conspiracies against their liberties. The fate of the Roman Republic, above all, demonstrated the results of the introduction of excessive democracy in government.54 The essence of the British mixed government was that in it “the Supremacy was lodged in the People, (including King and Chiefs) and the Exercise

53

The London Magazine, and Monthly Chronologer (London) [1736–1746], Vol. 5,

113. 54 James Erskine, Lord Grange, The Fatal Consequences of Ministerial Influence: or, the Difference between Royal Power and Ministerial Power, Truly Stated . . . (London 1736), 11–12.

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of the Supremacy, in the general Assemblies of the People”. Grange’s concept of the people thus included all three elements of the mixed constitution, which he saw as an equal combination of “the Democratical, the Aristocratical, and the Monarchical”, albeit one in which the different powers constantly challenged each other and brought about necessary changes.55 In 1736, the monarchical element seemed to have become too dominant because of ministerial influence in elections and Parliament.56 This opposition claim was put forward most forcefully in The Craftsman, which, referring to the seventeenth-century radical thinkers John Locke and Algernon Sidney, suggested that parliamentary legislation was no longer based on “the People’s Power”.57 The opposition may have presented itself as the champion of the popular cause, but many authors remained suspicious of the abilities of the people at large to rule without a directing authority.58 Democracy was certainly not their programmatic goal. The Royal Speeches at the turn of the 1730s and 1740s demonstrate continuity in official conceptualizations of the political role of the people. While the true interest, advantage and general benefit of the people were emphasized in the speech of 1739, the inseparable nature of the interests of the King and the people was also presented as a given fact (X, 874–875). The Lords repeated much of this but retained a reference to the collective rights of the people (X, 938). The Commons chose to refer to “the just demands and expectations of your Majesty and your people” (X, 961), meaning the defence of the interests of the political community abroad rather than any negotiation between the Crown and the people. Even these formulations did not go without

55

Erskine, The Fatal Consequences of Ministerial Influence, 1736, 16–18. Erskine, The Fatal Consequences of Ministerial Influence, 1736, 22. 57 [Anon.], Craftsman, No. 548, 1 January 1737, cited in The London Magazine, and Monthly Chronologer, Vol. 6, London, [1736-1746], 13. Also in 1737, an edition of James Harrington’s Oceana was published by John Toland in Dublin. Harrington had written with respect about ancient “popular states” but had had relatively little to say about ‘democracy’ as a realistic form of stable government in the long run, even if he had recognized the hypothetical possibility of democracy being “rightly founded and rightly order’d” or “well-regulated” and lauded the successes of Athens and Florence. In a dialogue, Harrington had even suggested that the government of old Israel had been ordered like in “all other Democracies”. James Harrington, The Oceana of James Harrington, Esq; and his other works . . . (Dublin 1737), 38, 512, 573–574. 58 George Berkeley, A Discourse Addressed to Magistrates and men of Authority . . . (Dublin 1738), 16. 56

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controversy at a time when there was a dispute about foreign policy and general unhappiness over the treaty with Spain.59 Among the Tory opposition in the Lords, John Leveson, the Earl of Gower, insisted that the House should inform the King that the measures of the ministry were by no means “agreeable to the sense of the people in general”. According to this respected aristocrat, there was no evidence that “the heads of our ministers are equal to the hearts of our people” (X, 886, 888). On the government side, James, the Earl of Cholmondeley, an officer himself, recognized the need to observe “the sense of the people” but rejected direct appeals to the biased people in questions of war. Referring to the campaign of the opposition press, he said that it was inconceivable that [. . .] the sense of the people, or rather a faction of the people, ought to influence, far less determine, us in our deliberations about affairs of which the people have no right information, and which they can only see with the eyes of those whose interest it is to mislead them (X, 909).

Like Gower, John Carteret, the Earl of Granville, a leading opposition man and an excellent speaker, saw it as the duty of the Lords to demonstrate “to his Majesty the sense of his people, and to the people the sense of this House.” In other words, the Lords should never make the King believe that the people were happy when they were not; nor should the Lords give the people a wrong impression of their views. A failure to express the discontent of the people would actually undo “the spirit of our people” (X, 917–918). The people could no longer trust Parliament if the Lords did not express their dissenting views on the measures of the ministry (X, 923). John Hervey, a public supporter of Walpole and a friend of Prince Frederick, saw no reason to make “the people without doors” suspicious of the ministry by stating something unconventional in the Address (X, 930). In the Commons, Walpole himself accused the opposition of deceiving the people with suggestions of an easy victory against Spain (X, 947, 951, 956). The debates that followed led to opposition leaders walking out and denying, in private correspondence, any connection between “the voice of the House of Commons” and “the sense of the nation”.60 The opposition to Walpole certainly knew how to make

59 60

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 8. Colley 1982, 224–225.

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political use of allusions to the people, but the political consequences were as yet insignificant. The declaration of war on Spain in October 1739 forced the parties to reconsider their choice of words. In the Royal Speech, the ministry repeated a formulation borrowed from the preceding Commons’ Address, underlining “the just expectations of my people” (XI, 82) and implying that, in Britain, the expectations of the people were also heard during wartime. The Lords as a whole were entirely loyal in their Address (XI, 81), but individual peers were ready to contest the ministerial definition of the political community. Philip Dormer Stanhope, the Earl of Chesterfield, maintained that there was a division in Britain “between the people of one side, and a few of our ministers on the other.” (XI, 43) With the support of John Campbell, the 2nd Duke of Argyll, he further claimed: “In this country, I think, the people and the administration are two terms that are generally made use of as opposite to each other.” He said that the unwillingness of the ministry to enter a war against Spain had just deepened the division (XI, 44, 75).61 The declaration of war had finally brought the two together so that the people had actually prevailed over the ministry (XI, 46). Lord Chancellor Philip Yorke, the Earl of Hardwicke, naturally enough rejected the way Chesterfield had used the concepts of the people and the ministry as opposites. His conclusion was that, as the ministry had a majority in both houses, it enjoyed the support of the majority of the people (XI, 62). This was the spirit of the British constitution as the government interpreted it. The Commons, too, used strong constitutional language in its Address. While acknowledging the royal care of the people and the need to defend “the honour of your crown”, they defined the British monarchy as dependent on Parliament, with the King using “the power granted to you by parliament”. The Commons further emphasized the popular nature of the British system by defining themselves as “the representatives of the people in parliament” (XI, 96–97). The implication of the Commons Address of 1739 was that the House fully supported the war effort provided that this was seen as a joint project of the popular and monarchical elements of the constitution. The outbreak of war was used to assert the central position of the Commons

61 Argyll even suggested that the ministry had turned into “the enemies of the people”.

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in the political system as the voice of the people, probably as a new strategy to justify the policies of the Walpole ministry. In the debates, no constitutional claims were made, which suggests that the Address was intended to be an expression of support for the war policy. In printed literature, opposition criticism of Walpole’s ministry soon took a radical turn. In January 1740, The London Magazine published a speech purporting to be an excerpt of recent parliamentary debates but possibly rather a reflection of what the opposition would have liked to hear the members of parliament argue. The author maintained that the people were freest in societies where “the People have been so wise as to reserve in their own Hands the supreme and absolute Power of the Society” and where the Magistrates “are but the Servants of the People”. What was more, he presented a positive interpretation of democracy:62 [. . .] a Democracy is the only Sort of Government, under which the People can be deemed absolutely free; and those mixt Forms of Government, which have any Thing of the Democracy in their Constitution, that is to say, where the People reserve in their own Hands any share of the supreme and absolute Power of the Society, the greater the People’s Share is, the more they are to be deemed free; [. . .]

There were still limits to such freedom in large societies such as England, with the possibility of losing all liberty looming in the background. “An absolute free Government or pure Democracy” was not so desirable, as the degeneration of “a Sort of Government absolutely free, commonly called a Democracy” into “an absolute Monarchy” had demonstrated during the Interregnum. The recommended form of government continued to be a mixed one provided that the opportunities of the Crown to intervene in the actions of the Commons, the principal element that ensured freedom, were effectively curtailed. The conclusion was that the people should possess at least “a Part of the supreme Power”, sharing it with the King and the Lords but acting independently of them, just as the provinces in the Netherlands acted independently of each other.63 The obvious point was that the Walpolean control of the Commons through placemen should be ended. But

62

The London Magazine, and Monthly Chronologer (London [1736–1746]), Vol. 9, 2–3, 7, 9. 63 The London Magazine, and Monthly Chronologer [1736–1746], vol. 9, 3, 8, 10–11.

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we also have an unusually appreciative description of democracy here. Despite the mixed views of democracy among ancient and modern political philosophers like Niccolò Machiavelli and Algernon Sidney, democracy was nevertheless seen as welcome provided that aristocracy and monarchy were there to balance it.64 In his speech of 1740, George II also emphasized the combination of the monarchical and popular elements in the constitution, though only with the conventional goal of maintaining “the honour of my crown, and the undoubted rights of my people” (XI, 611). As several opposition leaders had recently passed away or been dismissed, the ministry had no need to make any particular concessions.65 The Lords set national unity as the goal, urging: “Your majesty’s government at home must be strengthened in the affections and support of your people.” They repeated the royal promise about the rights of the King’s people (XI, 693–694), while the Commons and some lords spoke during the debate about “the undoubted rights” of the people (XI, 624, 645, 657, 697). John Carteret, an eminent opponent of Walpole, urged Parliament to speak “the language of the people” (i.e. that of its own) instead of the language of the ministry. Choosing the latter alternative because of corruption meant ignoring “the sentiments of the people”. He argued that while Parliament could change the ministers, it could not change the sentiments of the people. Therefore, instead of applauding the policy of the ministry, the Lords should preserve their dignity in the eyes of the people and indeed of the monarch by censuring it (XI, 681–682). The use of references to the people was thus once again made a programmatic part of the opposition to Walpole, and more such language was to come, uttered by Carteret and his allies in both houses. The Prime Minister Challenged by a “Popular Government” in 1741–1742 These statements anticipated the approaching end of Walpole’s ascendancy. A major moment in the history of the rise of responsible government was witnessed in February 1742, when Walpole was forced

64 Bartholomew Shower, Cases in Parliament Resolves and Adjudged . . . The third edition, [London] (1740), preface. 65 Holmes & Szechi 1993, 8–9.

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to resign after losing his majority in the Commons. Even in February 1741, motions for his removal had been debated in both houses. While descriptions of this event have conventionally focussed on the Commons,66 there was actually a more extensive use of allusions to the people in the Lords’ debate. Unlike most other parliamentary reports, Cobbett provides the Lords debate first, which suggests that for the contemporaries it was the primary one. Carteret headed the joint attempt in the Lords, and Samuel Sandys, the Baron of Sandys, in the Commons. Their criticism focused on Walpolean foreign policy and on the concentration of power in his hands. Carteret made a better speech, but his motion was defeated in the Lords, and the same happened to Sandys’ motion in the Commons.67 From our point of view, the arguments concerning the political role of the people in the two speeches are of particular interest. Carteret, who had already challenged the Walpole ministry in 1740, opened the debate in the Lords on 13 February 1741 with what he himself recognized as an “extraordinary” motion to remove the first minister from office. As an experienced opponent of the Walpole ministry, he chose to use a combination of a traditional reference to the need of royal advisors to be generally respected and of a more challenging one derived out of an explicit definition of the British political system as a popular government: A weak man is certainly, in any country, very unfit for being in the king’s counsels: and, in a popular government, a man who has incurred the general odium of the people, ought not to be continued in the king’s counsels, because the unpopularity of the minister may at last affect the throne itself, and render the people disaffected to their sovereign (XI, 1048, 1060–1061).

Such a categorical definition of the British polity as a popular government rather than a mere mixed monarchy, even if it was derived from the Roman republican tradition, was unconventional and potentially a conceptual re-evaluation of the constitution. While Carteret emphasized the role of the people as loyal subjects to the monarch and his government, he left no doubt as to their capacity to withdraw their support not only from an unpopular minister but, indirectly, also from the monarch himself. The formulation reflects a developed understand-

66 67

Turkka 2007, 35. Cruickshanks 1992, 40–41.

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ing of the consent of the people as the foundation of all government and it represented a view that had seldom been expressed so clearly in Parliament; indeed this is the first definition of England as a “popular government” that I have located in the available records. Nor was the choice of words merely accidental, as Carteret repeated the concept for emphasis. As a leading opposition Whig, he was thus actively defining the British polity as a “popular government” and using this definition to challenge the long-governing Walpole ministry: If the people be generally dissatisfied with the late conduct of our public affairs, and if that general dissatisfaction be wholly directed against any one man in the administration, as our government is still, I hope, a popular government, it is a sufficient cause for this House to let his majesty know the character of his ministry, by an Address to remove him from his counsels (XI, 1064).

As Walpole was an “unpopular minister”, he could not continue in the leadership of “a free state” (XI, 1078). Parliament, as the incarnation of the people, must remove him. There were different ways of reporting Carteret’s argument. According to an alternative account, authored by Samuel Johnson considerably after the actual debate, no mention of “popular government” had been made during it. However, even the traditionalist Johnson, suspicious of popular governments, commented on the effective use of references to the people by Carteret. Johnson used the rather more old-fashioned term vox populi.68 According to him, Carteret had pointed out how “the voice of the people [ . . .] ought always to be attended to, and generally to be obeyed” (XI, 1153). This formulation did not change the basic argument that much. The possibility of the popular element of the constitution to complain about an unpopular minister was merely expressed with alternative phrases such as “the universal cry of the nation”, “the resentment of an unhappy people” and the principle that “a free people have a right of complaining when they feel oppression”. Johnson reported how Carteret had urged the Lords to “set the nation free from its distresses” and to “appease the people” (XI, 1154–1155). All this represented a more traditionalist version of language referring to the people. Johnson also mentioned how Carteret had described the arrogance of Walpole’s policies during the Excise Crisis, his habit of fostering corruption and ignoring the petitions of the people: 68 Gunn has suggested that this term had been increasingly replaced by more modern expressions after 1734. Gunn 1983, 273.

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chapter two A whole nation was condemned to slavery, their remonstrances were neglected, their petitions ridiculed, and their detestation of tyranny treated as disaffection to the established government, [. . .] (XI, 1166– 1167).

While the concept of popular government remained foreign to Johnson, the intimate relationship between the King and the people provided a way of calling for the dismissal of the prime minister. Because of “the general discontent of the people”, Johnson’s Carteret argued, it had become necessary for the “man to whom the people impute their miseries” to retire (XI, 1169). The conceptualizations of the popular element in the constitution varied between the different reports, but even in the traditionalist version the sentiments of the people mattered. The two reports leave little doubt that Carteret had presented an argument based not only on an abstract notion of a contract between the ruler and the people in the past but also on the active potential of the people to remove unwanted ministers through their parliamentary representatives. The phrase ”popular government” represented a more republican understanding of the British constitution based on the active consent of the people. The use of the concept was certainly innovative in this context, which is probably why Johnson avoided it in his report. Even if we shall never now exactly what Carteret originally said, the first report, which was published immediately after the debate, illustrates the central role which the phrase ”popular government” obviously played in the argument. It was Johnson who edited Carteret’s speech. Language referring to the people also played a role in the rest of the debate, according to both reports. In the early report of the London Magazine, the speeches of Argyll, Hardwicke and Lord Balhurst contained more extensive arguments concerning the people and politics. Johnson reported the arguments of several other lords as well. Carteret was seconded by Willoughby Bertie, the 3rd Earl of Abingdon, who was convinced about the integrity of the opinions of the people. The people could not be misled in a question of this scale: If we consider the nature of popular opinions on public affairs, it will be difficult to imagine by what means persuasion not founded on truth should universally take possession of a people; [. . .] the multitude, my lords, censure and praise without dissimulation, [. . .]; their voice is at least the voice of honesty, and has been termed the voice of heaven [. . .] (XI, 1170–1171).

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Abingdon argued that political polemicists hired by the Walpole ministry had had little effect on the opinion of the people, which demonstrated how mere persuasion was not capable of turning the minds of the people (XI, 1171). Thomas Pelham, the later Duke of Newcastle, countered this by conceding that the people never complained without cause but suggested that the sources of their difficulties may have been misunderstood. He opposed the motion because it would only show that the popular protests had been justified and productive (XI, 1173, 1175). The implication was that the political elite should not let the potentially gullible common people determine the course of the affairs of state. The Duke of Argyll reiterated Carteret’s points by arguing that both the nation and the King were suffering under a faction directed by a wicked minister and that such government gave rise to violent popular grievances. According to his interpretation of the nature of the free monarchical constitution, unpopularity justified the dismissal of a minister in a system in which the monarch had to interpret the opinion of the people (XI, 1098–1099): [. . .] the very nature of our constitution must convince us, that the public odium alone is sufficient cause for the king to dismiss any minister that has drawn it upon himself, because in a free country, the king is to govern by the affections of the people (XI, 1100).

The major problem was that the sentiments of the people—in this case “the general hatred of the people” for a minister—were not communicated to the King by his ministers, and hence Parliament should take the initiative to save the King from the risk of losing “the affections and esteem of the people” (XI, 1100). Walpole had to go simply because he no longer enjoyed the confidence of the people. According to Argyll, “the people can never be easy whilst a man is in power who, in their opinion, is a traitor against the laws and constitution of his country” and more particularly so because he himself knew that he was “generally hated by the people” (XI, 1104, 1117). Argyll cited the extent of the current public debate as evidence of widespread dissatisfaction among the people, claiming that only the pamphlets of the opposition sold well (XI, 1102). This showed that the people should not be seen as “a herd to be led or driven at pleasure, as wretches whose opinions are founded upon the authority of seditious scribblers, or upon any other than that of reason and experience” (XI, 1184). Argyll’s conclusion was that the Lords could satisfy the people only by asking the

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King to dismiss Walpole (XI, 1117). A failure to “attend impartially to the voice of the people” and any negligent attitude towards “the miseries of the people” would, according to his popular rhetoric, be potentially dangerous for the Lords themselves. The people should definitely not be considered “a herd to be led or driven at pleasure” (XI, 1183–1184). The government side was represented in the debate by Hardwicke, the Speaker of the Lords, who recognized the justified demand of the people to have their legal rights protected and saw it as the privilege of the Commons “to watch over the state of the nation”. The establishment standpoint was, however, that the people were apt to complain even under the best of governments and that the opposition all too eagerly provoked the people to protest over mere trifles. According to the Speaker, mischievous authors had fabricated the claims that the ministry had “designs against the liberties of the people”. Publicity was to blame, not the ministry: [. . .] in this country [. . .] every man may not only say, but print and publish almost whatever he pleases, and by the willing credulity of the people in such cases, suspicions may be raised and propagated so as to become general, without the least foundation; and therefore, those general rumours or suspicions can never be a proper or just foundation for any resolution in parliament, [. . .] (XI, 1119–1120, 1126, 1194).

Suggestions based on opposition prejudices tended to be widely accepted and were now “echoed back from the people to the parliament.” (XI, 1199) It was, according to the government view, the parliamentary opposition who had abused the press and caused the entire crisis. Lord Balhurst was the third opposition speaker who put forward far-reaching arguments based on the principle that all political authority was ultimately derived from the people. In his view, the people controlled the actions of the government essentially through Parliament: It is the essential quality, the distinguishing character of a free government, that the conduct of every minister and magistrate ought, and may be strictly and impartially enquired into, by the assembly of the people (XI, 1137).

The Lords thus wielded the use of this controlling power that was typical of free government, indeed of popular government. The demands of the people—as interpreted by the opposition—were impossible to ignore as the people did not err in questions of this magnitude.

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According to Balhurst, the integrity of the British people could be counted on: [. . .] I will venture to become an advocate for the people of England; I will venture to assert, that no general suspicion was ever raised among them without a just ground; that they never complained of any trouble they were put to, if it was really necessary for their own protection; [. . .] (XI, 1138).

The fourth opposition lord to defend the constitutional status of the people was Henry Howard, the Earl of Carlisle. He understood the Lords as working simultaneously in cooperation with the King and the people while maintaining a balance between the two sides. His conclusion in this particular case was simple: “[I]t is our duty, as well as our right, to address the throne, that a minister should be removed who fears the people” (XI, 1203). The logic of the removal of an unpopular minister was that already proposed by Carteret, i.e. that suspicions against the minister endangered “the happiness of the people”, the goal of all government. A threat of “popular fury” called on the Lords to take action that would be favourable to all sides. The Lords were, after all, a hereditary council capable of conveying to the monarch “the sentiments of the people, without danger and without fear.” (XI, 1203–1204) The Lords had a major role in a system that was, ultimately, a popular government. Such a sympathetic view of the people as the source of government was by no means generally held. The Earl of Cholmondeley, representing the aristocratic view from the government side, appealed to historical precedents. According to him, it was no more than “an acknowledgement of the insufficiency of arguments, when the people is called in to second them, and they are only to expect success from the violence of multitudes.” (XI, 1205). The political role of the people was not irrelevant for Cholmondeley, however: he recognized that their advantage, liberty and virtue should be looked after but this did not mean the adoption of popular direction in politics: That all government is instituted for the happiness of people [indefinite form], that their interest ought to be the chief care of the legislature, that their complaints ought patiently to be heard, and their grievances speedily redressed, are truths well known, generally acknowledged, and, I hope, always predominant in the mind of every lord in this assembly. But, that the people cannot err, that the voice of same is to be regarded as an oracle, and every murmur of discontent to be pacified by a change of measures, I have never before heard, or heard it only to disregard it (XI, 1205).

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The people tended to complain, but that was not to be made the guiding star of government: [. . .] it is no reproach to the people that they cannot be the proper judges of the conduct of the government, so neither are they to be censured when they complain of injuries not real, and tremble at the apprehension of severities unintended (XI, 1206).

Now that “the general voice of the nation” seemed to have risen against Walpole, the duty of Parliament consisted in “reforming the errors and regulating the heat of the people” rather than voting against the minister. Cholmondeley turned to a judicial analogy describing the proper place of the people within the British political system: The utmost claim of the people is to be admitted as accusers, and sometimes as evidence, but they have no right to sit as judges, and to make us the executioners of their sentence (XI, 1208).

In other words, Parliament should act independently of such an aggrieved people. George Montagu Dunk, the Earl of Halifax, was the last lord to take a stand in the controversy. He did not “conceive the people infallible” but was assured that, in an issue like the one at hand, the people seldom erred. If the people were miserable, they had to be able to give expression to their grievances, and the Lords had to take measures to relieve them. Joining the advocates of popular government who challenged Walpole, Halifax repeated the point that Walpole’s major failure had been his inclination “to oppress and ridicule the people, to plunder them, and set them at defiance.” (XI, 1208–1210). The Lords debate already reveals highly diverging understandings of the political role of the people, with the opposition making use of extensive appeals to the people to challenge Walpole. A similar confrontation was seen in the Commons. While the formulations in the two available reports are diverse, appeals to the sentiments of the people are present in both of them. The London Magazine reported how Samuel Sandys, just like Carteret, built his proposal for the removal of Walpole on an interpretation of the role of the people in various forms of government. His formulation was based on his admiration of mixed government and the extension of the originally aristocratic Magna Charta to concern the people more generally:

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Sir; among the many advantages arising from our happy form of government, there is one which is reciprocal to king and people, which is, a legal and regular method by which the people may lay their grievances, complaints, and opinions, before their sovereign; [. . .] In absolute monarchies, the people may suffer, they may complain, but though their sufferings be public, their complaints must be private: they must not so much as murmur against their king’s measures and ministers; [. . .]. As members of this House, Sir, we are obliged to represent to his majesty, not only the grievances but the sentiments of the people, with regard to the measures he pursues, and the persons he advises with or employs in the executive part of our government: [. . .] (XI, 1224–1228).

In such a reciprocal alliance between the monarch and the people, the political significance of the people and the responsible nature of government became undeniable. In the rest of his speech, Sandys analysed the numerous causes of the prevalent “popular discontent”, endeavouring to demonstrate that Walpole’s policies both at home and abroad had been so unpleasing “to the generality of the people” in and outside Parliament that they had brought “the curses of the people” on the prime minister. The Commons was, according to Sandys, representing “the sentiments of the people” to their King, it being evident that “a free people neither will nor can be governed by a minister they hate or despise”. No doubt was left as to the popular challenge to Walpole: In Sandys’ (probable) words, he had entered the ministry “with the general disapprobation of the people”, had never understood “the genius of our people” and by his policies had endangered “the liberties of the people”. Like Carteret, Sandys counted on the willingness of the King to retain “the affections of his people” by dismissing such a despised minister (XI, 1229–1230, 1241). This was a forceful argument that has been seen as moulding the history of parliamentarism.69 Even Johnson could not change the basic content of the argument in his more revised report: His Sandys was likewise a champion of the people as the source of political authority. However, Johnson’s Sandys would seem to have spoken more in the name of a Parliament that derived its authority from the people, not for a politically active people as such: [. . .] the authority of parliament is yet acknowledged though it has been long eluded; the people are still allowed to be the source of authority, though the authority which they have granted has been long used only

69

See Turkka 2007, 28, 35, 220.

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chapter two to injure and oppress them; [. . .] power which is established by our constitution as the superintendent of our government, and the guardian of our rights, [. . .] (XI, 1304).

Even Johnson’s report communicated Sandys’ arguments that the power of Walpole’s ministry had been “in opposition to the interest and the voice of the people” and that the opposition was “animated by the general voice of the nation”. Johnson’s Sandys concluded his appeal to the wishes of the people by stating: “The people [. . .] desire a change not of their sovereign, but of his minister” (XI, 1308, 1312, 1321). Such a recognition of “the people” as “the source of authority” was certainly voiced in the Commons, and it was obviously shared by a considerable section of the political elite. The reports provide differing information about the reactions of the audience to Sandys’ speech yet leave no doubt as the centrality of the concept of the people in argumentation on both sides. James Hamilton, Lord Limerick, continued Sandys’ criticism by claiming that Walpole’s policies were leading to slavery for the people (XI, 1327). William Pitt the Elder argued that discontent among the people alone was a sufficient reason to dismiss Walpole; for the government to be successful, it was essential that the people should believe that its liberties were safe (XI, 1363–1364). William Heathcote likewise suggested that “the general hatred of the people” and potential decrease in their affection for the King were enough for Walpole to be dismissed (XI, 1366). The government side could hardly deny the significance of the opinion of the people, but they could always try to explain it away in an attempt to save Walpole. Phillips Gybbon simply denied the truth of accusations that Walpole had corrupted Parliament, which remained, in his view, “that assembly to which the rights of the people are intrusted” (XI, 1334). Stephen Fox, like Walpole many times before, presented the opposition as responsible for having aroused the people with their anti-government and downright anti-Hanoverian propaganda. The interpretation of Parliament as the representative of the people having been incorporated in this way into the liturgy of the Whig establishment, it was impossible for Fox to accept opposition suggestions that the Commons did not represent the true sentiments of the people. He considered it totally outrageous to represent the Commons as “a herd of slaves hired to drudge for their master, and to give up to his disposal the rights, the properties, and lives of their fellow-subjects”. Such a claim appeared to him to be merely a desper-

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ate attempt by a “faction [. . .] to disturb the happiness and corrupt the loyalty of the people” (XI, 1337, 1354, 1358). John Howe elaborated on this interpretation, insinuating that the opposition had “alienated the people from the government, and filled the nation with distrust, suspicion, and resentment”. Furthermore, they had “flattered the passions and corrupted the opinions of the people”, so that any constituency tended to view itself as capable of dictating its will to Parliament and the nation at large, blaming the ministry for any imaginable trouble that might emerge (XI, 1364–1365). In other words, the opposition seemed to be campaigning for an imperative mandate that would question the authority of Parliament in the face of popular demands. In contrast, Howe defined the balancing constitutional role of the Commons, in much the same way as that of the Lords had been defined by the government side. The essence of the argument was a distinction between the people as a whole and the representative body. Not all political power was to be understood as invested in Parliament: The business [. . .] of the parliament is to hold the balance between the court and the people, and to preserve at once the dignity of the crown, and the rights of the nation; nor are we to suffer the servants of the king to be torn from him by popular fury, any more than the liberties of the people to be sacrificed to the ambition of a minister (XI, 1365).

In this configuration, both houses were equal mediators between the monarch and the people and not mere advocates of the cause of the people. Howe’s interpretation also considerably limited the constitutional relevance of popular opinion. According to him, popular discontents were a common but mostly unfounded phenomenon caused by factors that no ministry could remove (XI, 1365). The strongest argument in support of Walpole was presented by Thomas Pelham, a rising Whig leader and future minister, who pointed at two weaknesses in the opposition claims. As befitting an establishment Whig, Pelham presented it as a major strength in a minister not to be “the minion of the mob” trying to entertain “the populace”, which “in all countries love to be diverted with changes, and astonished with extraordinary events” (XI, 1246). Here he was expressing the classical notion of the nature of the common people. As the populace was always fickle in its opinions, no excessive weight should be laid on their views, particularly as there was no evidence that Walpole had lost the confidence of the truly respectable people who alone needed to be represented in Parliament:

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chapter two [. . .] that this gentleman has incurred the hatred of the better sort of people in general, I believe, will appear to be a mistake, [. . .] for as the members of this House are their representatives, [. . .] (XI, 1246).

With these words, Pelham expressed the fact that only the higher ranks were represented by the Commons, and argued that the system of representation reflected the opinions of those people to a sufficient degree. Pelham had a further argument against the compliance of Parliament with the assumed opinion of the people. Even if all the people were dissatisfied with Walpole, their opinions were not to be depended upon because the people, even those of the better sort, are but very bad judges of a man’s virtue or wisdom, and they are much worse judges of a minister’s conduct in political affairs; [. . .] (XI, 1246).

The people of all orders simply lacked the capacity for evaluating the performance of a leading statesman, and hence it was inappropriate to condemn the policies of a minister “for no other reason but because it is complained of by the majority of the people”. According to Pelham, such a procedure would violate the spirit of the constitution by questioning the principle that the King should freely choose the best possible advisors. The British constitution was not a republican one, and hence the supervision of the ministers was not to be carried out directly by the people but through “the attachment of the people to their king” and the combined supervision of the monarch and Parliament over the ministry (XI, 1246–1247, 1253–1254). These views of a major statesman suggest that the British form of government was not yet purely parliamentary—even if the Whigs would later be on forced to change Walpole for Pelham. Pelham’s speech provoked John Barnard—a member of parliament elected by the votes of tradesmen and minor merchants rather than those of the Whig elite, and a major advocate of colonial war—to formulate the views of the opposition more explicitly and also to take up the question of the state of representation of the people. Barnard could not concur with Pelham’s claim that “the sentiments of the majority of the better sort of people in the nation” were seen in “what appears to be the sentiments of the majority of this House”. Such a view was unsustainable as a consequence of “how unequally the nation is represented in this House” (XI, 1256). On the contrary, Barnard argued, “[T]he sentiments of the majority of the better sort of people are often very different from what appears to be the sentiments of the majority

the westminster parliament and the people, – 101 of this House” (XI, 1256). As a consequence, Walpole’s policies had actually been “disapproved of by a great majority of the better sort of people in the nation, though not by a majority of this House” (XI, 1257). Barnard did not hesitate to mention the obvious fact that the Whig oligarchy no longer followed the seventeenth-century maxim Vox populi est Vox Dei but instead rejected the views of “the populace, or what ministers and their friends call the mob” (XI, 1257). Any opponent could then be dismissed as a voice of the insignificant common people. Such a ministerial attitude was dangerous, however, as it was unlikely that “the better sort” would continue to support the government while “the populace, or meaner sort” were unhappy with it. Barnard’s assumption of the unanimous nature of the sentiments of the people was based on the obvious fact that “the populace [. . .] are servants, and, unless when agitated by some flash of enthusiastical madness, speak the sentiments of the better sort.” (XI, 1257) Furthermore, “the meaner sort, or the mob” would hardly protest without an initiative coming from their masters, and therefore a good minister will always [. . .] aim at popularity, even amongst the meanest sort of people, because from them he may most certainly learn his real character among those of the better sort (XI, 1257).

Barnard went on to characterize a popular government, arguing that there was no problem involved in the willingness of the people to change ministers frequently. Indeed, in a free country, such changes were “necessary for the security and preservation of the rights and liberties of the people” (XI, 1257). He added a loyal monarchical justification for the replacement of Walpole. Walpole was to be replaced by the King to ensure a new parliament that was sympathetic to the Hanoverians: [. . .] if there be any connexion between the sentiments of the majority of this assembly, and the sentiments of the people; if we are to judge of the sentiments of the people, by what appears to be the sentiments of the majority of this assembly, we may on the other hand, judge of what will be the sentiments of the majority of the next parliament, from what are the present sentiments of the people; and if the majority of next parliament should consist of such as have the same opinion of this minister as the people generally have, can his majesty expect any confidence from such a parliament? (XI, 1259–1260).

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The suggestion was that the ruler would do better to listen to the wishes of the people at large and sack the prime minister in order to prevent his opponents—including Jacobites—from being elected to the Commons. An even worse scenario was that the composition of the new parliament would be determined by means of corruption instead of by free elections. A majority created with corruption would hardly respect “the liberties and privileges of the people” at all (XI, 1260). This would have meant that “an unpopular minister, or one who fears the resentment of the people” would gain “a corrupt majority in parliament” (XI, 1268). In the arguments of the opposition, as voiced by Barnard, the spirit of popular government spoke strongly in favour of Walpole being removed from office. Walpole himself, aware of his gradually diminishing majority, chose to focus on practicalities rather than attempting to respond to the accusations that the sentiments of the people were against him. Denying the facts, he repeated the government stand that his ministry had taken the views of the respectable people into account: [. . .] all the objections now made to the conduct of the administration, have been already answered to the satisfaction of a majority of both Houses of Parliament, and, I believe, to the satisfaction of a majority of the better sort of people in the nation (XI, 1289–1290).

Walpole represented the opposition complaints as wholly unfounded. For him, it remained impossible to concede that the opinion of the people as a whole had political relevance or to believe that the majority of the Commons, which he had toiled so hard to secure, no longer necessarily supported him. Walpole did not yet fall in February 1741. In May of that year, however, as a result of a nationwide campaign against his management of the war against Spain, his ministry lost a considerable proportion of its support in a general election. The War of the Austrian Succession was turning into a disaster, with military defeats and royal support for Hanoverian possessions that was contrary to British interests. The opposition was successful in suggesting that the “universal voice of the people” was dissatisfied with the policies of the ministry.70 In these circumstances, the ministry used printed propaganda to attack opposition claims based on the maxim Vox populi vox Dei, the sug70

161.

Black 1990, 43–44; Holmes & Szechi 1993, 9; Dickinson 1995, 212; Wilson 1995,

the westminster parliament and the people, – 103 gestion being that the popular voice in this case was merely the voice of a faction.71 An anonymous author suggested that any attempts to increase the relative power of the people in the constitution violated the principles of the Revolution of 1688.72 In a Speech from the Throne in December, the Walpole ministry continued to ignore their loss of a majority in Parliament, referring conventionally to the need of the Crown to observe the sentiments of the King’s people as communicated by their representatives (XII, 221). The Lords, anticipating coming challenges, responded by reminding the executive power more bluntly about the need to hear “the ardent wishes of your people” as a way of securing “the loyalty and affections of your people” (XII, 289). The Duke of Argyll argued that “the voice of the people” indicated the existence of widespread discontent in the nation and emphasized the need for “a mutual confidence between the government and the people.” According to this opposition lord, the proposed Address would give up “the rights of the nation” if it refrained from criticizing the war policy (XII, 269, 275, 283). The Address of the Commons made no reference to the people, probably because of the activities of Walpole’s supporters in formulating the response, but even Trevor who seconded the motion emphasized the dignity of the members of parliament as the Representatives of the People of Great Britain, a People whose Birthright gives them a Claim to approach their Sovereign, [. . .] with Language, which absolute Monarchs never hear from the Slaves by whom they are surrounded (HPHC, XIII, 23).

The formulation was close to that used by Sandys in February when he proposed a motion against Walpole. Among the opposition members, William Shippen appealed to the duty of the Commons “to give such Advice as may most truly inform his Majesty of the Sentiments of his People, and most effectually establish in the People an Adherence to his Majesty”. The new Parliament, after all, offered the King “an Opportunity of knowing the Opinions of their People without Disguise” (HPHC, XIII, 29–30).

71

[Briton], Public Clamours Traced to Their Original Sources . . . (London 1741), 13–14. 72 [Anon.], The True Principles of the Revolution Revived and Asserted. Being a Defence of the Present Administration . . . (London 1741), 14.

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Walpole’s ministry was replaced by a new coalition in February 1742. Arguments based on the concept of the popular authority of all government—together with several other arguments in favour of responsible government—had thus demonstrated their ability to persuade the majority of the British political establishment. After 1742, the politically potent concept of the people remained the preserve of the parliamentary opposition. It is probable therefore, that its use was curtailed, successfully, by the following Whig ministries for at least another two decades. Views on the Excessive and Insufficient Power of the People in the 1740s In November 1742, another year of the War of the Austrian Succession caused the Pelham-Carteret ministry and its parliamentary majority to emphasize the defence of the national community in the Royal Speech, and all references to the people were avoided (XII, 832). Such a tactic was logical after the recent outburst of language referring to the people, the failed Tory attempt to repeal the Septennial Act, and the meagre progress made in the project to investigate Walpole’s administration and to reform Parliament.73 In the Lords, Philip Dormer, the Earl of Chesterfield (later Stanhope), would have liked the House to defend “the interest of his people” in clearer terms (XII, 844). John Pane (1686–1762), the Earl of Westmorland, a leading Jacobite, claimed that “the general voice of the people” demanded an inquiry into the extension of corruption during the Walpole administration and the ministries (XII, 849–850). In the Commons, the Whig leaders of the House managed to prevent any excessive use of language referring to the people. The only exceptions were individual opposition members like Major John Selwyn, who reminded his audience of the struggle of previous parliaments for the liberties of the people. He combined the concepts of ‘Parliament’ and ‘sovereignty’ in an unconventional manner, arguing that it was necessary that Parliament “[let] in the eye of sovereignty upon all the public calamities of the state, and [shew] a becoming vigilance for the preservation of our ancient rights and privileges” (XII, 866). Even

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Holmes & Szechi 1993, 10; Wilson 1995, 165.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 105 here, sovereignty was not necessarily invested in Parliament alone but rather in the King, whom Parliament was supposed to inform about the state of the national community. Barnard, the fiercest spokesman of the opposition during the February 1741 debate, again reminded the Pelham ministry that corruption was likely to make the people suspicious of all government (XII, 868). The policies of the Pelham ministry remained unchanged in 1743 in that no references to the political role of the people were made in the Speech from the Throne. Instead, the collective national interest was defended (XIII, 101) at a time when the King’s battles on the Continent were becoming increasingly expensive and unpopular.74 Officially, both houses were content with the ministerial formulations, which described the war as just and necessary for “glory to your majesty, and honour to this nation” (XIII, 231). In the debates of the Commons, Britain was commonly viewed as a national community engaged in war and led by a strong monarch. Only an experienced opposition man such as George Lyttelton complained about the ministry not having sought the unanimous support of the Commons or “the general approbation of the people.” (XIII, 186). There was rising criticism, too, of the running of the war by Carteret, the Secretary of State for the North.75 After France had entered the war, the ministry chose in November to once again refer to “the true interest of my people”, defined as analogous with that of the Crown and concerning first and foremost international politics (XIII, 983, 993). The war with France was such a unifying experience for the British political community that even a ritual discussion of the principles of the political system was regarded as inappropriate in both houses that year. A further instance of a specific Commons debate in which popular government became a topic of discourse concerned a motion for a change in the government of the City of London. Through the motion, the opposition aimed at the removal of the veto of the aldermen in the decision-making of the City. This was part of a broader campaign by London merchants for a constitutional reform.76 The debate, taking place before the outbreak of the Jacobite Rebellion later in 1745, gave

74 75 76

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 10. Holmes & Szechi 1993, 10. Dickinson 1995, 210–211.

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rise to an interesting discussion on the popular element in the constitution. It is noteworthy that an anonymous tract had recently viewed democracy in appreciative terms as a form of government that secured the liberty—even the “perfect freedom”—of the people, provided that property was equally distributed and a degree of noble counselling to the multitude was allowed. The author had suggested that a nation where democracy prevailed could be flourishing, prosperous and successful, just as Rome had been under “the people’s influence, in the management of affairs.”77 The implicit message was that the Whig oligarchy was monopolizing state offices and excluding the people from their proper share in the government. The Roman model provided a vehicle for advancing such a challenging argument. Such polemics hardly affected the views of the establishment. In February 1745, Pelham, as a leading minister and manager of the Commons, consistently opposed the above-mentioned motion, presenting it as one favoured mainly by “the people out of doors”. He, too, turned to Roman history, in order to demonstrate the point that the populace was always willing to see its share in government enlarged yet unable to make beneficial use of its power. According to Pelham, “No free state ever long endured, where the populace had any great share in the government.” Such a state would be troubled by parties and factions. Furthermore, “the vulgar”—being unable to foresee the consequences of their passions for their interests—would allow some party leader to take over arbitrary power and abolish the free government (XIII, 1129).78 Pelham used history to make the point: in Rome, with the creation of a republic, the people had received “a very great share in the government”—but only in appearance in that the patricians had retained their influence over the people’s choices of magistrates. Popular leaders had, however, stirred up them to seek more power, which had caused a decrease in the influence of the patricians and a rise in the licentiousness of the people. Once the people had gained power, they had chosen the idols of the popular party as their magistrates and,

77

[Anon.], An Essay on Civil Government. In Two Parts . . . (London 1743), 19–22. Pelham had, of course, a plethora of classical authorities to base his argument on. Suitably for his purposes, a brand new translation of an anonymous commentary on Sallust was available, containing critical comments on popular states of all kinds. Factions, struggles, changes, calamities, the loss of liberty and finally tyranny appeared as the only results of the people becoming involved in government and introducing a “wild Power in the Many”. Sallust, The Works of Sallust, Translated into English. With Political Discourses upon that Author . . . (London 1744), 190. 78

the westminster parliament and the people, – 107 before long, one of them, Julius Caesar, had abolished the liberties of the people (XIII, 1129–1130). According to Pelham, the Roman instance indisputably demonstrated the consequences of excessive popular power. To avoid this destiny, the British form of government called for a senate or assembly of nobles “vested with a power to give a check to the extravagances of the people” and thus maintain its liberty. The Commons provided the people “with a sufficient power to prevent their being oppressed”, while the Lords balanced any extravagancy in the pursuit of power. The nearly perfect system had failed only once, during the Civil Wars, when “the people, by means of their representatives in this assembly, having got the whole power of the government in their hands, murdered the king, overturned the constitution of their country” and finally succumbed to arbitrary rule (XIII, 1132–1133). On the basis of the Roman and English precedents, the first minister concluded that it was utterly dangerous in a free state “to lodge a great power, without any controul, in the people, or in any popular assembly”. This principle also concerned the government of the City of London, particularly as any “popular madness or frenzy” in the capital might lead to a national disaster (XIII, 1133–1134). Barnard, the usual defender of the popular cause in the Commons and a major advocate of the motion being debated, countered the government by recommending a better regard for “the opinion of the public” (XIII, 1138). According to him, it was ministerial corruption and a decrease in political virtue among the establishment that threatened the balance of power in England, not any usurpation of power by the people. The attitude of the governing elite constituted a further dimension of the current constitutional problem: Those who have been taught and accustomed to vilipend the knowledge, the judgement, or the discretion of the people in the exercise of power, may, perhaps, think, that the liberties of a country may be endangered by lodging too much power in the hands of the people, or what we in this country call the commons; but this can never be the case, as long as the nobles and the chief families among the commons preserve so much as the appearance of any virtue or public spirit among them (XIII, 1139–1140).

Barnard described how the balance between the people and the nobility could be retained as long as the nobility remained virtuous. If they lost virtue, a popular leader might take over, as the people would then prefer an absolute monarchy to an absolute oligarchy. Such a

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development could take place even within a seemingly free government with a parliament chosen by the people if the elections were governed by corruption (XIII, 1140–1141). Barnard insisted that the fall of the constitution during the Civil Wars had followed not from too much power being given to the people but from the lack of virtue among the nobility and their consequent loss of influence among the people (XIII, 1144). This remained true in 1745 as well: the liberties of the people would not be threatened by “any power that may be lodged in the hands of the people” provided that the political elite remained virtuous. Quite the contrary, the best way to preserve liberty was that of “lodging in as many hands as possible the exercise of those powers and privileges vested in the people”. Such a method would make it impossible for the ministry to bribe all the decision-makers (XIII, 1145–1146). In this way, Barnard turned the historical precedents from Rome and the English Commonwealth into an apology for a popular government. The ministry obviously did not share Barnard’s views. William Yonge, the Secretary at War, challenged Barnard’s interpretation of Britain as a popular government. At the same time, his use of the phrase “popular government” demonstrates that by 1745 the concept had become established in parliamentary language. While expressing concern that popular government could turn into an undesirable political system, if not kept within its due bounds, Yonge referred to popular government three times in his speech. His argument was, however, that the suggested reform would only add to Britain’s notoriety as an unstable political community:79 [. . .] under a popular government, the people will always be turbulent, inconstant, and unsteady, [. . .]; and the more popular the form of government is, the more turbulent the people will be, the more inconstant and unsteady their public measures. When the people have the government in their hands, they will be always flying from one extreme to the other; for as there is no perfect happiness in human affairs, nor any form of government, or public regulation, but what is attended with inconveniences, a great majority of mankind think only of the inconveniences they feel, and to get free of them, they fly to the contrary extreme, [. . .] It is for this reason, that absolute monarchies are more steady in their pursuits, and more fixed in their public regulations, than popular

79 This speech was reported in The London Magazine, and Monthly Chronologer in May 1746 after a delay of over a year. (London) [1736-1746], Vol. 15, 224–228.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 109 governments; and of all sorts of government, those called aristocracies are the most steady and constant, especially if the number of their nobles be but small, and but a very few of them entrusted with the supreme direction of public affairs; for if their nobility be very numerous, and all have a share in the supreme government of their country, they fall under the same inconveniences to which a popular government lies exposed (XIII, 1155).

Yonge was thus highly sceptical of the abilities of the people to govern. His ideal was an aristocratic form of government with a limited number of aristocrats participating in governance. Any democratic principles of government seemed to lead to excesses. Interestingly, Yonge also placed the British constitution in the European context, which he knew well. Venice, the Dutch Republic and Poland were the countries with which the British system could be compared. Yonge thus did not view the British constitution as unique but as related to several aristocratic regimes. He depicted Venice positively, acknowledging its stability, although the Dutch Republic provided an even better example of a stable polity as a result of an aristocratic government in which “the people have no share”. Poland, by contrast, was not to be imitated as its form of government with a large aristocracy was incapable of making any decisions. According to the British Secretary at War: “In all countries where their form of government is too popular, they are never at peace within themselves” (XIII, 1155–1157). Yonge could not reconcile excessive popular power with his ideal of a balanced government. In the case of London, the proposed decrease of the power of the aristocratic aldermen would produce “all the inconveniencies of a too popular form of government” (XIII, 1157). George Heathcote, himself a wealthy merchant and alderman from London, continued to defend the suggested reform and popular power in general, referring to the need to save liberty from what he saw as growing monarchical power. For Heathcote, all Continental regimes appeared as equally productive of slavery in comparison with the status of the British as “a brave and a free people”. He did not care if the rest of Europe regarded the British as “a turbulent and unsteady people” because of their free government, as this simply meant that the British were ready to defend themselves against any ministry that threatened their liberties. Walpole’s administration provided a model case in that once a previous “idol of the people” had started to jeopardize liberty he had been stopped by the people (XIII, 1161–1162). As

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for the current ministry, Heathcote implied that there was a general tendency among those aiming at arbitrary power to “rail at popular power, and to load all numerous popular assemblies with faction, sedition, turbulence, unsteadiness, and I do not know how many other bugbears” (XIII, 1170). He himself was in favour of strengthening the popular dimension of the British government at all levels, including the government of London: [. . .] I hope, this House will take care to leave as much power in the hands of the people as may be sufficient for preserving their liberties; and when we find, that the power of the people has, by the arts and insinuations of ministers, been so much diminished as not to be a proper balance for the power of the crown, we ought, and, I hope, we always shall take care to increase the one, and diminish the weight of the other. When I consider our ancient constitution, and reflect upon the great power formerly lodged in the hands of the people, I am really surprised, Sir, to hear any gentleman talk of the danger of throwing too much power into their hands. The power of the people! alas, Sir! they have scarcely any power left. The crown has already ingrossed the greatest part of what the people were possessed of by the ancient constitution of our government (XIII, 1170–1171).

Heathcote’s interpretation of the ancient constitution not only defended the power of the people but also represented the necessary popular element as being endangered by the current Whig oligarchy. Consequently, he argued in favour of the liberation of “the power of the people” or “the people’s power” from excessive domination by the Crown in elections and the work of Parliament. The people seemed to have been constantly losing their power and the possibility to vote freely for their representatives in the Commons. London was, according to Heathcote, one of the few cities in which the people could still influence politics in accordance with the ancient constitution (XIII, 1171–1172). This speaker had a clear plan for extending popular influence in politics, starting with London: [. . .] it is our business in this House, to attend in the most serious manner to the ebbings and flowings of the people’s power, and to restore it, as often as we find it has been too much diminished by any rash or ill-judged regulation; . . . (XIII, 1172).

It is hardly surprising that the opposition failed to win a majority for their plans to reform the government of London, but they managed to present their arguments in favour of popular government clearly in the Commons. The concept ‘the power of the people’ understood

the westminster parliament and the people, – 111 in the active sense of a factor that affected the constitution of parliaments evidently existed in parliamentary discourse by the mid-1740s. The Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, however, curtailed the radicalization of defences of the people’s power for years to come. Indeed, it is not until two decades later that recorded parliamentary debates contain an equal number of references to the political role of the people as before 1745. One explanation for the standstill is the conflicts of the time; others include the stability of government and restrictions on parliamentary reporting. Even so, Speeches from the Throne and related debates hint at some existing disagreements over constitutional questions. In October 1745, when the foreign wars had proved unsuccessful and the troops of the Pretender were making progress in Scotland,80 the vulnerability of the Hanoverian establishment called for a stronger rhetorical justification of its position in the Royal Speech. George II now defined it as his major duty to preserve “the constitution in church and state, and the rights of my people”. The rights of the people had not been mentioned in Royal Speeches for five years. It was made clear this time, too, that “[t]he interests of me and my people is always the same, and inseparable” (XIII, 1311–1312). In the Address of the Lords, the rights of the people were listed in imitation of the Royal Speech and only at the end of an acknowledgement of George II’s “paternal regard for the laws of the land, our constitution in church and state, and the rights of your people” (XIII, 1326–1327). Westmorland reminded the Lords in vain about the grievances of the people concerning corruption in general elections and about the lack of rewards for the people’s support for the ministry during the rebellion. However, he remained a lone voice with his warnings about a change in the spirit of the people (XIII, 1321–1322, 1324). The majority of the Commons similarly aimed at appeasing the public by emphasizing the unity of the interests of the Crown and the people (XIII, 1363). The mover of the Address, Henry Legge, a loyal supporter of any Whig establishment, added an explicit reference to the Hanoverian dynasty as “the choice of the people” (XIII, 1330), thus countering Jacobite calls for a Stuart restoration by recalling the Revolution Settlement of 1688. Some opposition members, however, suggested that the people might suspect the motives of the political establishment if nothing was done to decrease the influence 80

Black 2001, 245.

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of placemen. Francis Dashwood (1708–1781), the Baron le Despencer, a major critic of the established system and a suspected Jacobite conspirator, maintained that the people expected a decrease in election corruption in order that they might feel that they would continue to be “a free people” in the future as well. While the interests of the King and the people could not be different, those of the ministry and the people might be (XIII, 1337, 1339, 1341). Humphrey Sydenham suggested that “the true and genuine spirit of the people”, evident in instructions from the electors to their representatives, called for anticorruption measures (XIII, 1351). Unsurprisingly, all such calls for reform were rejected as highly pernicious at a time of war against the French and the Jacobites, particularly as the people had not petitioned in the issue (XIII, 1349–1351). There was no reason to add to the fear that the people felt about the future of the constitution by taking up constitutional questions (XIII, 1358). It is noteworthy, in any case, that the British parliamentary system allowed this kind of argumentation for and against even at a time of open rebellion in parts of the country. Certainly, the years of rebellion were no time for extensive discussions on democracy, but Erasmus Head’s sermon in connection with the trial of the rebels in Carlisle in September 1746, while rejecting arbitrary monarchy, recognized democracy as an element of the mixed form of government; democracy placed legislative power “in the Major Part of the Community”.81 When Parliament was convened in November 1746, the Royal Speech made no reference to the people but, after expressions of popular loyalty from the two houses, the King’s answers expressed all possible goodwill towards “my people”, comprising the inhabitants of both England and Scotland (XIII, 1426–1428, 1432). The year 1747, one of extraordinary elections, already saw some intensification in the public debate. John Campbell, the Duke of Argyll, wrote again in favour of “the truly national Representation” which would be achieved “by a frequent and periodical Change of the popular Representation”.82 Another author argued, by contrast, that government was always the business

81 Erasmus Head, Loyalty Recommended on Proper Principles. A Sermon Preached in the Cathedral Church of Carlisle, during the Special Assizes held there, for the Trial of the Rebels . . . on Sunday, September 14, 1746 (London 1747), 9. 82 John Campbell, Liberty and Right: or, an Essay, Historical and Political, on the Constitution and Administration of Great Britain . . . (London 1747), 62–63.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 113 of a few in popular states.83 An anonymous propagandist defended the Hanoverians by appealing to the Whig maxim “the Voice or Choice of the People, is the Voice of God”.84 In more theoretical discourse, Francis Hutcheson recognized the potential virtue of democracies with “deputies elected by the people” although he conceded that “pure democracy” tended to be slow in decision-making.85 After a favourable election result and other demonstrations of loyalty to the ruling dynasty, the Royal Speech of November 1747 presented the new Parliament in conventional terms as the executor of the sentiments of the people to its monarch. Once the domestic crisis was over and the position of the administration strong, the King was also free to thank his subjects for cooperation by emphasizing the united nature of the war effort (XIV, 94). In the Addresses and debates, the relationship between the Crown and the people appeared as entirely unproblematic, partly because of the relative weakness of the opposition. None of the usual opposition rhetoric about the sentiments of the people was heard (XIV, 97–98, 100). The same kind of consensual language referring to “a flourishing and happy people” was echoed when the War of the Austrian Succession finally ended in October 1748 (XIV, 321–322, 324, 352–353). The successful war and an overwhelming Whig majority had brought the British political elite into agreement over the relationship between the monarch and the people. The people was viewed as a passive object of royal actions. Calls for a more active engagement of the people in the united effort were removed from official statements after the war. Despite this consensus in Parliament, the end of the 1740s saw some public debate of interest. Gregory Sharpe, for instance, suggested that the Whig oligarchy would be destroyed once the people decided to “establish a Democracy or popular Government in themselves” and thereby produce first anarchy and then the restoration

83 [Anon.], An Essay on Liberty and Independency: Being an Attempt to Prove, That the People under a Popular Form of Government, May be as Much Slaves, as Those Subject to the Arbitrary Will of One Man (London 1747), 20. 84 [True Scotchman and lover of his country], Hereditary Right not Indefeasible: or, Some Arguments Founded upon the Unalterable Laws of Society and Government, Proving that the Rights Claimed by the Jacobites, Can Never Belong to Any Prince or Succession of Princes (London 1747), 22. 85 Francis Hutcheson, A Short Introduction to Moral Philosophy, in Three Books; Containing the Elements of Ethicks and the Law of Nature . . . Translated from the Latin (Glasgow 1747), 298. The original version had been published in 1742.

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of the monarchy.86 Robert Dodsley published a schoolbook with the frank intention of teaching everyone “of a Free People” the notion of every Englishman as “a secondary Legislator, as he gives his Consent by his Representative”.87 Dodsley’s description of democracy repeated traditional reservations but also mentioned some noteworthy positive features: The third original Form is called Democracy, which [. . .] signifies the Government of the People; for under this Form every Citizen, when he has attained to proper Qualifications to recommend himself to the public Choice, is intitled by Virtue of that Choice to a Share in the Government. We need not wonder therefore, that this Form has always had many Advocates, that it has been presented in the fairest and most plausible Colours; and that it has been cried up as of all others the most favourable to Virtue, Merit, and Liberty. At first Sight indeed it appears so to be, but a very little Consideration will shew us, that it must be subject to many and great Inconveniencies. While the Government is small and low, a Democratic State is generally in a happy and flourishing Conditions; that is to say, it is purest, and answers best the End of its Institution, by which it enlarges and dilates itself, arriving quickly at a high Degree of Prosperity; which from the Nature of its Constitution it is not able to bear; for as Aristocracies are commonly subject to Cabals, so Democracies are almost always disturbed with Factions; [. . .].88

Dodsley categorized the regimes of his day on the basis of the classical division. According to him, the Dutch Republic without a stadholder (until 1747) had been a combination of aristocracy and democracy. Pure democracies only existed in the free cities of Germany, while a mixed constitution of the Spartan and Roman type was to be found only in Sweden “where tho’ the Administration of Affairs is in the King and Senate, yet the last Resort is in the Dyet; to which Deputies are admitted from the Clergy, the Citizens, and the People.” There remained no doubt as to the desirability of such a mixed government in comparison with pure types; a happy combination of the advantages of all forms was the best. The victory of Sweden over the Danish

86 Gregory Sharpe, A Short Dissertation upon that Species of Misgovernment, Called an Oligarchy (London 1748), 17. 87 [Robert Dodsley], The Preceptor: Containing a General Course of Education. . . . (Dublin 1749), Vol. 1, xix. The book was reprinted five times by 1775. 88 [Dodsley], The Preceptor. Second edition, (London 1754), vol. 2, 480; cf. another schoolbook definition, according to which “when the Representatives of the People rule, ’tis called a Republic; and if the People themselves rule, ’tis a Democracy.” Samuel Edwards, A New Compendium of Geograph . . . (Dublin 1765), 30.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 115 and Polish domination in the sixteenth century and the Dutch Republic after the restoration of stadholdership in 1672 and 1747, provided Dodsley with evidence of an inherent strength in mixed governments. Even so, there was no denying the inconveniences of constant struggles between the different parts of the constitution in such regimes.89 The ideal solution was to be found in the British House of Commons, which had such power as was “all that ever was pretended to, in the very purest Democracies, and was even in them much more easily eluded or defeated”.90 The British system was simply better than any of the pure democracies. This may have been the language of some schoolbooks, but the members of parliament themselves did not yet use the concept of democracy to describe their activities. Royal Speeches and the Addresses of the two Houses also continued to depict a totally harmonious relationship between the King and his people, based on the notion of the monarchy as a guarantee of the happiness and prosperity of the people (XIV, 573–575, 608). A conflict between the interests of the two remained unthinkable, and the Commons emphasized “the mutual and inseparable interest of your majesty, and your people” (XIV, 608). Now that peace had been restored, John Perceval (1711–1770), Lord Egmont, who worked as an adviser to Prince Frederick, ventured to question the credibility of the Address even in the eyes of “the most vulgar and ignorant part of the people” (XIV, 579). This opposition man wanted Parliament to take a tougher stand as the spokesman of the people, which made Pelham, the first minister, summarize in ironical terms the current uses of the concept of the people in the Commons: [. . .] what is called “the people” is a sort of ghost or hobgoblin, sometimes raised by the imagination of the person that is frightened; and, like other hobgoblins, it always says what the imagination of the frightened suggests, or the art of the frightener devises (XIV, 585).91

89 [Dodsley], The Preceptor, 1754, 481–483, 514. Dodsley probably, and quite correctly, associated the Swedish Noble Estate with the Senate, thus not listing it with the other three estates. Interesting is also the definition of the Swedish Peasants as “the People”. 90 [Dodsley], The Preceptor, 1754, 499. 91 For Lord Barrington’s parallel accusation about the abuse of the concept of the people, see Gunn 1983, 80.

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Pelham’s own characterization of the people was moulded by his desire to retain the established order: The British people, he claimed, counted on Parliament and were never excessively subservient to either the ministry or the King (XIV, 585). The Jacobite opposition, represented by John Hynde Cotton, who had actively supported the Pretender during the rising, replied to Pelham by complaining that the current administration did not take the people and their calls for a reform of Parliament seriously: I am sorry [. . .] that any minister should have cause to compare the people to a hobgoblin, that can frighten none but fools: the time has been when the voice of the people was of some real importance, and when the voice of the people and the voice of the parliament was always the same: but now, I am certain it is otherwise; and I do not found this opinion from the people I converse with; I found it upon the written remonstrances of the people to their members (XIV, 595).

The opposition was disappointed with its representation in Parliament and concluded that the voices of the people and Parliament diverged because of ministerial manipulation. This confrontation demonstrates how ‘the people’ continued to be a central concept of political controversy, the meaning and proper use of which the first minister and an opposition members of parliament were openly debating in the chamber despite repeated expressions of official consensus after 1745. The British debate about the people and politics was influenced by a major Continental author when the first English translation of Montesquieu’s De l’eprit des lois (1748) came out in 1750. While references to Montesquieu appeared in parliamentary debates only much later, its ideas would affect British conceptions of their constitution and, in the long run, their political language as well. Montesquieu gave considerable recognition to republican forms of government in the past, defining republican government as one in which “the body or only a part of the people are possessed of the supreme power”.92 He viewed both democracy and aristocracy as republican, related forms of government. He argued that “when the body of the people in a republic are pos-

92

Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1750, Vol. 1, 11; cf. Wright 2002, 293, which uses a modern translation that connects the concepts ‘the people’ and ‘sovereign power’. In the original French version the term is la souveraine puissance. Montesquieu, CharlesLouis de Secondat, Oeuvres de M. de Montesquieu, Vol. 1, (London 1767), 10.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 117 sessed of the supreme power, this is called a democracy”,93 connecting the concepts of ‘the people’, ‘the supreme power’ and ‘democracy’. In democracy, “the people should have the sole power to enact laws”.94 However, in the English translation, “the people” and “sovereignty” were associated only in the sentence: “In a democracy the people are in some respects the sovereign, and in others the subject.”95 This meant that “the people in whom the supreme power resides, ought to do of themselves whatever conveniently they can; and what they cannot well do, they must commit to the management of ministers” chosen by them.96 These statements do not remove anti-democratic criticism from Montesquieu’s book. His conception of the common people remained aristocratic and paternalistic, repeating assumptions like that which claimed that the actions of the people were “always either too remiss or too violent”. In a democracy, “the lower sort of people” should therefore be directed by those of higher rank.97 In a popular government, furthermore, “the power ought not to fall into the hands of the vulgar.”98 A notable alternative to democracy and popular government continued to be an aristocratic system with a numerous nobility, so that the people had no power but “the democracy” was instead “in the body of the nobles”.99 This aristocratic argument well suited some

93 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1750, 11, cited here from the first English translation, which was the version most likely to have been read by British parliamentarians; Maier 1972, 841; Dippel 1986, 61. 94 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1750, 17. 95 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1750, 12. In the original French, the term was le monarque, which shows that the concept of sovereign continued to be intimately linked with the person of the monarch in English. Montesquieu, Oeuvres de M. de Montesquieu, 11. The French concept of sovereignty seems to have been much easier to combine with the people as a synonym of the supreme power than was the case in the English language. The translation of Jean Jacques Burlamaqui’s text in 1752 contained the idea of shared sovereignty between the King and the people, and it presented Poland as a warning example of the anarchy of a popular government. J.J. Burlamaqui, The Principles of Politic Law: Being a Sequel to The Principles of Natural Law . . . (London 1752), 61–62, 73, 91. The concept of sovereignty entered English in a translation, but it was not yet regarded as a native one. The first edition of Fenning’s dictionary still defined democracy as “a form of government, wherein the supreme power is lodged in the people”, limiting “sovereignty” to refer to ‘majesty’. Daniel Fenning, The Royal English Dictionary: or, a Treasury of the English Language . . . (London 1761). 96 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1750, 12−13. 97 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1750, 14, 17. 98 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1750, 355. 99 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1750, 18.

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members of both the Swedish Noble Estate and the British House of Lords. Of significance for future parliamentary debates was also Montesquieu’s distinction between democracy and the liberty of the people, a point on which he differed from Aristotle.100 In his view, echoed by both British and Swedish speakers, true political liberty flourished in moderate governments only, not in aristocracy or democracy. While “in democracies the people seem to do what they please; [. . .] political liberty does not consist in an unrestrained freedom.”101 Montesquieu also held a traditional view of democracy in that he saw elected representatives and democracy as incompatible; representation was rather a feature of aristocracy.102 As for possible democratic states, Montesquieu could not view Republican Rome as a democracy.103 The British search for what he called “democracy” had also been not only unproductive but mistaken as well,104 a notion that Montesquieu’s Swedish audience readily repeated. Montesquieu’s association of the British constitution with “democracy” despite British denials of this is noteworthy.105 From an English point of view, democracy remained, in Samuel Johnson’s words, no more than “one of the three forms of government, that in which the sovereign power is lodged in the body of the

100 Cf. Hobbes’ citation of Aristotle arguing that “The Ground or Intention of a Democracy is Liberty” and that “no Man can partake of Liberty, but only in a Popular Commonwealth”, reprinted in a collection of Hobbes’ works in the same year 1750. Thomas Hobbes, The Moral and Political Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury. Never Before Collected Together. . . . (London 1750), 84. 101 Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, 1750, 213; Maier 1972, 842; Dippel 1986, 61. 102 Markoff 1999, 671. 103 Montesquieu 1750, Vol. 1, 239; Edmund Burke even questioned the extent to which Athens, Sparta or Rome had in reality been “free States, or popular Governments” and rather characterized them as oppressive oligarchies. Edmund Burke, A Vindication of Natural Society . . . (London 1756), 65–66. 104 Dippel 1986, 62. 105 Conventional political wisdom was represented by Sir Walter Raleigh’s maxims of state, reprinted in 1750–1751, which implied that England was a “Free State” and thus a “Popular State” but not necessarily a democracy. While in an aristocracy, “some small Part of the People have in them as a body Corporate, the Sovereignty and supreme Power of the whole State”, in a democracy “all the People have Power and Authority Sovereign.” Walter Raleigh, The Works of Sir Walter Ralegh, Kt. Political, Commercial, and Philosophical . . . (London 1751), Vol. 1, 2–3, 5, 41, 51; For William Temple, by contrast, “democracy” and “popular state” were exact synonyms, though England was by neither of them. Indeed, Temple rejected a popular state because of its inherent instability. William Temple, The Works of Sir William Temple . . . (Edinburgh 1754), vol. 2, 46, 52.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 119 people.”106 As no one claimed that all sovereignty would have been possessed by the body of the people, it was difficult for the British to accept suggestions of their system as democracy. They understood democracy as no more than an element of the mixed government and rarely suggested that Parliament was a democratic institution.107 However, Montesquieu may have affected their use of language in the long run, as his notions of democracy were often reproduced word for word in late-eighteenth-century reference works on politics,108 and they would also be later cited in parliamentary debates. Consensual Conceptions of the People as Subjects during the Seven Years’ War Most of the 1750s and early 1760s can be considered fairly unsurprising from the point of view of parliamentary discussion on the constitutional role of the people. After the crises of the 1740s were assuaged, the centre of political power shifted from Parliament to the Court and the ministry. After 1754, a further war with France and ministerial stability provided few possibilities for the free expression of views in Parliament.109 The Royal Speeches and parliamentary Addresses of the early 1750s remained, under Pelham’s direction, totally conventional. Very little was said about the people. Rather, international tensions brought the concept of the nation—its honour, security, interests and happiness—to the centre of ceremonial speaking (XV, 89), and domestic controversies were passed over in silence in the Addresses.110 Some particular debates show, however, that the popular dimension of the constitution continued to be highly esteemed among the British establishment, although ill-considered references to the rioting mob continued to appear as very suspect.111

106 Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language . . . Vol. 1. (London 1756). 107 Markoff 1999, 671. 108 See [Anon.], The Politician’s Dictionary; or, a Summary of Political Knowledge . . . (London 1775), Vol. 1, 396–397. 109 Black 2001, 247, 249. 110 Holmes & Szechi 1993, 240. 111 The debate on the Jewish Naturalization Bill on 17 April 1753 has been omitted from this analysis because of its concentration on ethnic prejudices. However, the debate contained an indirect suggestion that the British form of government was a “sort of democratical government” as opposed to the absolute governments on the

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When the Newcastle ministry drafted the Speech from the Throne in November 1754, the preceding general election was mentioned as having afforded “my people an opportunity of giving fresh proofs of their duty and affection to my person and government, in the choice of their representatives.” (XV, 330) Following an early-modern conception of the monarchy, Newcastle, who was anxious about royal support,112 presented the elections as no more than an expression of the loyalty of the people to the Crown; there was no question of an independent will of the people having been sought in them. Parliament was described as “my parliament” cooperating for “my own, and my people’s happiness” (XV, 331). Both houses unanimously reinforced such notions. This absence of any expressed independent identity among the members of parliament reveals how well the King and the ministry were able to manipulate the representative institution in this period. However, some opposition views were recorded. Thomas Potter, a member of a party supporting the Prince of Wales, insisted that no approving Address should be presented before the policy of the ministry towards the French in America had been properly examined (XV, 342). William Beckford, a financial backer of the anti-ministerial journal The Protester, argued that the Commons would lose “its character among the people” if it merely accepted the ministerial formulations (XV, 353). On the government side, Henry Legge easily rejected these protests as unproductive in that they might give rise to division in the House “or among the people without doors” and, most worryingly, reveal the existence of disagreements among the British to foreign powers (XV, 346–347). In the face of a war in 1755, the interests of the national community rose to the centre of royal speaking (XV, 528). It was certainly no

Continent, which made it more difficult for the system to tolerate religious deviation (William Northey, XIV, 1371). There was also a claim put forward that the Jews wished to deprive “the people of all power” in order to secure their position in a society where public opinion opposed all concessions to them; in other words, the toleration of Jews endangered the popular basis of the British government (Nicholas Fazakerley, XIV, 1408). Furthermore, the opposition was accused of attempts to provoke “the democratical affections of the lowest orders of the people” against laws like the Naturalization Bill (Earl of Egmont, XIV, 1420). The opposition was, in the end, successful and forced the ministry to withdraw its unpopular proposal, arguing that the sentiments of the people and those of Parliament were different. Colley 1981, 1–19; Wilson 1995, 199. 112 Black 2001, 247.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 121 time to emphasize the political rights of the demos.113 A debate on a military reform in the Lords in March 1756 illustrates the prevailing ways of talking about democracy. The Lord Chancellor, Philip Yorke (1690–1764), the Earl of Hardwicke, an active politician despite his position as Speaker, argued that an increased influence of the Commons in the nomination of the land tax commissioners—to the detriment of the monarch and the Lords—was about to lead to an excessive growth of the democratic element in the constitution, thus threatening its balance. Instead, the monarchical and aristocratic elements should be strengthened: The scale of power, in this government, has long been growing heavier on the democratical side, I think this would throw a great deal of weight into it. What I contend for, is to preserve the limited monarchy entire; [. . .] (XV, 731).

Many noblemen remained opposed to any increase in the popular or “democratic” element of the constitution and rejected reforms pointing in that direction, including the reorganization of the militia. Hardwicke, who had expressed his prejudices towards popular disturbances before and advised the Lords to treat the people like physicians,114 specified the potential risks of the proposal for the social order, describing how “none but the very lowest rank of our people” would be recruited and trained militarily, while arms might be made accessible to “the mob”. All this increased the risk of a mutiny. Greek and Roman precedents spoke rather in favour of an army consisting of propertied and truly free men (XV, 743–744). An alternative point of view defending a citizen militia was presented by William, the Baron and Earl of Talbot, who saw the bill as one that the Commons as “the representatives of the people” had prepared so well that their judgement about the good of the people should be esteemed. Indeed, the political community as a whole was likely to benefit from the strengthened virtue and martial spirit of both the lower and the higher ranks of the people that military training would produce. Rome, unsurprisingly, also provided an example of a martial 113 This debate on the Address of Thanks has, unlike most others, been contextualized in Jones 2006, 232–261. Jones focuses on the process as a struggle between Newcastle, Henry Fox and Pitt the Elder within the ministry. It demonstrates the crucial role which the debates on the Address played in parliamentary politics as a vote of confidence in the ministry. 114 Dickinson 1995, 156, 212.

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spirit among “the body of the people” (XV, 746, 748–749). Talbot’s ideas were identical with those in much of the public discourse, in which the notions of an active, armed citizenry and national strength and prosperity were often associated in this period.115 The democratic or popular element of the constitution thus continued to be simultaneously both suspected and admired by the Lords. Most noblemen did not want to arm the common people, while some viewed the civic activities of the people as the very foundation on which the strength of the national community rested. The Militia Act would be passed the following year, a major supporting argument then being that the defence of the nation and its constitution were to be placed in the hands of respectable classes of the people as opposed to the people as a whole.116 The start of the Seven Years’ War and the nomination of the PittDevonshire ministry led to the use of slightly more varied language referring to the people in the Royal Speech of December 1756, the aim being to motivate the national community in the struggle against France, despite food riots and other domestic problems.117 Another explanation is that the nomination of a new ministry at about the same time was generally considered a consequence of the impact of the “Voice of the People”,118 and the ministers who drafted the speech made use of this. The King now stated that he counted on “union and firmness in my affectionate people” and on “the spirit and zeal of my people” and assured the nation that he would regard equally “the just rights of my crown and people” when organizing the military forces (XV, 772, 775). A wartime consensus was easily achieved with the following speeches, too, in which the building up of the national morale played a major share (XV, 829), while setbacks at home and abroad were passed over in silence.119 The time of war made the Commons view themselves not so much as representatives of the people with potential grievances but rather as representatives of the King’s loyal subjects, denouncing “that spirit of disorder which has shewn itself amongst the lower people in some parts of the kingdom” (XV, 837–838).

115 116 117 118 119

Wilson 1995, 188, 200. Gould 2000, 78, 83, 87. Holmes & Szechi 1993, 241. Gunn 1983, 276. Holmes & Szechi 1993, 241.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 123 In the public debate of the late 1750s, democracy was constantly viewed as degenerate, disorderly, revengeful and scandalous, “a state of government the most subject of all others to disunion and faction”, while “a due admixture of Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy” provided the best form of government.120 In the North American colonies, however, it is possible to find an occasional reference to democracy as an essential element of the British constitution. Thomas Frink pointed out in his anniversary sermon that in Britain—as in Athens, Sparta and Rome—there was “Democracy, that is, a popular State, wherein the common People rule by their Representatives” side by side with monarchy and aristocracy.121 This seemingly conventional description of the mixed constitution associated the concepts of democracy and representation in a description of the Commons at a quite early date. At the same time, as Kathleen Wilson has demonstrated, the concepts of the people and their rights continued to play a role in extra-parliamentary discourse irrespective of the war.122 In its Address of November 1758, the Commons referred to the military victories and assured the monarch that the mutual cooperation between him and his people would lead to “the continuance of the same truly national spirit” (XV, 931, 934). The Royal Speech of November 1759, for its part, reflected the increased confidence of the national community as a consequence of major naval victories over France.123 Language referring to the nation rather than to the people predominated.124 In 1760, however, a further transformation in the corpus of Royal Speeches occurred. George III, the new King, who was eager to gain influence even to the detriment of his ministers,125 deliberately extended the role of the monarch in politics with a speech to which Parliament responded with expressions of unwavering loyalty. While the nation was defined with attributes of greatness and glory and in 120 Edward Wortley Montagu, Reflections on the Rise and Fall of the Antient Republicks. Adapted to the Present State of Great Britain (London 1759), 15, 18, 33, 87, 106, 357. 121 Thomas Frink, A King Reigning in Righteousness, and Princes Ruling in Judgement. A Sermon . . . (Boston 1758), 80. 122 Wilson 1995, 200. 123 In October, a reference to a “bloody and expensive war” in the King’s speech had been replaced with a “just and necessary” war in the Privy Council. Holmes & Szechi 1993, 242. 124 See also Ihalainen 2005, 390, 395, 402, 404−405, 409−411. 125 Christie 1982, 56.

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a way that strengthened the unity of interests of the people and the monarchy, the relationship between the elements of the constitution appeared as unproblematic. The King represented himself as “promoting the welfare of a people” and thanked them for their “loyalty and warm affection to me”. The victories allowed him to promise “the true and lasting felicity of this great people” and to count on “zeal and harmony among my people” (XV, 982–985, 995). During a successful war and in the beginning of a new and probably long reign, no friction between the people and the monarch was to be mentioned in ceremonial statements, while unity and loyalty were emphasized. In rhetorical terms, all sovereignty had been given into the hands of the monarch, “a gracious and affectionate sovereign”, as he seemed to be serving his people so well. The national community could hardly have been defined in more favourable terms; it was “a dutiful and united nation” and “a free and happy people” (XV, 993–995). In the early 1760s, no sign of a schism between the monarchical and popular elements of the constitution was made visible. After the general election of 1761, George III characterized Parliament as conveying “the truest information of the sense of my people, by [. . .] their representatives” but made no further mention of the popular element of the constitution (XV, 1110), thus presenting the monarchy ever more clearly as the dominant element. The Commons tended to likewise remove all possibilities for opposition to monarchical power by defining itself as “a happy proof of the zeal, the loyalty, and the affection of your people” (XV, 1118–1120). The rhetorical construction of a monarchy based on unanimous popular affection seemingly played down all tension between the elements of the constitution. After the military successes of 1762,126 too, George III and his ministry viewed the people as faithful, and nothing more seemed to be expected from them in political terms (XV, 1233, 1235, 1238). No negotiation between the powers of the state was seen as necessary by either of the Houses. In official terms, the British political community was completely united at the time of the conclusion of the Peace of Paris in 1763. As for the public debate, it remained as suspicious of excessive democracy as it had traditionally been, despite occasional statements on the positive effects of the democratic element. Oliver Goldsmith’s ficti-

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the westminster parliament and the people, – 125 tious Chinese philosopher in The Citizen of the World, for instance, explained the unique degree of freedom in England by “their enjoying all the advantages of democracy” yet maintaining the prerogative of the monarchy. According to this account, the British people did not play any particular role in the legislative power in comparison with other European states. Goldsmith implied that the balance in the British constitution was so delicate that any development “towards a Democratic form” would decrease the amount of freedom enjoyed by the subjects.127 Two translations of classics that came out in the early 1760s remind us of the continuous easy access that the British had to anti-democratic ideas abhorring the political activities of the common people. H. Spens, the translator of Plato’s Republic (1763), concluded in his introduction: [. . .] in every Democracy the people are enemies of the good, whilst they caress cunning and self-designing men, who, to serve their own ends, sooth the passions of others, and give countenance and encouragement to popular vices and corruptions.128

Democracy appeared as “licentious”, “corrupted and depraved”, “a monster with innumerable heads”.129 Plato had early on taught that democracy “arises when the poor prevailing over the rich, kill some, and banish others, and share the places in the republic, and the magistracies equally among the remainder”, and that only tyranny would follow.130 The translator of Polybius (1764) applied his teachings to contemporary Britain, lamenting how “from the Revolution to the present time, the government has been strongly drawn towards democracy”, and warning about a future fall of the country. While the King and the people had traditionally controlled each other, so much power had been given to the people that excess liberty, partisanship and the general corruption of the people threatened to destroy the constitution, leading first to popular licence and then to despotism.131 Polybius had already shown how “the people were all well pleased to 127 Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World; or Letters from a Chinese Philosopher, Residing in London . . . (London 1762), Vol. 1, 215, 217. 128 Plato, The Republic of Plato. In Ten Books. Translated from the Greek by H. Spens, D.D. With a Preliminary Discourse Concerning the Philosophy of the Ancients by the Translator . . . (Glasgow 1763), xi. 129 Plato, The Republic, 1763, xvi, xxxi. 130 Plato, The Republic, 1763, 335, 354. 131 Polybius, Two Extracts from the Sixth Book of the General history of Polybius. . . . Translated from the Greek. . . . By Mr. Hampton (London 1764), no page numbers.

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maintain this popular state” with its equality and liberty but could not prevent it from degenerating into anarchy. Once the people took over “the intire sovereignty”, the result would be “a government administrated by a blind and unskilful multitude” even if it was still called “a free and popular state”.132 The classical predictions for democracies were depressing, and no-one really yet questioned their validity. Nor was Enlightenment political philosophy straightforwardly pro-democratic either. When Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s most famous works were translated into English in the early 1760s, they provided little that was new in debates on democracy and the supreme power of the people. Émile (1763) suggested that only in connection with the original formulation of the social compact “had the people [acted] collectively in quality of sovereign”.133 In democracy, “the supreme power” had committed “the charge of government to the whole body of the people, or to the majority of them, so that there may be more magistrates than private citizens.” Democracy might “include a whole people, or may restrain itself only to the half”.134 Generally speaking, it was a form of government suited only to small states.135 The Social Contract (1764) repeated many of these views, adding that democracy “is established [. . .] by the simple act of the general will”, and that “in a well founded democracy [government] should coincide with the public Will”.136 Rousseau continued to denounce a truly democratic system in words that would be echoed by the critics of democracy in Westminster later on: [. . .] there never existed, and never will exist, a real democracy in the world. It is contrary to the natural order of things, that the majority of a people should be the governors, and the minority the governed. It is not to be conceived that a whole people should remain personally assembled to manage the affairs of the public; and it is evident, that no sooner are deputies or representatives appointed, than the form of administration is changed.137

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Polybius, Two Extracts, 1764, 9, 37. Rousseau, Emilius and Sophia, Vol. 4, 247. 134 Rousseau, Emilius, 1763, 257. 135 Rousseau, Emilius, 1763, 258. 136 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Treatise on the Social Compact: or the Principles of Politic Law . . . (London 1764), 107, 109, 116, 173. 137 Rousseau, A Treatise on the Social Compact, 1764, 110. 133

the westminster parliament and the people, – 127 Furthermore, Rousseau rejected the idea of representation of the people in the British fashion, maintaining that “the people” or “the sovereign cannot be represented” and pointing out that the ancients did not even know such a word. In Rousseau’s view, the people of England were free only during the election of the members of parliament.138 According to Rousseau, democracy was subject to constant change and the risk of civil war at any moment, and hence he saw it as a perfect form of government that suited only tiny and simple states, or even only “a nation of Gods”.139 Rousseau thus shared many of the traditional doubts about democracy. He also represented ‘the sovereign power’ and ‘the people’ as separate concepts in much of his book. One of the few instances in which ‘the people’ had been both ‘the sovereign’ and the magistrate was provided by the Roman Republic, which had for a time under the tribunes been “a true democracy”. However, when the Roman people had been “legally assembled as a sovereign body”, many problems had followed.140 These adverse notions of democracy changed little in the British debate. At the same time, domestic debates on the political role of the people were being revived. When John Wilkes could not make his voice heard in Parliament, he turned to publicity to defend a populist anti-ministerial cause.141 Wilkes and America: The Increasing Relevance of ‘the People’ in Political Argumentation, 1763–1769 We have seen how the ministry and Parliament had followed a highly consensual line in their mutual ceremonial speeches during the Seven Years’ War. Once peace had been restored with the Treaty of Paris in February 1763, the atmosphere of the political debate changed abruptly. In Parliament, Pitt and Newcastle, former prime ministers, criticized the new Bute and Grenville ministry for the excessively mild peace terms it had imposed. The common people and the press, in turn, protested against a new cider tax so vehemently that Bute had to resign. Wilkes attacked the ministry so fiercely that the government

138 139 140 141

Rousseau, A Treatise on the Social Compact, 1764, 163–165. Rousseau, A Treatise on the Social Compact, 1764, 112–113. Rousseau, A Treatise on the Social Compact, 1764, 147, 159. Thomas 2004.

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endeavoured to close down his journal. Meanwhile this populist was being supported by London crowds demonstrating in the name of “Wilkes and liberty”.142 Radicalism as such was nothing new, but a period of intensified extra-parliamentary radicalism was about to begin. The rise of radicalism was provoked by problems caused by economic change and numerous wars. It was also based on an already existing tradition of protest and on a developed network of associations and the press, particularly among the middling orders. A considerable proportion of the population had subsidized or participated in the Seven Years’ War, which had led to a broadening of the concept of citizenship and notions of the popular origin of power. Politicians ready to challenge the parliamentary elites were able to make use of this emerging wider concept of the people. The parliamentary elites, however, felt little acute need to actively appeal to the people at large at this stage.143 A more modern concept of the people may have been gradually emerging after 1760, but the circumstances for its breakthrough did not yet exist. According to Denis Baranger, the modern concept, once it emerged, entailed the existence of the people, first, as a political force in constitutional questions and, second, the notion of the people as the source of all legitimacy.144 The crisis of the 1760s was certainly aggravated by the actions of the new King, including a tendency in the Royal Speeches to concentrate exclusively on the role of the monarch as the centre of the political system. The King left the people no political role beyond expressions of loyalty when he argued: It will ever be my earnest wish and endeavour, to demonstrate to my people, by my action, the love which I bear them; and I doubt not of receiving from them the grateful and just returns of duty and affection (XV, 1335–1336).

The pronoun “I” dominated the speeches, while the people appeared as no more than the King’s people, and the Houses of Parliament contented themselves with echoing these formulations. The Commons played down all constitutional friction by declaring in 1763 that “your

142

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 243; for a recent biography of Wilkes, see Thomas

1996. 143 144

Colley 1981, 16; Dickinson 1995, 222–224; Wilson 1995, 198, 207, 209. Baranger 1999, 357, 360.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 129 real interests and those of your people are inseparable” (XV, 1341, 1343–1345). Even if George III was not building an arbitrary monarchy, concern about the constitutional consequences of the policies of his ministries was rising among various opposition circles, including the aristocratic Rockingham Whigs and the populist Wilkites. The first avoided appeals to the people, the latter built on them.145 The closing speech of April 1763 provoked Wilkes to write that previous ministries had been more cautious in their formulation of the speeches, remembering the role of Parliament as “the constitutional guardian of the liberties of the people” (cited in XV, 1331). Wilkes reminded the Grenville ministry of the prerogative which the people possessed, in addition to that of the King (XV, 1336), and presented a conspiracy theory according to which the new monarch was threatening the rights of the people.146 Such a challenge immediately led the majority of the Commons to denounce Wilkes’ North Briton No. 45, published on 23 April 1763, as alienating “the affections of the people” from the King in its criticism of the peace treaty (XV, 1359, 1393).147 This happened despite protests from Pitt the Elder, a major opposition leader, according to whom “the rights and interests of the people” would be jeopardized by the censorship of Wilkes (XV, 1363–1364, 1401). The latter became an object of illegal persecution and, in January 1764, he was expelled from the Commons.148 He fled to France, and the cause of the people seemed to find no further spokesmen in Parliament at that time. In the following years, it was rather the relationship between the British Crown and the inhabitants of the North American colonies that produced some uses of language referring to the people by the opposition. Even the advocates of the colonial cause did not yet defend democracy, or “a government of all over all” but spoke in favour of representation derived from the notion that power, which had been placed “ultimately in the people” by God, needed for practical reasons to be transferred to “a few”.149 On the colonial side, we find individual

145 146 147 148 149

19.

Dickinson 1977, 206–207. Dickinson 1995, 224. Black 2001, 251. Christie 1962, 12; Holmes & Szechi 1993, 243; Thomas 2004. James Otis, The Right of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved [London 1764],

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voices defending “the Order of Democracy” side by side with that of monarchy and aristocracy.150 Much more influential than such ephemera was William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765), probably the most important contribution to constitutional theory in eighteenth-century Britain. Blackstone aimed at preserving the supposedly perfect British mixed constitution with mutual checks between its various elements: the King, the nobility, the people, which were taken as parallel to the classical models of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy. Blackstone defined this community as a whole, not individuals, as the source of sovereignty, and he placed all sovereignty in the British constitution in the hands of Parliament. He also emphasized the representatives’ independence of their electors.151 From the point of view of long-term conceptual change, it was significant that he depicted a Commons, “freely chosen by the people among themselves” as “a kind of democracy”.152 According to him, in democracy, “the right of making laws resides in the people at large”. His concept of democracy had positive aspects as well: Even though “popular assemblies are frequently foolish in their contrivance, and weak in execution”, they aimed at doing “the thing that is right and just, and have always a degree of patriotism or public spirit”.153 Furthermore, Blackstone represented the elections as “the exercise of the democratical part of our constitution”. In other words, sovereignty was exercised and “the people’s will” was declared by the electors “in a democracy”.154 Blackstone’s representation of democracy as an integral and potentially positive element of the British constitution certainly affected the ways in which British politicians talked about it in the years to come. All this had little immediate influence on the Royal Speeches, the King continuing to emphasize his active role in January 1765 and referring to the need to “secure the rights, and promote the happiness of my people”, obviously with reference to American protests against

150 Daniel Dulany, Considerations on the Propriety of Imposing Taxes in the British Colonies . . . The second edition, (Annapolis 1765), 1, 5, 33. 151 Derry 1976, 18–19; Dickinson 1977, 147; Miller 1994, 246; Similar views on the King and Parliament as sovereign were held by Adam Smith. Goldsworthy 1999, 181–183, 201–202. 152 William Blackstone, Commentaries on the Laws of England, Vol. 1 (Oxford 1765), 51; Evans 2006, 6. 153 Blackstone, Commentaries, 1765, 49–50. 154 Blackstone, Commentaries, 1765, 164.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 131 new taxes (XVI, 2, 4, 6). The Commons, by contrast, seemed to be talking about the “rights” of the subjects at home, but remained unspecific in this (XVI, 5). In another Address, they emphasized the power of the King-in-Parliament over all parts of the Empire, promising “to exert our most zealous endeavours for [. . .] the true interest of your people, in all parts of your extended empire.” The majority chose to underline the unity of interests of the monarchical and popular elements of the constitution by stating that “Your Majesty’s happiness and that of his people are one” (XVI, 89). In January 1766, interestingly, the emphasis of the Royal Speech changed, under the direction of Charles Watson-Wentworth, the Marquis of Rockingham, to “your affection and concern for the welfare and prosperity of all my people”, the members thus being urged to support the monarchy (XVI, 92). Such formulations were aimed at strengthening conceptions of the King and Parliament as the possessors of the supreme power over all British subjects. During the Stamp Act crisis, the colonists suggested that the people were the origin of all power and that sovereignty was divided, while the British political establishment (including lawyers such as Blackstone) emphasized the sovereign status of Parliament.155 In official rhetoric in London, the different elements of the constitution, including “all your Majesty’s people”, remained united (XVI, 110–112). Only individual members like Pitt questioned the theory of the virtual representation of the colonies and emphasized the right of representation as a condition for taxation (XVI, 100, 104).156 The crisis resulted in the attribute “sovereign” being increasingly associated with the British legislature as a whole. Harry Dickinson has suggested, however, that the American calls for representation actually inspired some British radicals to adopt a new concept of the people challenging the orthodox doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty. They would, later on, apply the newly defined concept, which emphasized the accountability of Parliament to the people, in their calls for extended suffrage.157 The content of the British parliamentary debate was changing in other ways, too. In 1766, the dispute with America already led to some significant discussions in the Lords. When the power of the King and

155 156 157

Dickinson 1976, 189, 201–204. Goldsworthy 1999, 192. Dickinson 1976, 204; Dickinson 1995, 225.

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Parliament to legislate over the whole Empire was being debated, George Lyttelton, now the Baron of Lyttelton, a veteran member and a close ally of Pitt, lectured the House on the principles of the constitution, starting with “an original compact” in which the government had been given the power to decide on behalf of the people. This meant that the British system did not allow the people to freely oppose laws passed by the legislature. Such opposition would mean the dominance of the democratic element in government, which was unthinkable in a mixed constitution in which all supreme legislative power remained in the hands of Parliament (XVI, 166). The only express sympathizer of the colonial point of view was Charles Pratt, Earl Camden, also an ally of Pitt, who questioned the right of Parliament to pass the Stamp Act, pointing out that there were limits to what the legislature could do. “The sovereign authority, the omnipotence of the legislature” did not, according to Camden—who had defended individual liberties in the Wilkes case—extend itself to the private property of the subjects in the form of taxation without the subjects having the opportunity to consent through their representatives (XVI, 168). The notion of the sovereignty of parliament was clearly strengthening as a reaction to American discontent, but so were disagreements over the extent of sovereignty within Parliament.158 The Lord Chancellor, Robert Henley, the Earl of Northington, replied by refuting Camden’s views as unconstitutional and underlining the universal need for subjects to obey parliamentary majority decisions instead: Every government can arbitrarily inpose [sic] laws on all its subjects; there must be a supreme dominion in every state; whether monarchical, aristocratical, democratical, or mixed. And all the subjects of each state are bound by the laws made by government (XVI, 170).

Northington proceeded by suggesting the withdrawal of British protection from the colonies if they did not prove their proper allegiance to the mother country. He pointed out, in highly ironical terms, that even such weak states as Genoa or “the kingdom or rather republic of Sweden” would be capable of taking over the American colonies if the colonists tried to survive independently of Britain (XVI, 171). The colonies would be nothing without the protection of the British

158

Dickinson 1977, 147, 215–216; Goldsworthy 1999, 193–194.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 133 monarchy. Northington’s other point was that excessively republican constitutions gave rise to weak political communities. Sweden was not the primary object of his criticism, but, in his capacity as the Speaker of the British House of Lords, he pointed out that Sweden with its extraordinary form of government was far from an ideal polity; it rather provided a warning instance of weaknesses that the reduction of monarchical power was likely to give rise to. The majority of the Lords were of the opinion, articulated by David Murray, the Earl of Mansfield and Viscount Stormont, that the British Parliament represented the Empire as a whole and had an equal authority over all its subjects irrespective of their voting rights. Representation by election was merely a royal favour, and the idea that “every subject must be represented by deputy, if he does not vote in parliament himself, is merely ideal” (XVI, 173). It is evident that the American complaints did not have an extensive effect on how the political role of the people was understood in the British Parliament.159 In the opening speech of November 1766, the ministry of William Pitt the Elder (the Earl of Chatham), lamented discontent at home and in America and suggested that some subjects had broken the unity of the people (XVI, 236). For both the Lords and the Commons, the people remained essentially the King’s people (XVI, 240–241), but the Commons also referred to “the future liberty [. . .] of your people” (XVI, 244). This emphasis on liberty can be interpreted in two ways: it reinforced the capability of the British monarchy to safeguard the liberty of its people, but it might also be an indirect expression of concern for the future liberty of the people in an era when accusations of tyrannical rule by the Crown were being made on both sides of the Atlantic. The current premier probably had nothing against such a choice of words. In the public debate, concern for the political role of the people was also being expressed much more outspokenly. For example, Marchamont Nedham’s republican writings, originally published in the early

159 Documents drafted by colonial assemblies contain some quite different conceptualizations of the political role of the people, especially with regard to its representation. The Virginians, for instance, argued that the liberties of the people which their forefathers had enjoyed in Britain had been transmitted to them as well, and that these liberties included the right for the representatives of the people to decide on taxation (XVI, 120). The same argument about the American people wanting representation of the colonies in Parliament as a condition of their consent to taxation was made by Benjamin Franklin when he was questioned on the issue. XVI, 146, 156, 158.

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1650s, were reprinted; they advanced a number of arguments emphasizing “the excellency of a free-state or government by the people”, the principle that “the original and fountain of all just power and government is in the people” and the necessity of placing “the supreme authority in the hands of the people’s representatives”.160 Simultaneously, speculations on the positive effects of democracy within the mixed government were emerging in political philosophy. Adam Ferguson wrote about general ideas of democracy and popular government: Candour, force, and elevation of mind, in short, are the props of democracy; and virtue is the principle of conduct required to its preservation. How beautiful a pre-eminence on the side of popular government! And how ardently should mankind wish for the form, if it tended to establish the principle, or were in every instance a sure indication of its presence!161

The concept of democracy seemed to be experiencing a slight re-evaluation, even though Ferguson, too, pointed out that not all the people acted “in their capacity of sovereign” in a democracy. He also added that popular governments often had aristocratic features and remained vulnerable to being corrupted into despotism.162 There was no escaping the presumed fact that ordinary men were unable to rule without this giving rise to confusion, servility, corruption and factions and, finally, to the loss of their “sovereignty”.163 Ferguson seems to have been the first English-speaking philosopher to combine the concepts of democracy, the citizen and sovereignty in this way, but he certainly did not recommend pure democracy or popular government for his own age or country. In his view, Rome’s mixed government had been inclined towards democracy, whereas in England monarchy was stronger, and this produced the best conceivable system.164

160 Marchamont Nedham, The Excellencie of a Free State (London 1767), v, x, 25, 34. Nedham described how Solon and the Romans had placed “both the exercise and interest of supremacy in the hands of the people” (xvi, 5). 161 Adam Ferguson, An Essay on the History of Civil Society (Edinburgh 1767), 100. 162 Ferguson, An Essay, 1767, 101–102, 110. 163 Ferguson, An Essay, 1767, 286–287; The idea of men being ready to give up their “sovereignty” in a democratic state can also be found in Thomas Leland’s translation of Demosthenes, The Orations of Demosthenes, Delivered on Occasions of Public Deliberation . . . (London, 1771), 81. 164 Ferguson, An Essay, 1767, 252, 254.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 135 In the Royal Speech of November 1767, drawn up under the direction of Augustus Henry Fitzroy, the Duke of Grafton, the effects of the crisis of the preceding years can be seen more clearly than before. The ministry had been subject to some successful opposition manoeuvres, and the country had witnessed further food rioting.165 At a time of constitutional friction in the Empire and an economic crisis caused by the rise of corn prices, it was considered necessary to address not just the governing elite but also the totality of the King’s subjects outside Parliament, including the poor (XVI, 380–381, 383). Importantly, the response of the Commons did not concentrate so much on thanking the King for his services to his people as on defining the political role of Parliament itself. That role was presented as totally loyal to the monarch, the Commons promising to work “with a zeal and alacrity becoming the representatives of an affectionate and grateful people”. However, the House represented itself essentially as the representatives of the people, emphasizing “the indispensable duty we owe to those we represent” and expressing thereby a view of the source of their political power as independent of the monarch (XVI, 393). This may have been primarily a sign of the rising self-confidence of Parliament with regard to the American question, with the principle of the representation of the people by Parliament clearly present.166 The Commons’ formulation may also have been addressed to the voters in order to prepare them for the coming general election. In the debate on the Address, the young Edmund Burke was among those who openly suspected the administration of “spreading corruption through the people.” Burke denounced what he saw as the ministry appealing to the people by the means of the Royal Speech, attempting to make Parliament responsible for solving the food crisis (XVI, 387, 390–391).

165

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 244–245. At about the same time, the concept ‘national representation’ also entered public discourse for the first time, being used to emphasize the “supreme legislative capacity” and “sovereignty” of the British Parliament. [Anon.], The Constitutional Right of the Legislature of Great Britain. To tax British Colonies in America, Impartially States (London 1768), 12, 51. According to the author, in the British popular government: “The legislature, consisting of king, lords, and a representation of the people, or commons, constitute her supreme and absolute sovereignty.” (p. 41) The sovereignty was shared by all the elements of the constitution; see also Joseph Priestley, An Essay on a Course of Liberal Education for Civil and Active Life . . . (London 1768), 103. 166

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The character of the debate about the political role of the people was indeed changing more broadly in the late 1760s. The election campaign of spring 1768 became more colourful after Wilkes’ return from his four years of exile on the Continent. Wilkes had met Voltaire and renewed his contacts with French radical intellectuals such as Baron D’Holbach, whom he had known since his studies at the University of Leiden. He now fought a successful election campaign for a seat in the populous constituency of Middlesex but, predictably, was prosecuted for his previous offences. Wilkes made skilful use of the prosecution to gain popularity, suggesting that the parliamentary oligarchy was attempting to prevent the representation of the people in Parliament. His supporters turned to widespread rioting in London, which ended in the so-called St George’s Fields massacre with several fatal casualties. The Grafton ministry reacted with persecution after a further Wilkite election victory and repeated propaganda attacks on the government.167 The result of the controversy was a crisis that had both political and constitutional consequences. Wilkite protests appeared in courts, county petitions, parliamentary speaking, the press and demonstrations and riots, and they lasted until 1770. The Wilkite movement strengthened an already existing urban popular political culture which provided an alternative to parliamentary politics. It made effective use of publicity and encouraged the formation of associations. An anonymous author suggested that the concept of the public had been redefined so that it stood for the mob. Some of the associations that were formed and the arguments that were used during the crisis would serve as a foundation for later political radicalism, involving more people in political activities that would, in the long run, have an influence on parliamentary politics and political discourse.168 According to Wilson, the Wilkite reformists, with their references to the right of resistance, already heightened ‘popular sovereignty’ into a central concept of British politics.169 Dickinson has suggested that the Wilkite movement occurred simultaneously with a radicalization of public discourse from the late 1760s onwards. Joseph Priestley, for instance, argued on the basis of natural rights theory in favour of the 167

Christie 1982, 75; Holmes and Szechi 1993, 245; Dickinson 1995, 225; Wilson 1995, 211; Thomas 2004. 168 Dickinson 1977, 210, 213; Gunn 1983, 81; Reid 1985, 139. 169 Wilson 1995, 216–217.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 137 ultimate sovereign authority of the people and the right of resistance, describing the rulers as no more than “the servants of the people”. According to Dickinson, in Priestley’s understanding, the sovereign authority of the people was active in the sense that they had a right to freely reform a government.170 It is evident, however, that Priestley did not yet use any explicit concept of popular sovereignty.171 Linda Colley, by contrast, claims that Wilkes’ long-term influence was rather modest.172 The Wilkites certainly did not constitute a democratic movement,173 even if commentaries on party-strife during elections turned into openly anti-democratic criticism of them. Among the allegations was the following one, which lamented the fact that the fierce campaigning had extended to the masses and given rise to disorder: The general election is now over; and it is speaking a melancholy truth to say, that the state of the elections was a state of democracy, through several parts of the kingdom.174

The Wilkites themselves, though including the middling and even lower orders in their concept of the people, did their best to distinguish between “the people”, who they represented, and “the mob, who were to remain excluded even after a reform.175 The effects of the Wilkite affair and the American crisis crept only gradually into the language of ceremonial speaking. When they met the new Parliament in November 1768, the ministry still followed the conventional formula by defining the occasion as an “opportunity which the late general election gives me [the King] of knowing from their representatives in parliament the more immediate sense of my people” (XVI, 466). The sovereign had reduced references to what he

170 Dickinson 1977, 198. Dickinson draws generalizing conclusions by combining references to a variety of authors who wrote in different contexts, without always analysing their original use of language. This method often hides the extent of the points of view and the scale of the conceptual change. Generalizing concepts of ‘democracy’ and ‘the sovereignty of the people’ are also used in Goodwin 1979, 56, when the views of the reformers are discussed. 171 See Joseph Priestley, An Essay on the First Principles of Government; and on the Nature of Political, Civil, and Religious Liberty (Dublin 1768), 24–25. 172 Colley 1981, 16. 173 Christie 1962, 2; Wilson 1995, 227. 174 [Anon.], A Perspective View of the Complexion of some late Elections, and of the Candidates (London 1768), 3–4. 175 Dickinson 1977, 212–213; Wilson 1995, 235.

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had done and would do for his people, however, and instead recognized the ability of Parliament to act in cooperation with the King. However, the rights of the king’s people continued to be viewed only collectively and they were contrasted with their violations by outsiders, including some Americans (XVI, 466–467). There were few in Parliament who opposed such sentiments. Parliamentary debates of the expulsion of Wilkes from the Commons, which were opened soon afterwards, also contain few references to the political role of the people. Wilkes was being accused—in Blackstone’s words—of having attempted “to prejudice the minds of the people against the administration of public justice” (XVI, 542–543).176 On 2 February 1769, however, George Grenville, an opponent of the expulsion, recognized Wilkes’ status as “an object of popular favour” capable of inflaming “the people without doors”. Grenville suggested that Wilkes’ popularity would soon wither away if he was just allowed to keep his seat in Parliament, while his expulsion would turn him into a victim and further increase his popularity (XVI, 567–569). On the following day, Wilkes was expelled from the House. And after each re-election that followed, he was always expelled again.177 By April 1769, several members of parliament would already be arguing that “the right of the people” had been violated by the nomination of Wilkes’ rival candidate to Parliament and that the repeated expulsions of Wilkes had turned into “a dispute between the parliament and the people” (XVI, 584). Edmund Burke, a Rockingham Whig, accused the ministry of having made the Commons present Addresses that were “libels on the people” and having thereby created a schism not only between the Commons and the voters but also between the King and the people (XVI, 587). Other debaters insisted that “the Commons and the people are virtually the same” and “inseparably connected both in interest and in freedom”. It was hence very strange that the Commons should violate “the liberties of the people” in the way they had (XVI, 595). In the course of spring 1769, the Wilkes affair thus started to produce constitutional debates, including arguments emphasizing the primacy of the rights of the people. The public debate and crowd activity

176 Blackstone was preparing the last part of his Commentaries upon the Laws of England for publication in 1769. Holmes & Szechi 1993, 245. 177 Holmes & Szechi 1993, 245.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 139 was changing the way in which at least some opposition members understood their role in relation to the people. For the rest of 1769, the opposition continued to organize widespread petitioning in favour of Wilkes and against the decisions of the Commons,178 which contributed to this change in parliamentary language. Pamphlets were published, including some that pointed out the original source of the authority of the Commons—the people. According to the anonymous author of one, the most valuable principle of the constitution continued to be “that which vests in the people the power of chusing their own representatives in Parliament.” He added that “it is by them that the consent of the people is given”.179 The relationship not so much between the King and the people but rather that between the current Westminster Parliament and the people at large had been a topic of general dispute in and out of Parliament. This controversy was also observed with keen interest in countries outside Britain, including Sweden, as we shall soon see. Redefinitions of the Relationship between the People, Parliament and the Crown in the Aftermath of the John Wilkes Case, 1770–1771 The relationship between Parliament and the people had become problematic in an unforeseen manner as a consequence of the recurrent elections in Middlesex, in which John Wilkes repeatedly won the popular vote, only to have his entry to the House prevented each time by the Commons. This confrontation was hardly relieved by the appointment of Lord North as the Prime Minister on 25 January 1770, though the manipulation of Parliament was intensified.180 The Royal Speech of 9 January 1770 retained its old tone, ignoring accusations that the administration was not demonstrating proper respect for the rights of the people. George III merely argued that he would maintain “the dignity and honour of my crown, together with the just rights and interests of my people”, and that he expected to receive the full backing of “my parliament, [. . .] in their zeal for the true interest of

178

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 245; Thomas 2004. [English freeholder], The Sentiments of an English Freeholder, on the Late Decision of the Middlesex Election (London 1769), 6–7. 180 Holmes & Szechi 1993, 245; Black 2001, 253. 179

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my people” (XVI, 643–644). Parliament was still the King’s institution rather than the people’s. The Lords officially echoed these formulations, but in reality criticism was on the rise. Lord Chatham (William Pitt the Elder), with his authority as a former premier, challenged the request that the Lords should agree on the Address in order to pacify the people and demanded instead that the complaints of the people should be examined. As the privileges of the Lords stood “upon the broad bottom of the people”, the peers should “watch over, and guard the people; for, when the people had lost their rights, those of the peerage would soon become insignificant.” (XVI, 651) If indeed it really was pronounced in the Lords in 1770,181 this was a radical statement from a former first minister, echoing Wilkes’ words in 1763.182 Chatham went on to advise his fellow noblemen: Let us be cautious how we admit an idea, that our rights stand on a footing different from those of the people. Let us be cautious how we invade the liberties of our fellow-subjects, however mean, however remote; for [. . .] slavery [. . .] [is] a disease which spreads by contact, and soon reaches from the extremities to the heart (XVI, 651–652).

No distinction between the people and the peers was to be made by the former premier, now frustrated in opposition. Chatham’s point was that the liberty of the subjects had been invaded, that the complaints of the people were justified and that the Lords should have informed the King about the dissatisfied mood of the nation. This meant, above all, reconsidering the prosecution of Wilkes by the Commons (XVI, 652–653). Chatham’s suggestion was viewed as utterly dangerous by the Earl of Mansfield (XVI, 654), but Chatham went on to insist that the proceedings against Wilkes had been unconstitutional, that the “national rights contained in Magna Charta” concerned “the whole people”, and that the Lords should respect “the collective body of the people” even more than the Commons as “the representative”. The Lords should have “the English nation” on their side and act as “mediators between the King and people” (XVI, 661–663). The Wilkite language of popular politics had undeniably entered the British Lords. The elder Pitt was rather alone in his use of such language, but his

181 The source critical problems related to this debate are obvious, as Cobbett bases his report on the account of a politician who revised the notes as late as 1813. 182 See Dickinson 1977, 211.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 141 style of argumentation was gaining ground. The Wilkite rhetoric was repeated in printed literature and found its way abroad, including all the way to the Swedish House of Nobilities. Nor was the Commons content with repeating old loyalist formulas. After an extensive debate, they decided to send a clear message to the King, the government and the general public, expressing themselves in increasingly confident terms in the aftermath of the Wilkes affair: We will steadily perseverve [sic] in such principles as are most agreeable to the true spirit of this free constitution, and invariably pursue such measures as are most conducive to the real happiness of the people (XVI, 729).

The House was speaking with a voice of its own, emphasizing its interpretation of “the true spirit of this free constitution” and its determination to make decisions that would be for the best of “the people”, as the members of parliament understood it. In this formulation, the word “people” was used for the first time in the history of the Addresses of Thanks by the Commons since the mid-1730s with the definitive article, without the usual references to “the King’s people”. “The people” undeniably stood for a collective political agent independent of the monarch but one constituted by Parliament rather than some extra-parliamentary people. Repeated claims in public discourse that the sense of the Commons and that of the people diverged had forced the lower house to define itself more emphatically as the true representative of the people, understood as a collective. This message was still reinforced by repeating the conventional claim about the unique nature of the British constitution and by implying that Parliament was working to ensure the future of the constitution (XVI, 730). By this time, even most of the parliamentary opposition were unhappy with Wilkite radicalism and rather advocated an interpretation of themselves as “the people”.183 Contrary to what some speakers had suggested during the preceding session, the Commons Addresses were not mere meaningless rituals but could at times convey serious messages, even ones relating the existing constitutional frictions. The formulation of 1770 was not so much a turning point in the relationship between the monarchical and popular elements of the British constitution as a statement

183

Wilson 1995, 217.

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emphasizing the independent status of Parliament in relation to the people at large, and particularly to the Wilkites. At the same time, the confident formulation presented in the name of the people hid disagreements within the Commons. William Dowdeswell, a member wavering between Whig and Tory attitudes, took up the “violations of the people’s rights” by the government in various parts of the Empire and the neglect of all petitions of the people (XVI, 680). According to Velters Cornewall, a country Tory, “in an assembly of the people, regard is to be paid to the voice of the people” and to “popular discontents” no matter what their reason was (XVI, 684). The response of the Attorney General, Thomas de Grey (1748– 1818), to these speeches illustrates the belief of the majority of the members that the Commons retained an indisputable right to exclude Wilkes from the House on the basis of the denial of the imperative mandate. This was particularly so because the Commons constituted “the people”: This House, once chosen, is, to all legal and constitutional purposes, the people collectively, and to suppose their judicial proceedings, when chosen, to be cognizable by any number of the individuals who have chosen them, is to subvert our constitution from the root (XVI, 686).

A further comment of De Grey reveals the social prejudices inherent in the attitudes of the parliamentary elite towards the Wilkite cause: the opposition outside Parliament consisted of no more than “a few despicable mechanics, headed by base-born people, booksellers, and broken tradesmen”. The signers of the petitions were “the scum of the earth, the refuse of the people, unworthy to enter the gates of his Majesty’s palace” (XVI, 696). No wonder De Grey’s speech was interrupted by John Glynn, a Unitarian member of the editorial board of Wilkes’ North Briton, who shouted that the claims constituted “an offence against the people of this free kingdom”, as “[t]he privileges of this country do not depend upon birth and fortune” (XVI, 696). The language of the people challenging the establishment flourished among opposition speakers for the rest of the debate. George Sackville (Germain from 1770), an old officer who supported the nomination of North to the head of the ministry, emphasized in a very fervent speech the need to rephrase the Address as “the minds of the people are alarmed, and they have high expectations from the deliberations of this House.” (XVI, 686) Reconsidering the expulsion of Wilkes was the only method to “give the people satisfaction” and to show that the

the westminster parliament and the people, – 143 Commons remained “the representatives of the people”. The Commons should denounce the ministerial formulation, which suggested that the King approved the manipulation of the election results in Middlesex as well as the neglect of popular petitions in favour of Wilkes in order to not offend the people (XVI, 687–688). In Sackville’s description of the state of affairs, the people throughout the Empire were concerned that their liberties were in danger, expected action by their representatives and otherwise were prepared to withdraw their support from the House. In the worst scenario, the tragedy of St George’s Fields might be repeated. If the Commons did not aim at saving the constitution, “the representatives of the people” would turn into a “league against the people”, and the people might deny the authority of Parliament and allow themselves to be governed by an authoritarian ruler instead. This had, according to Sackville, already happened in the once free state of Denmark (XVI, 688–690).184 Charles Jenkinson, a servant of the court with a Tory background, overcame his usual timidity and questioned the idea that “the authority of this House was to depend on the voice of the people out of this House” (XVI, 690). The controversy over the relationship between Parliament and the people appeared to him to be a result of a Wilkite faction abusing the thoughtless multitude. According to Jenkinson, support for the Address did not mean voting “away the people’s rights”; opposition to the amendment should rather be seen as a defence of both the rights of the people and the honour of the members (XVI, 691–692). Two more opposition speeches followed, both of them questioning the authority of the Commons to some degree. George Savile, a defender of the rights of the electors to freely choose their representatives, argued that while “the diminution of the authority of this House by the people” was lamentable, even worse was “the invasion of the people’s rights by the authority of this House” (XVI, 699). He repeated his last point despite having been repudiated by Sir Alexander Gilmour (XVI, 700–701). Savile found a defender in the Wilkite Glynn, who demanded that the suggestions in the press about the rights of the people having been betrayed by the Commons should be taken seriously. Glynn maintained that the lower house had already lost “the 184 In Denmark, royal absolutism had been taken over by J.F. Struensee’s autocratic rule in 1770.

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love and confidence of the people” and was about to turn from “an assembly of free representatives of a free people, into a gang of slaves” (XVI, 701, 703). The debate became heated, and Jeremiah Dyson, a pedantic observer of parliamentary procedure and a consistent defender of the authority of Parliament, maintained that the claims of the opposition were unfounded. He saw no reason why the people should protest against Parliament; it was merely the opposition that desperately exploited “the mob” and “rabble” of the rioting “middling sorts” and the publicists of London for their sinister purposes. No conflict between Parliament and the people existed in the first place: We have been told, [. . .] that we have lost the love and confidence of the people, that an hon. gentleman who has reproached us with betraying our trust, has spoken the sentiments of the people, that we are at this moment in danger of being called to account by the people, that the people are ready to do themselves justice upon us, and that we should beware what we do, because the people, whom by one of the rhetorical flourishes, which are so useful on other occasions, he calls the Avenger, is at the door. Sir, it is hard to say whether this insult is more gross against this House or the people. Is the rabble that is now supposed to be gathered about the door, the people? Are the writers of news-papers, who wish for a prison or a pillory, that their libels may be thought more important, the people? Or do the petitions, about which so much has just been said, contain the sense of the people? The people are too great, too respectable a body to become the tool, the puppet of any faction; [. . .] (XVI 703–704).

Dyson, as one of the voices of the majority, concluded that Parliament should not be affected by the opinions of the rabble if it did not want to see the entire system degenerate into a tyranny of the mob (XVI, 705). The mixed constitution should be actively protected from such degeneration, the assumption continuing to be that the parliamentary majority constituted the people. As the opposition did not give up their claims that the people as a collective was discontented with the administration (XVI, 705, 710), the Prime Minister insinuated that they were “alienating the affections of the people from their Sovereign” (XVI, 717), i.e. behaving treasonously. The official line remained unchanged: the administration was not violating “the rights of the people”, nor would it allow outsiders to violate the power of Parliament (XVI, 719). The debates on the Address in spring 1770, in the aftermath of the Wilkes controversy, thus led to extensive disagreements over the

the westminster parliament and the people, – 145 proper political roles of the people on the one hand and Parliament on the other. A turning point in the parliamentary use of language referring to the people was clearly at hand. The debate, which had been initiated by Wilkite publications, was joined by parliamentarians outside the House as well. Edmund Burke, for instance, was already active at that time.185 Whereas the concept of the people was at the centre of this debate, that of democracy did not yet play any noteworthy role in it. The main message of oppositional publications such as Junius’ letters in the Public Advertiser was that the Commons’ power was delegated by the people and that there were serious defects in the representation of the people in that House.186 The controversy of spring 1770 and the troubles of the rest of the year led to some revisions in the drafts of the Royal Speech and Addresses of the following November. Lord North chose to rephrase the description of the relationship between the monarchy and the people in some respects, particularly as he himself esteemed the Commons but was concerned about the questioning of the government’s authority in public discourse. Furthermore, even some of North’s supporters had referred to the voice of the people in favourable terms during the year.187 In a speech approved by North, the King responded to popular discontent by repeating five times the phrases “the honour of my crown” and “the just rights and interests of my people”. The addition of the attribute “just” before the rights of the King’s people may be seen as

185 Burke referred to democracy only twice in his pamphlet, denying the “democratical” character of the Commons’ decision on the Middlesex election and arguing that the British constitution, though it was not based on the popular election of magistrates “provided [. . .] better for all the effects of it than by the method of suffrage in any democratic State whatsoever”. At the same time, he argued forcefully in favour of “that great and only foundation of Government, the confidence of the people” and of the people being allowed to express their discontent in relation to their rulers even if “the generality of the people are fifty years, at least, behind-hand in their politicks”. Burke’s suggestion was that the dispositions of the House of Commons and the people at large did not currently meet, which was highly problematic as the forms of power “all originate from the people.” The essence of the Commons was, after all, to function as “a controul for the people”. Edmund Burke, Thought on the Cause of the Present Discontents (London 1770), 5, 8, 14, 23, 29, 35; This book would be cited against Burke in a Commons debate over twenty years later. See pp. 402–403. 186 [Anon.], The State of the Nation, as Represented to a Certain Great Personage, by Junius and the Freeholder: and the Petitions of the Citizens of London . . . (London 1770), 1-2; [Junius], A Complete Collection of Junius’s Letters . . . (London 1770), 154–155. 187 Gunn 1983, 277.

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a slight reformulation. To show that claims about the administration neglecting the interests of the people had no foundation, the King referred to “my people’s rights”, though still defining them collectively and limiting them to the context of foreign policy. The familiar definition underscoring the indivisibility of the King and his people was also still there: “I have no interest, I can have none, distinct from that of my people” (XVI, 1032). This statement can be seen as a response to the questioning of the unity of interests of the Crown, Parliament and the people in preceding political discourse. The Commons replied with a highly consensual Address, according to which the House was determined to defend the cause of the King’s people. The Address was designed to appease the opposition and the public more generally by underlining the House’s conviction that the King “would never be induced, by a mistaken tenderness for the present ease of your people, to sacrifice their more essential and more lasting interests”. However, the Address extended the formulations of the Royal Speech when referring to the need to maintain “the luster of your crown” on the one hand and the need to preserve “undiminished the rights of your people” on the other (XVI, 1079, 1081). The message was that no royal intrusion on the rights of the people would ever take place. These formulations had been strongly challenged during the debate. William Meredith, a Tory and previous Jacobite, carried on the old opposition attack against the ministry in the name of the people, suggesting that despite governmental claims of the continued confidence of the people, “the people wish destruction to them and their measures”. Meredith openly took issue with the misleading nature of the use of language referring to the people’s rights by the Crown: North’s ministry claimed that it was defending the rights of the nation against Spain while in reality it was seriously “violating the rights of the people at home”. A further suggestion was that without the removal of a threat to liberty at home (i.e. a reconsideration of the decision on the Middlesex election), there would be no certainty of the readiness of the people to fight for their liberties abroad either (XVI, 1038–1040).188

188 In the report of the London Museum, reprinted in Cobbett, the formulation is more moderate, referring only to the people being “at variance with them and their measures”. However, the basic argument about the ministry having violated the essential rights of the kingdom, the people being therefore unwilling to fight and the Wilkes case calling for reconsideration was the same (XVI, 1057–1059).

the westminster parliament and the people, – 147 Prime Minister North replied to this claim scornfully, attributing it to the opposition’s readiness to “abandon their lawful sovereign” (XVI, 1050, 1072). This whole exchange demonstrates the continuity of the confrontation between the government and opposition (which had been opened by the Wilkes affair), expressed through language referring to the people. There remains no doubt that the Wilkite protests provided an impulse for a change towards new conceptions of the political role of the people. One particular debate contributed to the ongoing transition in the parliamentary concept of the people. On 25 March 1771, the Commons discussed the imprisonment of the Lord Mayor of London because of his failure to stop the printing of parliamentary debates as the House, on a motion of Colonel George Onslow, had ordered in February.189 The Wilkites were again actively challenging the secrecy of the Commons and, as a result of this episode, they managed to radically cut down the censorship of parliamentary reporting. Reporting had expanded dramatically as a consequence of the Middlesex election, and the Wilkites wanted to ensure the access of “the people” to parliamentary proceedings in the future as well.190 The debate concerned the true definition of the rights of the people on the one hand and those of Parliament on the other. Interestingly, it also produced previously rare references to the existence of a democratic element in the British constitution. The extensive and at times radical use of language referring to the people on both sides followed to a great extent from the fact that Wilkite crowds were at times rioting in the very courtyard of Parliament, demonstrating their support for those London officials who had protected the printers (XVII, 119, 155). The members of parliament were forced to define their position on what the proper political role of the people was—and in more concrete terms than ever before. The most active accuser of the London officials was Welbore Ellis, a placeman who rejected all attempts to change the constitution. He interpreted the publication of the debates as a major breach of the privileges of the Commons, demanding that the practice should be prevented and the status of the Commons as the guardian of liberty reinforced (XVII, 121). Whenever the opposition tried to defend publication, Ellis was there to repeat his arguments.

189 190

Bullard 2005, 314. Thomas 2004.

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Savile opposed the motion to punish the London magistrates, suggesting that the Commons might not be “the true representatives of the people” in the first place (XVII, 121). Alderman James Townsend, a Wilkite member, interpreted the case as one “between the people and their representatives” and expressed his concern that the privileges of the Commons left “the people scarcely the shadow of liberty”. Indeed, he argued, such censorship was just a further stage in governmental attempts “to root out the people’s liberties”. The privileges of the Commons should rather be seen as identical with those of the people. Townsend’s conclusion was that the Commons violated this principle in forbidding discussion of their debates outside its walls (XVII, 121–122). This opposition provoked Ellis to put his argument on the relative roles of Parliament and the people more vehemently. According to Ellis, the London magistrates aimed at destroying the whole institution of the Commons by violating its privileges. This was, indeed, more than an opposition attempt to abuse a mistaken notion of an “all-ruling supremacy in the people” and of a misleadingly broad concept of the people. The purpose seemed to be to destroy the balanced constitution by a redefinition of the political role of the people. Ellis maintained, by contrast, that the Commons alone—and not the populace at large, or even the voters—constituted the people of England (XVII, 125). His concept of the people remained highly exclusive, resembling that held by the parliamentary elite more broadly: [. . .] one of the most favourite principles of the present opposition is, that all authority is originally derived from the people, and that in exigencies of peculiar necessity, where the law has provided no remedy for unforeseen criminalities, that then the power of the people should interpose, and the safety of the state even justify occasional infractions upon the established ordinances of the kingdom. The opposition, however, while it reasons in this manner, while it contends for this all-ruling supremacy in the people, never once reflects, that it is actually enforcing the propriety of parliamentary privilege. This House, Sir, in its legislative capacity, constitutes the only people of England which the law acknowledges: [. . .] the moment they [our constituents] elect new representatives, these representatives, and not the constituents, again become the legal body of the people. To imagine any other people, either in a judicial, or an argumentative sense, is to lay the political axe immediately at the root of our constitution, it is to substitute anarchy in the room of order, [. . .] (XVII, 125).

the westminster parliament and the people, – 149 The concept of the people appeared here as totally identical with membership of the Commons; Ellis regarded it as unconstitutional to suggest that some other people outside the House existed, and even worse was any claim that the said people were entitled to intervene in politics. The logic of the supreme authority of Parliament as represented here demolished all calls for active popular participation in decisionmaking. Ellis argued: As we are therefore the people of England, Sir, nothing is more absurd than to say we are trampling upon the rights of the nation, when we are merely supporting our own constitutional claims, and exercising those powers, which have been immemorially allowed us for the most salutary purposes (XVII, 126).

Popular government in its British sense, as understood by Ellis, was the same thing as parliamentary rule conducted behind closed doors. What the City magistrates had done in allowing reports on debates to be published violated the privilege of the Commons and thereby bypassed “the whole body of the British people” as represented by Parliament. This was so because the privilege of the House was originally meant “to make the scale of the people as important in the constitution” as that of the King and the Lords and was inviolable without destroying the House as “the temple of freedom”. Publication would, according to Ellis, mean that anyone would be allowed to misrepresent the debates of the House in public (XVII, 126–128). Ellis’ motion that the Lord Mayor should be condemned for violating the privilege of the Commons was adopted by the majority, but his claims were also disputed by many. Savile warned the members of parliament of making themselves “detestable to the nation” with the proposed measures (XVII, 130). Glynn saw the dispute, again, as one “between the people and their representatives”. According to him, the privileges of the Commons, originally awarded by the people, were now being perverted by the House (XVII, 131, 133). Thomas Townshend (afterwards Baron Sydney) was convinced that any repressive measures of the Commons would be resisted by the people anyway (XVII, 136). The speech of the Attorney General, Baron Edward Thurlow, well demonstrates how differently ‘the people’ could be viewed. The offence of the London magistrates had been that they had expressly denied “the power of decision in the whole representation of the British people”, and even that of “the united majesty of the British people” (XVII,

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137–138). This formulation, provoked by the opposition defence of the political rights of the people outside Parliament, is unique for the period 1734–1771 in that the concept of the people was connected for the first time with ‘majesty’, though, of course, the word referred to the institution of King-in-Parliament as the majesty which ruled over the British people. Any idea of the people alone as the majesty would still have been as inconceivable to Thurlow’s contemporaries as any notion of it as the sovereign. However, a recognition of the popular basis of parliamentary power was present in his ideas (XVII, 139). Once the ministry had defined the decisions of the majority of the Commons as identical with “the sense of the people”, John Dunning, an opponent of excessive monarchical power, pointed out that the people might resist the decisions of the Commons—even if made in the name of the good of the people—if they felt that the parliamentary measures demonstrated “a spirit of despotism”. The best solution would be to stop the censure of the actions of the London magistrates. Dunning also had an unusually radical constitutional point to make when viewing the people as “the original spring from which the three streams of government proceeded, and must in fact be paramount to all” (XVII, 140, 142). In such a view, the origin of all political power in the people was undeniable; the question was only how far the political participation of the people in decision-making could go. In this particular case, the opposition was campaigning for no more than the right of the general public to be informed about what was discussed in Parliament. However, the next step seemed obvious, leading to the questioning of the degree of representation which the current division of parliamentary seats provided: It is a plausible argument, that the voice of the nation is only to be heard in this House; but plausibility does not necessarily imply justice, nor does this House constitute a real representative of the kingdom. [. . .] when it is [. . .] recollected, that the inadequacy of parliamentary representation is a subject of universal complaint, there is but a slender basis for asserting that our voice is the voice of the kingdom, and that as such it should be decisive in every deliberation (XVII, 142–143).

This statement implied that a parliamentary reform concerning the distribution of places was inevitable before the Commons would be able to claim that it alone expressed “the sense of the people” (XVII, 143). The debaters of March 1771 were divided into those who advocated the right of the people at large, outside Parliament, to have access to

the westminster parliament and the people, – 151 political information and those who defended the exclusive privilege of Parliament as representing the people to discuss politics. Their disagreement thus arose out of two different political concepts of the people, a division that became increasingly important in parliamentary debates as the century progressed. It is worth observing how in 1771 Charles James Fox, a man with an aristocratic background and an active member of parliament since 1768, fiercely opposed what he considered a misleading theory of the “divided interests of the Commons and the people” as well as claims that “the voice of this House is not the voice of the people”. Fox considered it unconstitutional to make the above-cited appeals to the people outside Parliament, as the members of parliament were and would remain “the only revealers of the national mind” and “the only judges of what ought to be the sentiments of the kingdom” (XVII, 145).191 He did, however, recognize that popular discontents often occurred when laws were passed in Parliament. He also denied the existence of two concepts of the people, arguing: “I will not differ with the honourable gentleman about the idea he annexes to his term of “the people””. His argument was rather that the members of parliament were responsible for seeking the common good “notwithstanding the imaginary infallibility of the people” (XVII, 145–146); in other words, because the people were bound to misunderstand the nature of political affairs, it was necessary for the members of parliament to decide on their behalf, even against their express wishes. Fox evidently shared his conception of the people with much of the parliamentary elite. One explanation for his attitudes is that his seat had practically been bought by his father. Furthermore, Fox’s loyalty to his father Henry made him oppose the Rockingham Whigs, his father’s earlier political opponents, support the Grafton and North ministries and criticize Wilkite populism in the early 1770s. His anti-populist attitudes even made him a target of mob violence at that time.192 Fox would become a champion of the cause of the people outside Parliament only after he campaigned for Middlesex around 1780. In 1771, Fox still considered it one of the fundamental duties of Parliament to defend the British mixed constitution against any popular attempts to replace it with democracy. It was indeed Fox, familiar

191 192

For a similar instance, see Derry 1976, 17–18. Mitchell 2004.

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with the French Enlightenment criticism of pure democracy as well, who opposed excessive democracy as utterly dangerous to the British constitution during these debates. In 1771, democracy was, according to Fox, a phenomenon to be actively resisted by the Commons: [. . .] let us suppose that the people, instead of this mixed monarchy, which we celebrate equally the pride and envy of the universe, should instruct us, their representatives, to introduce a democratical form of government; should we act as good subjects to our king, or as faithful guardians to our country, if we complied with so dangerous an advice? [. . .] Shall we, then, do what we are sensible is wrong, because the people desire it? Shall we sacrifice our reason, our honour, and our conscience for fear of incurring the popular resentment, [. . .] (XVII, 146).

The members of parliament, as representatives of the people, must be wiser than their electors and the people at large; they must protect the balance of the most ideal constitution of the whole universe, even against the people. For Fox, the people were incapable of ruling on their own, and democracy in its classical sense remained an abhorrent form of political anarchy, which meant that Parliament needed instead to play the key role in the mixed monarchy. Fox’s ‘people’ did not deserve any recognition as statesmen: I suspect their capacity to judge of their true happiness. I know they are generally credulous, and generally uninformed; captivated by appearances, while they neglect the most important essentials, [. . .] (XVII, 146).

According to Fox, the people changed their minds arbitrarily and complained unnecessarily, being unable to appreciate the successes of Britain. Such an incompetence to judge the common good had almost destroyed the constitution after the Civil Wars, in a period of “unlimited indulgence of the popular wish”. Even the current composition of Parliament demonstrated how the people tended to re-elect their representatives despite their proven inability to advance the interest of the electors (XVII, 147–148). It was a totally ridiculous idea that the Commons should have no power to make decisions, whereas “the people, because the origin of all power” and “the fountain of authority” did not need to obey its decisions (XVII, 148). An extended interpretation of the popular origin of political power was unacceptable, as the entire system was based on the principle that power had been delegated to the Commons.

the westminster parliament and the people, – 153 Fox was thus convinced that the Commons rather than “the people at large” constituted the appropriate body to decide what the common good was. Fox’s final definition of the respective roles of the people and the Commons was an uncompromising one, probably because it had recently been reinforced by the hostility of the London crowds towards him in person. Fox’s conceptions of the people and democracy in 1771 and later on in the 1780s and 1790s are also illustrative of the profound conceptual change that the Age of Revolutions brought to the content of these concepts. In the 1790s, Fox would be the major advocate of popular power, the sovereignty of the people and democracy in the British House of Commons. In 1771, however, the power of Parliament in relation to the people was for him still absolute: I pay no regard whatever to the voice of the people: it is our duty to do what is proper, without considering what may be agreeable: their business is to chuse us; it is our business to act constitutionally, and to maintain the independency of parliament: whether it is attacked by the people or by the crown, is a matter of little consequence; [. . .] (XVII, 149).

While Edmund Burke would turn from being an advocate of the rights of the people in the 1770s and 1780s into an opponent of democracy in its French revolutionary form, Fox’s concepts of the people and democracy developed in quite the opposite direction after 1780. In 1771, Fox was still unyielding in his opposition to the mob asserting its influencer on parliamentary decisions. If Parliament were not alert, “the people will be their own agents, though they elect us to represent them in parliament” (XVII, 149).193 Such a popular political agency was unthinkable as the members of parliament were already the agents of the people. Fox further elaborated his uncompromising condemnation of political activism of the Wilkite kind: “I stand up for the constitution, not for the people; if the people attempt to invade the constitution, they are enemies to the nation” (XVII, 149). In the heated atmosphere of 1771, it seemed entirely logical to Fox to view the people at large as potential enemies of the nation if they did not recognize the supremacy of Parliament with regard to the determination of the interests of the people. Parliament represented order, the people anarchy of the Wilkite kind. There was, clearly, no straight development towards modern representative mass democracy even in the political thought of a man who would later be known as 193

Author’s emphasis.

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the leading spokesman for the cause of the people. Fox’s illustrative speech also shows the logic of the language referring to the people as used by the political elites of representative institutions like the British Parliament and the Swedish Diet: the concept of the people was used to legitimate the participation of the elite in decision-making and the limits of the politically significant people were defined very restrictively: they did not really extend beyond the walls of the assemblies. By the early 1770s there were alternative understandings of ‘the people’, however. Colonel Barré repeated the point that the establishment defence of parliamentary privilege denied “the birthright of the people, who are ultimately paramount to all the three branches of the legislature.” For him, the Commons itself was enslaving the people and opening the way to anarchy (XVII, 151–152). William Meredith warned of a deepening discontent among the people as a consequence of the imprisonment of the Lord Mayor (XVII, 154). His prediction was realized: on the following day, 27 March 1771 a crowd rioted around the parliament building, with “the people out of doors” thus concretely participating in the political process (XVII, 155). Richard Whitworth, a further defender of the popular cause and opponent of extensive parliamentary privilege, characterized the confrontation between the Commons inside and the people outside as the deepest crisis which Parliament had ever encountered. He saw the Commons as actually being “at war against itself ”, which might lead to a civil war if the scheme of censoring parliamentary reports was not rejected. Whitworth lamented how the people struggling for the laws of the land and their liberties at large, and the representatives of that same people, and from whom they derive their whole authority, contending for that assumed power of uncontrolable, unlimited, indefinite privilege and jurisdiction (XVII, 158, 160).

Whitworth and the Wilkites lost the division but won the argument in the long run, and reporting on parliamentary debates soon became freer than ever before. The crisis also led to divided understandings of the political role of the people among the political elite. The differing definitions of the people would be used during the American War and the parliamentary reform movement of the 1780s. It is noteworthy, however, that the confrontation of 1771 did not yet bring about any breakthrough in references to democracy. A further important consequence of the controversy was that the publication of parliamentary debates became easier, as North’s ministry, despite its victory in the division, abandoned attempts to keep parlia-

the westminster parliament and the people, – 155 mentary debates completely secret.194 It follows that the source basis for the later chapters on Britain is considerably more extensive than that on which this chapter was based. The public debate would also become increasingly interested in the proceedings of the Commons after 1771, which further strengthened its position at the centre of politics. The debates of the Lords would soon be reported more frequently as well, which contributed to the survival of the upper house as another, and often ideologically more advanced, forum of political debate. The British parliamentary debate on the political role of the people in the late 1760s and early 1770s was considerably more lively and radical than at any time since 1734. However, the radicalization of the debate on the proper place of the people was by no means unique in Europe at that time. Nor did north-western European political cultures function in a vacuum; on the contrary, members of their political elites actively followed developments abroad. We may now turn to simultaneous debates in a country from which records on parliamentary debates are even more extensive, which also had a relatively free public debate and which has been seen as having taken major steps towards modern democracy during the same period. In the British Parliament, the character of the estate-dominated polity of Sweden, its threatened status and its fall were discussed at least a dozen times between 1734 and 1784. In 1752, William Beckford, a colonial merchant, still denied the relevance of comparisons between Britain and Sweden because freedom in Sweden was “of such a modern date, that it cannot be brought as an example” (XIV, 1103). By 1766, however, the extraordinary nature of the Swedish regime was recognized by Lord Northington, the Speaker of the House of Lords, who referred to “the kingdom or rather republic of Sweden” (XVI, 171). It is, therefore, worth examining what the position of the people actually was in the understanding of the political establishment of such a “republic”. Likewise, it is interesting to see how the Swedish political elite viewed the British form of popular government, which many of them considered the closest point of comparison. It is time to make an excursion to the northeast to find out about the state of Swedish “democracy” and, through a comparison, to obtain tools for a better understanding of the British eighteenth-century debate on the political role of the people as well.

194

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 246.

CHAPTER THREE

THE SWEDISH CASE: DID POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY AND REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY EXIST IN SWEDEN BEFORE 1772? Lord [. . .] do not let our blessed form of government fall into anarchical and lawless democracy [sjelfswåldig och laglös Democratie], which can only be cured by tyranny and sovereignty [Tyrannie och Souverainité].1 If that is to be called democracy, then according to the law democracy belongs to the Estates of the Realm in their plenary sessions, and in my thoughts I shall always remain committed to a democracy so constituted on the basis of our law.2

The Swedish Age of Liberty (1718–1772), an era when the royal prerogative was taken over by the Senate and the four-estate Diet, is a fascinating period from the point of view of the comparative history of popular sovereignty and democracy. Its late phase (1769–1772) produced contradictory references to the concept of democracy like those cited above. The debate on democracy at the Swedish Diet, as recorded in its minutes, was more active than in the British Parliament during the same period. Members of the Diet could either pray to God to save their country from democracy or—in the midst of a heated debate on the form of government—suggest ironically that the current form of government actually contained a major element of democracy. Historians have written a lot about the breakthrough of the principle of popular sovereignty and the rise of democratic debate and practice in Sweden in the late Age of Liberty. Most of their conclusions have been reached by applying the generalizing concepts of popular

1 Fredrik Vilhelm Leijonancker, Fri Frågor, Til Et Fritt och Sjelftänkande Folk (Stockholm 1769), 8. The pamphlet ends with this prayer dated on 27 January 1769. The word sovereignty refers here conventionally to the absolute power of the sovereign, a use which illustrates the logical impossibility of combining the concepts of the people and sovereignty. As Captain Leijonancker had served in the French navy, he may have been familiar with French political terminology relating to democracy and sovereignty. 2 Fredrik Gyllensvahn, Sveriges ridderskaps och adels riksdagsprotokoll från och med år 1719 (SRARP), 1769–1770 (Stockholm 1962–1964), Vol. II, 28 November 1769, 160.

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sovereignty and democracy in their interpretation of the eighteenthcentury political reality. However, little systematic analysis of the actual language which was used by contemporaries to describe the political role of the people has been carried out. In this chapter, I shall analyse the vocabulary by which the political role of the people and the form of government known since classical times as democracy were described by Swedish statesmen and journalists during the last years of the Age of Liberty. My goal is to elucidate to what extent the Swedish political elite (comprising the members of the Estates who actually attended the Diet and a number of political writers) understood their political community in a way that would legitimate the use of the terms ‘popular sovereignty’ and ‘representative democracy’ by us historians to depict their political system. I ask to what extent it had become possible to recognize popular sovereignty and democracy as positive phenomena which could be seen as defining both the political conceptions of individual actors and the regime of the Age of Liberty as a whole. This leads us to the question of whether these concepts in their modern, positive and post-revolutionary senses already existed in Sweden at the time of the royal coup of 1772, and whether Sweden thus experienced a modernization of attitudes to democracy that predated that of the rest of Europe. Alternatively, a comparative reading of the sources may reveal patterns of thought that were quite conventional among the political elites of the “free states” in Europe. The results of this analysis, while demonstrating the important role that references to the people in politics played in Sweden, will challenge some previous interpretations of the late Age of Liberty as an era that witnessed considerable progress in democracy. I have chosen to focus on the last years of the Age of Liberty (1769– 1772) as they have traditionally been seen as a period when the political debate reached its most radical phase,3 producing arguments that have been regarded as anticipating those of the French Revolution. Quite extensive claims have been put forward about the radicalization of the Swedish political culture and about Sweden developing as a political community towards modern democracy based on the principle of popular sovereignty. Before historians can legitimately characterize the regime and the politicians of the Age of Liberty as democratic, they must first demonstrate that the actors themselves understood their 3

Fahlbeck 1915, 330–331.

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political system as democratic and identified themselves as democrats in a positive sense. They must demonstrate that the people of the age either supported the Athenian notion of direct democracy or had adopted a more modern concept of representative democracy. If neither was the case, historians should avoid teleological interpretations and rather respect the ways in which the contemporaries conceptualized their politics in early modern and often quite classical terms. The main point of studying past political vocabularies is to try to understand the political thought of the political actors through an empirical analysis of their own language and not only through our unhistorical interpretation of their aims. In this chapter, I shall show that the Swedish political elite around 1770 still hardly possessed any clear understanding of ‘popular sovereignty’ or ‘representative democracy’ in the senses that these concepts would take on more generally only after the French Revolution. This does not, however, mean a denial of the centrality of the concept ‘the people’ ( folket) in contemporary political debate; rather it entails pointing out that no modern conception of popular sovereignty or representative democracy had yet become possible in the mideighteenth-century Swedish understanding of politics. In Swedish discourse, ‘sovereignty’ stood only for the kind of royal absolutism that the country had experienced before 1718 and which the political elite and even the monarchs themselves consistently denounced. If these speakers and writers had any ideas resembling what would later be called “popular sovereignty”, these had to be expressed in more traditional parlance. It follows that the contemporary vocabulary by which the political role of the people could be discussed needs to be elucidated and the various meanings it was given reconstructed. This entails the elucidation, analysis and explanation of the meanings these keywords might receive through their use in particular political debates. An equally important question is whether the word ‘democracy’ (demokrati) occurred during the debates of the Estates, and if so what exact meanings did it carry? It is worth considering whether democracy was yet associated with representation at all. Could the members of the Diet attribute positive connotations to democracy by either associating it with, or distinguishing it from, the long tradition of criticism of direct democracy? If we can find a debate in which democracy based on representation as a potential form of government was discussed in favourable terms during the last years of the Age of Liberty, we shall

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perhaps be able to talk about Sweden as the country where modern democracy first saw the light of day. If not, we should be careful not to exaggerate the degree of modernity of the Swedish regime under the Estates. Interpretations of the Age of Liberty as a Watershed in the Progress of Democracy After the collapse of absolute monarchy in 1718 during the last phase of the Great Northern War, Sweden had turned into a monarchy that was ruled by the Estates to an extent that was exceptional in the Europe of that time. Since the Middle Ages, the Swedish political system had been based on the Diet (Riksdag), which was composed of four estates—the Nobility, the Clergy, the Burghers and the Peasantry—who convened at least once every three years. The members of the three lower estates were partly chosen by various systems of election. The Peasant Estate, in particular, was relatively large, constituting in principle about a quarter of the population. However, the system appears anything but ‘representative’ or ‘democratic’ in the post-French-Revolution senses of these words, as the majority of the populace, including most of the lower orders and professionals who did not belong to any estate, continued to be excluded from representation. Even so, the Swedish version of estate representation allowed relatively large groups of people to send their spokesmen to the Diet. At the Diet, each estate held its own meetings and had one vote in the legislative process. Deliberation took mainly place within individual estates, while interaction between the estates was characterized rather by negotiation. Three estates were able to pass a law but the consensus of all four estates was needed to change the constitution. In practice, the Diet met more often than every three years, and when it did so, it could remain in session for over a year. The work the Diet carried out was of considerable importance: it held the supreme power in the realm, including legislative, supervisory and even a degree of executive power. The senators became increasingly answerable to the Diet for their political actions, and they were liable to be sacked through a judicial process—a procedure that historians have often depicted as an early form of parliamentarism.4 The Swedish form of

4

Gustafsson 1994, 48–49, 158; Nordin 2003, 60; Saastamoinen 2003, 49.

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government was exceptional in that neither the monarch nor the ministry played such a dominant role in legislation as they did in Britain, for example. In Sweden, it was first and foremost the Estates’ trust that the Senate had to earn rather than the King’s.5 In such a context, the self-confidence of the representative institution grew independently of the other organs of state, and this is reflected in the arguments presented in the Estates concerning the monarchy, the Senate and the people at large. A fierce rivalry between two parties, the Hats and the Caps, divided mid-eighteenth-century Sweden. Their original goals were moulded by the new political constellation, but some of the characteristics of the factions that they were composed of remained unchanged: the Hat Party consisted of leading economic interests and the highest noble civil servants, who were strongly francophile in foreign policy and culture more generally. And they continued to receive considerable financial support from their French allies. The Caps, in contrast, had political and financial connections with the British and Russian embassies, supported a more cautious foreign policy and were not quite as keen on economic subventions as the Hats. By the late 1760s, some proponents of the rights of the non-noble estates had also found a political home among the Caps.6 The Caps thus received most of their support from the lower orders, and consequently some of them entertained ideas that challenged certain features of the established social order, the privileged position of the Nobility in particular. By the 1760s, the Hat Party, too, had undergone some transformation. As the voice of many members of the Nobility, the Hats had originally been highly critical of a strong monarchy and campaigned in support of the political influence of the Nobility as embodying ‘the people’ who should rule the country. However, when the Hat Nobles encountered the challenge to their privileges from the Caps and the lower orders, many of them were ready to reconsider their position and to become supporters of a stronger monarchy under the new king, Gustavus III, who ascended to the throne in 1771. Harald Gustafsson has argued that the constitution of the Age of Liberty described above should not be seen as ‘democratic’—despite some elements of representation, the existence of rival parties and changes in the membership of the Senate depending on who were in 5 6

Metcalf 2003, 41–42. Skuncke 1999, 285.

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the majority in the Estates. In a number of ways, the Swedish regime remained traditional and oligarchic, and it ought, according to Gustafsson, to be characterized rather as an “autocracy of the estates” than a “representative democracy”. The system may have been idealized by some critics of the French regime, but many foreigners also saw it as a warning example. While the rule of the Estates and the lack of a strong monarchy made possible the birth of novel notions concerning who should possess the supreme power in society, the Swedish regime had not developed into anything like a modern parliamentary state by 1772. The limited degree of radicalism among the Estates is demonstrated by the readiness of nearly all their members to give up the existing form of government without any notable resistance as soon as the King proposed a new one in 1772.7 Scholars have also put forward more liberal interpretations of the Swedish Age of Liberty as a period of development towards modernity and democracy, suggesting that the parliamentary system provided an alternative to classical direct democracy and was progressing towards representative democracy. This interpretation has been defended ever since the 1910s when it came as a reaction to earlier critical scholarly views of the Age of Liberty. Another explanation for the strength of this understanding of mid-eighteenth-century Sweden as a democratizing political community may be that most Swedish studies on the Riksdag have focussed on the structures and functioning of the Diet in its heyday rather than on an analysis of the contemporary language of politics used in actual debates, let alone any study of the suppressed Diet in the era of Gustavian autocracy.8 Analytical concepts applied by historians rather than an empirical analysis of the language of the primary sources have dominated the field. Fredrik Lagerroth, for instance, wrote extensively about the organization and working methods of the Riksdag. For him, it was evident that the Swedish form of government had been based on a “democratic-monarchical ideal” ever since the Middle Ages and had produced calls for “popular representation” since the seventeenth century. Lagerroth argued that the regime of the Age of Liberty was “a modern parliamentary regime” with a “four-chamber system” that was more advanced than the contemporary British one. The Swedish system was,

7 8

Gustafsson 1994, 50, 52, 134, 157. Malmström 1877, which is a mere chronical of events, and Hildebrand 1896.

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Lagerroth claimed, developing towards “the rule of the people”, “popular sovereignty” and “democracy”. By the end of the age, he suggested, the three lowest estates of the Riksdag constituted nothing less than “a real representation of the people”. He concluded that “the democratic principle” of the political power being derived from the people affected the Swedish regime throughout the Age of Liberty.9 For a comparative study of language referring to the people, Lagerroth’s interpretation provides little as it builds on generalizing conclusions drawn in the spirit of general constitutional history rather than on any analysis of direct citations from original sources. Yet Lagerroth’s study opened a tradition of history writing within which the Swedish regime has been interpreted as the most advanced political culture in eighteenth-century Europe. Following Lagerroth, Sweden has been seen as a pioneer in constitutional development, as a country that anticipated both the philosophy of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution.10 While Lagerroth’s conclusions have been repeated in historical studies published in the early 2000s, the criticism which Lagerroth’s book received back in the 1910s has not always been taken into consideration. Even in 1915, his book was, in fact, seen as “unhistorical” and as determined to present the Age of Liberty in excessively modern terms.11 The strongest evidence which Lagerroth presented to support his interpretation was a manuscript written around 1760 by Carl Fredrik Scheffer. Scheffer was a leading Hat politician, and he wrote the text to instruct the Crown Prince, whose governor he then was. In the manuscript, Scheffer formulated the most radical version of the ideology of the Hat party, which had been radicalized by the failed coup by

9 Lagerroth 1915, 322, 326, 690, 711; Lagerroth 1934, Vol. 5/1, 148, 179, 212; Lagerroth 1947. Hugo Valentin wrote about “the democracy of the House of the Nobility (riddarhusdemokrati)” with reference to the lower nobility in connection with the question of social divisions within the estate. Valentin 1915, 1. 10 Lagerroth 1915, 665, 733–735. 11 Fahlbeck 1915, 326–328, 330, 335; also Fahlbeck 1916. Though criticizing Lagerroth, Fahlbeck took as his starting point the assumptions that “the sovereignty and original right of the people” and “the republican parliamentary doctrine” constituted the official foundation of the Swedish constitution in the Age of Liberty, with the Estates (or the people) possessing the highest power in the realm. Fahlbeck developed his argument on the basis of what he saw as the pioneering status of Sweden in the development of natural law, claiming that power had been transferred from “sovereign individuals” to “the new sovereign”, that is the Estates, which stood for the people.

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Gustavus’ parents in 1756. Scheffer wanted to teach the son that the Swedish people had preserved “unlimited power [. . .] for themselves or for their representatives, who are called the Estates of the Realm”. Furthermore, the Estates were “the representatives [representans] or plenipotentiaries [ fullmägtige]” of the Swedish nation “as if the nation itself and the whole Swedish community as individuals had been gathered there”.12 The Estates were not merely a representative body to which the people had delegated their power, but they actually constituted the people or the nation. This meant that they should be seen as the possessors of supreme power with no responsibility to their electors.13 Scheffer’s formulations need to be read carefully. He did not use the word ‘sovereignty’ to describe the status of the Estates although he did use related terms. It was still impossible to imagine a monarchical regime where ‘sovereignty’ referred to someone else than the monarch. Not even Montesquieu had yet written about ‘popular sovereignty’ even though he recognized a form of government in which the supreme power belonged to the people. Scheffer solved the situation by referring to the power of the Estates as imperium.14 The Estates undoubtedly possessed the highest power, but that power was not yet called ‘sovereignty’. Scheffer was using the word ‘representatives’ as a synonym for the vernacular fullmägtige, but this term had not yet been generally adopted by the members of the Diet. Lagerroth’s thesis has been echoed by several historians in and outside Scandinavia, in the latter case often by scholars with Scandinavian 12 Lagerroth, 1937, 188, 199. The members of the Nobility considered themselves to be representatives of their individual families. In the case of the other estates, it might be more correct to speak about the plenipotentiaries ( fullmäktige) of each estate than of ‘representatives’, particularly as the Estates were not seen so much as representatives but as the nation itself. Nurmiainen 2009; Fahlbeck has pointed out that the people could be described as the possessors of the highest power even though the power actually resided in the Estates. ‘The people’ would thus have been a euphemism for the Estates. Some politicians may also have used ‘the people’ to refer to the whole populace in their speeches, all of which only goes to illustrate the multiplicity of meanings attached to the concept. Fahlbeck 1915, 342–343. 13 Roberts 1986, 66–67; Wolff 2007b, 56–57; Wolff ’s conclusions can be read in English in Wolff 2008. 14 Wolff 2007a, 360–361; cf. Wolff 2007b, 57, in which Wolff suggests: “The nation, represented by the Estates, was [. . .] sovereign, but the people who elected them was not per se.” If someone else than the monarch could be viewed as ‘sovereign’ in Sweden, it was the Diet, not the people; Scheffer’s statement has often been generalized into a universal definition of the political order of the Age of Liberty. Scheffer was no uncritical admirer of the rule of the Estates, however, as he had no trust in the capabilities of the people. By the 1760s, he was ready to extend the royal prerogative.

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connections. In 1986, Michael Roberts, in his The Age of Liberty: Sweden 1719–1772, was mainly content to repeat what Lagerroth and other early twentieth-century Swedish historians had stated about the Estates-dominated political system. Aiming at making the Swedish case understandable to an Anglophone audience, Roberts used a plethora of supporting literature but did not proceed to any analyses of parallel primary documents from England and Sweden.15 He concluded that the Swedish constitution made it possible for “the sovereignty of the Estates” (Robert’s words) to develop, unlike in Britain, where the King could appoint and dismiss ministers, dissolve Parliament and veto legislation.16 ‘Sovereignty’ is clearly used here as a synonym for the contemporary expression ‘supreme power’ (högsta makten). The existence of a weak monarchy did not, however, entail the existence of the power of the people. Roberts refers to a pamphlet published during the so-called “principalate” controversy in 1747 according to which the people had renounced their rights to the Estates and could never claim them back.17 According to the principle of government being based on the consent of the governed, Roberts sees eighteenth-century Sweden as comparable only to Britain and the Dutch Republic. Indeed, he argues: “There was no representative system in Europe which was so firmly based on a broad sample of the population”.18 Structural and functional descriptions of the system made him also conclude: “In some important respects Swedish parliamentarism in the Age of Liberty had progressed further than parliamentarism in Hanoverian England”, or for that matter in any other country.19 Michael F. Metcalf has likewise presented Sweden as “the most representative legislative body to appear anywhere prior to 1789” and “the most sophisticated national legislative body in terms of its procedures and checks and balances”.20 However, these are all only estimates of the way in which the Swedish

15

Roberts 1986, 59. Roberts 1986, 62. 17 Roberts 1986, 66, 69. The term ‘principalate’ refers to the notion that the nonnoble members of the Estates were responsible to their electors ( principaler) also during the Diet and that their mandate could be cancelled at any time. An extensive account on the controversy can be found in Nurmiainen 2009. 18 Roberts 1986, 71, 217; a recent attempt to compare Britain and Sweden can be found in Turkka 2007, 9–21, 220–221. 19 Roberts 1986, 91, 212. 20 Metcalf 2003, 40, 48, 54; see also Metcalf 1985, 148. 16

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representative system functioned, not the results of any analysis of the contemporary language of politics or of actual comparisons between the two countries, Britain and Sweden. Marie-Christine Skuncke has recently repeated the thesis that Sweden possessed “a unique political system during its Age of Liberty” thanks to “the quadricameral parliament, or Riksdag”, which formed the centre of political power. According to Skuncke, the Riksdag constituted “a parliamentary system advanced for its time” based on an “exceptionally broad social representation” and “an advanced political party system”. The presence of the Peasants at the Diet distinguished it from most other European regimes and was admired by some French Enlightenment philosophers. Skuncke has recognized that the term ‘democracy’ is a modern one. Few contemporaries used ‘democracy’ as a positive expression. Nevertheless, Skuncke has pointed to the existence of “the Swedish debate on democracy in the years 1766–1772” as “a modern democratic debate” in that it dealt with questions such as publicity and equality. She further argues that Anders Nordencrantz, one of the most innovative writers of the period, wanted to “democratize” the Riksdag.21 However, a preferable approach might be to focus on what the people of the age really said about democracy, avoiding formulations that could be understood unhistorically.22 Bo Lindberg has recently suggested that the classical concept of democracy actually constituted a major ideological challenge to early modern Swedish politicians in that it forced them to reconsider their political system.23 Democracy had traditionally been discussed in

21 Skuncke 2003, 260–262, see also 403 and Skuncke 1999, 283–285, 288–289. The only example of ‘democracy’ appearing as a positive concept originates from Johan Hartman Eberhart, who saw a contrast between Democratie and “the aristocratic party”. Even this seems to have been a conventional description of different elements in the mixed constitution rather a defence of democracy in any modern sense. The verb ‘democratize’ appeared for the first time only after the French Revolution, which means that it was conceptually impossible to ‘democratize’ institutions in the 1760s. See Dunn 2005, 16–17. 22 Cf. a related use of the modern and potentially misleading positive concept of democracy in Virrankoski 1995, 407, 423, 426, which characterizes Anders Chydenius as a “democratic” politician. 23 According to Lindberg, politeia and demokratein had not been clearly distinguished by Aristotle, whose concept of ‘citizen’ also had a “democratic” content and hence could be read in radical and democratic senses by early modern theorists. By the time of Polybius, Lindberg argues, demokratein had appeared as a “neutral” name for the power of the people. Lindberg 2006, 15, 101, 195–196. This is a surprising interpretation given Polybius’ critical view of excessive democracy in Rome. However,

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learned treatises published in Latin, not in the vernacular, and had not been considered applicable to Sweden. The use of the term became more frequent in the course of the Age of Liberty, at a time when the concept of ‘citizen’, gained, according to Lindberg, a “democratic” connotation and contemporaries began to view the era as “more democratic in the sense of equal”, even though no breakthrough of democracy was yet seen.24 In 1720, David Salvius defined democracy as a form of government in which a free common people (en frij menighet) “permitted certain deputies or magistrates to discharge those daily tasks of governance which cannot be postponed”.25 In 1728 Johan Hermansson characterized Sweden as a monarchy that was “democratically tempered”, because the King was elected. And writing in 1749, Johan Montin was already, according to Lindberg, “at an abstract and general historical level” an advocate of “representative democracy as opposed to direct” so that “the Estates represent the people and make decisions on their behalf ”.26 Of course, Montin did not use some modern concept of “representative democracy”. He did not speak about “limited democracy” either but rather wrote in conventional terms about the role of the Estates within a mixed monarchy,27 which implies Polybius did use ‘democracy’ to designate “the good polity”, while adopting ‘ochlocracy’ as a name for the power of the mob. Maier 1972, 834. 24 Lindberg 2006, 114, 209–210. 25 [David Salvius], Påminnelser Angående Succesions-Rättigheten i Sweriges Rike, Samt Det å kallade Souvereine Wäldet, Upsatte i Januarii Månad 1719 (Stockholm 1720), paragraph 2. Salvius had also explicitly spoken about the “representatives” of these people. 26 Lindberg 2006, 210–211; cf. an opposite conclusion in Saastamoinen 2003, 49, and Velema 2002, 21, on the Dutch debate; Montesquieu, though calling a republic in which the people had sovereign power a democracy, had recently rejected the very idea of combining democracy and representation. Dippel 1986, 61; Maier 1972, 841, Markoff 1999, 671. 27 Montin did define democracy in very positive terms in the particular context of the controversies of the 1740s, seeing it as an antidote to tyranny and aristocracy within a mixed government. He argued, after Montesquieu, that the form of government could be called a “democracy” when “an assembly of the Estates themselves possess the supreme rights”. Montin’s aim in using the term ‘democracy’ seems to have been to reject demands for a wrong kind of democracy of the multitude by defining the existing system as the right kind of democracy. In this he followed the classical critique of the power of the many in pointing to its impracticality in large societies where the people could not simply be assembled in one place. The power of the many was harmful to the understanding of the common people, which was incapable of correct judgement. Furthermore, even the best of democratic governments could end in the ruination of society as a result of disunity. What Montin argued was that supreme power should be delegated to qualified members elected by each estate, with power invested in the meetings of these fullmägtige of the estates and not to the

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that we should be cautious in any conclusions that we draw. Lindberg has also found an instance of democracy being used in 1751 in a polemical sense to counter claims that Sweden was an aristocracy. He suggests: “The tenor of the debate can undoubtedly be described as democratic in the sense of equality”. On the other hand, he concedes that radical writers never used the term to identify themselves with; rather they were attacked for advocating “democratic principles”. There were statements in the 1760s claiming that democracy was such a bad form of government that it could not be changed for any worse one. Hence it is no surprise that the French ambassador described the domestic crisis in Sweden as having been caused by an epidemic of “the love of democracy”.28 None of these uses of the word ‘democracy’ constitutes evidence that the Swedish system was actively defined as democracy in a positive sense. The thesis of a development towards democracy in mid-eighteenthcentury Sweden finds further support in Jonas Nordin’s suggestion that the word ‘democracy’ developed in this period from a denomination of a form of government into an ideological concept which referred to the rights of the citizen.29 Peter Hallberg, for his part, has found in Swedish history writing “the invention of a democratic ideology” that reflected the unique parliamentary system of the country.30 The rule of the Estates, social confrontations between them and the freedom of the press certainly created a suitable climate for radical ideas to emerge. In the late 1760s, the opportunity of the three lower estates to outvote the Nobility at the Diet also encouraged them to challenge the special status of the highest estate. Nordin has argued that the constitution was developing towards popular government ( folkstyre) in that it could only be changed after another election of representatives for the Diet. The relatively free

people as a whole. Johan Montin, Borgelig Regering, til des Uprinnelse och Art, Beskådad (Stockholm 1749), 69–73, 75, 77–80, 83–84. This is actually very much the language used to describe the British kind of parliamentary power within a mixed government expressed in Swedish terms, not a defence of some modern representative democracy. ‘The sovereignty of the Estates’ was not a possible expression in Sweden, where ‘sovereignty’ was widely rejected as politically incorrect because of its association with absolute royal power. Even in 1755–1756, the Estates were still not defined as sovereign but as the “holders of the power”. See Saastamoinen 2003, 37, and Ihalainen 2007 on Lindberg 2006. 28 Lindberg 2006, 213. 29 Nordin 2003, 64, 358. 30 Hallberg 2003, 279, 281.

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public debate also enabled the expression of radical ideas among the lower orders. Nordin sees this radicalism as based on principles such as the will of the people ( folkviljan; it is unclear whether this concept can be found in the primary sources) restraining and steering legislative and executive power, all citizens constituting the legislative body and being entitled to choose their representatives on equal terms, and noble privileges in legal matters and appointments to civil and military offices being abolished. Nordin’s interpretation of the goals of the lower orders sounds excessively modern, although he does point out that this was not yet “a modern conception of democracy”.31 These ideas were held only among limited groups of writers. They reflect a radicalization in political discourse and an increasing ability of the non-noble estates to cooperate with each other.32 Nordin also points out that the goals of this lower-estate radicalism were mainly social and judicial rather than political: the non-noble estates fought for the same legal opportunities for office as the Nobility possessed rather than for the extension of political representation outside the Estates.33 The Cap Party had made the civil service, monopolized as it was by the Nobility, an object of scrutiny since 1765, sometimes claiming that the power of the holders of office originated from the people, that the duty of the state was to preserve the liberty of the people, and that the people should be able to supervise how their liberty was maintained.34 Nordin suggests that this campaign, had it succeeded in abolishing the privileges of the Nobility, might have led to the system of representation in the Estates being questioned and to a reform extending to a “bourgeois revolution” and to the creation of a modern parliamentary system.35 It goes without saying that this is counter-factual history writing and goes far beyond what the people of the time themselves said about democracy, sovereignty and representation. Scholars have claimed to have discovered much evidence of popular power and democracy, or at least of a search for these, in the late phase of the Swedish rule of the Estates. The existence of these tendencies, however, needs to be demonstrated through international comparisons and empirical analyses of the language of politics of those times

31 32 33 34 35

Nordin 2003, 61, 64–65. Nordin 2000, 424. Nordin 2000, 402; Nordin 2003, 70. Nordin 2000, 407, 419; cf. Cavallin 2003, 252; Winton 2006, 318–319, 332. Nordin 2003, 71–72.

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rather than by applying later concepts to the interpretation of sources from one country only. Historians should not overgeneralize from the fact that the entire epoch is conventionally called “The Age of Liberty”.36 We should also avoid calling the early modern four-estate Diet a quadricameral parliament. The Diet remained a deliberative assembly of the Estates, which was convened by the monarch in order to consult with his subjects, and it concentrated on maintaining the privileges of the corporations represented in it. It was not a parliament consisting of free and equal citizens and meeting independently of the monarch. We should perhaps see the Swedish polity, in Charlotta Wolff ’s words, as “a republican monarchy” or even as an aristocratic republic and not as some sort of democracy.37 One special context of the debate of the late 1760s needs to be emphasized. Confrontations between the estates became more fierce after the opportunities of the lower estates for advancement to the Nobility were curtailed in 1762. This restriction meant that welleducated men of high social standing among the clergy and the burghers could no longer expect to enter the highest offices, which were reserved solely for members of the Nobility. Nor was it even possible for all men of standing to send their plenipotentiaries to the Diet. The affected parties were able to express their discontent with the situation after the establishment of freedom of the press in 1766, which resulted in an increase in public political debate during the Diets of 1769–1770 and 1771–1772. Political newspapers and periodicals, pamphlets and official documents were all printed and circulated in unprecedented numbers.38 We should thus primarily interpret the challenge to the Nobility and the government in the context of an estate society where access to the Nobility had been recently denied and the possibilities for

36 An alternative denomination for the period 1718–1772 in Swedish history would be “The Period of Estate Rule” (ständervälde). This name too can be misleading if it suggests that all the estates enjoyed equal possibilities for political influence. “The Age of Liberty” is used here because of its associations with the field of the history of political ideas and because of its widespread use in previous research, rather than to emphasize the uniquely advanced character of the era in European history. ‘Liberty’ referred to the liberty of the Estates in the absence of strong monarchical power, a state comparable to that of the Roman Republic. See Carl Fredric Scheffer, Tal, Om Förbindelsen, Imellan Grund-Lagarnas Art och Folkets Sällhet, Som After Dem Styras Skal; Hållit Uti Kongl. Vetenskaps Academien, Vid Praesidii Afläggande, den 28 October 1772 (Stockholm 1772), 7–9; Wolff 2007b, 35, 37; Wolff 2007a, 359. 37 Wolff 2007b, 35; Wolff 2007a, 367. 38 Skuncke 1999, 284; Skuncke 2003, 264, 286.

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the expression of opinions opened up. The struggle for broader privileges for the lower estates was not a product of Enlightenment philosophy or comparable to the acts of defiance of the French Revolution.39 The use of language referring to the people often emerged out of the particular goals of the participants in the confrontation. The speakers were aiming at strengthening their own privileges rather than advocating radical ideas about the extension of political rights to the whole population. The debate took place in an estate society, not in a rapidly democratizing political community. To explore the validity of the thesis that the Swedish political culture was developing towards ‘representative democracy’ based on ‘popular sovereignty’, it is necessary to analyse the concepts that were used to describe the political role of the people in the debates of the Estates and in printed literature. The rise of such notions should be reflected in the practical everyday language of politics. In the rest of this chapter, I shall analyse the relevant vocabulary used in the debates of the Diets of 1769–1770 and 1771–1772. My intention is not to “define” the concepts in a normative manner for analytical purposes but to empirically elucidate the nature of the concepts used in contemporary debates on the political role of the people. The Enlightenment and the French Revolution brought about changes in the meanings of political concepts, and consequently post-revolutionary concepts are not necessarily applicable to the pre-revolutionary period at all. Furthermore, ‘democracy’ has been such a contested concept since the French Revolution that no one definition for it has ever existed. To obtain an authentic understanding of past thinking, we need to reconstruct both the contemporary vocabulary by which themes related to what later was to be called ‘popular sovereignty’ and ‘representative democracy’ were discussed and the variety of meanings which its key concepts were given in various contexts. The specifically Swedish sources I have used for this purpose consist of all of the journals of the plenary debates of the Nobles—the largest, most powerful and potentially the most open to new ideas of the Estates thanks to the high degree of knowledge about European political theory among its members. I have contrasted those debates in 39

Cf. Lagerroth 1915, 665. Lagerroth went as far as to refer to the possibility that “the true representatives of the people” might have constituted a “national assembly” in Sweden by the early 1770s; Skuncke 1999, 292; Lindberg 2003, 20; Cavallin 2003, 252; Nordin 2006, 154; Wolff 2007b, 58.

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which the political role of the people was discussed (or should have been discussed in view of the subject of the debate) with related debates in the important Secret Committee of the three highest estates and in the plenary debates of all the lower estates. I have also consulted the proceedings of two special joint committees in which constitutional questions were discussed: a joint committee of the Secret Committee, the Secret Deputation and the Deputation of Justice in October 1769 and a joint committee of the Secret Committee and the plenipotentiaries of the Peasant Estate in the autumn of 1771. The former discussed proposed changes to the constitution, the latter dealt with the royal oath to be given at the accession of Gustavus III. The sample of public debate analysed side by side with the Riksdag debates consists of four kinds of printed item: (i) pamphlets in the title of which the word “people” ( folk, folket) appeared in a distinctly political sense; (ii) the leading political papers of the time; (iii) documents with titles which caused controversy at the Diet; and (iv) documents with titles which have been presented as radical in previous research. It is interesting to consider whether the key concepts were understood differently at the Diet and in the published literature.40 As Bo Lindberg has pointed out, the concept of the people ( folk) played a fairly marginal role in Swedish politics for much of the early modern period. The Roman concept of populus, which provided a precedent for some early modern political theorists, could be understood as incorporating both the rulers and the ruled. It referred to citizens who together constituted the people, enjoying liberty and actively taking part in public affairs. In the early modern period, by contrast, the people was generally viewed as separate from the rulers and was hence seen as having no political role beyond the original creation of political power. In the seventeenth-century too, the Riksdag had been unwilling to identify itself with the people. The situation changed dramatically during the Age of Liberty when, according to Lindberg, a democratic understanding of ‘the people’ was emerging.41 The abolition of absolutism could be interpreted as the restoration of the right of the people to choose its form of government. The philosophical legitimacy for such thinking was to be found in John Locke’s Two Treatises. Locke’s book could be understood in a way that made

40 41

See Nordin 2000, 408; Cavallin 2003, 254. Lindberg 2006, 124, 127.

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it possible to uphold claims that the “supreme power” had always remained “in the hands of the people”.42 It is not certain, however, that Lockean notions of the political role of the people were generally held among the Swedish political elite, as the most radical interpretation of the power of the people would have violated the interests of those in power. According to Per Nilsén, Locke’s texts were used only ad hoc by the anti-absolutist elite who wanted to increase their power over that of the King. As soon as the noble elite had succeeded in this, they forgot their Lockean ideas.43 According to Lindberg, the classical phrase ‘free people’ was forcefully reintroduced in the course of the Age of Liberty, and the concept of the people was increasingly used in various political senses by the noble elite. Towards the end of the period, a further transformation took place, as the rulers and the ruled were “reunited” after the Roman fashion and “the Swedish people” established itself as a political agent. This happened as the concept of the people was widened to include the lower orders and the view that political power was given to the rulers by the people was increasingly articulated.44 Lindberg has placed the beginning of this transformation in the mid-1750s, when a confrontation between the monarchy and the Hat party saw the latter arguing that the highest legislative power belonged to the free Swedish people as represented at the Riksdag. In the most far-reaching definition formulated by Johan Browallius in the early 1750s, the Estates were the “authoritative executors of the rights of a free people, among whom the law alone is sovereign and absolute”.45 Here, however, it was not

42 Kari Saastamoinen has argued that in the Swedish translation of Locke’s famous work, the people ( folk) appeared as a political agent and sometimes also as the source of supreme political power. In the latter case, the will of the people could be understood as separate from the will of the legislature. Saastamoinen 2003, 50. 43 Nilsén 2001, 181. 44 Cf. Saastamoinen 2003, 50; Lindberg argues that during the conflict over estate privileges, the concept of the people was extended to include many more members of the lower estates. This kind of rhetoric should perhaps rather be seen in the context of the Burghers and to a lesser extent the lower Clergy striving for the privileges which the Nobility enjoyed in the late 1760s. These writings thus tended to view wider sections of the entire population as ‘the people’ in opposition to the Nobility. Such rhetoric did not mean that the writers were prepared to extend political rights to the Peasants, let alone to country people outside the Peasant Estate. 45 Lindberg 2006, 93. The statement was made in a memorandum of the Minor Secret Deputation of January 1752, in which it was concluded that legislative power in the Swedish constitution belonged to “the Estates of the Realm, and shall be executed by their popularitét” (p. 454). Here ‘popularitét’ obviously stood for the

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the people but the law that appeared as a substitute for royal sovereignty. In the 1760s, some tracts addressing “the Swedish people” suggested that the supreme power belonged to the Estates, who represented the people.46 There were also oppositional publications in which a distinction was drawn between the actions of the Estates and the sentiments of the people. These claims were rebuffed by maintaining that the Estates defended the welfare of the entire people—‘the people’ standing not just for the members of the Estates but for every inhabitant of the realm.47 While the relative rise in the use of the concept ‘the people’ is evident, there were few references to ‘the people’ in political theory. Folket mainly stood for the aristocracy in an early modern republican sense. Even so, Lindberg suggests that the Swedish political elite understood constitutional liberty as the right of the people to participate in decision-making and that this conception was sufficiently developed to justify the designation “popular sovereignty”. At the end of period, the idea of constitutional liberty was radicalized further. This happened as a consequence of several factors, including the long tradition of using phrases like “the free people” and “free nation”, the Estates-centred political system and ideas borrowed from Britain and elsewhere. Some writers then extended the concept of liberty to mean that the people were free to decide on their form of government. Even so, it remained evident that the rights of that free people were to be exercised by the Estates.48 While finding the relatively modern notions of popular sovereignty and representative democracy in eighteenth-century Swedish political language, Lindberg has also emphasized the continued relevance of classical political concepts and examples to the contemporary debate. The Swedish debate does not appear to have been as future-oriented as that which would be later waged in connection with the French Revolution. Lindberg’s study provides a good starting-point for the

majority. The document denied the legislative power of the King and argued that in a free people “only the law could be sovereign and absolute (Souverain och enwäldig)” (p. 457). This usage did not, however, associate the Estates directly with the concept of sovereignty. “Mindre sekreta deputationens betänkande om irriga begrepp rörande regeringsformen”, 17 January 1752, reprinted in Malmström 1899, vol. 4. 46 Lindberg 2006, 162–164. 47 Nordin 2000, 414–415. 48 Lindberg 2006, 186.

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following analysis, which is based on the actual debates of the Estates. We first shall consider how the Estates and the press presented the key concepts of the debate during the Diet of 1769–1770. Within the Noble Estate, this led to some far-reaching conclusions about the political role of the people but hardly yet to a recognition of an active sovereignty of the people or of democracy as a goal of the political community. The Relationship between the Nobility, the Nation and the People at the Beginning of the Riksdag of 1769–1770 A serious constitutional crisis preceded the Diet of 1769–1770, and this was reflected in government activities, party struggles and public debates. The King and the Hat-dominated higher administration had opposed the governing Cap party in a number of ways since the Diet of 1765–1766, when the Caps had succeeded in seizing power from the previously dominant Hats. The most extreme form of opposition to the Caps included a royal “strike” in 1768, to which the Caps responded by ordering a stamp with the royal signature, to be used in case King Adolphus Frederick refused to cooperate. The oppositional Hat party for its part—though previously critical of the monarchy—had started to conspire with the King to restore royal power and thereby its own pre-eminence. With the approach of a new session of the Diet, the power struggle produced an unprecedented public debate in the press, which had been released from pre-publication censorship just a couple of years previously. An entirely new type of public debate was emerging. The Hats, with Carl Christoffer Gjörwell at their head, began to create a medium for party propaganda. Their aim was to counter Cap propaganda, which was mainly published in the periodical Uplysning för Swenska Folket (Information for the Swedish People). The Cap organ took a critical stance towards the King, while the Hat publication Den politiske Aristarchus (The Political Aristarchus) defended him. The points of view of the parties had changed radically after the mid-1750s, when the Hats were still significant opponents of the King. The political opinion of the voters had also changed dramatically since the Diet of 1765–1766. When the Estates met in Norrköping in April 1769, it soon became evident that the Hats held a majority, which enabled them to obtain all the posts of Speakers of the Estates and gain a majority in the important Secret Committee. No leading Cap

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adherent succeeded in becoming a member of the Committee.49 During the Diet, the Cap Senate was replaced by one consisting of the supporters of the allied Hat and Court parties.50 A party political change of power was taking place, and there was a revival of the old unanimity concerning the appropriate privileges for each estate. The estates may have been equal in their powers according to the constitution, but only one estate was truly influential. The Nobility remained the most self-confident, numerous and influential estate, and it fiercely defended this status. The Nobles had most deeply adopted the idea that political power was based on the consent of the leading subjects. In 1769, the Nobility was still also the estate within which the political role of the people was most likely to be emphasized—primarily with reference to the Nobility and secondarily to the other estates. The majority of the population were included in the concept only in virtual terms. Noblemen were generally familiar with classical political thinking, with the Scandinavian language of freedom and with current political theory in France, Britain and elsewhere, particularly if they had recently travelled on the Continent. The Nobles constituted a debating organ in which all of these traditions of political speaking could interact, and it was they who defined the key political concepts of the time. They remained unanimously critical of the concept of sovereignty, for instance, continuing to denounce the so-called “Age of Sovereignty” (souverainitetstiden),51 which had preceded the Age of Liberty and had seen the concentration of all power in the hands of an absolute monarch. At the same time, the Noble Estate repeatedly denounced ‘aristocracy’ as well. Both parties used this concept to criticize each other for attempts to create a despotic form of government based on a majority in the Senate.52 In 1769, ‘aristocracy’ was a favourite concept of the opposition Hats when they attacked the Cap Senate

49

Malmström 1877, Vol. 6, 112–113. Lagerroth 1934, Vol. 6/2, 201. 51 ‘Souverainiteit’ as monarchical power had been the conventional usage at least since Salvius 1720; Ridderstolpe, SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 2 May 1769, 45; von Schönberg called the French and Prussian regimes “souveraine”. SRARP 1769−1770, Vol. I, 27 May 1769, 149. See also Olof von Nackreii’s distinction between “the most souveraine states” and the consideration of the will of the people among “a free people” like the Swedes. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 15 September 1769, 354; Fredric Gripenstierna, SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 529; Christer Horn, SRARP 1771–1772, Vol. I, 17 October 1771, 434. 52 Wolff 2007a, 362–363. 50

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for what they saw as attempts to create “an intended tyranny” in which the cooperation of the King would no longer be sought.53 This critical attitude of the Swedish political elite towards both sovereignty and aristocracy was easily transferred to that of the Gustavian regime, so that after his coup in August 1772 Gustavus III denounced “the so-called sovereignty” and “an aristocratic despotism” of the Estates.54 The latter, for their part, would then thank the King for having removed “the aristocratic power” by his coup.55 What these instances tell us is that ‘sovereignty’ stood merely for the monarch and that sovereign royal power was consistently denounced. It remained impossible for the Estates to declare themselves “sovereign” even though they did emphasize their role as the possessors of supreme or legislative power. And it would have been even less conceivable to speak about “the sovereignty of the people”.56 If ideas that would later be understood as standing for the sovereignty of the people occurred, they must have been expressed in other language. ‘Democracy’ did not belong to the everyday vocabulary of the Nobility, but the word did appear during some debates in 1769 and 1770, when some noblemen advocated and others opposed a proposal to extend the role of the plenary sessions of the Diet and to include the Peasants in economic and foreign political decision-making. At the same time, we can find numerous references to the rights of the people in the debates of the Nobility. The meaning of ‘the people’ remained vague, however: noblemen readily used the concept to vindicate their own status as legislators, but it is far from clear whether they would have included the other estates, let alone the population at large, in the concept. The self-evident assumption was that the Nobility held a key role within the constitution and, together with the other estates, communicated the voice of the people to the executive power. The political

53

Gustav Adolph Gyllenborg spoke against aristocracy although he was later to defend the Senate. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 1 May 1769, 38; cf. Sekreta utskottets protokollutdrag, SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 20 May 1769, 68; Lorentz Creutz, SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 83; Johan von Böhnen, SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 91; Samuel Ehrenmalm, SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 97; Schönberg, SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 108; Augustin Ehrensvärd, SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 27 May 1769, 156; Carl Ridderstolpe, SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 15 November 1769, 73. 54 SRARP 1771–1772, Vol. III, 21 August 1772, 628, 632. 55 Bondeståndets riksdagsprotokoll (BdP), Sten Landahl (ed.) (Stockholm 1978), 26 August 1772, 507. 56 Roberts 1986, 67; Wolff 2007a, 361.

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role of the rest of the people appeared as a passive one: the people remained the object of the actions of the executive power and the Estates rather than any kind of active political agent. Axel von Fersen, the Hat Speaker of the Noble Estate, made a speech at the opening of the Riksdag on 22 April 1769 that illustrates what was meant by the generally held principle of the people having a role in the political process. Fersen, as a nobleman, was unwilling to change the form of government to the extent that the Court wished, and thus he defined the members of the Estates as “a free, independent people” who were entitled to advise the executive power on affairs of state. He eagerly defined the Nobility as the embodiment of that people by saying that “the gentle hearts of the Knights and Nobility cannot be closed to the voice of the people [ folckets röst]”.57 Thus the Noble Estate formed the core of the free people in a political sense even if they did not belong to the common people. On the other hand, they listened to the voice of the people at large when making decisions. These two classical senses of the concept of the people would be used side by side and frequently confused in the debates of the Estates.58 They might also be distinguished more clearly in cases where members of the Nobility spoke about “the common people” (allmogen, menigheten). The commoners (menige Allmogen) had recognized judicial rights, but they could not be regarded as politically active.59 The concept of the people ( folket) could likewise be used in a broad sense when it suited the purposes of the argument. Count Lorentz Vilhelm Creutz, for instance, challenged the Senate by asking: “Why have the lords of the Senate not wanted to pay attention to the cries of the people, [. . .] which has also found their ways to the throne”?60 Here the role of the people was limited to a petitionary one, but the concept of the people could still be used by the opposition to question the legitimacy of the current government.61 Creutz may have been an active supporter of the Hats in opposition to the Court in the 1750s, but by the late 1760s he was suggesting that the King heard the complaints of the people

57

SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 22 April 1769, 4. According to Charlotta Wolff, the concepts ‘the people’ and ‘nation’ had become synonymous as political actors and were both associated with liberty and rights by 1769. Wolff 2008, 67–68; cf. Wolff 2008, 69. 59 Se Gustaf Adolph Leijonmarck, SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 416–417. 60 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 83. 61 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 83–84; see also von Frese, 90. 58

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better than the Caps, and that the Hats could help the King in solving the crisis and delivering the people from their distress. In the Secret Committee, the representatives of the three highest estates met to discuss constitutional issues. In May 1769, the predominantly Hat members of the Committee debated the measures taken by the Cap Senate. Mayor Mattias Kjörning, a supporter of the Court, argued that the Senate had violated the right of the citizens (Medborgars) to freely choose their deputies during the elections with the obvious aim of changing the constitution into what he called “a harmful Dyarchie”. These measures had made the officers of the state “odious in the eyes of the nation”.62 Colonel Fredric Horn (a Hat) likewise complained about the interventions of the Senate in “the free Riksdagsman elections of the nation”.63 Chamberlain John Jennings (a Hat) questioned the ability of the Cap members of the Senate to defend freedom and depicted them as “the purest aristocracy”. A further object of criticism was the harsh treatment of the King, recalling the anti-royalist measures of 1756, which “the nation had wished to forget for ever”.64 The concept of ‘the nation’ also occurred in Colonel Carl Fredrik Pechlin’s (Hat, later Cap) reference to the Swedish nation as loyal to their King, in lamentations about the disunity which the parties caused in the nation,65 and in Gabriel Lütkemann’s (a Hat clergyman) emphasis on the need of the nation to defend its rights.66 Colonel Johan Diedric Duwall (Hat), who had schemed in secret with the Court and the French about the possibilities of changing the constitution in order to make it more monarchical, accused the Senate of attempting to “create an aristocracy to the detriment of the nation”.67 This debate shows how the Hat party, after obtaining an overwhelming majority in the Secret Committee, defined the interests of the nation as the opposite of those of the ‘aristocracy’ of the governing Cap party. Speaking in the Secret Committee in the presence of the representatives of the Clergy and the Burghers, the Hat Noblemen seem to have eschewed attributing any far-reaching meanings to the concept of ‘the

62 Riksdagsarkivet (R) 3457, Secreta Utskottets Protokoll (SUP) 1769–1770, 6 May 1769, 42; Malmström 1877, Vol. 6, 115; The term dyarchie probably referred to joint rule by the monarchy and the aristocracy as opposed to the population at large. 63 R 3457 SUP 1769–1770, 6 May 1769, 46. 64 R 3457 SUP 1769–1770, 6 May 1769, 46. 65 R 3457 SUP 1769–1770, 6 May 1769, 45; 12 May 1769, 91, 103. 66 R 3457 SUP 1769–1770, 6 May 1769, 50. 67 R 3457 SUP 1769–1770, 12 May 1769, 104–105.

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people’ and rather talked about ‘the nation’. Speakers from the two lower estates used the concept in essentially the same way. The context was different when the Nobility debated the issue among themselves. The political role of the people was emphasized in much more outspoken terms as soon as no need for self-censorship was felt. The concept ‘the people’ was given a variety of meanings in the political argumentation of the rival parties. Some nobleman already saw the freedom of the press as a natural element of the Swedish constitution and viewed the consequences in quite positive terms. Leonhard Magnus Uggla, for instance, argued that the freedom of the press was a boon to a free people in that it informed the nation about the actions of the authorities and the members of the Estates.68 The publicity created by a free press thus enabled the people to better control what was going on in the administration and in the legislative assembly. This suited the Hats well in their campaign against the Caps. A further element in the Nobles’ understanding of the political role of the people concerned the responsibility of the executive power to the Estates. Whenever an argument on this subject was put forward, the phrase “a free people” was frequently used. Major Johan von Böhnen depicted the policies of the Cap Senate as nothing less than crimes against the people. The Senate had violated “the rights of a free people who abhor slavery” and demonstrated “bold and illegal measures and stern hearts” towards a free people. Worst of all was the Senate’s suggestion that “liberty was in danger and the people were the biggest shame of the nation”—something that Böhnen considered utterly impossible in a state where the people was the most important defender of liberty and where the people and the nation were one and the same thing. Reflecting on the current policies of the Hat and Court parties, Böhnen presented the King as the major champion of “liberty and the people” ( för frihet och folk).69 For party political reasons, and following their previous anti-monarchical ideology, the Hats gave the people a key role in their criticism of the Cap Senate. At the same time, they were approaching the Court in their arguments. Individual Caps endeavoured to defend the Senate by using similar references to the people, which shows the importance of the concept for both parties in the Noble Estate. Samuel Ehrenmalm, a Councillor of the Court of Appeal,

68 69

SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 86–87. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 91–92.

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pointed to “the happiness of the right of a free people to give counsel on the common good of the realm during their joint meetings”.70 Here the advisory role of the people acting through the Estates was recognized by the government. This type of argumentation made the Estates—primarily the Noble Estate—appear identical with the people. Ehrenmalm also attempted to uphold faith in the continued support of the Estates for the Cap Senate. A more theoretical aspect emerged when the Historiographer of the Realm, Anders Schönberg (Hat), defined “the liberty of the Swedish people” as consisting of “that security which everyone should enjoy according to the law so that one citizen did not need to be afraid of another”. For Schönberg it was self-evident that the Estates were “the only and most certain defenders of liberty” in “a free nation”.71 The problem was that the Senate had not listened to the “complaint of the people” despite their responsibilities for its welfare.72 Schönberg, conversant with Anders Nordencrantz’s writings on England and probably with the Wilkes affair in mind, took this as a warning example of what the consequences in Sweden and other “free regimes” could be.73 Schönberg’s points were echoed by Carl Magnus Sparrschiöld, who was unhappy with the way in which the Senate had failed to “defend the right and liberty of the people” and to “maintain the rights of the people”. As the Senate had paid no attention to “the cry of distress of the nation”, the Swedes were currently no more than “a people sighing in the face of miseries”.74 The concepts ‘the people’ and ‘the nation’ were being employed here for obvious party-political ends. “A free people who love their rights and laws” was the ideological slogan of the Hat opposition in its attack on the Cap Senate. However, much of this language was common to both parties in the Noble Estate, as can be seen in some Cap contributions to the debate.75 Carl Johan Ridderstolpe, a Councillor of the Court of Appeal, and probably the best speaker in the Noble Estate, wished to see clearer appreciation of the offices of the senators “for the sake of the people” as their very purpose was indeed to secure “liberty and the rights of the people”.76 70 71 72 73 74 75 76

SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 96–97. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 108–109. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 107. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 109. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 111, 113. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 114, 116. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 23 May 1769, 101, 103.

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Ridderstolpe’s defence of the Cap Senate was all the more noteworthy in that he had recently moved to the Cap side and started to play a major role in the formulation of its political arguments. The Senate was losing the debate, however, including the argument over how the rights of the people had been looked after. The Caps attempted to reply in a related debate. The speaker, Gustav Adolf Gyllenborg from the Collegium of Mining, argued that the Senate had been forced to use a stamp to replace the royal signature. This action had saved the realm from following the way of Poland into total disintegration. Gyllenborg maintained that the stamp would never be used “without the voice of the nation”, as the Senate knew it so well. He referred to the nation as: [. . .] the informed, gentle but at the same time earnest Swedish people who also know the content and meaning of both the law and righteousness whenever they become irritated.77

The claim was that the Senate governed according to the voice of the people in all circumstances. This recognition of the popular legitimacy and necessary control of government, expressed at a time of an approaching political catastrophe for the Cap Senate and aimed at the ears of the Noble Estate only, is important in that it reflects a far-reaching conception of the people as a political agent controlling, advising and, if need be, petitioning the government. “The people”, of course, stood primarily for the majority of the Noble Estate. By this time, some noblemen were expressing concern over an undesirable extension of the political nation outside the Estates as a consequence of the freedom of the press. Eric Linderstedt, was worried about “an unsanctioned disease of censuring (tadelsiuka) the business of the Estates and the government that has appeared in the nation”.78 Linderstedt saw such political interest as inappropriate, considering that political power belonged to the Estates and the Senate only, not to the whole nation. The increasing public discussion showed that the concept of the nation was no longer being used merely to legitimate the established political order or to criticize those currently in power, but that the existence of a nation outside the Estates had to be recognized. In a more traditional understanding, the nation had been seen

77 78

SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 27 May 1769, 143. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 27 May 1769, 150.

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as an object that could be saved by the Estates;79 now it could also be seen as constituting a potential threat to the Estates. With a free press, the nation was no longer so easy to define and control by the core of the political elite. But how would the lower estates conceptualize the ongoing shift in the balance of power between the two parties? Would they interpret it through a concept of the voice of the people similar to that which is traceable in the debates of the Nobility? This was not the case in 1769: the lower estates had quite other interests and ways of conceptualizing politics. The Burgher Estate continued to debate the specific interests of individual towns or of the estate as a whole and did not enter into any substantial debate on the nature of the political power and the role of the people. Only a few party members took up these questions. Mayor Johan Kock criticized the Senate for prosecuting an “aristocratic” way of governing and thereby neglecting “the liberties and rights of the nation”.80 Another critic, Mattias Kjörning, who had voiced his concern in the Secret Committee, maintained that the trust of the nation had been transferred from the Senate to the Estates.”81 In other words, he claimed that the greater trust enjoyed by the Hats among the nation legitimated their political actions against the Senate at the Diet. While the Nobility and some burghers might refer to the political role of the people in debates over the confidence enjoyed by the Senate, the Clergy had little to say on the subject. The lack of engagement in political debate on the foundations of executive power reflects the traditional role of the clergy as a social and ideological corporation defending the established order. The clergy constituted an important political force in that it stood for continuity in values, providing a basis for a restoration of older ways of thinking if need be.82 Clearly the Clergy were no pioneers in the radical language of politics.83 A similar dedication to inherited values is visible among the Peasants. While the Nobility talked about the people and the nation as the core of the political community, the Peasants rarely used these words. Their preferred concept was that of the common people (allmoge,

79 80 81 82 83

See SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 27 May 1769, 151. R 1392 Borgarståndets protokoll (BrP) 1769–1770, 23 May 1769, 394–395. R 1392 BrP 1769–1770, 25 May 1769, 458. Ihalainen 2003, 406; Ihalainen 2005. Cf. Winton 2006 and Ihalainen 2006, 824–825, 828.

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menighet), a term that emphasized estate identification and political passivity rather than activity. Lacking a generally applicable and politically active concept of the people, the Peasants continued to view themselves as political objects rather than subjects. This traditional view of themselves was combined with sympathy for the monarchy. Lars Torbiörnsson, a servant of the Speaker of the Estate, expressed his gratitude for what the King had done “to save his people from oppression” and “the populace and particularly the country people from calamities and miseries”.84 This was a peasant expression of Hat opposition to the government: it was the King and not the Senate that was to be thanked. The argument reinforced inherited conceptions of the common people as the subjects of the ruler and as passive objects of whatever measures the King was pleased to take. It does suggest, however, that there was, in addition to official communication between the estates, freer social interaction between the members of the different estates in taverns and communication of information through the press.85 Fellow party members were told about debates in the other estates, and consequently the informed members of the Peasant Estate shared some topics of discourse and political concepts with the higher estates. The Concept of the People in Printed Literature and the Reactions of the Estates to Publicity in the Autumn of 1769 The concept of the people re-emerged in the debates after the Estates started to review the consequences of freedom of the press in the autumn of 1769. A flood of pamphlets and periodicals were seen by the members as violating the rights of the Estates and the constitution. The discussion focussed on two particular titles, the anonymously written En Patriots Tankar, Om Grundlagens nödvändiga förbättring (The Thoughts of a Patriot on the Necessary Improvement of the Constitution) and the previously mentioned Cap periodical Uplysning för Swenska Folket. In the former, Arvid Bernhard Virgin (Hat) had criticized some of the principles of the constitution, the Estates’ habit of changing their earlier decisions, and the policies of the Cap Senate. His text started with a conventional description of the Swedes as 84 85

BdP 1769–1770, 23 May 1769, 60. Sennefelt 2003, 415.

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“a free people” and “a free nation” and continued with insinuations that the Caps had abused the system in ways that would lead to “the oppression of all the nation”. Virgin also suggested that the English case demonstrated how a monarch could successfully act as a counterbalance to Parliament. A warning counter-example was to be found in Poland, where the whole system was about to fall apart after a failure to reform the constitution by strengthening the monarchy.86 Such claims for a stronger monarchy had already been rebuffed by Cap pamphleteers. Not all Hats, either, agreed with Virgin. Anders Schönberg had argued that it was unthinkable that the power of the King could be strengthened by imitating the English constitution. On the contrary, “a free people” must defend its liberty by retaining the Swedish constitution unchanged. Nevertheless, Schönberg recognized, with an explicit reference to the Wilkes case, that the English, too, were “a people enlightened by a general freedom of thought and one zealous about its freedom and security”.87 Most commentators did not make such concessions but denounced Virgin as “a patron of sovereignty”88 and advised the Swedes not to imitate the false freedom of the English.89 The periodical Uplysning för Swenska Folket, which had appeared since the beginning of 1769, was one of the new political publications which emerged with the freedom of the press and the approaching meeting of the Diet. It is uncertain who actually authored this publication. One suggested author is Esbjörn Christer Reuterholm, a Cap Senator, who would have presented the views of the Senate in it. Another suggestion is that a Cap called Johan Odelius was paid by the Danes for writing this propaganda.90 If we assume that it was written by a Cap, the political content of the periodical was not without

86 A. Wirgin, En Patriots Tankar, Om Grundlagens nödvändiga förbättring i det, som rör Fides Publica och des Befästande, s.l., s.a., 63–64, 69. The author was prosecuted and paid a high fine for his publication. 87 [A. Schönberg], Anmärkningar, Wid En Ny Skrift, kallad: En Patriots Tankar . . . (Stockholm 1769), no page numbers; Wilkes was also presented as a defender of the rights of the nation in [Anon.], Wärkan Och Påfölgden Af Wåldsamheters Utöfwan Bland et Fritt Folk (Stockholm 1770), no page numbers. 88 [Anon.], Bref Til Politiske Eqvilibristen, Eller Hwar På en Patriots Tankar . . . (Stockholm 1769), no page numbers. 89 [Anon.], Mörker och Förwillelse För Swenska Folket, I Politiska Saker (Stockholm 1770), no page numbers. 90 Sveriges periodiska litteratur (SPL), Vol. 1:129, www.kb.se/Sverigesperiodiskalitteratur/1/1_129.htm; Lagerroth 1915, 613.

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contradictions. The author implied, for instance, that the wrong kind of policy by the Senate would see the Swedish people revert to a state of nature. The Estates remained, in his view, the only defender of “the rights of a free people”.91 He described the latter in totally positive terms, talking about “the honest Swedish people”, “the steadfast Swedish people” and “the Swedish people’s ancient devotion to virtue and honour”, while the Senate was portrayed as misleading the otherwise virtuous people.92 All this sounds very much like an opposition position: the author seems to have been using the concept of the people to attack the Cap Senate rather than to defend its position. The periodical was, in any case, seen as provocative and was repudiated by a number of pamphlets. The author was accused of misleading the common people and the nation as a whole.93 More particularly, the way in which the writer had “publicly spoken to the people on matters of government” was represented as an attempt to “implant the most dangerous false notions in the Swedish people”.94 The critics talked about the people in terms that were just as positive as those used in Uplysningen, but they urged the people not to be misled by the kind of propaganda that this publication had promulgated.95 In the Noble Estate, Hat speakers viewed the publications not as representations of “the voice of the people” but as attacks against the people. Colonel Carl Hierta (Hat) saw them as violations against religion and the law and interpreted them as attempting to incite the people against the royal family.96 As the debate progressed, other periodicals also became objects of criticism by leading Hats. Fredric Horn took up one entitled Pratsiuka fritalaren (The Garrulous Free Speaker) and accused it of questioning the respectability of “the King, the Estates, the civil servants and the people”.97 This periodical had—

91

[Anon.], Uplysning För Swenska Folket Om Anledningen, Orsaken och Afsigterne Med Urtima Riksdagen 1769 (Stockholm & Götheborg 1769), 30, 73–74. It is questionable whether Reuterholm could have expressed such ideas as he had opposed the summoning of the extraordinary Diet. 92 [Anon.], Uplysning För Swenska Folket, 1769, 76–77. 93 [Anon.], En Swensk Patriots Bref. Til Författaren af Uplysningen för Swenska Folket . . . (Stockholm 1769), 3, 7. 94 [Anon.], Undersökning öfwer Den i en utkommande Wecko-Skrift lofwade Uplysning för Swenska Folket . . . (Stockholm 1769), 2, 28. 95 [Anon.], Undersökning öfwer, 1769, 3–4, 21, 29, 33–35. 96 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 15 August 1769, 271. 97 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 15 August 1769, 271.

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despite its seeming defence of the principles of the constitution—been highly satirical about the higher orders and the Estates in general.98 While the Hat speakers complained about how these authors had written about the people, their real concern may have been that such propaganda broadened the concept of the people excessively and, in the long run, challenged the established order, including the privileged position of the Nobility. In the arguments of these speakers, the people appeared as a passive object of manipulation rather than an active participant in the political process. Jacob von Engeström (Hat) concluded that the freedom of the press had been grossly abused to the detriment of “the country and the people”. There had been a lack of respect for “the high person of the King, the Estates of the Realm, the Swedish people, the collegiums and the authorities as well as the constitution of the realm”.99 Though suspicious of the ability of the people to handle this kind of political propaganda, Engeström here recognized “the Swedish people” (in a definitive form) as an inseparable part of the political and administrative system of the realm and as comparable in this respect with the King, the Diet and the government. Lieutenant Carl Nathanael Franckenheim claimed that these publications had originated from nothing if not from popular rage ( folckilska) expressed by attacking the king, the Senate and the Estates.100 The concept of the people had gained such a central role in the justification of the established system within the Noble Estate that a criticism of any aspect of the established system could be interpreted as an injury to the people. At the same time, there remained deep-rooted doubts as to the true ability of the lower orders of the people to understand political questions. ‘The people’ legitimated the use of power by the Estates, but the Nobles continued to view with suspicion any ideas about the public discussion somehow reflecting the voice of the people. That voice was to be found in a Noble Estate with a Hat majority rather than in anonymous Cap publications. For instance, Rudman Bergenstråhle, a Councillor of the Court of Appeal, was unwilling to accord the people an active political role and repeated the traditional

98 The author represented himself as the advocate of all the Swedish “legislating” people and especially the lower orders as opposed to the Nobility. [J.G. Rothman], Philolalus Parrhesiastes, Eller Den Pratsjuke Fritalaren. En Wecko-Skrift. Första Flocken [Stockholm 1768], No. 21, 166–167. 99 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 18 August 1769, 289. 100 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 18 August 1769, 290.

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formula according to which “a happy people feared God, loved their king, their fatherland and the laws”.101 Even if the liberty of the press as such was not questioned, the debate reflects differing views as to the desirability of the freedom of the press awarded by the Cap Senate. Indeed, freedom in general was not always regarded as exclusively beneficial, as the examples of England under Cromwell and Poland under its present constitution demonstrated for many.102 In the Burgher and Clerical Estates, the controversial publications did not provoke any substantial debate.103 The Hat members of the Peasant Estate, in contrast, used the opportunity to demonstrate their loyalty to the established political order by denouncing the publications and echoing the party views expressed in the higher estates. They also suggested that the common people could not be so easily misled as the higher estates seemed to believe. Lars Torbiörnsson (Hat) complained how some author had in an inappropriate manner “railed at the Swedish nation with harsh accusations when he calls people criminals and the like.”104 “The Swedish nation” appeared here as a highly respectable agent not to be denigrated by authors, particularly ones from a rival party. Gabriel Månsson denounced “unlimited royal power or so-called sovereignty” in a manner familiar from other contexts, arguing that the accused author had violated the sacred fundamental laws of the realm, and suggesting that his text was a mere libel against the nation and the Estates. Having read the news about the Wilkes affair in England as reported by opposition writers there, 101

SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 18 August 1769, 297. Johan Albrekt Schönström and von Fersen, SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 18 August 1769, 306–307; von Böhnen argued a week later that the Swedes did not want to fall into anarchy “and become Poles”. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 424; Carl von Qvanten published similar arguments on the weaknesses of the Polish and English republican constitutions in his Tankar om Regerings-Sättet; Med bifogade Anmärkningar öfwer Finance-Wärkets bidragande til Frihetens både säkerhet och bestånd (Stockholm 1769), 9–10; Comparisons between England, Poland and Sweden were also made during the Riksdag of 1771–1772: [Anon.], Reflexioner, Angående den Lagstiftande Magten i Engeland, med mera (Stockholm) [1771], complained about the anarchical situation that had destroyed the people not only in Poland but also in Sweden. In [Anon.], Afhandling om Engellands, och Polens Borgerliga Författningar: “The English free (Fri-Borgerliga)” constitution with its combination of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy was preferred to the aristocracy of Poland. According to Swänska Frihetens Företräde, Framför Engelska och Polska Regeringar (Stockholm 1771), 7, the Swedish constitution was better than either of the other two; See also Roberts 1986, 188, on the English constitution as an argument in Swedish debates. 103 R 703, Prästeståndets konceptprotokoll 1769–1770 (PrP), 15 to 18 August 1769. 104 BdP 1769–1770, 15 August 1769, 166. 102

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Gabriel Månsson saw the author as advocating an English form of government where “parliamentary decisions (parlamenternas beslut)” would govern the country and even establish an autocracy.105 Here a respectable member of the Peasant Estate denied a parallel between the Swedish Estates and a “Parliament” of the English type, which he regarded with suspicion, believing that the English system was likely to lead to a victory of autocracy. The Swedish system appeared as quite unique in its degree of freedom, incomparable with any other and unchangeable. More generally speaking, ‘the people’, ‘sovereignty’ and ‘parliament’ were not yet concepts used by the Peasantry in discussing politics. The Peasant Estate regarded itself as part of the Swedish nation but did not expressly define itself as belonging to the core of ‘the people’ in a political sense; the Peasant Estate primarily viewed itself as the spokesman of the common people. In the printed literature, the argument was sometimes advanced that the Estates, and thereby “the freedom-loving nation” at large, had reacted strongly to Virgin’s pamphlet. An anonymous author saw such reactions as natural among the Swedish people, who had from time immemorial loved freedom and been zealous about its sacred laws.106 The pamphlet vindicated the established system by references to the divine help which “the Swedish people” had enjoyed when defending their constitution. The constitution was understood as uniting “the Swedish people” in that it provided its most important temporal blessing. Even if there might exist differing views among the people, the form of government itself was to be regarded by “a wise people” as sacred and beyond criticism.107 While “the voice of the people” supervised the maintenance of the established political system, the supreme power belonged to the Estates, in which “the Swedish people is collectively gathered through their plenipotentiaries [Fullmägtige]”.108 The Swedish system was not described as a ‘democracy’ here, but it was seen to contain a strong notion of the Estates as plenipotentiaries of the people.

105

BdP 1769–1770, 15 August 1769, 165; 26 August 1769, 180–181. [Anon.], Nödig Granskning Af En så kallad Patriots Tankar Om Grundlagens Nödwändiga Förbättring (Stockholm 1769), 3. 107 [Anon.], Nödig Granskning, 1769, 4–5, 11. 108 [Anon.], Nödig Granskning, 1769, 6, 9–10. 106

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chapter three The Concept of the People in Debates on the Constitution

In late September 1769, the Estates began to debate a reform of the “fundamental laws” (the constitution). The debates were initiated by a Hat attempt to reduce the direct judicial powers of the Estates and to extend the royal prerogative instead, which shows that a considerable section of the party had become defenders of the monarchy. The debates concerned the creation of the post of Chancellor of Justice, the elections of the Senate, legislative measures for a change in the constitution and the reinforcement of the division of power.109 The plan proved unsuccessful, but it provoked the Noble Estate to discuss the political role of the people extensively. The Burghers, too, were activated. The debates show how divergent were the Nobles’ conceptions of the proper degree of political activity among the people. Ehrenmalm, who had spoken positively about the involvement of the people in decision-making in the spring, now underlined the essential connection between the law and “the welfare of the people”.110 Captain Per Lilliehorn (Hat) emphasized the role of the people in the Swedish form of government with the obvious purpose of criticizing the Cap government. According to Lilliehorn, “the law is made for the people and not the people for the law; when a new law is legislated by us, the people with good reason expect to benefit from it”.111 Colonel Fredric Horn (Hat & Court) argued that “the existence and happiness of the nation is dependent on its laws, and therefore these should be suited to the true common good of the nation”. This meant that the laws should be beneficial for the King, the Estates and the people at the same time. It had been so in Greece and Rome in the past, and so should it be in Sweden.112 Classical examples guided the speech of Carl Johan Ridderstolpe (Cap) as well. For this advocate of a moderate reform in the form of government, Sweden was a free nation comparable with “free Greece and Rome” where ‘the people’ had been entitled to decide on all

109 110 111 112

Oscarsson 2003, 422; Lagerroth 1934, Vol. 6/2, 202. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 409. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 412. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 421–422.

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changes in the law.113 Ridderstolpe defined the Chancellor of Justice in highly classical terms as a man who [. . .] can represent the voice of the people [folckets röst] before the King and the Senate and the Estates of the Realm and without fear or prejudice and with an honest heart talk about the law and truth.114

The Chancellor of Justice would have been, following the Roman analogy, a kind of people’s tribune who communicated the voice of the people to the decision-makers. “The voice of the people” here implied not merely something to be brought to the knowledge of the decisionmakers but was apparently synonymous with the law and truth; this use gave the people (however defined) a fundamental political role in the system. Ridderstolpe’s formulation suggested that the Estates were not necessarily identical with the people in that they could be informed about the voice of the people by the said tribune. Even so, the Estates (and the Nobility in particular) were “the supreme power (högsta makten), the core of the nation, the most elect of the people (det utvaldaste folket)”. Thanks to their basic character, the Estates could never become despotic in the same way that individual rulers tended to. The nation could be counted on, Ridderstolpe suggested, and this was necessary, because “the spirit of the nation and law shall endure for as long as the nation itself if the nation is to retain its liberty and independence”.115 Ridderstolpe thus not only emphasized the role of the Estates—chosen from among the people—as the possessors of the supreme power in the realm, but he also expressed his belief in the ability of this nation to govern itself without the system falling into anarchy. This understanding of the popular foundation of estatebased government was not derived out of any explicit concept of the sovereignty of the people, but its implications regarding the political power of the Estates were far-reaching. Such a characterization of the proper roles of the Estates, the people and the proposed Chancellor of Justice provoked no immediate protests. Anders Schönberg (Hat) supported the reform by talking about the Chancellor as the bastion of “the rights of the people ( folkets rätt)”

113 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 427. This supports Lindberg’s thesis on the revival of the Roman concept of the people. 114 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 428. 115 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 429. For Ridderstolpe, “sovereigns” were “lords and powerful princes” to whom the Estate rule provided an alternative.

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between the sessions of the Riksdag. The Chancellor of Justice should then “enunciate the rights of the people (folckets rätt)” before the King and the Senate and otherwise protect those rights.116 Schönberg was referring here to the control of the legality of the government’s actions carried out by the Chancellor in the name of the people. Even if the Hat scheme was intended to lead to a stronger monarchy, it was advocated with repeated appeals to the rights of the people. Court Chancellor Sven Bunge (Hat) emphasized the need to distinguish between the powers of the people and those of the administrators:117 In free states, the government has always been divided between the people and those to whom the administration has been entrusted. Liberty is actually dependent on the fact that the people has resolved to retain for itself the legislative power, that is the right to make its own laws, and the direction of the executive power, or the right to apply the law that has been made.

Here Bunge offered a definition of liberty in a government with a popular basis. The people alone had the right to pass laws through a representative institution. They had given the executive prerogative to elected persons, who could be changed. In the autumn of 1769, the Hat and Court parties were looking forward to such a change. An old dispute on the existence of a contract between “the ruler and the people” was also revived. Gustaf Gottfrid Reuterholm, a Cap lawyer, protested against such a notion, maintaining that the relationship between the ruler and the people was to be seen as a law which the Estates were free to change without violating “the balance which should exist between the ruler and the people”.118 In a “free nation”, this took place when “the Estates, which were going to pass the law, had previously listened to the voice of the people” and in a sense to “all the nation and each member (ledamot) in the realm”. In this way, they could preserve “the love of the people for the form of government”.119 In Reuterholm’s formulation, the position of the people also appeared to be dominant in relation to the monarch. The Estates were to listen to “the voice of the people” and thus represent it.

116

SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 431. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 432. 118 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 437; The idea of the constitution as a contract between the King and the people had existed at the beginning of the Age of Liberty. Fahlbeck 1915, 344. 119 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. I, 25 September 1769, 438. 117

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The Hats mainly used references to the people in arguing their policy in the House of the Nobility; the Burgher Estate was less keen on using such language. The concept of the nation made an appearance but only as a suitably vague reference to the political community. Mayor Hans Ungers referred to the need to seek the happiness and benefit of the nation in establishing the new post of Chancellor of Justice.120 Mayor Georg Tollstorp (Cap) and Mayor Mattias Kjörning both described the future Chancellor as “the man of the nation”.121 The Clergy and the Peasantry did not refer to the nation or the people during their debates. It was thus solely the Nobles who appealed to the people in the constitutional debates during most of the autumn of 1769. At the same time, the debate in the press was lively. Folkets Röst (The Voice of the People), edited by Carl Estenberg, a Cap Councillor of the Court of Appeal, was among the most radical publications.122 Estenberg had been expelled from the House of the Nobility and was hence free to articulate whatever views he may have held.123 The very title of his paper sets out to popularize the vocabulary referring to the people. The basic assumptions of the author were that the Swedes were a free people and that the Estates were “the empowered plenipotentiaries of the people (Magtägande Fullmägtige)”. The paper evidently aimed at presenting the measures of the Cap Senate in a positive light, one of the claims being that the courtiers always considered “the voice of the people” as identical with that of God, and another that the Riksdag considered the good of the people the most important goal.124 The “fundamental laws” of Sweden were the best among all free states and the Swedish people the happiest on earth.125 With slight reforms the laws could be made even better. As the legislators had not sufficiently considered the risks to liberty that either aristocracy, democracy or the despotism of the many (sjelfswåldet) might entail, a reform was needed to [. . .] strengthen the liberty of the realm, safety and security against aristocracy, democracy and despotism of the many as well as against

120 121 122 123 124 125

R 1393 BrP 1769–1770, 25 September 1769, 1696−1697, 1700. R 1393 BrP 1769–1770, 25 September 1769, 1737, 1752. SPL, Vol. I:141; Metcalf 1985, 153. Nordin 2000, 416. [Anon.], Folkets Röst, 1769, No. 1, 1–2; No. 2, 5, 7–8. [Anon.], Folkets Röst, 1769, No. 10, 37.

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chapter three autocracy, as these are equally dangerous enemies of liberty. The experience of all times affirms that it has always been more unbearable for a people to be oppressed by many rather than by just one despot or tyrant.126

The Cap Senate was obviously not striving for anything resembling democracy in its later sense. It consistently denounced aristocracy as well. Later on, Estenberg made the same point by adding a denouncement of sovereignty: Aristocracy, democracy and other kinds of lawless despotic power and anarchy among the plenipotentiaries of the people are just as pernicious and dangerous to liberty and the people as unlimited autocracy or socalled sovereignty [Souverainiteten], and at times much worse; [. . .].127

Historians have also located suggestions for an extended participation of the people in Estenberg’s paper. The suggestion that “all freeborn respectable Swedish men who have reached maturity” should be allowed to participate in elections has been interpreted as a proposal for universal male suffrage.128 However, even if he was discussing the limits of the franchise, Estenberg was not making any ‘democratic’ initiative as he understood it. Even so, the ideas propagated by Folkets Röst were radical. Estenberg’s idea of the participation of the people was considered excessively broad and likely to lead to a confusion and despotism of the many that were worse than under the Polish Diet. Estenberg’s people stood “not only for the noblemen, clergy, burghers and peasants but also for every inhabitant of the realm, irrespective of the estate, conditions or circumstances he came from.”129 It was simply not possible to allow all kinds of people who lacked knowledge and insight to participate in the work of the Riksdag. Nor was there any need for them to be involved as the four Estates already looked after the welfare of the people. The limits of the concept of the people had obviously become an object of debate outside the Estates. At the Diet, the reform of the constitution was next debated in a separate committee in which the Secret Committee and the Secret and

126 127 128

[Anon.], Folkets Röst, 1769, No. 11, 43. [Anon.], Folkets Röst, 1769, No. 17, 68. Lagerroth 1915, 695–696; Roberts 1986, 209; Skuncke 1999, 291; Nordin 2000,

414. 129

[Anon.], Bref Till Utgifwaren af Folkets Röst (Uppsala 1769), no page numbers.

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Justice Deputations were jointly represented. The Secret Committee constituted an assembly where the representatives of the three highest estates discussed constitutional issues in terms set mainly by the noble Hat members. Schönberg was again the first to point out that all power was to be used “for the welfare and security of the people” and hence the office of the Chancellor of Justice was important for securing “the freedom, welfare and security of the people”.130 Mayor Johan Sundblad likewise reminded the committee that all offices existed for the people, not the people for the offices.131 Schönberg went on to deny the existence of a simple contract between the King and the people and emphasized the balances needed to prevent any form of government from degenerating into tyranny. If there was a contract between the King and the Estates, it must be conditional and was not to be confused with a very different kind of contract originally made by the people and preserved in their laws: The making of the proposal by the Estates of the Realm would [. . .] distinguish the rights of the people [ folkets rätt] and constitute a counterbalance to autocracy. The right of the King to choose out of three candidates demonstrates a balance with democracy. Not only His Royal Highness and his person but also the benefit and welfare of the people would be taken into consideration.132

‘Democracy’ was used here by a nobleman in a neutral sense, as an element of the mixed constitution. Carl Sparre’s way of talking about democracy suggests that monarchy and democracy could in principle be regarded as mutually counterbalancing elements in the constitution. Without such a balance, the welfare of the people was in danger of being destroyed. The classical term ‘democracy’ was used here instead of the more widely used vernacular term “the rights of the people”.133 More unconventional views were heard from Colonel Carl Fredrik Pechlin, previously a Hat but soon to become a Cap defender of the principle of the supreme power belonging to the Estates.134 According to Pechlin, there could be no balance between monarchy and

130 R 3480 Protocoller, hållne vid 1769 års Riksdag uti Sammanträdet mellan Secrete Utskottet samt Secrete och Justitiae Deputationerne angående Lagarnes Verkställighet 1769 (PSUSJD), 5 October 1769, 43r–44v. 131 R 3480 PSUSJD, 5 October 1769, 54r. 132 R 3480 PSUSJD, 10 October 1769, 76v. 133 R 3480 PSUSJD, 10 October 1769, 77v–77r. 134 Fahlbeck 1915, 330.

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democracy as the Estates were “the sole possessors of power”. No mutual contract between the monarch and the Estates existed, and the proposal for the appointment of a Chancellor was dangerous as it extended the royal prerogative, allowing the King to bypass the will of the Estates in nominating civil servants. Pechlin further reminded the committee that it was a major duty of the Senate to look after the rights and liberties of the people and to be responsible to the Estates in doing so.135 The more moderate John Jennings insisted that no-one had advocated the existence of a contract between the King and the people and repeated the conventional formula according to which the Swedish constitution comprised the King, the authority of the Senate and the liberties and rights of the Estates.136 County Governor Carl Rappe, a leader of the Hats, admired the balanced nature of this constitution in comparison with those of ancient Greece and Rome as well as with those of the contemporary Dutch Republic and Britain, all of which achieved a constitutional balance by different means: in Sweden the balance was between the King, the Senate and the Estates, while in the Netherlands it existed between the provinces, and in Britain between the King, the Lords and the Commons.137 Pechlin interpreted the classical lessons differently. As the Athenian and Roman systems had collapsed because of a lack of sufficient guarantees of the mutual rights of the people, the monarchy and the empowered Estates, they provided no applicable models for Sweden. Pechlin saw the Swedish constitution as entirely unique in that the Estates did not consist of the whole body of the people (hela menigheten) but only of their elected deputies (deputerade). Developing a notion of what was later to be called representation, Pechlin insisted that the constitutional balance arose from the principle that “the people are empowered ( folket är magtägande), and that not always the same per-

135

R 3480 PSUSJD, 10 October 1769, 78v–79r. R 3480 PSUSJD, 10 October 1769, 80v–80r. 137 R 3480 PSUSJD, 10 October 1769, 82r–83r; While referring to classical examples and considering the Dutch Republic and Britain as the most relevant contemporary examples, Rappe denounced Rousseau’s views on the social contract. The English constitution with its guarantee of the nation’s rights was represented as being equally worth preservation as the Swedish one by Israel Acrelius. R 3480 PSUSJD, 10 October 1769, 164r–165v. 136

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sons come to the Riksdag”,138 i.e. the plenipotentiaries of the people changed frequently. Furthermore, he questioned the claims that the three powers of the state were equal. His point was that only the Estates (and the synonymously understood people) possessed power in the Swedish realm.139 Pechlin’s statement illustrates the degree of radicalism among some nobleman in the autumn of 1769. Thanks to such speeches in favour of an extreme form of the rule of the Estates, Pechlin found it easy to obtain funding from Russia, which wanted to keep the Swedish monarchy weak. Recognizing his disagreement with the majority of the Hats, Pechlin decided to move over to the side of the Caps. Even Court Chancellor Bunge viewed the Estates as “the representatives of all the nation”, recalling the Hat formula used in the 1750s. The Estates, being both well informed and law-obeying, could not make any mistakes and, therefore, he claimed: “[. . .] they enjoy the trust of the nation to such a degree that their will expressed in legislation expresses that of the whole nation.”140 This statement not only underlined the power of the Estates but also recognized the role of their members as the representatives of the nation. While not disputing Pechlin’s and Bunge’s interpretations, the other debaters did not go so far either in defending the absolute power of the Estates or in equating it with the people. This constitutional dispute at the Diet was closely interconnected with debates in the public sphere. A pamphlet entitled Upmuntran För Swea Folk (Encouragement for the Swedish People), for instance, was discussed in the Secret Committee on 28 October. The pamphlet had been addressed directly to “the Swedish people” as “a free nation” without delimiting the concept of the people in any way. The author had urged the people to take a more active role in issues debated by the Riksdag so that they might be aware of what was going on and also express their opinions: “Look into these topics, people of Sweden, and express your thoughts on them”.141 For some anonymous authors, the Swedish people and their ancient rights had by the autumn of 1769 138 R 3480 PSUSJD, 10 October 1769, 87v; cf. Fahlbeck 1915, 337, who has interpreted this to mean that the Estates constituted an unlimited sovereign power as a kind of condensed people. 139 R 3480 PSUSJD, 17 October 1769, 177. 140 R 3480 PSUSJD, 17 October 1769, 166v. 141 [Anon.], Upmuntran För Swea Folk, Til Upmärksamhet I ett Högwigtigt Ämne (Stockholm 1769), no page numbers; R 3457 SUP 1769–1770, 28 October 1769, 874.

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become the key concept in the political debate.142 Even if these publications were mainly a form of propaganda in the power struggle between the parties in the Noble estate, they taught the political vocabulary referring to the people to the lower orders as well. At that juncture, Hat noblemen welcomed the extension of opposition appeals to the people to include the lower orders, something that the Caps had been doing for some time. This polemical and personal friction with the Caps induced at least one member of the Burgher Estate to use more radical language with reference to the people. In November 1769, Arvid Schauw, a mayor, businessman and leading Hat, deliberately challenged the Cap ministry after being excluded from the Riksdag by them in 1765 and being denied access to the Estate by the Caps in 1769 on the grounds of his supposedly unorthodox religious views. Schauw was, indeed, a Wilkeslike figure who chose to use language referring to the people in order to win the argument for his party. He presented a memorandum defending the right of the people to hold free elections, something that the Burgher Estate unanimously approved even though the other members did not employ similar arguments on the popular origin of political power. Schauw’s opening speech is illustrative of an extreme formulation used to define the fundamental rights and privileges of the people as well as of the notion that the sentiments of the people was expressed by the “representative” Estates. The Noble model of speaking about “rights and liberty” had evidently been adopted by some Burghers as well: [. . .] the constitution of the realm, maintained in the Form of Government and the Accession Charter and by the gathered plenipotentiaries of the four Representative Estates [Representive Ständers], constitute a major part of the rights and freedom of the Swedish people, [. . .] the assembled Estates of the Realm exercise these rights on behalf of the people [. . .] and have also been given the right to change [. . .] the fundamental laws [. . .] the free Swedish people [. . .] wishing to have their rights and freedom retained have also allowed their Riksdagsmen to keep and preserve it and conversely not to endanger it. [. . .] the right of the people [Folckets rätt] is original and perpetual [originair och perpetual], but the measures of the executives contingent [casuel] and subject to those adjustments and changes which the main goal [the welfare and freedom of the people] demands.

142

[Anon.], Upmuntran För Swea Folk, 1769.

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[. . .] everything should [. . .] be administrated so that, ne quid detrimenti kapiat res publica, and that the people’s, each individual citizen’s, right to enjoy the property, benefit and rights which the laws accord to him [is guaranteed].143

This was a forceful non-noble argument in defence of the rights, privileges and liberties of the people as well as a recognition of the participation of the people in the original contract in the Lockean sense. Schauw also referred to the indirect political participation of the people through the authorization of the plenipotentiaries of the Estates. The delegates at the Diet represented their Estates rather than the people more generally, but they were understood as working on behalf of the people and expressing the wishes and interests of the people with regard to the preservation of their rights and privileges. The main goal of the Diet was, of course, to maintain its existing rights and not to extend them to new groups. The reference to the rights of the people as “original and perpetual” is intriguing. Lagerroth interpreted this as an expression of “a doctrine of popular sovereignty justified by natural law”.144 Schauw did refer to the rights of the people, and he implied that all political authority was ultimately derived from the people. But at that time he could not have possibly talked about “popular sovereignty”. His view of the original emergence of civil society was commonplace in European political theory and had been present in Hat doctrine for some time. It was reinforced by works discussing Lockean political theory, like the one published by the Cap politician Anders Nordencrantz the following year, according to which: [. . .] Locke and other theoretical writers have been of the opinion that there always remains with the people “an original superior power to cancel or change the legislature when they find that it acts against the trust which has been given to it; so that when such a trust is abused, it is thereby forfeited and returns to those who gave it.”145

143 R 1393 BrP 1769–1770, 2 November 1769, 2245–2247, 2249–2251, 2253. The Latin quote: “the state should suffer no harm”. For “right and freedom” (rätt och frihet) as the ideological foundation of politics in this period, see Wolff 2007b, 34. 144 Lagerroth 1934, 6/2, 203; Ericsson 2003, 150. 145 Anders Nordencrantz, Undersökning om de rätta Orsakerne til den Blandning som skedt af Lagstiftande, Redofordrande och Redoskyldige Magternes Gjöromål . . . (Stockholm 1770), 47.

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This could mean an undesirable return to a state of nature, and hence Nordencrantz concluded that “the power of the Parliament is unlimited and incontestable”.146 Similar interpretations had been presented ever since the translation of Locke’s works in the 1720s. Schauw seems to have developed his thinking on the basis of Lockean ideas about the original power of the people and combined this with the tradition of the people sending plenipotentiaries to the Diet to defend their rights. According to his description, the people were not given any active role in everyday politics; decision-making would remain with the Estates. Not was Schauw referring to democracy, as he pointed out that in 1720 the Swedish people had already rejected “the inconvenience, disorder and peril which follows from democracy or a general popular government (Folk-Regering)”.147 The notion of “the original and perpetual right” of the people could be seen as a challenge to certain decisions made in the 1740s according to which all power belonged to the Estates, who were not directly responsible to their electors. According to Erik Fahlbeck, such ideas were advocated by individual opposition politicians and only when they were in the minority. The official doctrine consistently held that the highest power belonged to the Estates and not to the people.148 Schauw was not speaking in favour of democracy in some modern sense, and his defence of the people as the source of political authority was quite conventional. This seemed to be an isolated speech act; the other speakers did not endorse it, although only one openly criticized it. Even Schauw himself did not repeat his argument in any of his other thirteen speeches during the debate, which suggests that it was not his main point in the first place. Schauw’s memorandum and speech thus by no means constitute representative examples of the character of the debate among the Swedish non-noble orders. Alternatively, of course, we could assume that Schauw had merely been expressing a theoretical principle which had few practical consequences, and which the other members consequently did not bother to take up.149

146 Anders Nordencrantz, Undersökning, 1770, 47; Only Nordencrantz, influenced by British philosophy, used the term ‘parliament’ in such a wide sense. 147 Cited in Fahlbeck 1916, 34. 148 Fahlbeck 1915, 338. 149 R 1393 BrP 1769–1770, 2 November 1769, 2258, 2266, 2287.

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The Noble Estate had much more to say about the political role of the people. Ridderstolpe opened the debate by pointing out that the people ultimately possessed the supreme power in the realm. Indeed, “the supreme power of the nation” overshadowed even “His Royal Highness and the authority of the Senate”,150 which is a far-going interpretation expressing once again the dominant role of the Estates in the system. For Ridderstolpe, an extension of the royal prerogative was out of the question as the King could not have a prerogative “opposed to the nation, the power of which is the cornerstone of our entire constitution.”151 This was Noble republican language directed against the attempts by the Court to strengthen the monarchy. The spokesman of the Cap Senate consistently denied the possibility that the royal prerogative could be “a separate power opposed to that of the people, for whom the King rules”. The crowned head could not “wish something different from the people, whose will he executes” or hold a position that was “in conflict with the nation”.152 There remained no doubt as to the supreme power of the people within the Cap ideology as represented by Ridderstolpe. The people stood here primarily for the majority of members of the House of the Nobility rather than for the people as a whole. Ridderstolpe had other ideas derived from the Nobles’ republican tradition of understanding the political role of the people. He restated his view that the Chancellor of Justice should act as a kind of tribune chosen by the Estates and indirectly by the people, listening to “the voice and needs of the people”, looking after “the welfare of the nation” and supervising the maintenance of “the freedom of the nation.”153 ‘The people’ was a highly positive concept for Ridderstolpe: the people was honourable, patriotic and virtuous.154 Ridderstolpe was defending the political power of the people, but he did so inside the House of the Nobility, in an attempt to save his minority party. The radicalization of the concept of the people in 1769 was first and foremost a Noble phenomenon among both the Hats and the Caps, and it was advocated

150 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 15 November 1769, 66; cf. Ridderstolpe’s changing argumentation during the following Riksdag. 151 SRARP 1769−1770, Vol. II, 15 November 1769, 69. 152 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 15 November 1769, 71. Here we have an expression that comes quite close to the concept of ‘folkviljan’ (the will of the people) emphasized by Nordin 2003, 65. 153 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 15 November 1769, 68. 154 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 15 November 1769, 74.

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by the leaders of both parties. It arose out of a variety of factors: the need to legitimate opposition to the Cap Senate, the need to justify changes in the constitution, a reaction against attempts to strengthen the monarchy and attempts to counter the rise of the Hats. Much of the radical language used to refer to the people was, at that stage, shared by both sides of the Nobility. A speech by Otto Henrik de Frese also illustrates the central status of references to the people in the rhetoric of the Nobility in 1769. Frese defined the main purpose of the constitution as being to ensure “the happiness of the nation and the people” and the duty of both the King and the “empowered” Estates as being to “maintain the freedom of the people”. For him, the Estates were almighty, being responsible to no higher power. Anyone who challenged the title of the Estates as “empowered” would, according to Frese, jeopardize the rights of the people.155 This language of the people legitimated the dominant status of the Estates in general and the Nobility in particular in relation to the King. In Frese’s view, the system had only been strengthened since the freedom of the press had made it easier to hear “the voice of the people”.156 Such a recognition of the value of active debate outside the Diet reflects the optimistic attitudes of some Noble party politicians who believed that they had benefited from the new forms of political propaganda. By the time of the following Riksdag, attitudes towards free public debate would become much less favourable on all sides, particularly among the Nobility. A final remark on Frese’s thinking is apposite. When comparing the Swedish constitution with others, Frese turned not to Athens but to Sparta as a model of a mixed constitution; it had, according to him, maintained its flourishing position for 800 years by preserving its laws.157 Not unlike some British comparisons, a Swedish nobleman was here expressing his admiration for the supposedly virtuous and militaristic Sparta as an example over the democratic and potentially anarchical Athenian political system. There were also those who considered the Swedish constitution better than any other, including the classical ones.158

155 156 157 158

SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 15 November 1769, 79–80, 84, 87. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 15 November 1769, 86. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 15 November 1769, 80. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 15 November 1769, 89.

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The Noble Estate and the Meaning of ‘Democracy’ in the Autumn of 1769 In November 1769, the attempt to change the constitution generated some unusual disquisitions on the meaning of ‘democracy’ and on the possibility that the rule of the Estates might turn into democracy. However, it is doubtful whether these constituted any milestone on the road to democracy in a modern sense. The power of the people, as articulated by some noblemen, did not yet stand for democracy in any revolutionary sense. The exchange of views that followed was strictly restricted to the Noble Estate. It was provoked by Lars Herman Gyllenhaal’s memorandum proposing that some questions of finance and foreign policy could be discussed in the plenary sessions of the Estates, including the Peasant Estate, instead of being confined to the exclusive Secret Committee.159 The reactions show where the limits of popular rule lay in the opinion of the majority of the Noble Estate. While the political role of the people and sometimes even the democratic element within the constitution had been viewed in positive terms, the inclusion of the representatives of the Peasantry in economic and strategic decisionmaking remained unthinkable for many noblemen. ‘Democracy’ now provided a concept by which such aspirations could be rejected. The extension of decision-making to plenary sessions was presented as an attack on the principles of the constitution and an attempt to reveal secrets of the realm to foreign powers. Councillor Christer Horn, an independent, considered it absurd to make questions of foreign policy topics of public discussion among a perhaps less cautious and vacillating common people. According to him, Gyllenhaal’s proposal tended to “once and for all overthrow the form of government in a most dangerous manner and turn our government into a democracy”.160 In a democracy, “the Peasant Estate concerns itself with the affairs of the cabinet, and the common people (menigheten) judge over the proposals of foreign courts”.161 Such an involvement of the commoners and the Peasants in particular in decision-making sounded

159 160 161

SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 28 November 1769, 148–149. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 28 November 1769, 152. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 28 November 1769, 152.

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very strange in the context of classical political thought and also in the international context of 1769. The majority agreed that the Peasants should stay excluded as no democracy was desired. In a similar vein to Horn, Count Lorentz Vilhelm Creutz argued: If the plenary sessions, as seems to be happening, begin little by little to move to what according to the law belongs to the King, the Senate and the Secret Committee, the form of government will be gradually transformed into a democracy.162

According to Creutz, the practices of exclusive decision-making should be retained; otherwise there was a real risk of democracy growing within the Riksdag. While many noblemen had underlined the political role of the people when vindicating the influence of their own estate and party in government, there were few defenders of what were seen as outright democratic practices, and it was suspected that they might be in the pay of foreign powers that wished to keep the Swedish monarchy weak and to prevent France from benefiting from its Swedish alliance. Only two noblemen spoke on behalf of democracy in November 1769. Fredrik Gyllensvahn, a radical Cap, who must have been familiar with the language of politics of the Dutch Republic after serving its army, supported Gyllenhaal’s proposal for the extension of decisionmaking to plenary sessions. Gyllensvahn was known for his readiness to take matters to extremes, and this certainly decreased the credibility of this particular speech act. However, his speech demonstrates that the numerous vindications of the rights of the people could lead to a radicalization of the concept of democracy as well. He had previously defended majority decisions and responsible government, which suggests that he was intentionally arguing that the constitution allowed the plenary sessions to discuss whatever they liked. Referring to Horn’s and Creutz’s uses of the concept of democracy, he declared in provocative terms: If that is to be called democracy, then according to the law democracy belongs to the Estates of the Realm in their plenary sessions, and I shall always remain in my thoughts committed to a so-constituted democracy based on our law.163

162 163

SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 28 November 1769, 155. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 28 November 1769, 160.

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This description of democracy as a positively understood element of the constitution, arising out of arguments about the power of the Estates originating from the people, went further than any other in either the British Parliament or the Swedish Riksdag in the period studied here. Gyllensvahn’s speech act was a restatement of preceding claims that the proposed procedural change would lead to democracy and of more cautious references to a democratic element in the constitution. It did not define the entire rule of the Estates as democracy. Even less was it a call for some kind of ‘democratization’ of the representative system. It was a defence of a proposed procedural change that would increase the influence of the existing lower estates, among whom, importantly, the Cap party continued to enjoy more support than among the Nobility. While earlier speakers based their arguments on the pejorative senses of the classical concept of democracy, Gyllensvahn turned to the theoretical tradition of mixed monarchy within which limited democracy did have a legitimate place. The fact that such a defence of the democratic element was possible suggests that the concept had the potential to take on new meanings. A re-evaluation of the status of democracy within the classical model of a mixed constitution had thus become possible, albeit only in the minds of a few maverick noblemen. The opposing Hat argument came from Anders Schönberg. According to him, no democracy of the suggested kind was needed as the members of the Secret Committee were already elected by the (three higher) estates and thereby “represented” (ræpresenterar / ræpresenteras) them in the Diet.164 As the representation of the Estates was thus realized, there was no need for ideas such as the people as a whole being represented by the Estates. The representation of the Estates, not the people, remained the key idea of the Hat conception of the constitution. The concepts of “representative” estates and the “representation” of the estates occurred in public debates as well.165 Only the most radical Cap echelons suggested that the members of the Riksdag should be seen as “representing the people itself ”.166 The other spokesman for the democratic element was Carl Fredrik Pechlin, a former Hat who was approaching the Cap party because of 164

SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 28 November 1769, 161. [Anon.], Afhandling om Engellands, och Polens Borgerliga Författningar (Stockholm 1771), no page numbers. 166 [Anon.], Folkets Röst, 1769, No. 16, 62. 165

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the rising sympathy among the Hats for a strengthened monarchy. The ideological motivation for Pechlin’s speech is obvious: he had consistently opposed attempts to increase the royal prerogative though he had doubts about republican government as well. A further reason for his stance was a common one in the struggle between the Hats and Caps in the Age of Liberty: in November 1769 he had been bribed by Russian diplomats to join the Cap side.167 Ever since the 1740s, the Caps and the Russians had shared the goal of keeping the power of the Swedish King in check and maintaining the rule of the Estates along with their party divisions. Speaking to his fellow noblemen, many of whom doubted his political integrity, Pechlin saw nothing that would lead to democracy in the proposal that the plenary sessions should be better informed by the Secret Committee. In his view, the supreme power belonged to the plenary sessions of the Estates. While there had been a risk of the rise of direct democracy during a controversy on the responsibility of the members to their electors in the 1740s, there was no longer such a risk. Pechlin, despite his radical views, denied all intentions to introduce democracy, which indicates that democracy was neither a goal nor a term of self-identification for even the most radical members of the Swedish political elite: Constitutions are often created with plans that depend on current conditions. Whether it be aristocracy or democracy, [. . .]. This is not about establishing democracy. As long as the informed Estates take care of the constitution, there will never be any democracy here. As far as I remember, just once were we in danger of democracy, and that was when the question about principalate was put forward; [. . .].168

Pechlin’s point was, despite his support for Gyllenhaal, that the Swedish rule of the Estates was radically different from democracy. Democracy in the classical sense in which he understood it would have entailed the direct engagement of the people at large in decision-making. While the Hats saw the inclusion of the Peasant Estate in the debates as the rise of this kind of democracy, some radical Caps willingly drew a distinction between democracy and the equal engagement 167

Roberts 1986, 175. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 28 November 1769, 173, 175; In the anonymous pamphlet Upmuntran För Swea Folk, which had been mentioned in the Secret Committee a month earlier, Pechlin had been described as a defender of the freedom of the Swedish people and the rights of the nation. 168

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of the Estates in the decision-making process. Both stances were motivated by strong party-political interests: the Hats wanted to keep the rule of “the people” in the hands of the higher Hat nobility in the Secret Committee, while some Caps wanted to reform this so that the nonnoble estates with their Cap majorities would be involved in decisionmaking. However, Gyllensvahn was the only member who represented the latter alternative as “democracy”. Pechlin’s speech reflected a conception of the Swedish form of government as a mixed government that included elements of aristocracy and democracy, which were viewed in terms not that different from the established British notions. The purpose of the democratic element was to balance the aristocratic one; democracy was not a goal as such, although the democratic element needed to be slightly strengthened. Nor did the existence of such an element entail that the people at large should be allowed to live without the regulation of the powers that be: [. . .] our history books show that the realm has often been under monarchical and aristocratic power; monarchy when the kings have ruled on their own; aristocracy when the power has been held by the Senate or the business magnates. Aristocracy can also exist if power remains in the Secret Committee and certain factions make themselves holders of the reins. If our constitution is a mixed one and consists of both aristocracy and democracy [componerat och aristocrati o democratisk [sic]], extremes on both sides would be avoided. Not too much power for the Senate, the Secret Committee or the business magnates, nor any licence to be lawless for the people.169

Pechlin concluded that Gyllenhaal’s memorandum did not aim at a democratic coup but was a well-intended attempt to maintain “the freedom the nation” and “the benefit of the people” within a mixed government.170 It is tempting to read more into this speech than it really contained. Lagerroth saw Pechlin as an advocate of “the representative system” in which “the people were the possessors of power” and were represented by the Estates. Pechlin had pointed out in a committee debate that “the people are empowered” in being able to send different persons to the Riksdag. Lagerroth interpreted this as a desire to limit the power

169 170

SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 28 November 1769, 173–174. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 28 November 1769, 174.

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of the Riksdag in favour of the people.171 However, Pechlin did not argue for popular representation or representative democracy. The Noble Estate decided not to send the memorandum to the other estates,172 which blocked any possibility of further debates on democracy there. The motion itself was seen as so foolhardy that Gyllenhaal was prosecuted for having made an illegal proposal.173 In 1769 the advocates of a democratic element in the form of government still remained a clear minority within the Noble Estate. In the meantime, the public debate offered some alternative perspectives on the political role of the people. A pamphlet written by the Councillor for Commerce, Johan Fredrik Kryger, recognized the key role that the people played in the passing of laws but refrained from viewing this arrangement as democratic. Nor, according to Kryger, were all the inhabitants of the realm to be involved in the legislative process in the first place. In Kryger’s formulations, influenced by Montesquieu, persons authorized by the people, and not the populace at large, exercised the power of the people in a free state: [. . .] I call that state free in which the legislative power lies with the people. [. . .] A state can be free without being totally democratic. A people can commission one or more persons to take care of the executive power and still possess its freedom insofar as it can itself enact the laws according to which it wants to be governed and to supervise how they are administrated by those whose task it is the implementation of executive power. [. . .] legislative power and the power to demand accountability lie with the people. These can never, without all too great a disorder be exercised by the common people at large, but they have to take place through plenipotentiaries chosen specifically for that purpose. But [. . .] these [. . .] are chosen from among all the common people of the state; [. . .].174

The rest of the Riksdag in 1769–1770 saw no real debate on the political role of the people although proposals anticipating the rise of disputes over the privileges of the Estates were already being made. When a proposal for privileges for the Peasant Estate was put forward by Jonas Olofsson Norberg in January 1770, the emphasis was primarily

171

Lagerroth 1915, 622–623; Lagerroth 1934, 6/2, 204. SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 28 November 1769, 179. The proposal received 335 votes for and 483 against. 173 SRARP 1769–1770, Vol. II, 2 December 1769, 184. 174 J.F. Kryger, Tankar om et Nationelt Intresse i Fria Stater och i synnerhet i Swerige (Stockholm 1769), 3, 7. Cf. Gjörwell’s writings during the following Riksdag. 172

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on economic rights and not on extended political ones.175 The Peasants made no political use of references to the people to legitimate their demands but merely pointed out that “the liberties and rights of the Peasant Estate are as sacred as the other ones protected by the fundamental laws”.176 However, it is not out of the question that there was a gradually rising political consciousness among the Peasants. The activities of their plenipotentiaries at the Riksdag had increased political awareness and led to the publication of writings in which the members of the estate called for the representation of the Peasantry in the Secret Committee. First and foremost, however, they demanded equal treatment with the other estates in economic and judicial matters.177 The most extensive notions of the political rights of the people and of the existence of a democratic element within the constitution emerged among the Noble Estate at the Riksdag of 1769−1770. At the same time, the Nobles were the fiercest opponents of democracy, being concerned to maintain rather than to reform a system that was so advantageous to them. The involvement of the Peasant Estate in decisions on the economy and foreign policy appeared to most noblemen, and Hats in particular, to be a type of democracy they did not want. Increasing Contestability of the Concept ‘the People’ during the Riksdag of 1771–1772 The party-political situation changed quite dramatically between the Diets of 1769–1770 and 1771–1772.178 When the new Riksdag convened in spring 1771, the ruling Hat and Court parties had a majority only in the Noble Estate, while the Caps dominated all the three lower estates.179 The Caps of the lower estates had used the concept of the people sparingly when their party had been in power during the Diet

175 The proposal for privileges for the non-noble estates, including the Peasants, had initially been made by Alexander Kepplerus, who aimed at reforming rather than challenging the estate system and wished primarily to promote the interests of his home town. Nurmiainen 2003, 413. See also Nordin 2000, 394, 401. 176 BdP 1769–1770, 18 January 1770, 473–474; 3 February 1770, 561–563. Privileges for the Peasant Estate had also been proposed during the Riksdag of 1765–1766, but no progress had been made on the issue. Nordin 2003, 62. 177 Claréus 2003, 407. 178 For the original Swedish citations in the rest of this chapter, see an earlier version which has been published in Ihalainen 2008a. 179 Lagerroth 1934, 6/2, 209.

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of 1769–1770. Radical Cap speeches in favour of popular power and the democratic element of the constitution had remained exceptions in the House of the Nobility. And among the Burghers, a radical Hat leader had been the only outspoken proponent of the rights of the people. By 1771, however, the Cap opposition in the lower orders was making much wider use of references to the people, while the Hats and the Nobility more generally had become increasingly cautious in their use of the appeals to the people that had previously been characteristic of them. In the opening speeches at the Diet of 1771−1772, the concept of the people still retained its prominent place. King Gustavus III was well aware of the persuasive potential of words like “the people” and “citizen” for influencing the members of Riksdag and chose to describe himself as “the first citizen (medborgare) in a free people”. He also said that it was his goal to rule over “a free people” so that the Swedes would become “the most fortunate people on earth”.180 The Speaker of the Noble Estate, Axel Gabriel Leijonhufwud, replied with the traditional Noble rhetoric of references to the people, mentioning “the Swedish people” in general as well as “the Swedish people assembled at a general meeting of the realm”.181 The prevalent notion of the Nobility and the other Estates as constituting the politically active Swedish people and not merely representing it is visible in a formulation which stated that the Nobility “together with the rest of the Swedish people” met the King at the Diet.182 The Swedish people was symbolically present, and this constituted an opportunity for Leijonhufwud to express established views about the role of the people in decision-making. In the public debate, too, the notion of the Estates as the delegates, the elected plenipotentiaries of the people, continued to occasionally appear. An important change in the content of the debate in the press was also taking place. As Marie-Christine Skuncke has demonstrated, Noble party leaders were beginning to lose their control over the press as writers from the commoner estates increasingly attacked their special privileges. Writings criticizing the Nobility appeared mostly in papers supported by the Cap Party, whose financial sponsors were 180

Sveriges ridderskaps och adels riksdagsprotokoll från och med år 1719 (SRARP), 1771–1772 (Stockholm 1969), Vol. I, 25 June 1771, 25–26. 181 SRARP, Vol. I, 25 June 1771, 26–28; Lagerroth 1934, 6/2, 209. 182 SRARP, Vol. I, 25 June 1771, 28.

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mainly from abroad, particularly Britain, Russia and Denmark. Publications supporting the Court similarly continued to receive financial backing from the French Embassy. The most heated issue of the Diet and the press debates was over the possibility of extending privileges to the non-noble estates. Newspapers such Dagligt Allehande (Daily Miscellaneous) would report regularly on debates in the Estates in the autumn of 1771 and spring of 1772.183 The use of references to the people in these publications was not strictly divided according to Cap and Hat lines of argumentation. The confrontation was one between estates rather than between parties. Carl Ingman, a leading publicist, described the constitution in conventional terms as one in which “the Swedish people” had deposited its freedom and security “in the hands of its plenipotentiaries (Fullmäktiges hander)” and placed the supreme power “in the hands of friends and fellow citizens”. Ingman, hired by a Hat leader and hence eager to defend the privileges of the Nobility, maintained that the constitution functioned so well that “the trust of the people” had never been betrayed.184 Ingman’s appeal to the members of the Diet illustrates the Nobles’ view of the political role of the people: Free Swedish men! You who, as the trusted ones of the people, have been raised from among your fellow citizens to be their highest judge, in whose hands we in good faith have laid our welfare and that of our children, it is your ears that should be open to the voice of the Swedish people, [. . .] you cannot abuse the rights of the entire nation [. . .].185

Ingman combined this Noble republican notion of the members of the Diet as the judges of the people with expressions of sympathy for the Court, admiring a monarch who was actively supported by the Swedish people and seeing the Estates as being “the plenipotentiaries of Sweden” who would be setting “the crown on the head of Gustavus on behalf of the Swedish people”:186 When speaking about the coronation, Ingman combined the terms ‘people’ and ‘representative’ in its foreign forms (representative, representant), something that was seldom done at the actual Diet, where the vernacular term ( fullmäktig) was

183

Skuncke 2003, 418. [Carl Ingman], Svenska Folkets Röst, Framburen Inför Rikets Församlade Ständer Vid Riksdagen 1771 (Stockholm 1771), 2. 185 [Ingman], Svenska Folkets Röst, 1771, 7. 186 [Ingman], Svenska Folkets Röst, 1771, 13–14. 184

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favoured: “Be aware that the people who have made you their representatives pays most careful attention to all your steps, [. . .].”187 At the Diet, it was the Accession Charter together with the connected question of the privileges of the Estates that gave rise to the most extensive debates on the political role of the people. The formulation of the Charter became such an important question because it was considered comparable to the constitution, although it could be changed by the decision of three estates instead of the unanimity usually required on privilege questions.188 The opportunity was used by the lower orders with Cap majorities to prosecute the question of privileges, which had been effectively opposed by the Noble Estate. They saw a possibility to combine this question with the reformulation of the Charter of 1751. According to the suggested new formulation, the agreement of the King and three estates would be enough to enact changes in estate privileges. Likewise, state offices would also be opened to the members of the non-noble estates.189 In these circumstances, in which the special status of the Nobility was being openly challenged, the Cap opposition began to use words referring to the people more frequently, in radicalized senses, and also among the lower orders, which they dominated. In the course of autumn 1771, three proposals for according economic privileges to the three non-noble estates were made. In the Peasant Estate, the question of privileges was addressed as a consequence of the reintroduction of a proposal that had already been made at the end of the preceding Diet. Among the Burghers, Johan Sundblad proposed a formulation of privileges for his own estate. Henrik Albrekt Brandenburg repeated this proposal in early October. All the proposals focused on equal judicial and economic rights and contained no claims for extended political rights. The Peasant Estate remained unwilling to open estate membership to those members of the rural population who did not yet belong to it. On the other hand, there were calls for widening the membership of the estates so that land-owning persons of standing could take part in elections, but they went unheard.190 Every estate continued to jealously defend its own inher-

187

[Ingman], Svenska Folkets Röst, 1771, 14. Nordin 2003, 62. 189 Nordin 2000, 418. 190 Roberts 1986, 196–197; Nordin 2000, 402–403, 407, 414, 421, 426–427; cf. Lagerroth 1915, 671–674. 188

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ited rights against all outsiders and only attempted to widen them. Only those who already belonged to one of the estates could apply for new privileges.191 In 1769 the concepts of the nation and the people had been used for party-political ends by some noblemen and a solitary Hat leader in the Burgher Estate. They had articulated fairly conventional notions that political power originated in the people. In 1771, however, these ideas were being used by quite different groups and for different purposes. At a time when the position of the Nobles was being questioned by suggestions that privileges should be extended to the lower orders, it was mainly the Burghers and the Clergy who used this language, and they did so increasingly as the conflict on privileges grew more heated. The Secret Committee was in charge of preparing the proposal for the Accession Charter. The composition of the Committee was unusual in that members of the Peasant Estate were also invited to join the planning sessions. The extended Committee of fifty noblemen, 25 clergymen, 25 burghers and the delegates of the Peasant Estate thus constituted a unique forum in mid-eighteenth-century Europe: in 1771 and 1772 members of all four estates of the realm met and debated constitutional questions in Sweden. When the question of the Accession Charter was first taken up in the Secret Committee, Anders Ekman (a Cap burgher) suggested an amendment according to which the King would state that he received his post not only from God but “from the hand of the Highest and the hand of the people or nation ( folckets eller nationens)”.192 The people were thus represented as an equal bestower of political power side by side with God, in a law that formed part of the constitution. Ekman also emphasized that the hereditary position of the King was derived from the free election of the Estates. The proposal was supported by [Caspar] Wikman, a member of the Clergy, which suggests that it was in agreement with prevalent notions about the character of the monarchy and with Lutheran political ideas.193 It was also in accordance with the medieval tradition of elective monarchy. The reason for the emphasis on the concept of the people by the Burghers and Clergy 191

Roberts 1986, 207–209. R 3570 Secreta Utskottets Beredrings Protocoller och Handlingar Rörande Svea Konunga Försäkran (SUBP), 25 September 1771, 57. 193 R 3570 SUBP, 25 September 1771, 57. 192

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may not only have been a desire to revise the formulation of the Charter but also to advertise the approach which those groups had adopted in the controversy on privileges. At about this time, the Cap majorities of the two estates were forming an alliance over the privilege question. Some members of the Committee referred to the people mainly in speeches defending free elections, which they felt had been disrupted by the interventions of the executive power. They wished to see the right to free elections written down in the Accession Charter. Israel Melin (a Cap clergyman) criticized all government influence on elections as something that violated the very essence of the freedom of the people.194 The press had also written about the manipulation of the elections, higher civil servants and the Senate being accused of having “encroached upon the rights of the people” and attempting to silence “the voice of the nation”. As a consequence, it had become difficult for the nation “to see itself represented (presenterad, sic) by those who had not been chosen by it but by the authorities”.195 In another pamphlet, a quotation from the proceedings of the Secret Committee during the previous Riksdag was used to complain about how the nation “does not see itself represented by those it has itself chosen”. Here a clear contrast was made between the Hat Senate and the nation.196 This also provides us with an instance of the combination of ‘the nation’ and ‘representation’, an association of terms that the Estates themselves eschewed. The author lamented the fact that the people was prevented from choosing its representatives for the Diet freely. He saw it as a particular problem that “the common people [Små-Folket]” did not really know their rights.197 On 30 September, the Burgher Estate became active in the Secret Committee, bringing the dispute over privileges to the fore. Johan Lorentz Munthe (Cap) argued that the people had a right to demand a newly drafted Accession Charter that contained a promise to rule according to the constitution, which should never be changed.198 The old rights of the people should be reinforced in a manner that would

194

R 3570 SUBP, 25 September 1771, 68. [Anon.], Tankar Om De Ämbetsmän, som wid förflutne Riksdagsmans-Wal, gjordt inbrott i Folkens Rätt och Wal-Frihet (Stockholm 1771), no page numbers. 196 [Pileus Invariatus], Folkets Rätt, At Obehindrat Wälja Riksdagsmän, Såsom En wäsentelig del af Nationens Frihet (Stockholm 1771), 6–7. 197 Folkets Rätt 1771, 3, 5. 198 R 3570 SUBP, 30 September 1771, 88. 195

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make the political role of the people indisputable. Samuel Corin stated: “Properly speaking, the Accession Charter should contain the high commitments of the King to the people”.199 The popular basis of the royal prerogative was being emphasized by the Burghers, not by the Nobility as in 1769. Such views were not unanimously held in the Committee. According to Johan Christoffer Hasencampf, a reference to “the commitments of the King to the people” would become a new element in the constitution. He doubted whether the Charter could be viewed as “a contract between the King and the people”, since such a contract should be drawn up by the two sides in cooperation. This would go too far as the Swedish people was already an exception among peoples with elective monarchies in that the King agreed to the existence of an Accession Charter.200 There were other opponents among the Nobility, including Chamberlain Fredric Ulric von Essen (Cap). Von Essen, who had entered into an agreement with the King about retaining the constitution and sympathized with the claims of the lower estates, could not accept the view that the Charter was a kind of contract between the King and the people.201 Carl Johan Ridderstolpe, a leading Cap, defended the status of the Accession Charter as a fundamental law. In his view, it constituted a joint act in which the nation and the people participated together with the monarch: [. . .] on the part of the King it would be the highest act ensuring the safety of the nation: and it comprises a fundamental [byggeligt] promise [. . .] about the freedom and security of the people.202

This was a moderate way of saying that political power was originally derived from the people, something that a considerable proportion of the political elite could accept. However, the focus of the speech was consistently on the necessity of securing the existing privileges. Another debate in the Committee is noteworthy for its comparisons between the Swedish and other past and contemporary republican regimes. The parallels reveal that the real point of dispute was not so much between the King and the people but between the Nobility and 199

R 3570 SUBP, 30 September 1771, 90. R 3570 SUBP, 30 September 1771, 92–93; On the controversial background of the contract theory, see Roberts 1986, 64–65. 201 R 3570 SUBP, 30 September 1771, 95. 202 R 3570 SUBP, 30 September 1771, 95–97. 200

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the other estates, the latter wishing to cut down the favoured status of the Nobility by extending their own privileges. The Burghers and some Clerics were active in the campaign, but the Peasants held their peace. Even some Cap noblemen expressed their sympathies for the demands of the lower estates. Clas Frietzcky (Cap) considered it necessary for the Nobility to make concessions in the conflict, his concern for strengthening the royal power overshadowing his worries about noble privileges.203 Frietzcky was convinced that a real spirit of liberty and love of the constitution could only be achieved “when a free, equally empowered people see themselves as equally entitled” to the benefits of society.204 Among the Burghers, Olof Raméen pointed to the Nobility’s monopoly on office, which the lower estates wished to abolish. Raméen used references to the people here, insinuating that the nobles were not actually part of the nation or the people. It must have sounded highly provocative in the ears of the noble members to hear Raméen maintain that there was “great alarm in the nation” over the question of privileges and that it was absolutely essential that the people be “satisfied in this issue to some degree”.205 The wishes of the nation and the people were presented as being distinctly contrary to the noble privileges. This was essentially a restricted definition of a central political concept used in an attempt to gain an advantage in the dispute over privileges. The Nobility, who had traditionally constituted the most eminent section of the people, was being effectively excluded from that people. As Jonas Nordin has pointed out, this exclusion of the Nobility was a conscious tactic adopted by the lower estates.206 The views of the lower clergy were summarized by Israel Melin. The problem was that while the relationship between the people and the King was in order, the relationships between the different estates were not: “The Swedish people would be secured in its freedom in relation to the throne”. On the other hand, there was not as yet any guarantee regarding “the balance which should exist between the estates”.207 This was a further contribution to the process of the radicalization of the concept of the people in the privilege controversy. To leave no doubt

203 204 205 206 207

Nordin 2003, 63. R 3570 SUBP, 1 October 1771, 126. R 3570 SUBP, 1 October 1771, 128. Nordin 2000, 407. R 3570 SUBP, 1 October 1771, 129.

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as to the seriousness of the confrontation, Melin compared contemporary Sweden with the Roman Republic, suggesting that similar rights to offices and equality in decision-making between the Estates were necessary to achieve a balanced constitution: [. . .] the Roman patricians enjoyed the respect of the people as long as they did not usurp the rights of the people. When the plebeians could take the highest offices, and when decisions made by their comitia tributa became as valid as decisions in their comitia centuriata, the Roman freedom and the right of the people was settled for the first time.208

This simultaneous reference to the two classical senses of the concept of the people, the common people on the one hand and the people as the political community on the other, tended once again to exclude the Nobility from a people that was interpreted as consisting of the three lower estates only. With a further related parallel drawn between Sweden and republican Florence, Melin warned the Nobles about the consequences of their unwillingness to proceed in the privilege question: The nobility in Florence attacked the common people [menigheten], but thereby decreased their power, their own security and their prestige and never regained the trust of the public.209

Although Melin was talking on a rather general level, he was advocating the equal distribution of privileges amongst the existing Estates, not a political reform entailing a wider representation of the people in the Diet. The Nobility had previously used the concept of the people both in its disputes with the King and in its internal party strife. The radicalization of the arguments of the lower estates in the course of autumn 1771 changed their argumentation considerably, not only in the joint committees but also in the plenary sessions of the estate. The Cap leader Ridderstolpe, who had previously been ready to make concessions to the lower estates for tactical reasons, reacted by rejecting all comparisons between the Roman and Polish Republics and “our free community”. The only things that really connected Rome and Sweden in the circumstances of 1771 were the party strife and the impossible demands of the plebeians. In Rome, these had led to the fall of the

208 209

R 3570 SUBP, 1 October 1771, 130. R 3570 SUBP, 1 October 1771, 130.

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Republic, and the implication was that the same might happen in Sweden.210 Fredric Horn, an old opponent of democratic schemes, also opposed the goals of the lower estates as threatening the status of the Nobility. According to him, Roman history proved that “once tribuni plebis ruled like tyrants they also received the fate of tyrants”.211 No wonder Horn would soon ally himself with the King. Comparisons between the Roman division into patricians and plebeians on the one hand and the Swedish Nobility and the commoner estates (odalstånden, as they were called at that time) on the other were frequent in the public debate as well. The Nobility might be regarded as representing aristocracy and the commoners democracy in this context. One argument was that a balance between these without a strong monarchy as a mediator had caused the fall of the republican form of government in Rome and might destroy liberty in Sweden as well.212 For the Nobility, it seemed difficult to accept the idea of a necessary balance between aristocracy and democracy. As Captain Pfeif put it, the Accession Charter was first about the King’s “commitment to the realm and then about the rights of the nation”,213 it was not about privileges. Once the discussions in the Secret Committee seemed to be challenging the privileges of their Estate, individual noblemen ceased to champion the rights of the people as visibly as before. The negative reaction on the part of the Nobility induced some members of the lower estates to imply that it was not total equality they were aiming at. This indicates that the concept of the people had not been used to extend democracy in a classical sense or to underline some active sovereignty of the people in a more modern sense but primarily to achieve equal possibilities for clerics and burghers in the competition for the key posts in the realm. This was an entirely understandable goal in an estate society in which social mobility was curtailed by the different privileges accorded to each estate. Johan Sundblad (Cap) pointed out that it was not a democratic scheme he was advocat-

210

R 3570 SUBP, 1 October 1771, 133. R 3570 SUBP, 1 October 1771, 135. 212 [Anon.], Reflexioner angående Romerska Republiquens olyckelige tilstånd, efter Konunga-Magtens afskaffande (Stockholm 1771), no page numbers. 213 R 3570 SUBP, 1 October 1771, 143. There were three captains called Pfeif attending the Noble Estate in 1771. It has not been possible to identify this particular speaker. 211

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ing. Such an attempt, according to him, had already been condemned by Plato as leading to the despotism of the many.214 The debate in the Secret Committee had been radicalized, but it still concerned privileges rather than the form of government as such. The proposal of the Committee was—in accordance with the wishes of the lower estates—that the King should follow the will of the majority of the Estates and that appointments to offices should only be based on merit and no longer on noble status.215 The concept of democracy had not been used once during the debates of the Committee. References to the nation and the people had, in contrast, appeared quite frequently. As the Burghers had been most active in introducing radical definitions of the rights of the people into the joint debate, it is now worth considering the arguments they used in their plenary sessions. The question of privileges was first addressed in the Burgher Estate on 12 October, when Sundblad made his proposal and linked the question to the decision on the Accession Charter. The proposal focussed one-sidedly on the interests of the Burgher Estate. It was followed by a long debate dealing with a variety of economic problems and purely individual interests which might or might not have had something to do with the formulation of the charter. The conflict with the Noble Estate was hidden behind the traditional rhetoric of consensus. Replying to a delegation from the Noble Estate, the Burghers argued that they wanted to avoid all changes in the constitution and merely “to maintain the balance between the equally empowered estates”.216 Apparently, the redefinition of the estates’ privileges would take place within the framework of the existing constitution. Rather surprisingly, references to the nation and the people played only a marginal role in the debates of the Estate. Not even Arvid Schauw (Hat), the spokesman for the political rights of the people two years previously, had anything to say about it.217 Inside the Estate, the privilege question was not seen as related to the political rights of the people or to the advancement of democracy. When Henrik Albrekt Brandenburg presented his proposal for privileges for the commoner 214 “He did not suffer from any Platonic ideas in favour of achieving equality between all people, or of abolishing all borders between [. . .] estates, between the higher and the lower, which would end in sufferance.” R 3570 SUBP, 1 October 1771, 139; See Nordin 2000, 422. 215 Roberts 1986, 201. 216 R 1410 BrP 1771–1772, 17 October 1771, 2468. 217 Cf. Lagerroth 1915, 672.

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estates, the people were mentioned only once, when the defence of the people was defined as one of the duties of the authorities.218 Only in speeches given to the other estates in the Secret Committee did the Burghers exploit the concept in order to advance the privilege issue. They certainly did not entertain plans to extend the political nation to include all the subjects. While some Clerics supported the Burghers in the Secret Committee, that Estate mostly refrained from talking about the political role of the people in their own sessions. Israel Melin spoke about “the previous security of the Swedish people in relation to the throne”, which should be supplemented with protection for the people from the power of the authorities.219 Uno Brander also spoke briefly about the need to protect the rights of the nation.220 The special privileges of the clergy received considerable attention, but little was said about the political rights of the people. Rather like many of the debates in the press, the Clergy primarily concentrated on the extension of the privileges of their own social or political corporation.221 This was a social debate within and between elite groups, not a radical debate aiming at a political reform, let alone a revolution.222 The Concept of Democracy in the Rhetoric of the Deadlocked Parties The constitutional crisis made the Nobility change their political argumentation. The radicalization of the concept of the people which the Noble members of the Secret Committee had witnessed and the rest of the members of the estate read in the press led to references to the nation and the people playing a much more limited role in Noble debates than during the preceding Diet. Pamphlets were circulated suggesting that it was unacceptable “in a free community to raise aristocratic and almost half-barbaric dividing walls between equally

218 Henrik Albrekt Brandenburg, Swenska Odal-Folkets Rätt, Sammandragen i Project til et Dem gemensamt tilhörigt Privilegium, Wid Riksdagen År 1771 (Stockholm 1771), 389, 398. 219 R 704 PrP 1771–1772, 12 October 1771, 859. 220 R 704 PrP, 12 October 1771, 859. R 704 PrP, 29 January 1772, 1270. 221 Skuncke 1999, 291. 222 Cf. Lagerroth 1915, 637, 652; For a related conclusion, see Roberts 1986, 210.

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empowered estates”.223 The Nobility was the obvious object of this criticism, while the King was readily presented as the defender of “the liberty of the entire nation”.224 In this atmosphere, the Nobility used the word ‘democracy’ in its classical Aristotelian sense in expressing concern for the rising demands of the commoner estates. Democracy was defined once again as a threat to the political order, not a valued element of the constitution and even less a positive future prospect. Baron Lars Kagg, a sympathizer of the Court and opponent of the proposed Charter, opened the debate by emphasizing differences in the language by which various forms of government were described: Monarchies, aristocracies and democracies, so different in their essential characteristics, are all based on laws that differ from each other as much as the words by which the forms of government are described.225

A special strength of the Swedish form of government was, according to Kagg, that it avoided most of the problems which the simple classical forms involved.226 Kagg did not develop this point into a defence of the democratic element within a mixed constitution, however. Nor were references to “the rights of the free people”, so popular among the Nobles at preceding Diets, widely used in this context.227 Councillor Fredric Horn, who had opposed the claims of the commoner estates in the Secret Committee, did not hesitate to argue that a democratic coup was being prepared. In his view, the political power of the Swedish Estates was already more extensive than in any other country with a mixed constitution. The Nobility had traditionally played a prominent role among the Estates, and the calls for privileges by the other estates was leading to dangerous changes in the relative strength of the estates: Now the supreme power seems to be moving to the other three estates, and then we are in danger of becoming a complete democracy, so popular

223 [Anon.], Medborgelighetens [sic] och Enighetens Echo, Wid Genomläsandet af Protocollerne och Projecterade Swea Konunga-Försäkran (Stockholm 1771), no page numbers. 224 [Anon.], Medborgelighetens [sic] och Enighetens Echo, 1771. 225 SRARP, Vol. I, 17 October 1771, 403. 226 SRARP, Vol. I, 17 October 1771, 404. 227 See Carl Magnus Sparrschöld, SRARP, Vol. I, 17 October 1771, 406, 408.

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chapter three [populaire] that nothing like it would exist in any other republic in the entire world.228

Sweden was viewed here as a republic in a broad classical sense, which meant that there was a popular and even democratic element in its constitution but certainly not direct democracy. The danger was that Sweden was about to turn into a real democracy just as foreign diplomats were currently reporting to their courts.229 In Horn’s understanding, demands for social equality and for privileges were leading to the rise of a democratic form of government. In his view, civilized states could not achieve such a “complete equality amongst subjects” as the commoner estates were calling for.230 This concern was shared by many speakers, but few chose to describe the development as the rise of democracy. Peter Tham, a court official with a Cap background, however, did join Horn, stating: “Such adjustments and additions to the constitution will finally lead to democracy”.231 There were also members such as Colonel Clas Cederström who referred to the Accession Charter as a contract between the King and the people. While such a contract could in principle be altered, Cederström could not accept a change that would lead to a decrease in the privileges of the Nobility.232 Most speakers ruled out all changes, either presenting the Charter as a fundamental law which both the monarch and the people should observe233 or questioning the existence of a pact between the King and the people in the first place.234 The basic character of the constitution could thus still be viewed in a variety of ways. Per Lilliehorn, a supporter of stronger royal power, used the concept of the people most extensively, drawing a parallel between

228 SRARP, Vol. I, 17 October 1771, 434–435; cf. the statement of the British Speaker of the House of Lords referring to Sweden as a republic in 1766. 229 See, for example, the reports of the French ambassador on the danger of Sweden becoming “purement démocratique” (2 August 1771) and about “l’amour de la démocratie” being “la maladie épidémique de cette nation” (12 September 1771), cited in Skuncke 2003, 274. Hat Nobles, concerned about what some of them viewed as the rise of democracy threatening other elements of the constitution, had certainly informed their French allies about these developments. Such diplomatic reports do not, of course, provide evidence of positive interpretations of ‘democracy’ among the Swedish political elite. 230 SRARP I, 17 October 1771, 435. 231 SRARP I, 17 October 1771, 440. 232 SRARP I, 17 October 1771, 442–443. 233 Per Lilliehorn, SRARP I, 17 October 1771, 444. 234 Hasenkamf, SRARP, Vol. I, 17 October 1771, 447.

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Sweden and other free nations such as Greece, Rome and Poland.235 He also opposed all changes to the Charter and the privileges of the Estates, which should be maintained in order to guarantee the liberty of the people. The Nobility as a whole decided to inform the other estates about their understanding of the proposal for the Accession Charter as a violation against the constitution and the established privileges of the Estates and hence as impossible for the Riksdag to adopt. In their view, the Charter of 1751 should be kept unchanged.236 Related discussions about the political position of the people within the constitution also appeared in the press. Gjörwell (Hat) published an essay reviewing Montesquieu’s notions of popular government (Folk-Regering, Folk-wälde) and democracy. Applying Montesquieu’s definition of democracy as a republic in which the supreme power belonged to the people to the Swedish context, he argued: A state can be free without being totally democratic. The people can retain their freedom even if they delegate the administration to one or several persons provided that they themselves ratify the laws and see to it that these are properly administered.237

The Swedish people had such a role both in the legislative process and in the control of government. While there were democratic features in a classical sense in the Swedish system, it was certainly not considered to be a democracy either in a classical or in some innovative modern sense. For Gjörwell, democracy was a system in which the people would vote on issues in large meetings and in this way become rulers engaged in the active use of power. This popular form of government had its strengths as shown by the fact that both Athens and Rome had been able to achieve “things worthy of wonder”.238 At the same time, it had caused major problems, as the people were capable 235 “Mr Lilliehorn recalled the history of the Roman people, how they retained their laws for so long until they lost all rights to pass their laws any longer. Aristocrats rose, the greed to rule made them violate laws and continually make new ones until they finally took the mantle of a ruler on their shoulders and their will became the law of the people. New accession oaths in connection with every change of King in Poland has brought that realm to the situation in which we find it today; [. . .] Among the Greeks emerged areopager [judges deciding on life and death] who worked for so long under the guise of defending freedom until the law disappeared along with the freedom of Greece.” SRARP, Vol. I, 23 October 1771, 493. 236 Lagerroth 1915, 657. 237 [Anon.], Politiske Reflexioner 7, 29 October (Stockholm 1771), 5. Gjörwell was the author at least of the first edition of this periodical. 238 [Anon.], Politiske Reflexioner 7, 29 October 1771, 51–52.

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only of choosing and supervising the administration but not of ruling themselves. The reason was that “the people either has too much or too little power”. In democracy and in “popular rule” (Folk-wäldet), it had also been necessary to divide the people into classes before the system could function.239 That is, a division of the people into electors and administrators as well as into estates had been imperative even in classical democracies and mixed constitutions. Furthermore, Gjörwell claimed, democracy or popular government was unlikely to function in Sweden as it called for virtues which were lacking in the Swedes, who paid so much attention to manufactures, trade, finances and luxury. The seventeenth-century English Commonwealth had already demonstrated that complete democracy was impossible. The Cromwellian attempt had proved to be no more than “the fruitless effort of the English people to establish democracy”. Because of a similar lack of virtue, the English had been forced to reintroduce their old, far superior constitution.240 Montesquieu’s political theory, instances from the classical and modern past, and the state of Swedish political debate all suggested to Gjörwell that the prospects for democracy in Sweden were poor. It was a much better option to retain the established constitution. After the Nobility had approached the Burgher Estate to communicate their views on the Accession Charter, the Caps began to increasingly refer to the people in their political argumentation. When the delegation of the Nobility had left the hall, Anders Ekman (Cap) stood up to put forward views which he had already expressed in the Secret Committee, maintaining that “the freedom and security of the nation” was the object of the reformed Charter. More particularly, the right to be chosen for state positions belonged also to “the non-noble part of the nation”, who also constituted “a free and thoughtful people”.241 Johan Henrik Hochschild (Cap) from Stockholm supported Ekman by underlining the power of the Estates to choose any policy as long as it did not jeopardize “the liberty of the nation” or the privileges of individual estates.242 Hochschild adopted a more radical approach, sug239

[Anon.], Politiske Reflexioner 7, 29 October 1771, 53. “The people in their dismay looked for democracy and found it nowhere. Finally, after many commotions, scandals and crises, they had to retain the same form of government which they had rejected.” [Anon.], Politiske Reflexioner 7, 29 October 1771, 55–56. 241 R 1410 BrP, 2 November 1771, 2510–2511, 2513. 242 R 1410 BrP, 2 November 1771, 2519. 240

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gesting that “the mischief of the Knights and Nobility in this matter should be revealed to the nation”;243 in other words, an appeal to public opinion should be made to counter the Nobles’ unwillingness to accord privileges to the commoners. A similar kind of appeal to the people outside the Riksdag is visible in Frans Cervin’s (Cap) advice that the Burghers should take the issue further to prevent “the nation” from becoming frustrated: “If the Estate still postpones its [. . .] answer, we shall have the voice of the nation against us.”244 The pressure from the Nobility thus made the Cap party adopt a more outspoken use of references to the people and the nation within the Burgher Estate. On 6 November, the estate approved a statement according to which the question of the Charter and privileges was highly significant “for the free Swedish people”, the Charter being seen as containing “the most precious property of the Swedish people” and as ensuring “the preservation of the rights and security of the people”. The view of the Cap majority was that the proposed formulation of the Charter would add to the “strength of the form of government, the prestige of the realm and the security of the people”.245 The concept of the people was used here to legitimate calls for widened privileges for the Burgher Estate and thereby also for the other commoner estates. In another reply to the Noble Estate, the Burghers agreed on a formulation emphasizing the law-abiding nature of the people on the one hand and “the trust of the people” as the basis of all administration on the other.246 In November 1771, the Cap majority of the Burgher Estate thus used a positively defined vocabulary referring to the people in a campaign to strengthen the social position of their corporation. The Noble Estate could not arrive at any consensus on how to proceed, although the proposal continued to be viewed as constituting a serious violation of the established order. Concern was expressed over the inability of the Estates to agree on the Charter becoming a threat to the people as a whole.247 Fredric Horn suggested that the ongoing dispute among the people on the proper interpretation of the

243

R 1410 BrP, 2 November 1771, 2529. R 1410 BrP, 2 November 1771, 2529. 245 R 1410 BrP, 6 November 1771, 2543, 2546–2547; cf. an extract of the proceedings of the Clerical Estate referring to “the unconditional right of the free and independent Swedish people” and that of those empowered by the people ( folkets fullmäktige). Cited in Lagerroth 1915, 658. 246 R 1410 BrP, 27 November 1771, 2706, 2719. 247 de Fritzkij, SRARP, Vol. I, 20 November 1771, 608, 610. 244

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constitution might affect the way in which the nation viewed the Nobility,248 the minority status of the Estate within the national community being thus recognized. Both the people and the monarch were viewed positively, the former appearing as free and law-abiding,249 the latter as gracious and loving towards his people.250 Captain Fredrik Vilhelm Leijonancker, who in 1769 had prayed to God to protect Sweden from democracy, emphasized the high degree of loyalty which the Swedish people exhibited for their King.251 Voices emerged suggesting that a royal intervention in favour of the Nobility might be needed to resolve the crisis.252 Horn, one of the most dedicated supporters of King Gustavus, repeated his point that the passage of the suggested privileges with a majority of the three lower estates would lead not only to the nobles losing their status but also to the rise of a democratic tyranny. In his view, “a popular government” could “never be based on equality” without soon degenerating into a tyranny.253 It was unrealistic to achieve equality, and any attempts to move in that direction would not only bring democracy but also endanger the existence of any kind of government. Though highly critical of equality and democracy, Horn did continue to recognize the popular basis of the Swedish government provided that the system was regulated by a strong nobility. His choice was easy when the time of the royal coup came in August 1772, and he took an active part in it. The Political Role of the People in the Accession Charter and the Nomination of Senators The stalemate of November 1771 was followed by three months of silence over the privilege issue in the plenary sessions of the Estates. The commoner estates chose to abandon a debate which they found fruitless and decided to prosecute the issue further on the basis of their majority regardless of the Nobles’ opposition. A royal intervention also followed, the King warning the Estates that he would personally

248 Fredric Horn, SRARP, Vol. I, 20 November 1771, 614, 30 November 1771, 680–681. 249 Uggla, SRARP, Vol. I, 30 November 1771, 665. 250 Liljehorn, SRARP, Vol. I, 30 November 1771, 670. 251 SRARP, Vol. I, 30 November 1771, 676. 252 Fredric Horn, SRARP, Vol. I, 30 November 1771, 680–681. 253 SRARP, Vol. I, 30 November 1771, 660.

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take royal measures in case no solution was found by the Estates, but there was no consequent breakthrough in the deadlock.254 At the same time, the demands of the commoner estates were almost daily debated in the press by both Cap and Court organs.255 It was evident that the Nobility was about to lose its monopoly of the civil service, but the estate contained to campaign against such a prospect. Some two hundred noblemen, mostly officers and young Hats, formed an organization to defend noble privileges and later on to support a restitution of the monarchy. In the meantime, the more moderate noblemen of both parties became concerned about the future of their precious constitution and viewed a compromise with the lower orders as the only way to save it.256 Once the debates on privileges were resumed in February 1772, the Noble Estate was even more divided than in the previous autumn. The increasingly critical nature of the confrontation was reflected in the use of references to the people. Now that the special status of the Estate was at stake, many noblemen regarded a return to traditional monarchy as the only way to defend their cause.257 Many members of the Clergy and Peasantry readily adopted traditional ways of speaking about the people, which questions suggestions that the commoner estates were unanimous and demonstrates the persuasive force of the traditional language of politics.258 Not even the Burgher Estate put forward the kind of challenging proposals that had been heard in the previous November. The radicalization of the public debate and the threat of a further royal intervention had obviously caused a traditionalist reaction amongst the members of all estates. The debates of the Secret Committee demonstrate this reactionary tendency in the language of politics most forcibly. Rather than emphasizing the liberties of the people, the Noble members adopted an approach that was based on the traditional idea of teaching obedient subjects in an organically understood society. The obvious goal was to persuade the commoner estates to readopt traditional ways of thinking and speaking and renounce their attack on the established order.

254

Lagerroth 1915, 662–665; Roberts 1986, 201–202. Skuncke 1999, 286; Skuncke 2003, 418. 256 Roberts 1986, 202. 257 Nordin 2003, 63. 258 Cf. Lagerroth’s interpretation of the lower estates as the true representatives of the people in Lagerroth 1915, 665. 255

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Illustrative of this approach is Per Lilliehorn’s argumentation, which maintained that the Nobles, too, “must have the voice of the people on their side when they, holding a law book in their hands, are defending their rights”.259 Here a nobleman who was sympathetic towards a stronger monarchy resorted to religious arguments in a speech that resembled an open prayer in order to touch the feelings of his audience: May Providence, which decides on the fates of peoples and countries, allow the spirit of unity to prevail amongst us so that this blessing would stay with us and those misfortunes be avoided which threaten a divided people!260

Fersen, one of the most prominent noblemen of the realm, also spoke about the need to save the fatherland by calming the confrontations with divine assistance.261 Even Carl Johan Ridderstolpe, who had defended the political role of the people only half a year previously, spoke like a Lutheran bishop. According to him, “the voice of the people” should been heard, but it was even more important to follow “the voice of God and conscience”. According to him, no power could prevent him “from thinking according to the law of God and nature, according to reason and conscience”. The highest goal was to save the fatherland by bringing the dispute over privileges to an end.262 It is noteworthy that Ridderstolpe now distinguished between the voice of the people and that of God in campaigning for the preservation of at least some of the special status of his estate. In these circumstances, the rhetoric of language referring to the people in the spirit of Noble republicanism had become obsolete. All these noblemen hoped that the Clergy and the Peasantry and hopefully the more traditionally oriented Burghers would be silenced with this Lutheran language of loyalty. And the reactions of the lower estates show that it was indeed highly effective among these sections of the Swedish political elite. After a large number of the Noble had readopted this kind of biblical view of the people, it would be easy for Gustavus III and his clerical propagandists to develop these reaction-

259

R 3570 SUBP, 11 February 1772, 206. R 3570 SUBP, 11 February 1772, 206. 261 R 3570 SUBP, 11 February 1772, 215. 262 R 3570 SUBP, 11 February 1772, 211; There do not seem to have been claims that the voice of the people was that of God, which was quite popular in Britain about this time. 260

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ary concepts further in the aftermath of the royal coup some six months later.263 The real masters of the language of obedience were to be found among the Lutheran bishops. While Jakob Serenius, a leading Cap politician, had emphasized the political role of the people in his Riksdag sermon in 1765, by 1772 he was referring to the common Lutheran values of the political community in order to defend the constitution against political and social innovations. Serenius warned his fellow politicians of the danger of the Swedes being separated from God by their animosities and losing their happy constitution as a consequence.264 Independently of their party sympathies, the leading clerics were opening a way for a traditionalist reaction that would bring the constitution of the Age of Liberty to an end. The message was readily received at least among the members of the Peasant Estate, supporters of both the Lutheran Church and traditional monarchy. The speech of Nils Svensson is an apt demonstration of their reactions. He did his best to convince the higher orders that the calls for privileges for the Peasant Estate were in no way meant to challenge the established order. He did refer to the rights of the people in general and the common people in particular, but he called for the maintenance of the established order and denied all accusations of the Peasantry being responsible for the crisis. He represented himself as a loyal spokesman of the simple people. At the same time, however, he made use of the only weapon that his estate had at its disposal: the threat that if the traditional rights of the people were not observed, there might emerge rising discontent, particularly at a time when a famine was raging in the realm and little had been done by the Riksdag to relieve it.265 His speech shows how the political ideology of the Peasant Estate continued to be based on the ancient principle of justice. It emphasized the observation of the mutual obligations of the Crown and the subjects. Evidently, this principle was defended more vigorously by the members of the Peasant Estate at the Riksdag in the

263

See Ihalainen 2005, 170–173. R 3570 SUBP, 11 February 1772, 213–214; Ihalainen 2003, 81. 265 “[. . .] well, the whole nation has to be shown that we have no share in this. [. . .] The guilt does not lie with us. I pray for God’s and the people’s sake that we think about the simple country people who support those empowered by them so that they might defend their rights. [When there is] a famine in a country, it is advisable to pay attention to the rights of the people according to the law.” R 3570 SUBP, 11 February 1772, 220. 264

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radical years of the late “Age of Liberty”.266 In order to gain entry to the political discourse of the higher orders and to have their points taken seriously, the members of the Peasant Estate not only repeated references to the divine order and the law but also used some words and phrases referring to the people and the nation. Unsurprisingly, Svensson’s speech was ignored by the higher estates. Despite all the rhetoric about equally empowered estates, the Peasants were not yet considered full members of the Swedish political community. Indeed, not even the Peasants themselves actively demanded inclusion. In their own plenary debates, they mainly continued to speak about “the old freedom of the common people”, emphasizing the judicial rights of their estate rather than political rights.267 When the other commoner estates campaigned for extended privileges by the means of words, the Peasants remained uninvolved. The interests of the individual members focused rather on various specific questions addressed in petitions from different parts of the realm.268 The Noble Estate also discussed privileges in February 1772. Opinions were divided: young officers were ready to fight for their privileges, but many nobles wanted to see a compromise. Classical parallels with the political position of the people that were drawn during the debates reveal some interesting features of the nobles’ understanding of the constitutional crisis. Captain Fredrik Otto Billberg started the discussion by drawing a parallel between social confrontations in the Roman Republic and in contemporary Sweden: Roman history teaches us that the first division there concerned the distribution of the lands of the Republic. Thereafter arose a dispute between patricians and plebeians, the nobility and the people, over influence on the affairs of the government. This led to the formation of triumvirates and finally to the fall of the Republic. Our situation is not that much different from the latter case.269

This description embodied a recognition of the existence of deep divisions between the Swedish Nobility and the people. The Nobility could even be understood as an antithesis of the people, just as some

266

Claréus 2003, 407–408. Bondeståndets riksdagsprotokoll (BdP), Vol. 12, 1771–1772 (Stockholm 1978), 4 September 1771, 593, 603. 268 BdP, 4 September 1771, 112–113; 12 October 1771, 156; 26 October 1771, 169; 30 October 1771, 173. 269 SRARP, Vol. II, 22 February 1772, 176. 267

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Burgher politicians had been suggesting. The redefinition of the concept of the people to exclude the Nobility thus seems to have been recognized by noblemen who were ready to make concessions to the lower orders in order to avoid an escalation of the crisis and the potential fall of the entire political order. Another warning example could be found in the democracy of Athens. In Lilliehorn’s description, the current political disputes made Sweden comparable with the most famous instance of democracy history could provide. The parallel also suggested a speedy fall of the Swedish system if the noble privileges were not protected: “Athens fell only when certain bold men among the people were compelled to renounce their rights as citizens in order to save themselves.”270 Lilliehorn’s obvious point was that the Nobility should continue to oppose changes in the mutual power relations of the estates; he presented the nobles as defenders of both their due rights and the form of government in general. He was using a rhetoric based on the ideal of a republic ruled by the nobles, in which they continued to be seen as the core of the people. It was easy for Court Chancellor Sven Bunge (Hat) to support such an interpretation of the liberties of the Nobility and the nation as inseparable.271 Lilliehorn returned to his definition of the Nobility as the core of the people in another speech, arguing that changes in the Charter were unthinkable as the document constituted “a golden band linking the rights of the King and the people”. The rights of the Nobility and the people appeared identical to such an extent that he spoke about “our and the people’s rights” and considered it unthinkable that he for instance should have gained his position “at the cost of the people”.272 There was also a group of prominent noblemen in both parties— such as Fersen, Ridderstolpe, Pechlin, Essen and Jennings—who were looking for a compromise among the Estates.273 While the first two had used Lutheran rhetoric in the Secret Committee, they looked for a compromise in the conventional rhetoric of the rights of the people when speaking to their peers. Alex von Fersen (Hat) represented the Accession Charter as an “act of state preserving the law and the

270 271 272 273

SRARP, Vol. II, 22 February 1772, 198. SRARP, Vol. II, 22 February 1772, 200. SRARP, Vol. II, 24 February 1772, 270–271, 281. Lagerroth 1915, 670.

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people’s liberties and rights based on it”.274 Carl Johan Ridderstolpe (Cap) likewise spoke about the need to uphold “the advantage of the people” by passing the Charter.275 Carl Fredrik Pechlin (Cap), as a known opponent of the royal prerogative, a radical politician and hence a major distributor of Russian bribes within his party, was more outspoken in his call for concessions over the nobles’ privileges so that the people would be united and their liberty secured in the face of the risk of royal power being restored.276 Most speakers rejected such suggestions. Gustav Adolf Leijonmarck (Hat) regarded it as essential to maintain the noble privileges. Any compromise would “terminate our form of government, and we would have neither aristocracy nor democracy nor any kind of law”.277 Leijonmarck did not recognize aristocracy and democracy as natural and balancing elements in the Swedish constitution, instead, he described the prospective anarchy that awaited the country. ‘Aristocracy’ was the term that had been used to attack noble opponents for their attempts to monopolize power; now the lower estates were accused of trying to introduce ‘democracy’. Leijonmarck, as a supporter of a stronger monarchy, rejected both alternatives. Despite comparisons with other mixed monarchies, it seems to have remained difficult for many noblemen to recognize the simultaneous existence of the three elements within the Swedish constitution. Warnings about the advent of democracy as a consequence of the proposed Charter were repeated. Gustaf Mauritz Posse maintained that the Charter should refer to the need of all the four estates to decide together about privileges. The suggestion that three estates could outvote the fourth meant nothing less than the victory of democracy of the most undesirable kind. Revealingly, he considered it necessary to retain the principle of unanimous decisions among the Estates as being “such an invaluable and wonderful defence of liberty against democratic power”.278 This young nobleman continued to view ‘liberty’—the most highly esteemed concept of the Sweden of his day— and ‘democracy’ as symmetrical opposites. The Swedish Nobility wanted no democracy in any classical or modern sense and indeed saw

274 275 276 277 278

SRARP, Vol. II, 22 February 1772, 180. SRARP, Vol. II, 22 February 1772, 190. SRARP, Vol. II, 22 February 1772, 187. SRARP, Vol. II, 22 February 1772, 207. SRARP, Vol. II, 24 February 1772, 268.

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themselves as defenders of liberty against democracy. The other estates did not seriously discuss the possibility of strengthening democracy at all. A further interesting feature, which we have already encountered in the Nobles’ debates of 1769 but in a more positive sense, is the influence of rising publicity on the concepts of the people and nation. By February 1772, some noblemen pointed out that an vague wider nation existed outside the House of the Nobility and the Riksdag and followed the actions of the various estates. Lilliehorn described “how the whole of the nation” and “the whole of the Swedish people” was reading reports of Riksdag debates.279 Even the Nobility might appeal to the nation for support in their conflict with the commoner estates. Some believed that “an enlightened nation” would understand that the Nobles had justice on their side.280 At the same time, there was awareness of the press being used to rouse the people against the Nobility. Billberg advised his peers to take measures that would restore the respected image of the Nobility among the people.281 He recognized the potential of the people as a reading public, did not deny that there existed a division between the Nobility and the people which had been propagated by the lower orders, and probably supported concessions on the privilege question. By February 1772, the majority of the House of the Nobility was ready to open the higher civil service posts to non-noble subjects, hoping that this would constitute a sufficient compromise.282 However, the crisis, during which the concept of the people had become contested to an unprecedented extent, was not yet over. A further heated debate was opened when the actions of the Senate began to be discussed in April 1772. The Cap opposition focused mainly on nominations to offices, the control of the freedom of the press and attempts to influence the elections for the Riksdag.283 The widespread criticism resulted in the dismissal of altogether seven Hat senators by a majority decision of the three Cap-dominated commoner estates.284 During the debate, even the Cap majorities of the Clerical and Peasant Estates, which had

279 280 281 282 283 284

SRARP, Vol. II, 24 February 1772, 282. Carl Jacob von Quanten, SRARP, Vol. II, 22 February 1772, 182. SRARP, Vol. II, 24 February 1772, 294. Roberts 1986, 203; Skuncke 2003, 281. Lagerroth 1915, 676. Roberts 1986, 203.

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previously been very cautious in their use of references to the people and the nation, became activated. The concept of the people was thus now being used by all the estates to legitimate their political demands. The Clergy focused on questions of censorship. In this context, Carl Kröger, a talented speaker, who liked to engage in disputation, argued with uncommon explicitness that “the voice of the nation corresponded word for word with that of the deputies of the nation [Nations röst likde Nations Deputerade lika som orden i munnen]” whenever the latter acted “on behalf of the nation”.285 This formulation approaches the later concept of national representation to such an extent that Lennart Linnarson has interpreted it as an expression of “the democratic parliamentarism of the Swedish eighteenth century”.286 However, it may be anachronistic to call this way of thinking democratic, and we should rather see Kröger’s formulation as a radicalization of previous statements made about the Cap majority presenting the voice of the nation which had gone unheard by the Hat Senate. Kröger added references to “the rights of the people” and to “the rights of the citizen” in criticizing the bribery which the Senate had employed to influence election results. Government influence had endangered the liberty of the nation to elect their delegates to the Riksdag. Kröger’s complaints against the Hat Senate were fierce in the context of Riksdag debates, though moderate in comparison with the public debate of the day: [. . .] with such measures, the Senate of the Realm has shown that it does not act as plenipotentiaries of the Estates or the people, and the confidence of the Realm in the Senate should no longer be continued, [. . .] such omissions of civic duties [medborgerligheten] have shocked the nation, and it is absolutely necessary for the plenipotentiaries of the people at the Riksdag to interpret this matter in a way that will earn them the affection [. . .] which the nation feels for them.287

Kröger was drawing strong associations between the Estates and the people and clearly presented the members of the Riksdag as plenipotentiaries of the people. His criticism of the Senate was based on the belief that the current administration did not serve the interests of the

285 286 287

R 705 PrP, 11 April 1772, 1733. Linnarsson 1943, 339; cf. Lagerroth 1915. R 705 PrP, 11 April 1772, 1734.

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nation and that the nation had the power to change the administration through their plenipotentiaries. Kröger’s statement was unusual in the corpus studied here. The fact that it was made in an assembly of Lutheran clergymen, and that it did not give rise to counter-arguments denying the principle of representation does suggest that these notions were held quite generally among the Swedish political elite. By April 1772, the concept of the confidence of the people could thus be used by an opposition clergyman in a call for a change of government. However, the Clerical defenders of the Senate considered it necessary to reject Kröger’s interpretation of the opinions of the nation. According to Peter Wetterberg, “the whole Swedish nation” continued to be “satisfied with their patriotic and zealous [. . .] government”.288 In his defence of the Hat ministry, he turned to traditional calls for “mutual civic [medborgerlig] and Christian love and trust” and emphasized the obedience which the Swedish nation should show under such a happy government.289 The statement only made the opposition Caps repeat their accusations, Dean Olof Lindbom questioning “the confidence of the nation” towards a Senate which had “treated the rights of the nation and the people [Nations och Folkets rätt] with such indifference”.290 For Lindbom, too, the members of the Riksdag were “plenipotentiaries of the people” defending the security and welfare of the nation.291 This was a unique debate in the Clerical Estate and shows the degree to which language referring to the people had been adopted by both parties even among the conservatively inclined clergymen. The previously passive Peasant Estate also referred to the people in their debates in April 1772. The old peasant custom of speaking about the rights of the common people thus seems to have been supplemented by the radicalized political vocabularies of the higher orders. Once some members of the Clergy had started to make radical claims by using the concept of the people, it was only a question of time before the members of the Peasant Estate did so as well. The fact that party affiliations crossed estate borders and that printed polemical political writings were available to all certainly played a role in the dissemination of the political use of this and related concepts. A further explanation is that members of the Peasant Estate were for the 288 289 290 291

R 705 PrP, 11 April 1772, 1744. R 705 PrP, 11 April 1772, 1745. R 705 PrP, 11 April 1772, 1754. R 705 PrP, 11 April 1772, 1755, 1759.

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first time allowed to take part in the meetings of the Secret Committee and were thus better informed about the current state of debate among the higher orders.292 Hence Gabriel Månsson would wonder “with how little tenderness for the people and respect for the law the important offices of the Senate have been administrated between the Riksdags”.293 Gabriel Heikkilä reminded his fellow peasants that “the rights of the realm and the people together with the form of government” constituted the law of the realm. This meant that any transgression of the law was a violation of “the rights of the people” as well.294 Heikkilä, a bilingual blacksmith from Vehmaa and supporter of the Caps, was the only peasant from Finland to contribute to the discussion on the political role of the people in the period studied here. The statement of this respected spokesman for Finnish interests and the Finnish language295 demonstrates the degree to which the plenipotentiaries of the common people in the eastern, more peripheral, provinces of the Swedish realm had also adopted the old Scandinavian notion of the rights of the people as the foundation of all government. It also supports Charlotta Wolff ’s interpretation that the concept of rights had indeed been extended to include all the inhabitants of the realm.296 We can add two further instances of peasants who used references to the people, this time speaking for the western provinces of Sweden. According to Eric Mårtensson, the Senate could no longer enjoy the confidence of the Estates once it had acted “against the law and the liberties and rights of the people prescribed there”.297 Lars Svensson stated that the duty of the Senate was to “look after the rights of the people”.298 All of these instances show that by April 1772 the members of the Peasant Estate had adopted a vocabulary referring to the people that carried meanings of political significance. Political connections at the Diet supported this strengthening and radicalization of old ways of speaking, and the acute famine in the country provided a context in which the Peasantry articulated their grievances more outspokenly than before.

292 293 294 295 296 297 298

Roberts 1986, 203. BdP, 11 April 1772, 314. BdP, 11 April 1772, 315. Paloposki 1961, 265, 316, 318, 378, 433. Wolff 2007b, 58. BdP, 11 April 1772, 317. BpP, 11 April 1772, 317.

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For the Noble opposition, talking about the welfare and rights of the people as the basis of government was nothing new. The supporters of the Senate had also learned to make use of appeals to patriotism to gather support for the senators of their party. The latter group, given the continuous majority of the Hats in the Estate, was more numerous in April 1772. Major-General Christer Horn argued that the nation, which he described with attributes such as “free”, “regulated by law”, “informed” and “king-loving”, would never accept the dismissal of the current Senate for what it had done. According to him, “the appeal of the calm people” had been abused by the opposition with its demands that people who were not entitled to participate in decision-making would determine the policies to be followed.299 Carl Sparre, one of the Hat leaders, recognized the right of the nation to be informed about how the affairs of the realm were being handled but rejected the criticisms of the Senate as unfounded.300 Two candidates for the new Senate, Court Chancellor Sven Bunge and Carl Eric Wadenstierna, argued that the previous Senate had earned “the gratitude and acknowledgements of the entire nation”.301 The Cap opposition, in contrast, was cautious in its appeals to the nation. Carl Johan Ridderstolpe merely pointed out: “The people can demand more from those men in whose hands they have placed their highest trust.” The dismissal of all the senators would, however, only increase “bitterness in the nation”.302 Excessive confrontations were to be avoided. Even a party-man like Fredrik Gyllensvahn called for “unity in the nation” at a time when the Nobility was being attacked. He mitigated his call for the dismissal of some senators by suggesting conventionally that “an appeased nation” should through the Estates give pensions to those who had to go.303 Horn and Ridderstolpe would continue to be the most prominent speakers in the House of the Nobility. While Horn conceded that “the liberty of the people” was to be exercised through elections to the Riksdag, he considered it necessary for civil servants to control how the voice of the people was registered because of the tendency of the populace to be so easily misled by men who propagated republican and downright anti-monarchical ideas. As an instance, Horn referred to

299 300 301 302 303

SRARP, Vol. II, 15 April 1772, 493–494; 25 April 1772, 544. SRARP, Vol. II, 25 April 1772, 549. SRARP, Vol. II, 25 April 1772, 497, 532. SRARP, Vol. II, 25 April 1772, 513. SRARP, Vol. II, 25 April 1772, 539–540.

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propaganda published after the royal coup of 1756 which had attempted to promote and install “popular government” (populaire regeringssättet; det populaire regimentet; en populair regering).304 It remains unclear whether Horn saw Sweden as such a popular government as he further added: There is no doubt that it is highly dangerous in a popular government for writings to be circulated which lead to insurrections and rebellions in the country.305

He was certainly worried about what he saw as a tendency of popular element of the government to rise concomitantly with the publication of radical ideas, which he had not anticipated when supporting the freedom of the press in 1766. The debates ended on 20 May when Ridderstolpe, among others, was elected a senator with support from the Caps, albeit against his own wishes. The Cap majority of the Clerical Estate underlined the trust which “the nation” felt towards the leader of their party.306 In one of his speeches, Ridderstolpe had himself recently stated: “It is our duty to go where the nation commands us to go.”307 Here he presented the sentiments of the people as the grounds for nomination to the Senate. As Clas Frietzcky, a Cap with republican notions, pointed out, the trust and wishes of both the King and the nation mattered in the nominations.308 Carl Jacob von Quanten even saw here “a new way [. . .] to receive mandates from [the] people, who really possesses them”.309 This is a noteworthy formulation in that it did not stand merely for the original role of the people as a party in the social contract but recognized the active delegation of power by the people to the government. Von Quanten also referred to the novel character of the procedure, something that must have made the Hats ever more concerned about the rise of popular government and readier to move to the side of the King. To be sure, not even von Quanten spoke in favour of democracy; indeed he consistently denounced both autocracy (envälde) and the power of the many (mångvälde) in a country

304 305 306 307 308 309

SRARP, Vol. II, 25 April 1772, 556, 559–560. SRARP, Vol. II, 25 April 1772, 561. SRARP, Vol. III, 20 May 1772, 77. SRARP, Vol. III, 11 May 1772, 31. SRARP, Vol. III, 20 May 1772, 82. SRARP, Vol. III, 20 May 1772, 81.

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with “a free people”.310 Decisions by the majority of the Estates were to be legitimated with reference to a mandate derived from the people, but the system remained essentially the rule of the Estates, not of the people at large. Even such a formulation was too much for the King and his noble supporters; and they would soon take the matter into their own hands. The Concept of the People at the Time of the Coronation and the Royal Coup of 1772 The last occasion for the expression of ideas on the political role of the people in the Age of Liberty was provided by the approaching coronation of Gustavus III, for which a ceremony needed to be planned. In discussing the rituals and words to be used in the ceremony, the four estates came to comment on the political role of the people, each in its own particular way. These comments show that not only party affiliations but also identification with a particular estate continued to mould understandings of what the people was and how its say should be reflected in government. The Peasants wished to use the occasion to gain privileges for the common people, but they did not choose to employ references to the people to justify their aims. These concepts only came up in those debates when members expressed concern over attempts by the higher estates to increase the responsibilities of the common people in the proposed formulations of oaths. This concern made Gabriel Månsson and Johan Andersson argue that such violations of the rights of the commoners were unacceptable for “people in a free nation”.311 Not even the Burghers defended the privileges of the lower orders with references to the people. Neither were they willing to revise the oaths of 1751; in other words, no major change in the understanding of the political role of the people had taken place among them despite occasional references to the popular basis of government during the privilege disputes. The Burghers rather chose to join the Clergy in opposing a proposal from the Nobility that one of the senators would join the Archbishop in setting the crown on the head of the king.312 Bearing

310 311 312

SRARP, Vol. III, 20 May 1772, 81. BdP, 11 April 1772, 349. R 1410 BrP, 11 May 1772; 20 May 1772, 3928; 1 May 1772, 3961.

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in mind their disputes with the Hat nobility, the Cap majority of the Burgher Estate found it unacceptable that a representative of the Nobility should play such a prominent role in an act of state. The Lutheran religious ceremony was sufficient in their eyes. The position of the Nobility was put by Sven Bunge when he suggested that the change was needed to demonstrate that the Clergy was no longer the first estate. The ceremony as such was unimportant in so far as the King would be recognized by his people.313 Bunge’s view reflects secularization in the definition of the political power of the King among the Nobility as well as a reference to its popular legitimacy as understood by the Nobles. Likewise, argued Bunge, the purpose of the oaths of the Estates was basically to “bind together the rights and responsibilities of the King and the people towards each other”.314 The differences of opinion regarding the coronation reflected the differing concepts of the people that were still held by each estate. While the Nobility was willing to increase the symbolic role of ‘the people’ in the coronation and to augment the secular character of the act so that one of their members would participate in it as a representative of the most important group of that people, the commoner estates rejected this as a mistaken form of symbolism of the rule of the people. Instead, they concentrated on the defence of the privileges of their own estates with arguments that did not make appeal to the popular origin of political power. For them, the old notions of the relative roles of God, the King and the people in the coronation act were sufficient. Many of them would actually welcome a stronger monarch who promised to uphold the privileges of all the estates. They had certainly not been advocates of democracy in any modern sense in the first place. At the time of the disputes over the oaths, there was rising dissatisfaction with the Diet throughout the realm for its inability to find solutions to acute problems. The failure of the Estates to do anything about the famine in particular was leading to the loss of their legitimacy in the eyes of the public. By August, the King and his supporters had resolved to take over. They were able to do so without encountering much opposition; there were only a handful of radical politicians like

313 314

SRARP, Vol. III, 20 May 1772, 93. SRARP, Vol. III, 25 May 1772, 143.

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Carl Fredrik Pechlin who protested against the coup. Much of the population agreed that the rule of the Estates should be replaced by a strong monarchy, and this was done without much difficulty. The lack of opposition strongly suggests that neither the Swedish political elite nor the people at large had been using their references to the people in some pre-revolutionary modern ‘democratic’ sense. Even those French philosophers who had once admired the liberty of the Swedish constitution were sympathetic to the coup and to the francophile Gustavus III,315 which questions the sincerity of their previous admiration for the Swedish constitution. Their flattering statements about the political order of an allied country may have been no more than compliments or an indirect way of criticizing the political order in France. Sweden had not become a ‘democracy’, and it was not admired as such. The success of Gustavus III depended on a number of factors, one of them being his command of rhetoric, by means of which he was able to persuade the Estates to cooperate. When speaking to them in connection with the coup, he delineated a widely approved redefinition of the concepts of the people and the nation. He presented the Swedish (political) nation as divided into two parties resembling two separate “peoples” ( folkslag) who had made “the people” ( folket) and “the populace” (menighet) victims of their never-ending strife. “The people” was “starving”, while “the nation” had seen its plenipotentiaries abusing the people. The solution which the autocratic monarch offered was to rule instead over “one free people” united by the King.316 In his definition, he questioned the legitimacy of the members of the Estates to be true plenipotentiaries of the nation and raised himself into the position of defender of the people—even a representative of the people. This interpretation seems to have been quite widely accepted, at least at the beginning of his reign. The transition to autocratic rule was easy because of the depth of the crisis of the estate system. It was also facilitated by previous appeals to the King both in the press and at the Diet, urging him to unite the divided Swedish people.317 The Lutheran clergy would also do their share in reintroducing a political language that supported a strong monarchy. 315

Roberts 1986, 203–206, 211. SRARP, Vol. III, 21 August 1772, 627, 629, 632; For background, see Alm 2002. 317 Johan Fredric Quist, Tal om Svenska Folkets Glädje och Hopp vid Konung Gustav IIIs Höga Kröning, Den 29 Maji 1772. Underdånigast hållt På Kongl. Trivial-Scholan i Örebro, Hyllnings-dagen (Örebro 1772), 17. 316

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This was the strategy of many leading noblemen as well. Carl Fredrik Scheffer, whom we met when reviewing the strongest arguments in favour of the rise of “popular sovereignty” in the Age of Liberty, had by the autumn of 1772 become a prominent spokesman for the new monarchical order. Speaking before the King and the Academy of Sciences in October 1772, the former tutor of Prince Gustavus had forgotten most of the advice he had given to his pupil some twelve years earlier on the supreme power belonging to the Estates as the plenipotentiaries of the people. Scheffer advised the King to assume power from the Estates, which had become excessively Cap-oriented, anti-aristocratic and popular. After the coup, he helped Gustavus to draft a new constitution. In his speech in October, Scheffer interpreted all classical examples of popular government in highly pejorative terms, describing how the unrestrained rule of the people in Greece had ended in “the most atrocious despotism of the many”. In Rome as well, under what Scheffer called its “Age of Liberty”, the Senate had disdained the people, and the latter had neglected all their duties in relation to the Senate. As a consequence, the people had been divided into two peoples ( folkslag) incapable of achieving unity and happiness.318 With these parallels, which actually stood for the rule of the Estates in the Swedish Age of Liberty, Scheffer and the Swedish elite whom he was addressing rejected the Athenian model of democracy and Roman republicanism and the unfortunate applications of these during the previous constitution of Sweden. By contrast, under Gustavus, the Swedish people was described as capable of achieving “this real and salutary liberty which is indispensable for the happiness of a people”. Indeed, the Swedes would be freer than any nation at any time in history. It followed that the Swedish people under the rule of Gustavus would become more fortunate than the Athenians had ever been under their despotism of the many.319 The King and the noble elite had made certain that Sweden would never become a democracy, which appeared in their rhetoric as the absolute opposite of liberty.

318

Carl Fredric Scheffer, Tal, Om Förbindelsen, Imellan Grund-Lagarnas Art och Folkets Sällhet, Som After Dem Styras Skal; Hållit Uti Kongl. Vetenskaps Academien, Vid Praesidii Afläggande, den 28 October 1772 (Stockholm 1772), 7–9. 319 Scheffer, Tal, 1772, 23–25, 30.

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The Academy of Sciences joined Scheffer’s interpretation by officially declaring the Gustavian regime the source of the highest happiness the people could imagine: Thanks to an improved constitution, a more solid foundation has now been laid for the lasting happiness of the people, honest liberty secured, and the security of each individual restored.320

With these words, not only the form of government but also the political role of the people had been successfully redefined. In reality, of course, both political liberty in the old sense and the estate radicalism of the late Age of Liberty had come to an end.321 The turn had been so dramatic that it has proved difficult for many historians to accept it. The building of Swedish and Finnish democracy was to start (again) only much later in quite different circumstances.

320 321

Scheffer, Tal, 1772, 32. Roberts 1986, 207.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE REEVALUATION OF THE REPRESENTATION OF THE PEOPLE AND DEMOCRACY IN WESTMINSTER, 17721789 The Swedish coup of 1772 did not go unnoticed in the British Parliament. Gustavus III’s seizure of power caused Thomas Townshend, Baron Bayning, to assert that the Swedish King had “cut the throat of Swedish liberty” (XVIII, 831), implying that the same might happen under any free government. Charles Lennox, the Duke of Richmond and Lennox, similarly suggested—with reference to North’s policies threatening the liberty of the people—that Britain, like Sweden, was ripe for “a total loss of liberty” (XVIII, 1378). John Wilkes also took the loss of liberty by the Swedes as a warning example to the British: The kingdom of Sweden, by its constitution one of the freest monarchies in the world, has recently fallen under the galling yoke of despotism by the treachery and perjury of its king (XIX, 1007).

Depending on their conceptions of the state of the British constitution during the American War of Independence and the activities of the parliamentary reform movement—and thus depending on their position as either supporters or opponents of the ministry—the members of parliament would either see the Swedish manner of depriving the monarchy of power in the Age of Liberty as a major mistake, or lament how the Swedes had in 1772 chosen “one instead of many representatives”.1 The Swedish case was thus considered relevant in the British parliamentary discourse on constitutional liberty, though it was mainly used as a warning instance by both sides in their arguments.

1 Sir Nathaniel William Wraxall, XXI, 1272; Richard Brinsley Sheridan, XIX, 1311; Archibald Campbell Fraser, XXIV, 391; Wraxall had visited the Scandinavian countries and became involved in an attempted murder of the Queen of Denmark, sister of George III; Fraser’s reference to Sweden is probably explained by his background as a diplomat who had previously negotiated with the Danes.

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The Speech from the Throne in January 1772 was remarkable in the corpus of ceremonial speaking in the British Parliament. As Chapter Two demonstrated, the Commons had adopted a clearer position as the spokesmen for the people in the late 1760s and in the very beginning of the 1770s. In the aftermath of the Wilkes affair, the ministry had also made some concessions towards a clearer recognition of the political role of the people. In spring 1771, the political roles of the people on the one hand and Parliament on the other had been sharply distinguished by both the Wilkite opposition and the defenders of the privileges of the Commons. It is thus noteworthy that George III, when speaking in January 1772, said nothing about his people; in other words, the ministry deliberatively ignored the concept. The King referred to the welfare of his people only after the Lords had closed their Address with that phrase. The Commons did not mention the people either, while the King answered by referring to his happy people under his government (XVII, 237). In terms of ceremonial speaking, the British political elite had been reunited in its conceptions of the relationship between the King and his people and remained so when facing food riots and American opposition to revenue officers.2 In the November Speech from the Throne, George III referred to his people three times, albeit in an entirely conventional manner (XVII, 517–519). His words were echoed by the two houses. The English discourse on popular government was partly nurtured by French political philosophy, particularly in the early 1770s. Radical Enlightenment conceptions of a sovereign people were creeping into the British language of politics through translations. Rousseau’s works were translated, and they suggested that the people had originally had sovereignty over themselves and had never surrendered all of it to councillors. Democracy, too, could simply be seen as a state “where the people are sovereign”.3 Jean Paul Marat, also originally from Geneva, published his Chains of Slavery in Newcastle and gained recognition despite his radical ideas on popular government. Marat

2

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 246. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Miscellaneous Works of J.J. Rousseau . . . (Edinburgh 1774), Vol. 3, 193, 196. The original title is Letters Written from the Mountains. 3

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rejected claims that democratic government would be more unsettled than monarchic or aristocratic and maintained that factions, seditions and rebellions arose “less from a popular constitution than from its corruption”. Marat argued likewise that popular risings advanced the cause of liberty and that popular government was unlikely to make any people suffer. According to him: “In a well constituted government, the people at large is the real sovereign, to them belongs supreme power.”4 While a Swiss émigré was putting forward such radicalized notions of democracy and the sovereignty of the people, in mainstream Anglophone opposition discourse Lockean language referring to the people and their “right to resume their original liberty” and to establish a new legislature was reviving in this period as a consequence of North’s fiscal policies in the American colonies.5 In the later eighteenth century, a number of thinkers built on increasingly radical interpretations of Lockean ideas about natural rights.6 The classical tradition of scepticism towards democracy had certainly not disappeared. Henry Home, Lord Kames, for instance, argued that democracy was “rash, violent, and fluctuating”, the most turbulent and hence the worst of all governments. A combination of the people and sovereignty would lead to catastrophic consequences, with mob rule: The people, in whom resides the sovereign power, are insolent in prosperity, timid in adversity, cruel in anger, blind and prodigal in affection, and incapable of embracing steadily a prudent measure.7

Kames’ conclusion was that “democracy will never be recommended by any enlightened politician, as a good form of government”.8 The constitutional debate of the Age of Enlightenment did not mean the victory of democracy, but its French, Swiss and Scottish dimensions provided some new interpretations of popular government, democracy and the sovereignty of the people in the English language as well.

4 Jean Paul Marat, Chains of Slavery. A Work Wherein the Clandestine and Villainous Attempts of Princes to Ruin Liberty are Pointed Out . . . (London 1774), 107–109, 197. 5 [Anon.], The London Magazine. Or, Gentleman’s Monthly Intelligencer (London) [1774], 188. The article consists mainly of a long quotation from Locke. 6 Dickinson 1995, 179. 7 Henry Home, Lord Kames, Sketches of the History of Man . . . (Edinburgh 1774), Vol. 1, 393–394. 8 Home, Sketches, 1774, Vol. 1, 403.

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These interpretations had not yet been adopted in British high politics. In the Royal Speech of January 1774, the people remained the objects of the patriarchal care of the King and Parliament (XVII, 937, 940). During that year, the relative weight of the opposition increased when Fox resigned from the ministry. Parliamentary legislation on trade, colonial administration and toleration for Catholics increased tension in America, but in Britain these measures strengthened support for the government in general elections.9 When Parliament was opened in November, a challenge to its supreme authority was already undeniable. The King thus advised Parliament: Let my people, in every part of my dominions, be taught by your example, to have a due reverence for the laws, and a just sense of the blessings, of our excellent constitution (XVIII, 34).

The formulation denied possibilities for opposition in the name of the people, either in Britain or in America. Both houses responded by expressing their determination to defend “the supreme authority” of Parliament.10 By the time of the next Speech from the Throne in October 1775, the war in America had broken out despite attempts at reconciliation. This increased divisions in domestic politics and deeply influenced British political culture, including conceptions of Parliament as the holder of absolute sovereign power yet as a far from a representative institution.11 The American struggle in the name of the interests of the people provoked public debate on the political power of the people and democracy. In anti-American loyalist polemic, often sponsored by the North ministry and distributed free of charge,12 the colonists, and implicitly their British supporters, were criticized for aiming at “a democratical tyranny” or “democracy” in the sense of mob violence. Blackstone’s Commentaries, which had otherwise given a rather positive sense to “democracy”, was used to reject demands that power should be given back to the people.13 The sympathizers of the Ameri-

9 10 11 12 13

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 246. Holmes & Szechi 1993, 246. Brewer 1980, 361–362; Wilson 1995, 237–238, 244, 249; Bradley 2007, 96, 102. Wilson 1995, 241. Dickinson 1998a, 92.

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can cause, by contrast, sometimes appealed to Montesquieu in calling for representation of the people as a pre-condition for taxation.14 Two political tracts—by James Burgh, and Jean Louis Delolme— illustrate the state of the theoretical debate in Britain and in Europe more generally at the time of the outbreak of the American War of Independence. Burgh presented an uncompromising interpretation on the popular origin of all political power. According to him, “all lawful authority, legislative, and executive, originates from the people. Power in the people is like light in the sun, native, original, inherent and unlimited by any thing human.” This meant that the power of the governors was “only borrowed, delegated, and limited by the intention of the people”. The people, in turn, were “answerable only to God”, as they were “the fountain of power” as well as “the object of government” and “the last resource”.15 While the exact concept ‘the sovereignty of the people’ was not yet available to Burgh, he did write about “the majesty of the people”, following an old Roman expression.16 Burgh also possessed a developed concept of ‘government by representation’, which meant “parliamentary government” without “regular appeal to the people”. He maintained that representation produced the same good effects in government “as if every inhabitant of the country were to deliberate and vote in person.”17 While this conception was based mainly on the British tradition, Burgh also regarded a wide range of regimes as mixed parliamentary governments, including those of Sparta, Athens and Rome in the past and the Dutch Republic, Britain and Sweden in the eighteenth century. The Dutch case was not clear, however: even though power should have belonged to the people, it was not extended to the middling sorts. In Britain, he argued, “the people are swallowed up in king, lords, and commons”,18 which did not sound like a particularly flattering expression either. In 1775, the Swedish case could be left without further comment. Burgh was unhappy with the degree of popular representation in Britain. To make his point, he quoted (inaccurately) Walpole’s warning of 1734 concerning the rise of “democratical” government if 14 [Anon.], Tyranny Unmasked. An Answer to a Late Pamphlet, Entitled Taxation no Tyranny (London 1775), 66. 15 James Burgh, Political Disquisitions: or, an Enquiry into Public Errors, Defects, and Abuses . . . (London 1774–1775), Vol. 1, 3–4. 16 Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 1774, Vol. 1, 4. 17 Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 1774, Vol. 1, 4. 18 Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 1774, Vol. 1, 8–9, 12, 16, 71.

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parliaments were shortened.19 While Burgh considered parliamentary privilege to be as extensive as “the people’s power”, he maintained— with an obvious reference to the Wilkes case—that the people had retained rights, including the right to choose their representatives, which Parliament should never violate.20 Burgh’s treatise was evidently critical of the established system. Margaret Canovan has even seen it as an example of a “forward-looking, activist conception of popular sovereignty” which consisted of the people’s right to change the constitution as it pleased, the constant presence of the people’s deputies in the Commons and suffrage extended to all men.21 Delolme’s book on the English constitution, by contrast, supported the notion that in Britain “the People’s Power” was “completely delegated to their Representatives”,22 i.e. that no active sovereignty of the people existed and that the constitution was essentially representative as opposed to popular.23 This view, formulated by an exile from Geneva, was later cited by some British parliamentary speakers to defend the established British system of representation against alternative models. Delolme wrote about “the superior excellence of a Government in which the People only act through Representatives, that is, by means of an assembly”. Indeed, Delolme argued, “such a Constitution is the only one that is capable of the immense advantage, [. . .] of putting into the hands of the People the moving springs of the Legislative authority”.24 The distinction that he drew between representative and democratic government was also important: A representative Constitution places the remedy in the hands of those who feel the disorder; but a popular Constitution places the remedy in the hands of those who cause the disorder; and it is necessarily productive, in the event, of the misfortune, [. . .].25

Delolme’s judgement of pure democracy was an uncompromising one: the Greek democracies had only caused irregularity and cruelty, while Roman efforts to create the equality needed in democratic govern19

Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 1774, Vol. 1, 113. Burgh, Political Disquisitions, 1774, Vol. 1, 221. This was clearly a condemnation of the exclusion of Wilkes from the Commons. 21 Canovan 2005, 25–26. 22 Jean Louis Delolme, The Constitution of England, or an Account of the English Government . . . (London 1775), 249. 23 Lieberman 2006, 340. 24 Delolme, The Constitution of England, 1775, 253. 25 Delolme, The Constitution of England, 1775, 254. 20

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ment had failed miserably. Likewise, the English seventeenth-century attempt to build “democracy” had been totally in vain.26 Moreover, in comparing the British and Swedish constitutions, he denounced democracy as “a disguised, and the worst of Aristocracies.”27 In some respects, Delolme expanded the meaning of ‘democracy’: Unlike most other authors, he considered practices such as trial by jury and the liberty of the press—the placing of judicial and censorial power in the people—as phenomena that actually made Britain “a much more Democratical State than any other”.28 This view made democracy a wider phenomenon than the form of government alone. Democracy was not merely about formal decision-making; it was also about what would today be called “the political culture”, and in that sense the British system deserved to be called democratic. Furthermore, the English form of government, which Delolme so much admired, contained an essential democratic element, though not necessarily one in Parliament.29 Delolme’s anglophile advice was to retain the representative system unchanged. His views may have contributed to parliamentary speakers such as Burke associating democracy with both free trials and publicity in the mid-1780s. The British constitution was thus both admired and criticized, in Britain and abroad. In the circumstances of war in America and the intense public debate on constitutional issues, North’s ministry chose to use of inclusive concept ‘the King’s people’ in describing the state of affairs in ceremonial speaking. The Americans, by contrast, were an “unhappy people” and a “deluded multitude” inflamed by the misrepresentations of their leaders. As for the King’s relationship to his dutiful subjects, they “can have no cause in which I am not equally interested” (XVIII, 695–697). The Lords ostentatiously emphasized “the sovereign authority of the British legislature” and “the authority of the supreme legislature” over all the British Empire, viewing the “sovereignty of the legislature” as something that belonged jointly to the King and Parliament (XVIII, 707, 709, 713–714). The Commons spent days debating the proper policy on America but finally only added to the formulations heard in the King’s speech a declaration

26

Delolme, The Constitution of England, 1775, 60, 92, 375. Jean Louis Delolme, A Parallel between the English Constitution and the Former Government of Sweden . . . (London 1772), 30. 28 Delolme, The Constitution of England, 1775, 408. 29 Delolme, The Constitution of England, 1775, 424; Lieberman 2006, 340. 27

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that the British constitution provided “the freest and happiest condition of any civil society in the known world” (XVIII, 796). The King was viewed as “the father of his people” whose rights and interests were identical with those of his people (XVIII, 797–798). In the British political culture, also the sympathizers of the Americans were allowed to speak. George Johnstone, the Governor of West Florida, lamented the lack of a parliamentary institution “to balance between the people and the crown” in America; therefore the people there were forced to defend the rights of their assemblies to express “the general sense of the people”. His suggestion was that instead of acting as “the guardians of the people’s rights and privileges”, the Commons were sacrificing these rights in America (XVIII, 745–746, 756). Temple Simon Luttrell, too, opposed an approving reply to the Royal Speech. In his view, “as representatives of the community in general” and as “the deputies of the people”, they simply could not approve it. Luttrell viewed the rebellion as understandable in that the original rights of the people had been violated (XVIII, 758). He thus did not rule out active popular resistance to a ruler, building on the tradition according to which resistance to arbitrary power by the people was a natural right.30 There were not many constitutional debates in Parliament during the early phase of the war. In March 1776, however, Wilkes, who had finally become the member of parliament for Middlesex two years previously, took the initiative by moving for parliamentary reform. The motion was supposed to answer long-standing calls for the removal of electoral corruption, the redistribution of seats and more frequent elections.31 No-one seconded the motion of the radical populist; indeed it the Prime Minister refuted it mockingly, and it was rejected without a division (XVIII, 1297–1298).32 Wilkes’ motion was probably addressed to the reading public of the “middling sorts” rather than to the Commons, particularly as he knew that he had no party to support him. It initiated a long series of related opposition motions regarding the abolition of rotten boroughs, an increase in the representation of the growing cities, the shortening of the length of parliaments, the extension of suffrage, and so on. These

30

Dickinson 1995, 164. Dickinson 1995, 176. 32 For Wilkes’ proposal in a long-term history of attempts to reform Parliament, see Cannon 1994, 67. 31

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proposals, which were particularly numerous in the early 1780s and again in the 1790s, and the debates that followed them made frequent use of language referring to the people. The argumentative structure of Wilkes’ original speech already reveals the centrality of the concepts of the people and representation. The speech opened with an expression of admiration for the classical models of Greece and Rome: “The most natural and perfect idea of a free government is [. . .] that of the people themselves assembling to determine by what laws they chuse to be governed, [. . .]” (XVIII, 1287). Then domestic history was invoked: the ancestors of the British had improved the classical system intended for small states by introducing “the representation of the many by a few, as answering more fully the true ends of government” (XVIII, 1287). Representation appeared here as a British innovation distinguishing its constitution from the Roman form of popular government, which had rather been based on disorderly public assemblies. Wilkes’ definition of the English version of representation was: Every Englishman is supposed to be present in parliament, either in person, or by a deputy chosen by himself, and therefore the resolution of parliament is taken [. . .] to give to the public the consent and approbation of every free agent of the community (XVIII, 1288).

While “the sense of the people” had been traditionally revealed by the representatives of “the great council of the nation”, in 1776, “the sentiments of the people” could no longer be seen in parliamentary resolutions because of the degenerated composition of Parliament. Therefore, it was essential “to restore to the people their clear rights, their original share in the legislature” (XVIII, 1288, 1290–1291). Wilkes put himself on highly sensitive ground by suggesting that the war with America was being fought “contrary to the sense of the nation” and that the opinions of the majority in Parliament were “directly counter to the sense of the nation.” A further provocation was hidden in the claim that a reformed Parliament would “speak the free, unbiased sense of the body of the English people” as opposed to the current “aristocratical tyranny” (XVIII, 1293–1295). The leading radical further maintained that the people was “the original fountain of power” and that the Commons was “only a delegated power from the people at large” (XVIII, 1296–1297). These were maxims that found no supporters in the circumstances of 1776. The stakes were too high as a result of the war, the challenge to the established form of representation was excessively grave, and in the eyes of his colleagues Wilkes himself possessed no convincing ethos.

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The debate on ‘the people’ and the constitution was left for free authors to carry further. The crisis can be seen in the introduction of some novel expressions in printed literature about this time. The exact phrase “the sovereignty of the people”, for instance, first appeared in the English language in print in an explicitly political sense when Edward Gibbon (1776) used it to describe what the monuments of Athens and Rome had been intended to represent. He also defined “a democratical government”, in quite conventional terms, as one in which “the citizens exercise the powers of sovereignty”. This continued until the multitude took over and “all the inconveniences of a wild democracy” followed in the cycle of forms of government.33 Likewise in 1776, a translation of Guillaume-Thomas-François Raynal characterized the Swedish constitution of the Age of Liberty, with its popular control over a very limited monarchy, as “the greatest act of sovereignty a people can exercise”. This implied that in Sweden the sovereignty of the people had been effectively implemented but had been lost with the royal coup of 1772. Such a statement in hindsight of course provides no proof that the Swedes themselves understood their system in identical terms. As for the British mixed constitution, it was in principle a good and balanced one according to Raynal, who argued that the monarchy effectively checked “the tendency of the government to democracy” by the means of bribery there.34 Whereas the notion of the sovereignty of the people had become available by 1776, democracy was definitely not yet seen as a goal. An anonymous pamphlet entitled Plain Truth, published together with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, presented democracy, in accordance with Montesquieu’s and Hume’s ideas, as a degenerated form of government. In principle, democracy was “extremely plausible and indeed flattering to the pride of mankind” but still “there never existed, nor ever will exist a real democracy in the world.”35 The problem with the Americans was that they were attempting to create “an independent, arbitrary, democratical government” and thus endangering the

33 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (London 1776), Vol. 1, 34, 47, 68. 34 Abbé Raynal, A Philosophical and Political History of the Settlements and Trade of the Europeans in the East and West Indies. . . . Translated . . . by J. Justamond, Vol. 2 (Dublin 1776), 31; Vol. 4, (London 1776), 413–414. 35 Thomas Paine, Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America . . . A new edition, [London] 1776, 2, 5.

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good effects of the British constitution.36 John Cartwright, a gentleman reformist, remained equally conventional in maintaining that the “pure democratical” form of government was impractical for large communities, even if he argued for “rights of sovereignty” in the people, defended the independence of Parliament in relation to executive power, and proposed an extended suffrage.37 Pamphlets published in America, by contrast, argued more openly for popular government, the people being seen as the best governors in all branches of power.38 This debate, which extended itself to Britain, combined older concepts in a creative manner. We can find, for instance, a definition of “popular government, sometimes termed democracy, republic or common wealth” as “that plan of civil society, wherein the community at large takes the care of its own welfare, and manages its concerns by representatives elected by the people out of their own body”.39 In such a definition, democracy no longer sounded quite as bad as classical conceptions of it suggested. It was indirectly connected with the concept of representation, too, which was still rare at that time. A more extensive discussion on democracy was to be found in Jeremy Bentham’s critical review—almost a parody—of William Blackstone’s Commentaries. Bentham’s point was that Blackstone had misunderstood democracy in defining it as “the government of all” on the one hand and calling the Commons “a kind of democracy” and the democratical branch of the constitution on the other.40 Blackstone’s attempted redefinition of the Commons as democracy was thus still being disputed a decade after the publication of his book. In his pro-colonial Observations on Civil Liberty, Richard Price widened the constitutional debate towards notions that Harry Dickinson has been ready to call a “doctrine of popular sovereignty” that challenged Parliament.41 Price saw the people as the body of independent 36

Paine, Common Sense, 1776, 37. John Cartwright, Take Your Choice! . . . (London 1776), 5; Christie 1962, 62–63; Miller 1994, 355. 38 [Anon.], The People the Best Governors: or A Plan of Government Founded on the Just Principles of Natural Freedom [United States 1776], 4, 13. 39 An anonymous address to the people of Pennsylvania reproduced in The Remembrancer, or Impartial Repository of Public Events . . . (London) [1775–1784], 124. 40 Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government; Being an Examination of what is Delivered, on the Subject of Government in General, in the Introduction to Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries . . . (London 1776), 89–90, 93, 105, 111. 41 Dickinson 1977, 222. 37

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agents and governors as their servants.42 He argued that the power of the people was above that of Parliament, maintaining that all free civil government “is the creature of the people”, “originates with them” and “is conducted under their direction” for the sole purpose of executing “the will of the people” (still a rare phrase in political discourse). The people could choose any form of government, but freedom always required their share in, and control over, government through a representative assembly, as the people simply could not have too much power. Power delegated to Parliament, by contrast, always remained limited. Indeed, “omnipotence”, insofar as it existed, “must be lodged where all legislative authority originates; that is, in the People.”43 This claim was adopted by Wilkes, who used it in Parliament in the following year, arguing that government was merely “a trust from the people” and that hence any idea of “the omnipotence of parliament” was mistaken.44 Challenges to the notion of the sovereignty of parliament were coming increasingly to the fore. In 1779 Price formulated his key maxim in the statement “the sovereignty in every country belongs to the people”.45 Such references to the people were striking, the point being that power would be returned to the omnipotent people if the King-in-Parliament could not guarantee the natural rights and liberties of the subjects.46 Few other authors had previously spoken so explicitly about Parliament as the executor of the will of the people. However, Price presented this argument without any reference to “democracy”. The reactions to these claims were numerous and revealing. Many denied Price’s claim that “all power rests and centers in the people” and emphasized instead the wisdom of the few or of just one in governance in comparison with the rule of the multitude.47 In particu-

42

Hampsher-Monk 2006, 670. Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, the Principles of Government, and the Justice and Policy of the War with America . . . The second edition, (London 1776), 6, 11–12, 15, 87. 44 Dickinson 1977, 216–217. 45 Richard Price, A Sermon, Delivered to a Congregation of Protestant Dissenters, at Hackney, on the 10th of February Last, Being the Day Appointed for a General Fast, The second edition (London 1779), 21. 46 Dickinson 1995, 172. 47 [Author of the Political Looking Glass], The Duty of the King and Subject, on the Principles of Civil Liberty . . . (London 1776), 8; John Shebbeare, An Essay on the Origin, Progress and Establishment of National Society; in which the Principles of Government . . . Contained in Dr. Price’s Observations, &c. are fully Examined and fully 43

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lar, Price’s idea of the “omnipotence of an illiterate multitude” was rejected, and doubts were expressed concerning the skills of the people at large as rulers. The decisions of a majority of members of parliament were rather seen as representing “vox populi”, as the House had been chosen with “the voluntary election of a whole people”.48 ‘Democracy’, too, was turning into a concept of dispute. Even if Price had said hardly anything about democracy, his opponents used the concept in their responses, arguing: “We have no instance of any government of a long duration, in a pure democratic state.”49 Henry Goodricke deliberately interpreted Price’s tract as an extremist advocacy of democracy, replacing the term “civil liberty” in the original text with “a pure democracy” and rejecting the claims that followed. Goodricke instead defended other forms of government based on popular consent and cited Algernon Sidney, John Locke, Joseph Priestley,50 Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui and Francis Hutcheson as critics of pure democracy. His conclusions were that popular states could not function as a result of excessive liberty and that it was a grave mistake to entrust political power into the hands of the people at large. Goodricke’s advice probably sounded agreeable to the British parliamentary elite: it was advisable “to avoid the evils of Democracy by excluding the great body of the state” and to have, instead, a Parliament “nearly connected and related to the people in general”.51 Publications such as Paine’s Common Sense, Cartwright’s Take Your Choice!, Bentham’s Fragment of Government or Price’s Observations on Civil Liberty—or even the US Declaration of Independence in July 1776—did not immediately affect the content of speeches in Westminster. This was the case despite the members’ awareness of the radical claim that the policies of the North ministry were only enabled by the corrupted nature of Parliament, which no longer communicated the wishes of the people to the Crown.52 The Speech from the Throne Refuted . . . (London 1776), 32, 35. Shebbeare was paid by the ministry. Wilson 1995, 241. 48 [Anon.], Remarks on Dr. Price’s Observations . . . (London 1776), 3–4, 7, 26. 49 [Anon.], Experience Preferable to Theory. An Answer to Dr. Price’s Observations . . . (London 1776), 8. 50 Priestley had argued in connection with the Wilkes crisis that popular power was originally given by the people. Gunn 1983, 82. 51 Henry Goodricke, Observations on Dr. Price’s Theory and Principles of Civil Liberty and Government . . . (York 1776), 91, 97–99, 106, 108–109, 113, 115–116; cf. 98 and Price, Observations, 1776, 4. 52 Wilson 1995, 248.

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in October lamented the mistakes of the King’s “unhappy people” in America in rejecting his mild government (XVIII, 1366–1367). In the Lords, some government supporters claimed that the rebellion had been fomented by the opposition in Britain, whereas Charles Watson Wentworth, the Marquis of Rockingham, and the Duke of Richmond, leaders of the Rockinghamite opposition, condemned the Royal Speech for misrepresenting the state of the people under the current ministry (XVIII, 1369).53 Richmond found an analogy in the fall of the Swedish free government in 1772. All liberty had been lost in a corrupt system as the consequence of a royal coup, and the same might happen in Britain: [. . .] from a total disregard which prevailed among public men, to the interests of the nation, and the innumerable modes of corruption, long established, with the new ones daily devised and discovered, he was in his conscience satisfied, that nothing but the personal virtue of the sovereign prevented this country from a total loss of liberty. Like Sweden, it was ripe for the event; [. . .] (XVIII, 1378).

The American war brought premonitions of a constitutional crisis and made some opposition members look for parallels elsewhere. Richmond, as a former officer and diplomat with experience on the Continent, was reasonably well informed about developments in Sweden. He may also have been influenced by Paine’s Common Sense, published in January 1776, which had presented Sweden and Denmark as recent examples of the sudden restoration of monarchical power in previously free states.54 The Rockinghamites failed to get the Commons’ Address amended as well. John Cavendish’s proposed alternative Address was critical of the conduct of the crisis by the ministry and opposed to the war as violating “the freedom of his Majesty’s people”. Its express goal was to restore to Parliament “the confidence of all [the King’s] people” (XVIII, 1400–1401). Wilkes went as far as to admire the American Declaration of Independence for allowing “the people” to decide (XVIII, 1405). Since the official Address made no complaints, the King responded in an authoritarian fashion by promising to defend the interests of his subjects (XVIII, 1431). As their protests seemed to have no effect on

53 54

Lowe 2004. Derry 1976, 175, 177.

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the policy of the ministry, many members of the opposition quitted Parliament soon after its opening.55 The ministry continued along the same path in subsequent Speeches from the Throne: Together with the parliamentary majority, it saw the war as the defence of the sovereignty of the King and the authority of Parliament against rebels aiming at the creation of a popular state. Nor was the public debate quite as radical as in 1776, containing as it did arguments critical of excessive popular involvement in politics. George Chalmers, for instance, argued in response to Willoughby Bertie, the 4th Earl of Abingdon, who had suggested that the authority of Parliament was delegated from the people, that, as “no such aggregate body as the people is known as a part of government”, it was unthinkable that “the supremacy of the people” could coexist.56 When the monarch continued to contrast the “unhappy multitude” of America with his “faithful people” in Britain in his speech (XIX, 355), not even the opposition to the war, led by Chatham (Pitt the Elder) and Rockingham,57 made any significant use of the concept of the people in its criticism. Richmond did express his concern for Britain losing its status as “a free people” as a result of the growth of the royal prerogative (XIX, 397, 411), and Captain John Luttrell viewed the speech as part of a project transferring “the supreme sovereignty”58 from the legislature to the ministry (XIX, 436–438), but this was regarded as no more than opposition grumbling. The loss of the Battle of Saratoga and the subsequent debate on a motion of adjournment in December 1777 demonstrates the tendency of defeats in the war to strengthen arguments based on the political role of the people among the opposition. In the Lords, Chatham opposed the adjournment by appealing to the role of the Lords as “the great hereditary council of the nation”, responsible for maintaining a balance “between the crown and the people”. In this case, according to the elder Pitt, both seemed to have been misled when the ministry had taken the country to war (XIX, 597–598). The government avoided getting involved in this kind of constitutional debate, whereas amongst 55

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 247. George Chalmers, Second Thoughts: or, Observations upon Lord Abingdon’s Thoughts on the Letter of Edmund Burke, Esq. To the Sheriffs of Bristol (London 1777), 60, 62. 57 Holmes & Szechi 1993, 247. 58 This is an interesting double expression combining the concepts of the supreme power and sovereignty. 56

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the Rockingham Whigs there was a willingness to take the argument further. William Petty, the Earl of Shelburne (later Marquess of Lansdowne), defended the right of the opposition to be taken into consideration as potential future ministers despite their protests against the war. Shelburne’s views mattered, as he was a former Secretary of State. In 1777, he was a leading opposition figure, and he maintained contact with moderate radicals in London. In just five years time, he would become prime minister. Shelburne based his interpretation on Britain as “a popular government” in which “the nation at large” had a say and “public opinion” both inside and outside Parliament mattered (XIX, 610). There had been relatively few explicit definitions of the British system as “popular government” in Parliament after the early 1740s; now the concept was back in the limelight. This debate on popular government in 1777 remained a single episode, to be sure, but it demonstrates the argumentative potential of language referring to the people and the public in a time of crisis, particularly when coming from such an influential figure. In 1778, an anonymous author argued that the British form of government had a strong popular element in the Commons, “the virtual Representative of all the Commons of the British Empire.”59 A government propagandist argued that “the authority of the people of England is absorbed in the parliament—that the vox populi is only to be heard in the senate”. The obvious conclusion was that even though government “originated from the body of a free people”, in everyday politics “the collective body have not even the shadow of power”.60 It was irresponsible to attempt to exceed “the bounds of the people’s power” as the people constituted merely one of the several agents in the system, and one that should remain passive: Popular declaimers tell us, that “the Crown encroaches on the rights of the people,” and yet, with the same breath, they absurdly maintain that the people at large (after delegating their whole constitutional power, and divesting themselves of every degree of authority in the community) can reassume it as often as they please; nay, what is still more preposterous, that they have a natural and unquestionable right, not only to

59

[Anon.], An Appeal to Reason and Justice, in Behalf of the British Constitution . . . (London 1778), 17, 54–55. 60 [Friend to the Public], The Delusive and Dangerous Principles of the Minority, Exposed and Refuted . . . (London 1778), 41, 43, 48.

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decide upon the conduct of their own share of legislation, but also to decide upon that of the other two estates, or component parts of the constitution; and to become party, judge and jury in the management of the whole authority of the nation.61

The fashionable concept of “the Majesty of the people”, propagated by the Americans and the opposition, was for this writer an absurd and meaningless expression derived from the writings of seventeenthcentury republicans: Where is the Majesty of the people, where the vox populi after they have constitutionally, and during a time, irrecoverably delegated the whole of their power in the constitution to representatives of their own choice, without the smallest legal reservation?62

In November 1778 the declaration of war by France made the American conflict seem increasingly threatening for the nation. Instead of simply strengthening patriotism, the entry of France and other Continental powers into the war increased criticism of the policies of the ministry.63 In this situation, in his next Royal Speech George III adopted a new tone in appealing to “the national honour and security” in order to motivate his subjects to fight in “the active and enterprising spirit of my people” (XIX, 1278). Such an emphasis on national feelings was readily accepted by the Lords, who continued the emphasis on the nation by referring to “the spirited perseverance of the British nation”, to “the national honour”, to “the yet undaunted spirit of the nation” and to the “national force” (XIX, 1320). In an atmosphere of national calamity, the more democratic aspects of language referring to the people seemed to have been left aside and the role of the monarchy in saving the people—or rather the nation—emphasized. As a reaction to this, William Hervey, Marquis of Bristol, insisted that, as “the guardians of the people”, the Lords should first demand an account of the war policies and formulate an Address in which “the voice and sufferings of the people” were present (XIX, 1286–1287). The Commons was slightly more conformist, echoing the rhetoric of “the active spirit of the nation” (XIX, 1377). Even Fox, despite being a francophile, appealed to “the national spirit” against the French (XIX, 1330). On the other hand references to the people were used by Wilkes,

61 62 63

The Delusive and Dangerous Principles, 1778, 55–57. The Delusive and Dangerous Principles, 1778, 57–58. Wilson 1995, 252–254.

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according to whom: “The people [. . .] alone can constitute a House of Commons.” And, furthermore: “There is a higher tribunal [than parliament], that of the people, our constituents, ever ready to do justice to the oppressed and injured.” The populist Wilkes was quite ready to declare: “The people have no confidence in administration. They are detested by the nation, and therefore continued in power” (XIX, 1335, 1340, 1346). Only Governor Johnstone, a voice of the colonists, seconded Wilkes in this conclusion (XIX, 1356). The result was, however, that the opposition remained unable to effectively challenge North’s ministry despite its use of language referring to the people. During the course of 1779, Fox became more outspoken in his criticism of the war and found considerable backing for this in the Commons. Spain entered the war, and the ministry began to show some signs of disintegration.64 This year would also become a turning point in the debate when Christopher Wyvill launched his nationwide Yorkshire Association movement in late December. The movement criticized not only the American war and taxation but also the state of representation, calling for the redistribution of parliamentary seats and speaking boldly in the name of the people. The criticism was echoed by radical groups in London. A central argument of the movement was that the war had led to the monarchy invading the sphere of the Commons by means of corruption. Even though many of the Rockingham Whigs who were active in the movement were not ready for a reform in representation, the movement grew quickly. Its extra-parliamentary agitation decreased suddenly, however, after the Gordon Riots of 2–9 June 1780, when an anti-Catholic demonstration of 60,000 people led to several hundred casualties. Many considered the riots a practical example of the dangers of popular associations and popular anarchy.65 However, extra-parliamentary opposition, which was even ready to challenge the authority of Parliament, certainly did not cease with the riots. In the parliamentary elections of 1780 support for the government also declined.66 The Association Movement would affect the use of language referring to the people in Parliament as well. Thomas Wycliffe’s treatise On Government, first published in 1779, represents an extreme case of a 64

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 248. Derry 1976, 187; Dickinson 1977, 219; Gunn 1983, 83–84; Perry 1990, 106; Dickinson 1995, 128, 143, 151; Gould 2000, 164–165. 66 Gunn 1983, 83; Wilson 1995, 265. 65

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defence of the cause of the people. According to Wycliffe, the justification for the supreme power of the people was derived from the divine will as expressed in the Bible: “St. Paul has ordered all governors to be subject to the people; it is therefore, a Divine command, that [. . .] every governor shall acknowledge the supremacy of the people.” It followed that: “the supreme power of a state is in the people, and that the subordinate power of a state is in the governors, who are delegated by the people”. The people were “the original senators” and “an original subject of a state, whose prerogative is therefore the supreme power of the state”. The people had appointed the King, the Lords and the Commons as their delegated governors; they had “no authority independent of the people”. The unavoidable conclusion was that the King could no longer be called a sovereign either because “it is the people alone who are supreme in power, and who have no superior”. For Wycliffe, as for Price, “the will of the people” was what the governors should be guided by even if it differed from that of the King. The problem with the current system was obvious: “The supposed sovereignty of the parliament” had replaced “the real sovereignty of the people”. A reform had become essential as it was demanded by such a number of petitioners that they could without doubt be regarded as ‘the people’. They were, indeed, so numerous that Parliament had no right to resist this “supreme power of the people” without violating “the rights and sovereignty of the people”.67 In Wycliffe’s text, the sovereignty of the people was no longer a mere theoretical notion but a concept used to justify concrete political demands. Democracy was not Wycliffe’s goal, but “the sovereignty of the people” was the starting point of his programme. At least from the edition of 1786 onwards, this concept provided a real alternative for definitions of the basis of the British government. The claim was so radical, however, that its incorporation in the language of parliamentary speaking would take several years, even in radical circles. In ceremonial speaking, the concept of the people remained incorporated in a language through which a stronger national community was constructed. Under attack from a French-led alliance, “the character of my brave people” could not but give rise to a “national spirit”,

67 Thomas Wycliffe, On Government; Addressed to the Public . . . (Liverpool 1786) (1779), 45–46, 49, 68–69, 71, 73, 78–79, 83–85, 102, 104, 110–111; for the extent of petitioning, see Bradley 1986.

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George III argued (XX, 1021). As Chesterfield put it in the Lords, the speech was designed “to rouse the people” and “to stimulate parliament, and through them the nation at large, to the most vigorous exertions” (XX, 1022). Even those lords who supported an alternative Address used language referring to the people only rarely to challenge the government. In the Commons, Prime Minister North, known for his spontaneity, recognized that the ministry was dependent on the majority in Parliament rather than public opinion: “God forbid, [. . .], that there should be a voice in the nation, stronger than that of parliament” (XX, 1109). Fox, by contrast, already insinuated in a speech in 1779 that the people outside Parliament “were beginning to murmur, and their patience was not unlimited”, and suggested that demands for a change of ministry were likely (XX, 1124–1125). This speech echoed Fox’s references to a possible popular uprising in his extra-parliamentary speeches and demonstrates a major change in his attitude to the people. Fox had now become an opponent of North’s ministry and even of the King himself. He was campaigning to win the most populous contested constituency of Westminster and speaking to large meetings outside Parliament there. Fox’s actions constituted a rather opportunistic attempt to rally popular support in order to overcome the North ministry, make peace and launch a constitutional reform: he did not care that his stance was inconsistent with his previous views or with the very different goals of the Westminster radicals, which including annual parliaments, secret polling, a redistribution of seats and an extended suffrage. The alliance made Fox, without a doubt, “the Man of the People”, creating connections between the parliamentary and London oppositions. Fox would maintain these links until the 1790s, but he remained a reformer working within the parliamentary system.68 By spring 1780, Parliament had also become a forum for reform debates. Arguments warning of excessive power on the part of the people were opposed there as we can see in the debate on Burke’s bill for abolishing the Board of Trade on 13 March 1780. This bill was part of a campaign for economic reform, which was connected with calls for parliamentary reform, an enterprise obstructed by North through

68 Christie 1962, 82–83, 99; Derry 1976, 188; Dickinson 1977, 219; Mitchell 1992, 34; Wilson 1995, 260; Corfield, Green & Harvey 2001, 159–160.

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the skilful manipulation of Parliament.69 The rise of the reform movement, in which Fox was involved, was, in any case, leading to the advent of a new concept of democracy in Parliament, partly as a result of Fox’s activities. The first to address the question of the political role of the people was Thomas Samuel Jolliffe, who commented on Fox’s preceding defence of the petitions of the people (XXI, 248). William Adam, a close associate of North and a man who had wounded Fox in a duel just a few months earlier, carried the argument further, opposing the idea that Parliament should act according to the supposed demands of the people as expressed in petitions. According to Adam, it was unthinkable to “give up the deliberative power of parliament” in that way (XXI, 255) as only Parliament had the right to engage itself in decision-making. Representation was the essence of the parliamentary system: We were sent here by our constituents to judge for them, to think for them, and to determine for them, not to obey implicitly the dictates of their will. If we did, we lost and forgot the very essence of what a House of Commons was (XXI, 255–256).

These were logical sentiments, coming as they did from a representative of a pocket borough. Adam presented direct democracy as potentially the most threatening prospect if Parliament complied with the demands presented in the name of the people. The people outside Parliament constituted a potential threat to the established political order: Suppose the people were to tell us, this mixed government, the admiration of all foreign nations, and the happiness of this, is not sufficient for our liberty, we want a democracy, that liberty may be extended. Would this House agree to their request, and alter the government of this country, because the prayers of their petitions contained such a request? (XXI, 256).

Adam saw aristocracy rather than the monarchy or “the democracy” or “people”, as benefiting from the bill (XXI, 256). The influence of the aristocracy should not grow disproportionately in relation to either the monarchy or democracy:

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Christie 1962, 95–98; Holmes & Szechi 1993, 248; Wilson 1995, 259.

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chapter four [. . .] a combination of rich and powerful nobility, might, upon the reduction of the necessary prerogatives of the crown, destroy and trample upon the democratical parts of the constitution (XXI, 256).

Adam wanted no pure democracy, but he wished to secure the democratic element of the balanced constitution, together with the monarchy and aristocracy. His readiness to defend the monarchy against any reduction of the royal prerogative also reveals rather conventional reasoning. According to his calculations, the revenues on which Parliament decided had grown tenfold by comparison with the royal ones since the Revolution of 1688, which had “rendered the people more independent” (XXI, 252–254). Leaving the Board of Trade as it was would, according to Adam, maintain the constitutional balance. The other debaters saw no reason to challenge Adam’s interpretation of the balance of the British constitution. Richard Rigby, who generally supported North and opposed parliamentary reform, called for respect for the voice of the people as expressed in petitions. Fox, by contrast, emphasized the right of the representatives of the people to control any monarchical measures that conflicted with “the voice of the people” (XXI, 258). Democracy had re-entered parliamentary debates, and it reappeared a number of times in the course of the 1780s. This happened soon after the launch of the parliamentary reform movement. While the ministry was able to prevent the reform, North regarded the spirit of the Commons as so threatening that he tried to resign, but this was not accepted by the monarch.70 On John Dunning’s initiative, according to which “the influence of the crown had increased to a degree dangerous to the liberties of the people” (XXI, 350), the opposition got a resolution passed lamenting the growth of monarchical influence and calling for the strengthening of the Commons. This defeat was probably the most serious one for any eighteenth-century ministry.71 On 2 June, the same day when the Gordon Riots broke out, the Duke of Richmond, a supporter of the radical reformist John Cartwright, made another attempt to introduce a bill for a parliamentary reform in the Lords. The bill was so radical—it included the removal of property qualifications for candidates, universal suffrage for men and payment for members—and so badly timed that it was rejected without any

70 71

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 249. Derry 1976, 188; Perry 1990, 107; Wilson 1995, 259.

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noteworthy debate on the issue. Viscount Stormont merely presented Montesquieu’s admiration of the British constitution as a major argument against any change in it (XXI, 686, 688).72 The above-mentioned riots quickly cut support for the Association Movement. This did not, however, remove the fact that the concept of the people had become contested in a new way, both in and outside Parliament.73 The public debate around democracy was quite intense and far from positive after the June riots. “Democracy” was becoming a more relevant political term in any case, particularly as it was already generally understood as a synonym for popular government. In some definitions, the concept of the sovereignty of the people was also being connected with ‘democracy’ by 1780.74 Even the idea of democracy by representation might occur as a hypothetical possibility, as in Thomas Mortimer’s handbook, according to which in democracy, [. . .] the supreme, legislative and executive power is lodged in the hands of the people; that is to say, in the majority. For where the majority of the people, either by themselves, or those they depute to represent them, have the whole power of the community, and can employ it in making and executing laws; in this case, the form of government is a perfect democracy.75

Mortimer summarized much of the preceding debate, recognizing both the good and bad sides of democracy. According to him, “Democracy, or popular government, at first sight, bids the fairest for the preference, as approaching the nearest to the state of nature, freed from its inconveniences.”76 Mortimer’s positive and negative sides of democracy were similar to those presented by Montesquieu: while democratic societies should be virtuous, they tended to be disturbed by “the slow, irresolute and discortant deliberations and councils of great

72

Dickinson 1977, 220. Wilson 1995, 261; Gould 2000, 174, 176. 74 According to Thomas Sheridan, in democracy “the sovereign power is lodged in the body of the people.” The meaning of “democracy” also appears to have been becoming gradually “modernised” in the sense that “democratical” stood for anything related to “popular government” or indeed for anything “popular”. Given this generalization of the concept, it is no wonder that opposition parliamentarians would also adopt the term in the following year. Thomas Sheridan, A General Dictionary of the English Language . . . (London 1780); see also William Fry, A New Vocabulary of the most Difficult Words in the English Language . . . (London 1784), 66. 75 Thomas Mortimer, The Elements of Commerce, Politics and Finances . . . (London 1780), 253. 76 Mortimer, The Elements of Commerce, 1780, 257. 73

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assemblies”, to be tumultuous and licentious, and to finally degenerate into anarchy.77 A translation of a recent book by Delolme also reinforced such commonplace prejudices about democracy and presented popular government as the rule of the commons.78 More radical voices were heard in the public discourse in 1780. An anonymous pamphleteer challenged the supreme power of Parliament by pointing out that the members failed to recognize the classical maxim that “the voice of the people is the voice of God”. Struggles for the rights of the people in Britain since the Revolution of 1688 had repeatedly demonstrated that this was indeed the case.79 This seemingly conventional claim embodied the radicalization of the old saying for the purposes of the Association Movement. The author attacked Blackstone, in particular, for having “carried the notion of a sovereignty in England independent of the people as far as it will bear”.80 Both the notion of parliamentary sovereignty, strengthened by the Wilkes affair and the American war, and Blackstone’s suggestion that the Commons constituted a democracy, were thus questioned. The author further argued that the democratic part of the mixed constitution was underdeveloped even though the people had never given away their original “right of supremacy”, as described by Locke.81 A reform was needed to put a stop to the corruption of the representatives of the people82 who were, indeed, in Cartwright’s words, “a mock representation of the people”.83 Locke was also the authority for John Joshua Proby, the Earl of Carysfort. He argued that England had originally been “a pure Democracy; that is, all matters of general importance were decided in an assembly of the whole people”.84 Irony was also employed to further the cause of the people: Thomas Tyers published a fake dialogue

77

Mortimer, The Elements of Commerce, 1780, 258–260. Jean Louis Delolme, An Essay on Constitutional Liberty: Wherein the Necessity of Frequent Elections of Parliament is Shewn to be Superseded by the Unity of the Executive Power (London 1780), 13. 79 [Gentleman of the Middle Temple], The Out-of-Door Parliament (London 1780), 10–11, 13. 80 Delolme, An Essay, 1780, 24. 81 Delolme, An Essay, 1780, 25–26. 82 Delolme, An Essay, 1780, 68. 83 John Cartwright, The People’s Barrier Against Undue Influence and Corruption . . . (London 1780), xxi. 84 John Joshua Proby, Earl of Carysfort, Copy of a Letter from . . . Lord Carysfort, to the Huntingdonshire Committee . . . [London 1780], 4–5. 78

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in which Walpole defined England as “a popular government”,85 thus distorting the ideas expressed by Walpole in 1734. The Gordon Riots and opposition gains in the September general election—although there were few victories for the advocates of a parliamentary reform—scared the executive power to such an extent that references to the people were cut down for the opening of the session in October 1780.86 If the riots were what popular politics produced, appeals to the people were best avoided. Opposition to the war in Parliament had also decreased after the riots and a victory in the Battle of Charlestown in June. This may have led to wrong conclusions by the ministers, however: The divergence of views between the ministry and the people at large were not removed. Calls for a parliamentary reform were rather increasing.87 In Parliament, the Earl of Abingdon, a Rockinghamite who constantly criticized North’s policies and advocated parliamentary reform, was the only lord to protest against the concessionary line of the House. In an eccentric speech, he called for “a new declaration of the rights of the people” now that a combination of the legislative and executive powers was aiming at despotism (XXI, 816). There were few opposition voices in the Commons as well. Richard Fitzpatrick, a Foxite who admired the American struggle for liberty, questioned the royal claim that the elections had conveyed “the sense of the people” as they had not been entirely free (XXI, 823–824). Fox, now an member of parliament for Westminster, likewise maintained that the elections had not communicated the true “sense of the people” because of ministerial manipulation (XXI, 831–832). In just a few months time, a more extensive discussion on the political role of the people would follow in Parliament. Enter Pitt and Fox: Democracy of the Pure Swedish and Mixed British Types Debated in the Early 1780s After 1781 the concept of democracy began to feature in British parliamentary debates with rising frequency. This was not so much a direct adaptation of the idea from America—still an enemy polity which did

85 Thomas Tyers, Political Conferences Between Several Great Men, in the Last and Present Century . . . London, 1780, 72. 86 Christie 1962, 120; Holmes & Szechi 1993, 249; Thomas 2004. 87 Wilson 1995, 259–260.

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not use that concept to define itself and the leaders of which explicitly rejected democracy.88 It rather followed from the deepening constitutional crisis in the British political community, with the monarchy and ministry being accused of having obtained excessive influence at all levels. A reform of parliamentary representation to counter such a development was called for. As John Derry has pointed out, the American crisis did not create radical thought in Britain or determine the ideas of the reformers. Wilkite populism, for instance, had been unconnected with colonial controversies on taxation and representation. The calls for reform also arose out of economic and local problems and from various notions about the privileges of Parliament and the principles of representation. The American war merely strengthened the expression of such existing grievances. The defeat in the war added to this by demonstrating to many Whigs—quite wrongly—that the monarchical influence in the British system was to blame for all the problems.89 Harry Dickinson, by contrast, suggests that the American example did cause the radicals to call for representation for all tax-paying subjects. Notions of sovereignty were also redefined as soon as the Americans adopted the concept ‘the sovereign people’. According to Dickinson, the British radicals borrowed this concept for themselves, moving from an emphasis on inherited rights to one on natural rights, the extreme case being Price’s suggestion that “omnipotence [lies] in the people”.90 Even though the American example was significant to some extent,91 we should consider the role that British authors and

88

Perry 1990, x; Ball 2003, xix. Derry 1976, 188, 201; Cf. extolling interpretations by historians and politicians of the American Revolution as the herald of “government of the people, by the people and for the people” which provided a universal model of representative government. Newman 2006, 73–75. See also Dickinson 1998a, 64. 90 Dickinson 1998b, 19–20; Dickinson 1998a, 90. Dickinson’s interpretation clearly distances itself from contemporary language use here and leads him to characterise the American Revolution as “a move towards democracy”; There were, of course, those who remained sceptical of American notions of “the Majesty of the People” and the sovereignty of the people. See Thomas Pownall, A Memorial Addresses to the Sovereigns of America (London 1783), 85; Even de Mably had doubts as to the lasting of the “rights of sovereignty [. . .] to the people” and appreciated “the narrowest limits to Democracy”. Abbé de Mably, Observations on the Government and Laws of the United States of America . . . [London/Amsterdam] (1784), 93–94; Goodwin 1979, 58. 91 By 1783, Adam Ferguson would write about the Roman people as “sovereigns of the commonwealth”. Adam Ferguson, The History of the Progress and Termination of the Roman Republic (London 1783), Vol. 3, 430. 89

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debating politicians played in redefining the concept of sovereignty in the late phase of the American war. We should likewise note the major contribution they made in giving the concept of democracy new meanings in this period. By 1781 democracy was no longer seen merely as a denomination for a purely theoretical form of government but as a possible direction of future development within the mixed government. The basic connotation of “democracy” remained rather pejorative, but the concept was used in a way that recognized the possibility of the British system developing (or degenerating) into democracy. This can be seen in the debates of 1781, which concerned the regulation of the civil list revenue, the annual budget awarded to the monarch, and was related to Burke’s and Dunning’s attempt in 1780 to introduce an economic reform. The proposal aimed at limiting the influence of the Crown by cutting the budget, i.e. by using the strongest means in the hands of Parliament to affect government policies. The measure was aimed at decreasing the influence of the ministry by abolishing offices distributed as pecuniary perks to government supporters. Thomas de Grey, a government official and Baron Walsingham from 1781, disputed claims that the influence of the Crown threatened the liberties of the people. Quite the contrary, any decrease in the power of the King was likely to hurt the national community as a whole (PR, II, 4, 6). Sir John Townshend responded by presenting the bill, which was designed to lessen the burden of the people in a state of national crisis by bringing the sovereign and his people together. He recommended that the members of parliament view the proposal as “representatives of the people”, demonstrating that they had not turned from being “the constitutional guardians of the people” into “their worst enemies”. The alternative policy would be “pernicious when they stood between the crown and the people, hiding and encouraging the attacks on the constitution”. The Commons should act as a national assembly removing causes for popular licence of the type of the Gordon Riots (PR, II, 7, 9, 11). Thomas Powys, a country member and fierce debater, also raised the opinion of the people into a justification for the bill (PR, II, 13–14). After this, the debate took on a comparative international dimension when Robert, the Earl of Nugent, referred to Poland and Venice as warning examples of pernicious constitutions in which the power of the monarch had been played down and was subjected to the control of the estates. According to Nugent, it was essential to achieve a balance that “secured the crown in its legal rights, and the people

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in their freedom and immunities”, something that the proposed bill could not offer (PR, II, 15). The contribution of William Pitt the Younger is of the utmost interest. He had entered Parliament only a month earlier, at the age of 21, and had immediately demonstrated excellent qualities as a speaker.92 He had joined the opposition to North and was now supporting the motion to cut the civil list. For Pitt, the Commons were “his Majesty’s public counsellors” who should both support the popularity of the King and respond to the wishes of the people. By accepting the bill, they would exercise their duty “to guard the lives, the liberties, and the properties of the people” and be “the faithful representatives of the people”. Pitt insisted that the Commons should listen to the petitions of the people, particularly when that could be done without decreasing the glory of the Crown; indeed, the measure would support “the common dignity of crown and people” (PR, II, 18–19, 21). In the speeches that followed, the concept of democracy, in the classical sense, played a crucial role only as an element in the mixed constitution. Archibald Macdonald argued: “Democracy was as much to be avoided as monarchy, or as aristocracy” (XXI, 1269). This later opponent of parliamentary reform considered that it was “criminal” on the part of the Commons to favour either the Crown or the people and to violate a contract between the monarch and the Commons (PR, II, 25–26). While there was no-one in favour of increasing democracy, the democratic element of the constitution was taken up by the opponents of the reform. They, too, recognized that there was a degree of democracy in the British constitution. The relative weight of this element was also becoming an object of serious debate in Parliament, as can be seen in Nathaniel Wraxall’s elaboration of Earl of Nugent’s and Archibald Macdonald’s arguments. Wraxall pointed out further warning examples of the rise of a mistaken type of democracy at the cost of monarchy in ancient and contemporary history. For him, the most relevant contemporary instances were the Dutch Republic and Sweden. Wraxall was certainly well informed in this respect as he was a professional travel writer who had visited both countries. As for the proposed reform, he had serious doubts. For him, the British constitution was a better form of government than any other, including all model forms of government that history 92

For background, see Hague 2004, 63–68.

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could provide. Republics, in particular, were to be avoided. The idealistic comments of anglophile authors on the Continent, in particular, showed that the British constitution was the best imaginable: He then drew a picture of the constitution of this country, and was warm in its eulogium. He declared it to be more perfect than the constitution of Rome, of Athens, or of Sparta; in short, than that of any republic either of antiquity or of modern Europe; its perfection he said, lay in the nice preponderance between its three branches, in that wonderfully correct equipoise which balanced the power of the three distinct but relative states of King, lords, and commons; nor need there be a greater proof of its excellence and its perfection, than the admiration, the esteem, and the applause with which it had been spoken of by the wisest men of all countries! (PR, II, 27).

In 1688, according to Wraxall, “the liberties of the people were accurately defined”, as the Revolution had brought a remedy from the Dutch Republic in the person of William III. Wraxall recognized the connection between the two ‘free’ peoples, despite the ongoing fourth Anglo-Dutch war, but the English form of government was by definition a better one and the English “a yet freer people” (PR, II, 27). Even William, despite his role as “the guardian of the liberties of the people”, had not given up all of the royal prerogative (PR, II, 27). The combination of guaranteed liberties for the people and a sufficient prerogative for the ruler thus constituted the basis of the success stories of the Dutch and the British. The grave weakness of the Swedish regime of the Age of Liberty, by contrast, had been the lack of true kingship; this state of affairs had led to the degeneration of the people’s liberty and might well do so in Britain as well. Wraxall presented the Swedish case as a demonstration of how excessive power in the hands of the people had led to a total decay of the political community. While the Swedish monarchy had been excessively dominant in the seventeenth century, the extremes of the so-called Age of Liberty, when politics had been run by the people, had produced nothing but misery. From the perspective of 1781, Sweden appeared as a warning instance of a popular government of a very bad kind, as a regime that the British should avoid to the very end. The picture of Sweden was, without a doubt, distorted for the sake of argument. Wraxall had travelled there in 1774–1775, and the Swedish Gustavian interpretation of the preceding regime may also have had an impact on his views. Sweden was used by him as a counter-argument against the extension of the popular element in the British constitution. The

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essential message was that the loss of economic, military and foreign political power, the lowering of public morale and the rise in corruption, mutual denigration, inefficiency and the economic stagnation typical of Sweden were to be avoided: During all that period, the strong features of Sweden were faction, venality, vilification, and poverty; loss of glory, strength, and respect. The navy reduced to seven ships, the people enervated and spiritless, the government without system or public glory; till at length the nation was sunk into contempt, despised by every other European power, and the Swedes almost annihilated as a people. All these calamities, and all this disgrace had been entailed on Sweden, in consequence of the people, in the year 1718, having, when they felt sore from the oppression and rigour of the reign of Charles the Twelfth, madly precipitated into the opposite extreme, and robbed the crown of all its natural, just, and constitutional influence (PR, II, 27–28).

Wraxall saw ‘the people’ rather than ‘the Estates’ as the rulers in the Age of Liberty. This shows that the language by which the use of power of the Riksdag had been legitimated could be easily used in other countries as well. In 1781, Sweden provided a threatening scenario of the wrong kind of popular rule, even of democracy, though Wraxall did not characterize the Swedish system with that word; he just repeated his warning of “the great danger of popular inroad and democratic violence” (XXI, 1273) in Britain, referring to the Gordon Riots (PR, II, 29). No reform in the direction of democracy where the people had the last say was desirable in Britain. John Courtenay, a later radical who now supported North in order to retain his seat, claimed that the British constitution made it easy for the opposition to overthrow the government by inciting “the terrors of the people” (PR, II, 35). Sir Francis Basset (1757–1835), for his part, rejected claims that the petitions presented to Parliament “expressed the sense of the people” by appealing to formalities: the meetings in which the petitions were formulated had been convened at short notice, had been signed “by people who had no right to sign them” and could hence not be considered as binding on the county at large. Self-declared “friends and assertors of the rights and of the liberties of the people” had merely presented unfounded claims (PR, II, 43). The “sense of the people” was to be measured in the Commons, the elected organ: From that House, [. . .], the sense of the people could only properly be collected; for was it to be supposed that their constituents would send those there, whom they did not know to be of the same sentiments with

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themselves? The late elections had shewn whom the people look upon to be the real supporters of them and their rights, [. . .] (PR, II, 44).

The third speaker to make democracy a subject of discussion was William Dolben, a moderate Tory representing Oxford University. He argued that all three elements of the British constitution, including democracy, should be reformed simultaneously (PR, II, 46). The opponents of the bill, using the concept of democracy in their arguments, were able to postpone the bill. However, the political rights of the people were soon to be debated again, and in a way that demonstrated a clearer revaluation of the concept of democracy. The choice of words in the February debates had probably been affected by the activities of the Westminster Association as well. Together with the provincial Associations, it was collecting signatures for petitions for parliamentary reform and better popular representation. These were presented to the Commons and debated there on 8 May 1781,93 when George Savile put forward a motion for diminishing the influence of the Crown. Some interesting statements on the political role of the people were made on both sides. Savile had already been infuriated by the Wilkes case and had later campaigned for shorter parliaments in cooperation with Christopher Wyvill. Now he saw it as “a mockery of the people” if the petitions were not taken into consideration. Indeed, “this would be the last petition that would be presented to that House from the people” if it did not have the effect it should (PR, III, 216). This statement hinted at the possibility of extra-parliamentary action of the kind seen in the Gordon Riots. Henry Duncombe added that the petition “spoke also the general sense of the people without doors” (PR, III, 217). The government counter-argument was that the thirty-two signatures of the petition could certainly not communicate “the sentiments of all the people of England,” particularly as individual freeholders were not “the people of England’s representatives” (PR, III, 218). Horace Mann appealed to the principle of parliamentary representation, so that “every scheme for reformation should originate in that House, which contained the only true delegates of the people” (PR, III, 219). A fresh argument was presented by Courtenay, who divided the people outside Parliament into two categories: those deserving all respect, and to those not worthy of political consideration. He pointed out that

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the government and opposition actually held different ideas of ‘the people’, the government referring to the respectable middle classes, the opposition to the rabble at large (PR, III, 228). For Courtenay, a defender of democracy some ten years later, “the great and respectable body of the people were those of the middle rank”. He even waxed poetical, declaring that these men were [. . .] the true props; they were the stay; they were the sheet anchor of the constitution! In that invaluable body of men resides the true spirit, the virtue, the nerve, the active energy, of Britain! (PR, III, 228).

Defending the North ministry in 1781, Courtenay saw the already enfranchised echelons of society as the true people whose voice was to be heard. As for the rest of the people, the opposition was manipulating them for their own purposes: [. . .] there existed another class of the people; men composed of the profligate, the idle, and the abandoned, who were ever ready to break out into acts of riot and outrage, and who were easily worked up into faction, or inflamed into sedition, by the popular breath of every turbulent demagogue, [. . .] (PR, III, 229).

All of these images were familiar from the Gordon Riots. Courtenay then turned to irony to silence the opposition, mocking the Common Council of London for exaggerating the principle that “all power originated from the people” with their attempts to shorten Parliaments so that they would become “directed by every popular blast, and turn, [. . .] by the breath of the people” (PR, III, 230).94 Amongst the many replies to Courtenay, noteworthy is John Harrison’s complaint about [. . .] the constant language of one side of the House, [. . .] to represent the petitions of the people in the most contemptuous light, as the voice of an ignorant and deluded multitude, led away by the factious and discontented spirit of their superiors (PR, III, 234).

Accusations of republicanism were another method used to play down popular petitions. Harrison95 regarded these as expressing a subservient attitude towards the ministry that was totally inappropriate for 94 Courtenay’s speech needs to be contrasted with his changed views during the French Revolution. His opposition to the extension of popular government did not prevent him from being converted into a supporter of democracy later on. 95 No further information on the speaker has been found.

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“any popular assembly”. It was also dangerous in that the ministry needed “confidence in the people” in a time of war (PR, III, 235–236). Fox developed Harrison’s argument, condemning belittling attitudes towards petitioners. He reformulated Courtenay’s claim that “in every government of a mixed or popular form, the middle rank of people were [. . .] the true echo of the nation” and rejected it, seeing instead “the sense of the people, or great body of the nation” as “the true criterion by which public opinion could be fairly determined” (PR, III, 251–252). Identifying himself with the people, Fox took his election campaign in Westminster as evidence of how “he, or rather the people, triumphed over every obstacle and every combination that was formed against him”. He also extended the concept of the people by defining it as “the people properly so called”, not “the middle class, but [. . .] the people at large, coming with all descriptions” (PR, III, 253). Fox’s popularity among the crowds even encouraged him to make use of the threat of new rioting. According to him, “the people [. . .] began to recollect and recover their senses” and might once again run to the streets if the administration did not respect their wishes (PR, III, 256). By February 1781, Fox had really become a man of the people in his political language, defining those who endorsed his opposition to North as “the champions of the people and the supporters of the popular cause” (PR, III, 261). The administration replied in the words of the Solicitor General, James Mansfield, who provided an official definition of parliamentary sovereignty, suggesting that it was just as unconstitutional for the Commons to deny the right of the people to be represented as for the people to “compel their representatives to act against their judgement”. The people did have their constitutional rights but even more important were the rights of the Commons, the influence of which was ultimately derived from the people: [. . .] the sovereign power of the legislature was to be maintained; that House had its constitutional rights as well as the people, whose representatives they were, and for whose behoof they acted as trustees; [. . .] (PR, III, 265).

From the point of view of the ministry, the petitions subordinated Parliament to the people, which was absurd (PR, III, 269). Likewise any association between sovereignty and the people was missing. The opposition lost this case against Crown influence, but further debate on the politically active people and democracy was coming.

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The Lords’ debates of 1781 reveal further meanings associated with the concept of democracy at a moment when a revaluation of its meaning was about to emerge in Parliament. The Earl of Abingdon used the word as a synonym for the common people in general and as the opposite of ‘aristocracy’, dividing the people thus into “the little” and “the great” (PR, IV, 300). This eccentric nobleman, inclined towards radical politics, probably drew the distinction because the concepts were more current than previously. Within a few years, ‘aristocracy’ and ‘democracy’ would more generally be viewed as opposites rather than complementary elements in an estate society. In 1781, this extension of the meaning of ‘democracy’ may have been a revision intended for the ears of the nobles only. Other lords rather viewed democracy as an element of parliamentary sovereignty. According to William Henry Lyttelton, Baron of Westcote (1776) and Baron Lyttelton (1794), the British mixed government was “composed of three elements, the monarchical, aristocratical, and democratical, which, when knit and united together, formed the sovereign power” (PR, III, 521).Westcote also associated ‘the nation’ and ‘sovereignty’ in a new manner in emphasizing the need to maintain “the inalienable and indubitable rights of the sovereign power of the King, the Parliament, and the nation” (PR, III, 523). The nation alone was not sovereign, but together with the monarch and Parliament it was. The concept of national sovereignty, as we know, would become more generally current only with the French Revolution. In the Commons, at least one Lockean statement on the popular basis of all government emerged during 1781. During the debate on Fox’s motion to conclude peace with America—a logical context for appeals to the political role of the people—Charles Turner, one of the opponents of the war, provocatively argued: The King, Ministers, nay the very Parliament itself, were constituted for the benefit of the people over whom they were placed, not for the aggrandizement of their governors. When, therefore, people talked of power, and of resistance to it, &c. they must mean right, for there was no legal or constitutional power which was not founded in right; nor any right which was not ultimately for the benefit and advantage of those who by compact, or common consent, created that right in persons of their governors, as sanctioned, explained, or marked out by the essential forms of the constitution (PR, III, 548).

In this type of instance, we can recognize the influence of American language referring to the rights of the people. Considered together,

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these instances from the debates of 1781 show that the time for a change in the parliamentary understanding of the concept of the people, visible to some extent in public debates since the late 1760s, was at hand. A major historical event would bring the change about. It was news of the lost Battle of Yorktown in November 1781 that functioned as the catalyst for conceptual change in the political language of the British Parliament. After the battle, not even the political establishment believed in a military victory in America any more.96 The way in which the ministry defined the constitutional relationship between the King and the people changed suddenly in an attempted response to the growing crisis of confidence. More importantly, the opposition adopted ever more radical language in presenting an alternative to the policy of the ministry, turning to the concept of democracy and revaluating it in a way that made it increasingly relevant for the ongoing constitutional debate. At the opening of the parliamentary session on 29 November 1781, four days after the news of the surrender of Cornwallis’ army to the Americans reached London, George III for the first time plainly declared himself to be acting according to “the trust committed to the sovereign of a free people” (XXII, 635). Such a combination of the three concepts (‘sovereign’, ‘free’ and ‘people’) was new in the context of ceremonial speaking. Sovereignty still remained with the King, but the constitutional position of the Commons as the representatives of “a free people” to whom the monarch was ultimately responsible was recognized more clearly than before. This attempted redefinition took place at a time when it had become clear that Britain would have to recognize the independence of the United States, a country which had declared itself to be fighting for the cause of the people. North’s obvious strategy in including the formulation in the Royal Speech was to combine the interests of the monarch and the people, as usual, but in a new manner by making the King view himself as a “sovereign” of “a free people”. In such a formulation, the people were no longer presented as the King’s people but as a free people, independent even of the monarchy. A long-term analysis of the corpus suggests that a revision was being attempted here, and a close reading of the following debates shows that this was indeed the case: the same formulation was used 96

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immediately in the debates of the two houses. Thomas Pitt, North’s fierce opponent, deliberately challenged it. In proposing that the supplies for the army be postponed, thus endangering the continuity of the struggle in America, he repeated the definition of George III as “the sovereign of a free people” (XXII, 752). This phrase had never previously been used in recorded parliamentary debates but appeared now several times within a few days. The recognition of the people as free—and thus as a potential political agent—by the North ministry was a response to the lost war in America as well as to long-standing grievances over the neglect of “the sense of the people” by the government. We should not, of course, overestimate the change that the formulation brought about: its introduction and Thomas Pitt’s response did not entail its immediate acceptance. Furthermore, this choice of words may have been no more than a temporary attempt to calm the parliamentary establishment at a critical moment when unity was needed but the existence of divisions was undeniable. Nor was the formulation necessarily ‘democratic’ in the sense of weakening the position of the Crown in relation to the people. It is, indeed, comparable to formulations that Gustavus III of Sweden used in his speeches from the throne before and after his royal coup in 1772. Gustavus presented himself as a “citizen” and king of “a free people”—not as a “sovereign”, which would have been considered an excessively direct reference to royal power in Sweden. Frederick II of Prussia was also inclined to use this kind of language. In other words, similar rhetorical modifications of the monarchy had been made previously and by monarchs who had no intention of limiting their constitutional role but rather out of the need to appease a potentially discontented political elite. Apart from this modification, the rest of the speech by George III was entirely conventional, the King combining “the honour of my crown, and the permanent interest and security of my people” and expressing his trust in “the faculties and resources of my people” (XXII, 835, 837). The question that follows is whether North’s modification of the status of the monarchy was sufficient. The Lords responded—after a debate, a division and a protest by the opposition against the continuation of the war—by acknowledging the monarch’s work for “the real welfare of your people” (XXII, 838). Baron Walsingham, a supporter of North, picked up the phrase “the sovereign of a free people” and

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extended the trust of the people to include the Lords as well, using it to argue against a premature peace settlement (XXII, 641). The Duke of Richmond, the leader of the protestors in the Lords, contested George III’s formulation, demanding that the House should instead “stand up as assertors of the rights of the people”. Unhappy with the views expressed from the throne, he insisted that the real defence of the rights of the people required a new policy on the war and a parliamentary reform. Only these would restore the original spirit of the constitution (XXII, 650–651). In the Commons, both sides accused each other of abusing the people in a time of war. Charles George Perceval, who proposed the Address of Thanks, insinuated that the supporters of the American cause had misleadingly claimed that they had the people’s backing (XXII, 680). Perceval’s formulation for the Address shows, however, a consciousness of the need to negotiate between the executive and the people as represented by Parliament. The Commons first welcomed the royal recognition of the freedom of the people, stating, with the deference befitting subjects: [. . .] we receive with the strongest emotions of duty and gratitude your Majesty’s gracious and endearing declaration, that you should answer the trust committed to the sovereign of a free people (XXII, 682).

The commitment of the Commons both as subjects of the King and as representatives of the people was emphasized, and the interests of the two presented as totally united (XXII, 682). At the end of the Address, however, Perceval added a further modification in comparison with the King’s speech. The fact that the Address referred to the political role of the people was apparently part of a further attempt by North to promote the cause of continuing the war. Perceval’s suggestion was that popular government supported the national morale and that the current conflict would be solved “by a vigorous, animated, and united exertion of the resources and faculties of the nation, and of the spirit of a free people” (XXII, 683). With this formulation, North and Perceval were speaking directly to the people, appealing to their national feelings. The reactions of the opposition show that the chosen strategy failed to convince some sections of the political establishment. Even so, the ministry was uncompromising in its nationalistic definitions of a warfaring political community. It once more reinforced the proposed

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redefinition of the political role of the people by making the King thank the Commons for their spirit and firmness as “the representatives of a brave and free people” (XXII, 751). The American war and domestic discontent were turning the Commons from mere representatives of the King’s people to those of “a brave and free people”, but it is important to notice that this redefinition was carried out by the representatives of the Crown and under exceptional pressure. The dispute that ensued produced further conceptual revisions. Fox, an opposition Whig whose self-confidence had been strengthened by his popularity among the voters of Westminster, regarded all the statements of the ministry as totally inappropriate for the occasion. According to him, the ministry had abused its power to dictate the message delivered by the King before “the representatives of the people of England”. Ignoring references to a free people, Fox, a consistent opponent of the policies on America and a politician with no need to seek royal favour, viewed the speech as one of a despotic monarch unable to recognize his failures or to sympathize with “the sorrows of his people”. To respond to “the general opinion”, the King should have said that he had been misled by his ministers, but, instead, the speech demonstrated to “an injured and undone people” what they could expect from their government. It was not the ministry but the opposition that had been presented as “accountable to the people for the measures of government” (XXII, 689–692). Turning to the old argument of the country opposition, Fox complained how the influence of the Crown in Parliament enabled the ministry to neglect “the voice of the people”. For Fox, this voice was identical with reason (XXII, 705). The ministerial choice of words obviously acted as a catalyst for the radicalization of language referring to the people in the Commons. Burke carried on the opposition onslaught, presenting the definition of the King as “the sovereign of a free people” and the promise to preserve the combined rights of the Crown and people as ministerial abuse of language designed to justify the continuation of the war (XXII, 719–729). Indeed, for this Rockingham Whig, the speech was “a fresh attempt to impose, to delude, and to draw on the people” (XXII, 722). It demonstrated that the ministry did not really care about “the wishes and the inclinations of the people”, a people that—according to Burke’s provocative counter-definition—was “a free, a great, and a suffering people”. As for appeals to the spirit of the nation, they were useless in that all such spirit had been extinguished by the unfortunate war (XXII, 727).

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The fierceness of Fox’s and Burke’s reactions shows how delicate the constitutional situation was, and how risky the attempted ministerial redefinition of the relative roles of the monarchy and the people was. The attempt was a serious one, but the speakers failed to convince the protesting Whig opposition. It was, in any case, a deliberate major speech act that made the relationship between the executive power and the people a constant subject of parliamentary discourse and initiated the rise of a new language of democracy. Two more speeches in the debate illustrate the existence of a conceptual confrontation that could no longer be hidden. On the government side, Richard Rigby interpreted the language referring to the people used by the opposition as unconstitutional, since Parliament remained the only forum for the expression of what the people wanted. The alternative that the opposition was offering had been seen in the Gordon Riots: What! Was not the sense of the nation to be collected in that House? Such applications to the people were unconstitutional, if not illegal; they led to disaster, public tumult, and outrage. He was always against them; [. . .] for the great constituent body of the people, having delegated their voice to their representatives, their representatives only could pronounce it; [. . .] (XXII, 728).

The parliamentary majority continued to define ‘the people’ in a way that emphasized Parliament as the sole interpreter of “the sense of the people”. After Richard Brinsley Sheridan, another Foxite, challenged the notion of the Commons as representing “all the sense of the country” (XXII, 729), Rigby reconsidered his point, addressing not just his colleagues but also the audience in the Strangers’ Gallery, where a commotion was going on. Aware of the risk of jeopardizing the goals of the ministry by associating all public opinion with the violence of rioters, and attempting to bring calm to the chamber, he recognized the existence of “the sense of the people” outside Parliament as well: [. . .] he would not have it go forth, at a time when there was so full a gallery, that he had spoken contemptuously of the rights of the people; he had objected only to the difficulty of gathering their sentiments in a peaceable manner (XXII, 729).

This was a reminder of the links between parliamentary debates and the public sphere. Care also had to be taken on the government side to avoid any unnecessary confrontation with public opinion. No unappreciative views of the people at large could be expressed.

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The opposition’s criticism continued even after the Address had been formally approved. According to Thomas Pitt, the inconsistency between the content of the Address and the true opinion of the Commons constituted an insult to the people. The Commons should have more clearly demonstrated equal loyalty “to the sovereign and people”, even if that meant challenging the ministry (XXII, 732). John Courtenay responded by urging Parliament and the people to continue with their support in the common struggle. This eloquent speaker attempted to raise the spirits of the chamber by describing how “the sacred and applauding voice of the people will sanctify their sovereign’s choice” as far as the conduct of the war was concerned (XXII, 751). Once again the ministerial side endeavoured to silence opposition by elevating the voice of the people into a position that had seldom been heard from that direction before; in other words, by means of formulations that were characteristic of the opposition. However, the voice of the people, as seen by the government, remained identical with the policy of the King’s ministry.97 While the meaning of ‘the people’ had been the topic of the debates of 29 November 1781, the following day brought with it a new introduction of the concept of democracy to British parliamentary debates. The young William Pitt, a rising member of the opposition, moved for delaying the supplies, thereby using the most powerful weapon that Parliament possessed to challenge the government. Pitt continued the debate on the Royal Speech, considering the Address of the Commons, which merely repeated the formulations of the Royal Speech, to be “degrading to the parliament of a free people” in a situation where the ministers had used the speech to “tell the people that they meant to persevere” (XXII, 752). While Addresses echoing the Speech from the Throne had been the rule, this no longer sufficed in the eyes of the opposition, who were increasingly confident in their application of the concept of the people to criticize the policies of the ministry. In this formulation, Pitt already substituted the phrase ‘the parliament of a free people’ for ‘the sovereign of a free people’, thus indicating what he regarded as the true centre of political power. The American war was leading to the increasingly frequent use of the concept of democracy and also to its gradual revaluation. Even if 97 Courtenay became famous for his use of irony in debates, but it is hardly likely that irony was used in this context.

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neither the American rebels nor their British sympathizers were campaigning in favour of an extension of democracy, their emphasis on the popular element in decision-making and calls for a reform in the system of representation promoted the tendency to view democracy in a more positive light. In Pitt’s speech of 30 November 1781, democracy was no longer just an unavoidable theoretical element of the mixed constitution but an element that needed to be actively defended by the opposition. For the first time in the history of recorded parliamentary debates, Pitt challenged the administration by using the concept, suggesting that the policies of the ministry were endangering not only the constitution in general but democracy in particular. “Democracy” appeared here in an explicitly positive sense, as a phenomenon to be championed. Pitt argued that the British political system would not be the same without democracy and that the tendency of the administration to undermine both monarchy and democracy by corruption had degraded the credibility of the nation in the eyes of foreign powers: [. . .] our government was no longer what it used to be—a government lodged both in the king and his people: it was now, by means of corruption, vested only in the servants of the crown; and therefore the nature of our government, which formerly derived so much lustre from its democracy, being changed, [. . .] (XXII, 753).

The suggestion that corruption had endangered the constitutional balance was an old one, but the inseparable role which Pitt gave democracy in the British system was new in the parliamentary context. Pitt argued that there had indeed been a considerable degree of democracy in Britain, a democracy that had been admired both at home and abroad. It was this democracy that was in danger in the crisis of 1781. It was unfounded for the government side to suggest that democracy was threatening the balance of the mixed constitution. Rather, democracy was being attacked by the current ministry and needed to be strengthened so that it could once again act as a counterbalance to the Crown. Building on previous suggestions for an economic reform by the opposition, Pitt insisted that nothing should be given “by the people to the crown” until the balance between the elements of the constitution was restored (XXII, 753). Even though calls for an economic reform had been repeated by the opposition every now and then, the association of the demands with the cause of democracy was a new one. This redefinition of the character of the economic reform, and the simultaneous redefinition

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of democracy, came from a young politician who had just recently studied history and classical and Lockean political philosophy at Cambridge University. From his father, Chatham, Pitt had inherited an interest in parliamentary reform and perhaps also a readiness to use language referring to the people as a tool in opposition politics. Once he entered the Commons, he brought with him old ideas of reform and the advancement of the popular cause as well as a readiness to use language creatively for political purposes. We should not let Pitt’s later fame as the embodiment of conservatism hide his ability for political revision and innovation, including the introduction of a revaluated concept of democracy into parliamentary debate in 1781.98 In this speech act, Pitt was supported by Fox. According to the latter, he “had undoubtedly hit upon the best means of procuring to the people that change of measures upon which their political salvation depended”. Fox developed Pitt’s claim that democracy was being ruined, defending, for the first time, democracy as the popular element of the mixed constitution (XXII, 754). While Fox had been suspicious of excessive popular involvement in the early 1770s, his experiences in campaigning for the Westminster seat had turned him into a spokesman of the people. Such a seemingly total change of attitude towards the people, and the popularity of this aristocrat among the public, made many contemporaries wonder. Yet Fox seems to have transformed his political language successfully.99 After Pitt’s initiative, he was ready to use the concept of democracy for the same opposition cause, though probably meaning no more by it than that the role of the Commons in the political process should be strengthened in relation to the royal prerogative. In Fox’s words, the Commons constituted the democratic element in a constitution endangered by monarchical innovation: Ministers had basely advised their master to rule by the silent means of intrigue, instead of reigning in the hearts of his people: they had destroyed the democracy of the constitution, and all was now swallowed up in the monarchy: [. . .] (XXII, 754).

98 Cf. Mori’s suggestion that the Younger Pitt had few innovative ideas or projects. Mori 1997, 17, 19, 21; Mori 2000, 5–6. 99 Stanley Ayling has also emphasised the rare occurrences of the concept of the people in Parliament, the Wilkes controversies of 1763 and 1768–1769 having been the only exceptions to the rule thus far. The Association Movement obviously motivated the increase in the use of the concept, and Fox found it a tool to oppose the King and North’s ministry. Ayling 1991, 75, 79.

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Fox’s suggestion was that the democratic element of the constitution had already been destroyed, which meant that the essence of the constitution had disappeared even if its outer forms seemed untouched (XXII, 754). The evident implication of Pitt’s and Fox’s speeches was that democracy was indispensable in Britain, needed to be defended, and was being defended by the Whig opposition. Such a revaluation of ‘democracy’—making the safeguarding of democracy a goal of politics—contributed significantly to the rise of an increasingly positive understanding of the concept in the course of the 1780s. The lengthy debates on parliamentary reform in the 1780s were thus preceded by a clearer recognition of the necessity of protecting the democratic element in the mixed constitution. In the 1790s, in different circumstances, Pitt and Fox disagreed on a number of practical political questions but continued to view ‘democracy’ in the basically positive sense which they had jointly given it from the early 1780s onwards. It is clear that the defence of democracy in the early 1780s arose out of opposition Whig claims that the British monarchy was developing towards tyranny. Members of the opposition willingly used any argument that supported this claim. In this context, they proved themselves to be just as conceptually innovative as the North ministry when the latter attempted to introduce a conceptual change at the opening of the session of 1781. In a time of acute crisis, a ministerial conceptual modification was countered with a revision by the opposition. How would North, the man responsible for the choice of words in the King’s speech, respond to the challenge by the opposition? He passed over the concept of democracy completely and had little to say about the people. He warned against tampering with the formulation of the Address; such an act would only demonstrate to the country’s enemies that there were divisions between the King and Parliament, which was unthinkable at a time when reasonable terms of peace were being sought. It was likewise nonsensical to appeal to voters in those circumstances to determine “the sense of the people” (XXII, 760). Pitt, the original mover, was given the last speech, which he used to draw a conceptual distinction between “the King” and “the Crown”, exploiting a slip of the tongue by North who had said “the King” when he meant “the Crown”. The use of a reference to the sovereign was not only considered inappropriate for the House100 but was also

100

Bentham, An Essay on Political Tactics, 1838−43, 135−136.

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seen as revealing North’s excessively close cooperation with George III. According to Pitt, no disunity between Parliament and the King’s person existed, while opposition between Parliament and the Crown as “the executive power of government” was a self-evident part of the constitution. This was, indeed, an essential feature of parliamentary government: “[I]t is because these powers are not one, it is because they are disunited, that this government has obtained the admiration and envy of every other nation” (XXII, 761). In Pitt’s notion of the constitution, the Commons had a key political role in that it communicated “the sense of the people” to the knowledge of the rulers and made decisions on behalf of the people on all resources originating from it and being used for its benefit (XXII, 764). This was, of course, still a minority view. Pitt and Fox lost the division but won the argument—from the afterwise perspective of an historian—in that they had introduced into parliamentary debates words referring to the people and democracy—and used them in more dynamic senses than ever before. Disagreements on how to conclude the unhappy war in America thus contributed to the radicalization of the British constitutional debate. Approximately two months later, on 23 January 1782, a further confrontation between Fox and North on the political role of the people took place. Fox initiated the verbal duel by calling for an inquiry into the actions of the Admiralty, using language referring to the people in his challenge to North: [. . .] in every government, there must be a confidence reposed in the servants of the Crown by the people; or else the business of the state can never be carried on with any degree of success: and though the people should be whimsical and capricious in their dislike of any minister, yet it never could be consonant to sound policy to keep him in office against the opinion and wishes of the people (PR, V, 251).

Fox was using the supposedly uniform opinion of the people as a way to legitimate his questioning of the confidence enjoyed by a leading minister. The “free people” was once again the agent, now calling for the dismissal of the minister responsible for the Admiralty (PR, V, 252). North conceded that an inquiry into the management of the Admiralty was possible but rejected any suggestion that ‘the people’ was entitled to sack ministers. Such an active appeal to the people would go far beyond the original institution of government by the people: His Lordship answered several of Mr. Fox’s arguments, particularly those on the people’s power of removal of a minister, and the propriety

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of such a step, without assigning any reason for the measure. That was a doctrine, his Lordship said, to which he could not subscribe, and more especially in the extent that the honourable gentleman had carried his idea to (PR, V, 256–257).

Prime Minister North thus recognized no power in the people to nominate and dismiss ministers. While this particular debate did not proceed further, language referring to the people was increasingly used by both the government and the opposition in the following years, not least because of a mixture of mutually competing coalitions that followed. North resigned in March 1782, but returned to office in April 1783 for the rest of that year, cooperating with his previous critic Fox. Soon most of the competing groups were using language referring to the people to legitimate their claims. Prospects for a Parliamentary Reform and the People’s Ministry, 1782–1783 North’s resignation led to the nomination of Rockingham and Shelburne as prime ministers in circumstances where the King considered abdication and the general public rejoiced in a seeming victory when the ministry was made accountable, ultimately to the people. The new Rockinghamite ministry was ready to recognize American independence.101 The main disagreements in 1782 concerned the ways to solve the crisis caused by the American war. Grievances concerning the state of the representative system also gave rise to debates in which the concepts of the people and democracy made an appearance. These debates were initiated by William Pitt, now the Leader of the House, who on 7 May 1782 moved for examining the possibility of a parliamentary reform. He put forward a motion of a kind never attempted by a government spokesman before without ensuring the support of the first minister. The motion made him a leader of the reform movement in the Commons for years to come, but his strategy failed to win a majority.102 It did receive considerable backing in 1782,

101 102

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 250; Wilson 1995, 267–268; Black 2001, 253. Christie 1962, 145; Perry 1990, 112.

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however, and led to related motions being introduced during the following years.103 Pitt supported a moderate reform proposed by Christopher Wyvill’s Yorkshire Association rather than the further-reaching one championed by Fox and some London radicals. He was obviously conversant with the radical writings of Richmond and Cartwright, among others, and was closer to their views in 1782 than he was later.104 He would hardly have gone as far as John Joshua Proby, the Earl of Carysfort, however, according to whom the people could “exercise sovereignty [. . .] either in a general assembly of the whole, or by their representatives”.105 Carysfort further argued that popular government had prevailed among all the nations from whom the British derived their origin.106 A more moderate reformer suggested that the people’s or “national Representation” in Parliament [. . .] forms the popular check or balance in the State, and according as it is naturally and with considerable equality preserved, or as it loses its spring from the general mass of the people, becomes the source of every evil.107

This anonymous author lamented the loss of “the democratic virtue” or “that distinctive spirit, which characterized the popular influence” in the electoral system of the day.108 Many other views on reform were expressed in the public debate of the time.

103 Pitt’s motion was preceded by Wilkes’ successful motion for expunging the resolution relating to his expulsion after the Middlesex election in 1769 from the Journals of the Commons. Wilkes appealed to the new Rockinghamite ministry as “the friends and favourites of the people” and to “their former upright conduct in the cause of the people”. He defended the bravery of the people in petitioning against abuses in parliamentary elections, presented the Middlesex case as the clearest expression of “the voice of the people” and saw the proposed change as “justice done to a people” (XXII, 1409). Despite Fox’s opposition on the basis of the need to retain parliamentary privilege, Wilkes managed to win the division (XXII, 1410–1411); Wilson 1995, 268. 104 Pitt had met Wyvill at Richmond’s house in April and been asked by the two men to take the initiative in proposing the reform. Christie 1962, 145–146; Cannon 1994, 72; Ehrman & Smith 2004. 105 John Joshua Proby, the Earl of Carysfort, Thoughts on the Constitution, with a View to the Proposed Reform in the Representation of the People, and Duration of Parliaments (London 1783), 29. 106 Proby, Thoughts on the Constitution, 1783, 29. 107 [Anon.], Anglia Rediviva: No Defence of the Aristocratic Party, but the King and People, Mutually Restored to Their Constitutional Action . . . (London 1782), 8–9. 108 [Anon.], Anglia Rediviva, 1782, 27.

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Even if the original idea was not his, Pitt’s role as the initiator of the debate on reform was significant. His proposal built on his experience in opposition to North, debates on the shortcomings of the representative and economic systems, and the favourable circumstances which the forming of the ministry by politicians with a record of speaking in the name of the people had created. The people wanted reform: “The voice of the people had happily prevailed, and we were now blessed with a ministry, whose wishes went along with those of the people.” The nation counted on these “friends of freedom” as it knew that they “respected the voice of the people” (XXII, 1416–1417, 1422). Furthermore, Pitt characterized the entire constitution as based on popular participation: in the British government, “the people were entitled to hold so distinguished a share [. . .] by the means of representation”. The problem with the system was that the representatives had “ceased, in a great degree, to be connected with the people”, becoming dependent on the monarchy or aristocracy instead (XXII, 1417). Even though democracy was not the concept with which to advocate such an historic reform, the message of the motion was unmistakable: democracy had suffered from the corruption of the representative system, and a restoration of the initial principle of the constitution was needed. It was intended that this should take place through a parliamentary reform reintroducing “a more near relation between the representatives and the people” and aiming at an “equal representation of the people” (XXII, 1421). The door for constitutional innovation was opened, though excessive conceptual revisions played no role in this proposal. There was no doubt as to the novelty of the proposal. Thomas Pitt, William’s cousin, immediately warned about the disastrous consequences of the proposed kind of reform. In his view, the rise of an excessive form of democracy was the danger: The reform would “let loose the imaginations of the public” and provoke “the passions of the multitude”. According to Thomas Pitt, the notion of equal representation was unconstitutional, and he rejected the “wild and extravagant ideas” circulating in the public sphere and viewed the idea of universal consent for laws as a product of speculative theorists. In parliamentary history he found that the knights had originally constituted “a complete representation of the people”, a function that they still exercised no matter how they were elected (XXII, 1423–1429). His cousin’s reform scheme, by contrast, was destructive of the political

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significance of Parliament in that it replaced a proper aristocratic influence in the Commons with the influence of everybody: Let us take care, that by innovation purely democratical, and which shall remove from us that influence to which we owe so much of our importance, we do not reduce ourselves back again to that state, when the great influence of all may crush us under its feet (XXII, 1427).

Much of this view is explained by the fact that Thomas Pitt had been elected from a borough which he himself owned. He was not, therefore, necessarily “one of the representatives of the people of England” (XXII, 1436). Not denying his own interest, he maintained that the principle of equal representation had never been applied to any free government. The very idea appeared to him to be “the most extravagant, the most impracticable, the most visionary and absurd” (XXII, 1425–1426). Extending democracy through representation was not an option for Thomas Pitt. The arguments against the bill can be summarized as follows: Archibald Macdonald maintained that all parts of Britain were already represented. Looking at other countries, it was a common case that the numbers of the inhabitants and their representatives did not correspond: “[W]itness Holland, where Amsterdam sent no more delegates than the smallest province, yet no complaint was made of any unfair representation” (XXII, 1429). John Rolle saw a philosophical conspiracy behind the reform scheme, having Enlightenment philosophy in mind. In his view, “a set of speculative men” had “stirred the people up to ask for something which they never before thought of ” (XXII, 1431). A third type of counter-argument was presented by Richard Rigby, who maintained that the associations that were campaigning for reform provided no proper way of sounding “the sense of the people”. Rather, the Commons should be trusted on this matter (XXII, 1436). There were also forceful arguments in favour of the proposal. Charles Turner argued that the American war had demonstrated how “the House of Commons at present were not the representatives of the people” as they could not hear “the voice of the people” (XXII, 1431). Fox, now the Foreign Secretary, was unhappy with the “virtual representation” and denied correspondence between “the voice of the people” and the votes of the Commons. After a year’s campaigning for a reform, he considered May 1782 the right moment to pass one before “the people would in the end assert their own rights” (XXII,

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1432–1433).109 Pitt, Fox and the other advocates of the reform received 141 votes as opposed to 161, partly because of absence on the government side.110 This was no triumph for representation or democracy, but an atmosphere enabling a further redefinition of the concepts had certainly been created as a result of Pitt’s motion.111 The rest of 1782 was a time of constant political ferment. Legislation excluding some government officials from the Commons and supporting economic reform was passed, but the sudden death of Rockingham led to a split in the administration. The public debate saw the appearance of numerous conventional if not downright reactionary contributions. Joseph Cawthorne, for instance, even though he saw government as “created by the people”, left no doubt as to the role of Parliament: “[T]he authority of the People of England is totally absorbed in the Parliament [. . .] the Vox Populi is only to be heard in the Senate.”112 Participation of “the People, or the collective body” in politics as well as “the Majesty of the people” remained out of the question, as the people tended to be “such free-thinkers in politics as well as religion”.113 Francis Basset warned about new applications of the maxim Vox populi, vox Dei which he considered to be likely 109 Steinmetz 1993, 86, sees this as an unrealistic proposition in the first place. Yet Fox carried on the campaign outside Parliament, speaking about the power of the people to control the Crown through the Commons and about its remaining power to censure the actions of the representatives. He also hoped that “the voice of the People” would be heard in further petitions for parliamentary reform. Charles James Fox, The Speech of . . . Charles James Fox, at a General Meeting of the Electors of Westminster, Assembled in Westminster-Hall, July 17, 1782 . . . (London) [1782], 12–13. 110 Christie 1962, 147. 111 Reactions against democracy followed, in any case. Only a week later, the concept of democracy was used in a highly pejorative sense in the Lords, recalling the danger of the anarchy of the masses. The Marquis of Graham proposed that a new kind of militia should be created in Scotland to ensure the safety of the nation. For Graham, the creation of a citizen militia would be a “constitutional” measure that would place “arms in the hands of the middle class of the community, who had little to gain, and much to lose by troubles and commotions”. The idea behind this proposal was that the middling classes “would be a shield to the constitution against the turbulent grasp of democracy or the encroachments of the Crown” (PRVII, 162–163), that is, they would constitute a balancing force between the monarchy and the popular element, adding to the balancing effect of the aristocracy. Only a few Lords supported the proposal, and some opposed it as leading to slavery. Sir C. Turner, PR, VII, 164. 112 Joseph Cawthorne, A Constitutional Defence of Government (London 1782), 7, 9, 18. 113 Cawthorne, A Constitutional Defence, 1782, 19–20, 27; For the meanings of the phrase “freethinkers in politics”, see Ihalainen 1999.

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to lead to a devilish mob rule and the loss of all liberties.114 Finally, Josiah Tucker attacked Lockean claims that the people was the fountain of power. For him, “a democratic Government is despotic in its very Nature” and indeed a “many headed Monster”.115 The approach of the opening of the session in December 1782 offered the unpopular Shelburne ministry an opportunity to carry on the redefinition of the political role of the people attempted by North a year before. The context for a new attempt was provided by the signing of the far-from-satisfactory peace preliminaries with America. After the debates on parliamentary reform in spring, it also seemed requisite to give some recognition to the people in the political process, particularly as the Prime Minister himself was sympathetic to reform. Shelburne’s task was all the more demanding in that the combined opposition of North and Fox was waiting for a chance to undermine any proposed reformulation. In his speech, George III addressed Parliament, without hesitation, as the representatives of his people. He underlined the importance of their opinions and emphasized their duties as subjects and decisionmakers on behalf of his people. The monarch seemed open to hearing “the sense of my parliament and my people” (XXIII, 205). But then followed a fateful turn in royal rhetoric as the King stated: “I have sacrificed every consideration of my own, to the wishes and opinion of my people” (XXIII, 207). To counterbalance this provocative suggestion, the monarch recognized the contribution of the people in the war effort more clearly than in any previous Speech from the Throne. The King referred to “the entire confidence which subsists between me and my people”, pointing out that “the signal spirit and bravery of my people” had been demonstrated, and asserted that he would also continue to trust “the spirit of my people” in the future (XXIII, 207–208). A long list of proposals closed with an appeal to the members of parliament both in the name of the King’s people and the monarch himself: “My people expect these qualifications of you; and I call for them” (XXIII, 210). All in all, in comparison with previous Royal Speeches the content had been largely renewed, and in ways that turned out to be highly controversial. Shelburne obviously misinterpreted the pre114

Francis Basset, Baron Basset of Stratton, Thoughts on Equal Representation (London 1783), 19, 21. 115 Josiah Tucker, Four Letters on Important National Subjects, Addresses to . . . the Earl of Shelburne . . . The second edition, (London) [1783], 75, 98.

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vailing feelings in Parliament and handled the speech in a way that cost him royal confidence. As the head of the executive power, he was making concessions in response to parliamentary pressure and the change of ministry, but the opposition saw the case differently. The Lords acknowledged the concessions “to the wishes and opinions of your people” and “attention to the true interests of your people” (XXIII, 220). Only Richmond called for a reform of “a mock of representation”, referring to the Commons (XXIII, 220). In the Commons, the response was mixed. The Address, drafted by Philip Yorke, did not acknowledge or elaborate on the concessions regarding the political role of the people; it was simply supportive of the monarchy. In reality, the members were in strong disagreement about the Royal Speech. Burke considered it one of “hypocrisy, self-commendation, contradiction, and folly”. He saw the suggestion that the views of the monarch and those of the people differed as an unconstitutional attempt by the ministry to retain its popularity. Even worse was the demand of obedience at the end of the speech. According to Burke, it questioned the supervisory role of the people over the actions of the administration. Instead of acknowledging the proposed formulation, the members should remember “the duty which they owed to the people of England, to declare that they would never submit to be slandered or tutored by the King’s ministers”. It was, according to Burke, “from the people of England that they were to receive rebuke as well as counsel” (XXIII, 268, 271–272). The Commons should be seen explicitly as the representatives of the people, functioning independently of the executive power, including the King. Fox shared Burke’s views with regard to the inappropriate content of the Royal Speech. The gravest mistake of the government was its tendency to undermine the constitutional role of the people: He saw the minister’s intention: he meant to wound the liberties of the people, by rendering that House odious, thereby to strengthen the power of the crown; a design as alarming as it was insidious, and he had long considered this to be the plan of the present minister (XXIII, 276).

Particularly threatening was the attempt to transfer the controlling power over the ministry from Parliament to the Crown and to make the ministry control Parliament instead: [. . .] the command of disinterestedness was a miserable attempt to gain popularity, and was, of all other ideas that could be possibly imagined, the most preposterous, and thrown out for the most preposterous

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chapter four purpose, to invite the people to fly to the Treasury and the crown, as an asylum from corruption; thereby meaning to insinuate to the people, that they could and ought to have no confidence in their representatives, and that they must seek for protection in the crown. This was what he termed the most insidious attack that could be formed, [. . .], against the constitution, [. . .] (XXIII, 277).

The solution to this constitutional crisis lay in the people; they would reject the ministerial trick against the Commons: [. . .] he had a confidence in the good sense and energy of the people of England, that they would never be brought hastily to entertain suspicions of that House; and when they did, that they would not fly to the crown for deliverance (XXIII, 277–278).

Not unlike Burke, Fox presented the people as a political agent that was independent of both the ministry and the Crown and trusted in its representatives in the Commons. As a consequence of attempts to get out of the American war and fierce rivalry between Whig factions, language referring to the people was being used in new ways by both the ministry and its opponents. While the Shelburne ministry had interpreted the situation as demanding concessions and expressed this view in language referring to the people, the foremost opposition speakers rejected their attempts, attributing sinister motives to them, as they themselves carried on using and developing the same language. The constitutional crisis of 1782 initiated a period of transformation in that the use of language referring to the people became even more frequent and the meaning of the concept of democracy was revaluated. The debates of the following years on peace with America, parliamentary reform and the organization of the government of the East India Company provided further opportunities for revised uses of these concepts. In spring 1783, the Shelburne ministry, which had failed to find support for the peace preliminaries, was replaced, despite royal opposition, by a coalition of William Henry Cavendish Bentinck, the Duke of Portland (a Rockingham Whig), Fox and North.116 During the negotiations for the new ministry in March, the Foxites made abundant use of references to the people. Daniel Parker Coke, a supporter of the Association Movement, conceded that Parliament, in proposing a new ministry, was entering the sphere of the royal 116

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 250.

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prerogative. However, it was precisely the duty of the Commons to communicate the wishes of the people to the ruler and to find “an administration entitled to the confidence of the people”: [. . .] it became the duty of Parliament to interfere, and to apply to the Sovereign for redress. It was the public call of the people by its representative body, and he hoped it would not only meet the compliance of the Sovereign, but that it would have the unanimous concurrence of the House (PR, IX, 513).

Charles Howard, the Earl of Surrey (a Foxite), spoke on similar lines concerning the political role of the people. While the King was to be respected as the sovereign, “there was also a high respect due to the people”. Both sides could be served if the Commons underlined “the hearty support, confidence, and good wishes of his people”. Using the potential unrest of the people as a threat, Surrey suggested that if the Commons did not put pressure on the monarch to form a new ministry, “the people would in a manner still more exceptionable” (PR, IX, 514). The picture which Surrey painted recalled the rise of the colonists against their mother country a decade earlier and the Association Movement of 1780. The established order would no longer be safe if popular assemblies took the initiative instead of the Commons: [. . .] the people would not merely assemble to have a more equal representation, but would assemble in all parts of the kingdom, and insist on knowing where the blame lay, that no administration could be fixed on, whose wisdom could relieve their distresses (PR, IX, 539).

This reference to the Association Movement was evidently part of the strategy of the Foxites to strengthen their position in the formation of the new administration and to advance the cause of parliamentary reform. It may also reflect a genuine fear of the mob, arising from Surrey’s own observations of mob rage during the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots, which had in fact made him, previously a Catholic, convert to the Church of England. The alternative view was that “the sense of the people” had already been taken into consideration in the plans for a new administration. John Buller referred to the controversial Royal Speech as demonstration of the readiness of the King to renounce his views in order “to comply with the wishes of his people” (PR, IX, 514). James Martin opposed the inclusion of the Foxites in the ministry, maintaining that the people were merely being manipulated in order to obtain their support for it (PR, IX, 515). Macdonald made an anti-democratic

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statement, warning of an over-representation of the popular element in the constitution. He considered “the democracy more to be feared than the regal power” (PR, IX, 524, 527–528), “the democracy” referring here to the domination of the Commons. The conclusion was that democracy needed to be kept in check by letting the King decide who formed the new ministry. Two more speeches by key debaters demonstrate how the concept of the people was used to argue both for and against the nomination of a particular kind of ministry in 1783. Fox himself carried on his exegesis of the Speech from the Throne, concentrating to a great extent on the meaning of ‘the people’. Since the speech had suggested that the King knew the sentiments of the people better than their representatives, Fox claimed that the Commons was entitled to address the King in connection with the nomination of the ministry, stating: “The people expect an Administration they can confide in, and to you they call for it.” A change of government was needed because the current advisors were rather acting “in opposition to the wishes of his people and to the sense of his Parliament” (PR, IX, 518, 520). Fox’s defence of the right of his party to be included in the ministry was uncompromising. It had to happen because “the people demanded it, and the kingdom wanted it; therefore it should have [the King’s] concurrence” (PR, IX, 530). Fox’s radical conclusion was that the actions of the monarch should be determined by the will of the people in the nomination of a ministry. William Pitt, who had not accepted the post of the Prime Minister offered to him in February, was rather more suspicious than the Foxite appeals about what the people wanted. He had doubts as to how “the confidence of the people” was to be measured impartially: [. . .] who were to be the judges of the particular men who had the confidence of the people, and how that matter was to be decided. At present there did not appear any criterion by which such an opinion could be formed (PR, IX, 535–536).

Appeals to the opinion of the people were thus being used both to justify and to question the legitimacy of the proposed new ministry. The temporary solution to the government crisis took the form of an alliance between Fox and North, something that was widely despised outside Parliament.117 After the cooperation between Pitt and Fox

117

Wilson 1995, 268.

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ended, rival political groups adopted language referring to the people to justify their different political programmes, which led to the further application of these terms in a variety of debates between the ministry and the opposition. Before that, however, Pitt made use of the exceptional situation in which the self-proclaimed friends of the people had seemed to be dominant in the ministry, and introduced a bill for parliamentary reform on 7 May 1783. The proposal was a much more moderate one than that of 1782, corresponding with the aims of the Yorkshire Association rather than those of any radical thinkers. Pitt’s speech was received very favourably, but the motion itself failed as a result of the change of power from Shelburne to the Fox-North coalition.118 Pitt seriously miscalculated the support for his bill, although it did result in a debate in which the concept of people was used in highly favourable senses. Pitt’s initial suggestion was that recent developments had caused such deviation from the original constitution that a reform restoring the Commons into “the guardians of the people’s freedom” was indispensable (XXIII, 828, 830). Unlike some radicals, Pitt did not speak for universal suffrage but for a slightly modified concept of virtual representation: [. . .] his idea of representation was this, that the members once chosen, and returned to parliament, were, in effect, the representatives of the people at large, as well of those who did not vote at all, or who, having voted, gave their votes against them, [. . .] (XIII, 831).

Thomas Powys turned out to be again the leading opponent of the motion. The moment was wrong, and it remained impossible to know what the people at large really wanted. Furthermore, while “the sense of the people” was to be respected, it had to be rejected when it turned out to be unreasonable (XXIII, 836). Thomas Pitt, too, opposed the motion, maintaining that the people at large wanted no such innovation. He regretted the way in which some members were ready “to throw all possible weight into the scale of the people” (XXIII, 842). There was no guarantee of the support of the ministry either. North consistently associated ‘the people’ with Parliament, maintaining that the American war had been “the war of the people”, fought to defend “the just rights of parliament, or in other words, of the people of Great Britain” (XXIII 849). North, coming from a safe pocket borough 118

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owned by his family, found no evidence whatsoever that the people were calling for a reform. Given that so few petitions with so few signatures had been received, the “real sense of the mass of the people” was not accessible through such documents (XXIII, 850–852). North’s uncompromising definition of the concept of representation excluded constitutional reforms, as all power was, and remained, in the hands of the King-in-Parliament: We are not the deputies, but the representatives of the people. We are not to refer to them before we determine. We stand here as they would stand; to use our own discretion, without seeking any other guidance under heaven (XXIII, 853).

The representative system was perfect as it stood, and there was no need to make the members into deputies by adding to the amount of popular influence in Parliament. Parliament deliberated and decided, and outsiders had no right to intervene in politics. Welbore Ellis, a doctor of civil law and North’s former minister, further proposed an exclusive notion of representation, pointing out: [. . .] representation, as now insisted on, was a word unknown to our ancestors, who never either argued or wrote upon it with any view to the sort of construction that it had now obtained (XXIII, 865).

‘Representation’ could still be seen as an innovation foreign to the original form of the British constitution. Ellis thus rejected the common argument that representation was the quintessential idea of the British constitution since time immemorial. In addition to Ellis’ knowledge of the law, there is also a more mundane human explanation for his interpretation of representation: Ellis himself had sat in the House for fifty-two years without ever having had to contest an election. The defenders of Pitt’s bill were suddenly a minority. Fox made an attempt to change the situation by taking the floor, despite his position as Foreign Secretary. He spoke openly for the renovation of the constitution; the war in America had revealed that the Commons “did not speak the wishes of the people quick enough”. Thereafter, fortunately, “the republicanism of the people” had taken over the royal prerogative. Even if no universal suffrage was thinkable, Fox spoke in favour of a moderate reform. According to him “the best government [was] where the people had the greatest share in it” (XXIII, 862–864). This indicated how far Fox had gone in his adoption of language referring to the people since 1780. He was speaking openly in favour a popular

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government based on an extended suffrage and dared to pronounce the despised word “republicanism” in the Commons. A rather more analytical speech on parliamentary reform was made by Captain John Luttrell. Luttrell, speaking with the authority of a naval hero, saw a risk of “a most dangerous aristocracy” developing if the representation of counties and boroughs were extended through a partial reform. An elected aristocracy, contending for power with the Crown, was likely to sacrifice “the most valuable rights of the people”. A much broader reform was needed if the rights claimed by the people were derived “from the original institution of representation” (XXIII, 865–867). Reviewing Continental writers on the British constitution as well as medieval constitutional sources, Luttrell interpreted them, unlike Ellis, as supporting an extensive reform: [. . .] the people by their proxies constituted an important collateral branch of the government more than 500 years ago, [. . .]; so that it should seem to a complete or perfect representation they were originally entitled, and therefore, if any parliamentary reform was to be made in the plenitude of justice and in the spirit of our constitution, it ought to extend to an equal representation of the whole kingdom (XXIII, 868).

This was the theoretical case for reform. In practice, however, Luttrell found such a reform “difficult, inexpedient, impolitic, and perhaps impracticable”. As a consequence, he considered the established form of representation to be as good as any suggested. Though excluding an extensive reform in the end, Luttrell did see a possibility for introducing what he regarded as an entirely new democratic element of Parliament: He said, that with respect to introducing the democratical part of the legislature, whether the change of circumstance in the continual flux of human affairs rendered prudent and necessary, whether from the good intention of establishing a more permanent common interest between the representative and his immediate constituent, or from what other cause it arose, there were various and discordant opinions about, nor was it material to the present purpose; [. . .] (XXIII, 869).

Luttrell viewed representation and the existence of a democratic element in the constitution as positive phenomena. He speculated on the possibility of some kind of combination of representation and democracy: the purpose of the democratic element would be to ensure that the representatives shared the interests of their electors. Even so Luttrell, too, rejected the possibility of a purely democratic reform. He

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rather recommended that the Commons curtail the growth of aristocracy, as that could endanger both the position of the Crown and the people (XXIII, 870). The result of the debate of May 1783 was no reform, either aristocratic or democratic, but the discussion went on; it had already given birth to the speculative idea of a more democratic legislative assembly. The conclusion of the American war and the recognition of the independence of the United States in September 1783 removed the last barriers to a free constitutional debate in Britain. Discussion was also provoked by a widespread dissatisfaction with the Fox-North ministry. The advocates of reform, in particular, viewed the alliance as mere opportunism,119 and this reaction became a further force motivating the use of language referring to the people. At the opening of Parliament in November, the ministry decided to avoid appeals to the people, despite Fox’s previous rhetoric and fame as a man of the people, and reintroduced traditional formulations emphasizing “the strength of the nation” instead (XXIII, 1124– 1125). While no major confrontation between the ministry and the Commons was seen then, Pitt and his allies challenged the ministry on Fox’s India Bill just two weeks later. The controversy concerned the organization of the administration of the East India Company, the strongest of all British trading organizations, ruling an entire subcontinent. Fox’s position as a spokesman of “the people”, and the equal willingness of the Pittite opposition to use language referring to the people, gave rise to debates in which the concept featured prominently. References to ‘popular government’ and ‘democracy’ were also frequent whenever the constitutional role of the people was touched upon, the opposition claiming that the proposed administrative model endangered the sensitive constitutional balance. Fox’s defence of his bill was based on a far-reaching references to popular government and publicity, which provoked further modifications in language by his fellow members in a number of debates. Indeed, Burke used similar formulations in a related debate three years later. Fox argued: “It was the character of despotic governments to be dark; of popular governments to have publicity; and he averred that it was their beauty and basis.” He then proceeded to propose that the commissioners supervising the Company were to be members of par-

119

Christie 1962, 192; Gunn 1983, 85; Corfield, Green & Harvey 2001, 160.

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liament responsible to the Commons. In his model, the people would control a key financial institution, as befitted a popular government (XXIII, 1277–1278). For some opposition members, these were excessively radical suggestions, sounding like democracy and the surrender of sovereignty over India to a few men chosen by the Commons. However, some Rockingham Whigs welcomed the proposal, including the young James Erskine, later the Earl of Rosslyn, who endorsed the view that Parliament should exercise sovereignty over India. In his speech, the phrase “the sovereignty of parliament”, which has been seen as the key doctrine of the British constitution in the eighteenth century, was pronounced for the first time in the surviving parliamentary records (XXIII, 1293, 1295).120 A young man, like Pitt in 1781, was here giving direct expression to an initially judicial notion that had been apparent in political debate for quite some time. The bill made its way through the Commons to the Lords, but the majority of the speakers, mostly Pittites, opposed it in both Houses. In the Commons, [George] Hardinge interpreted the bill as increasing royal influence at the cost of the people (XXIII, 1259). William Plumer represented the bill as a source of further corruption, endangering “the general privileges of the nation” (XXIII, 1260). For Archibald Macdonald, likewise, the bill was a trap “for the liberties of the nation” (XXIII, 1298). Thomas Powys insinuated that the scheme was no more than an attempt to make Fox independent of both the monarch and the people because he was no longer such a favourite of the people as previously (XXIII, 1310). As a member of a committee investigating Indian affairs, and having participated in the formulation of the East India settlement, Burke had considerable expertise on the subject. Even if he had originally opposed the introduction of British institutions to India, his concern over corruption in the Company made him fear parallel developments in Britain and support the reform suggested by Fox.121 Above all, he did not want any constitutional innovations to be introduced to 120 For the background to this important debate, see Dickinson, 1976, 189–210, and Dickinson 1998a, 65, 81; Keith Perry has simplified the ideological division between the British and the Americans in the mid-eighteenth century by arguing: “As British thought and practice moved towards the concept of parliamentary sovereignty colonial ideas were far closer to an idea of the sovereignty of the people.” Perry 1990, 17–19. 121 Langford 2004.

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Britain via India. Though he considered neither democracy nor aristocracy as an element of government to be undesirable per se, any attempt to increase the power of either of these elements—even in the government of a distant colony—was unacceptable. No reform towards a popular government was needed; neither was there any risk of a growth in the Crown’s influence (XXIII, 1376–1377). The fate of the democratic element of the constitution if the bill was passed was seen in other ways, too. John Ord opposed the bill because it “gave such a weight to the prerogative, as might in the end overbalance the democratical part of the constitution”. In other words, the democratic element (the Commons) had to be defended “because the moment the balance of the constitution was lost, our liberties were extinct” (XXIII, 1394–1395). Ord considered that the bill tended to increase the feared patronage and would only strengthen the position of the ministry. This kind of defence of popular government gave ‘democracy’ a more positive sense. Fox responded by accusing the opposition of mischievous attempts to alarm both the Crown and the people over the bill. Trying himself to make the best possible use of language referring to the people, he suggested that, when he had been part of the opposition, the opposition had enjoyed popular support but that this was not the case with the current opposition (XXIII, 1427). Fox was right about all sides becoming alarmed. Both the King and much of the public debate rejected the bill as an extension of ministerial patronage, and the Lords was forced to repudiate Fox, which led to the fall of the ministry. Pitt, who had advised the monarch to publish his views, was nominated Prime Minister in a minority government. This incident also revealed major differences in constitutional conceptions.122 There were few defenders of the democratic element of the constitution in the Lords debate, in which the effects of the royal intervention could be distinctly heard. Edward, the Baron of Thurlow, Lord Chancellor and the King’s loyal servant, argued instead that the bill tended to destroy the liberties of the people by giving excessive power to Fox (XXIV, 125). The Earl of Abingdon, a major critic of the Fox-North administration, wanted to see the Lords assume their role as “the mediator between the king and people” in this issue, holding a balance between the two parts of the constitution (XXIV, 136). As

122

Holmes & Szechi 1993, 250; Dickinson 1989, 2; Black 2001, 254.

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an opponent of excessive notions of parliamentary authority, he questioned Fox’s credibility as the self-declared “Minister of the People”, suggesting that Fox was merely abusing rhetorical references to the people as an excuse to neglect royal views. Fox was no more than [. . .] the minister [. . .] of a corrupt majority of the House of Commons, where the people now are, as he says; but not the minister of the people, as when mounted on his stages at Covent-garden and Westminster-hall (XXVI, 137).123

The increasing common claim of the extra-parliamentary opposition that the majority of the Commons did not actually constitute ‘the people’, abundantly exploited by Fox previously, was used here against the Foxites. The continuity of Fox’s popularity was likewise questioned. If Fox’s attempt was not prevented, he would make himself into “a middle power between the king and people” and destroy both the royal prerogative and the rights and liberties of the people (XXIV, 137–138). Abingdon also misrepresented Burke’s Thoughts on the present Discontents—published in an entirely different context in 1770—to demonstrate the claim that the ultimate goal of the administration was to establish an aristocracy subverting both the King and the people (XXIV, 139). The result was thus a conspiracy theory in which a political opponent was accused of creating an aristocracy. The Duke of Richmond, a member of the anti-Fox alliance and a future minister, likewise found a “dangerous innovation” in the bill. He viewed the bill as an attempt to introduce a false democratic system of government.124 According to this nobleman, who had studied in Holland, the example of the Dutch Republic showed that democracy should not be allowed to interfere with executive power. The ongoing war with the Republic gave relevance to the reference to suspect Dutch republicanism in this context, particularly as the Patriot movement was making progress there. Dutch “democracy” was something that a British nobleman did not want to see either at home or in the colonies (XXIV, 184). This statement also puts Richmond’s public calls

123 Polling in the Westminster elections took place in Covent Garden, and Fox made his speeches in Westminster Hall. Corfield, Freen & Harvey 2001, 163. 124 Richmond had published his ideas on manhood suffrage and annual parliaments—controversial even among the Rockinghamites—in a pamphlet Letter to Colonel Sharman earlier that year. Lowe 2004; He does not seem to have spoken so eagerly about the rights of the people once he entered Pitt’s ministry after the fall of Fox and North.

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for reform based on universal representation, universal suffrage and annual parliaments in perspective:125 “democracy” was not a term that this radical used to define his goals. In the face of a humiliating defeat, Fox further irritated his political opponents by describing himself as “the minister of a great and free people”. Anticipating his dismissal, he promised to quit office before “the voice of the nation” demanded it. “I ever stood, and wish only and always to stand on public ground,” he said and argued further: “The people of England have made me what I am; it was at their instance I have been called to a station in their service” (XXIV, 213–214, 220– 221). Fox remained, in his own words, a minister of the people, but his rhetoric had lost its ability to persuade. Nor did his parliamentary majority count once the royal will was against him. At that time, Fox was alone in acting so conspicuously in the name of the people, but his pioneering style was followed by future ministers in their attempts to legitimate their policies. Further Debates on Parliamentary Reform, 1784–1785 The nomination of Pitt as Prime Minister opened a period of over twenty years of fierce but respectful verbal duelling between the prime minister and Fox, the leading speaker of the opposition in the House of Commons. It created the setting depicted on the front cover of this book in the context of 1793. The debating style of the two differed in many ways: Pitt counted on the well-ordered presentation of arguments, Fox was ready to challenge every detail of his opponents’ arguments. Both were spontaneous in presenting ideas, but Pitt was much more circumspect in his statements than Fox.126 From our point of view, it is interesting that the Foxite opposition challenged Pitt’s ministry with language referring to the people from the very beginning. This kind of language had, after all, been employed by both men ever since 1780. In January 1784, the Foxites moved that a committee be nominated to investigate the state of the nation under Pitt’s minority government. In the ensuing debate, both the ministry and the opposition legitimated their stances with references to the popular support they enjoyed. 125 126

Christie 1962, 186. Christie 1982, 181–183.

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Erskine127 pointed out that all privileges, including monarchical prerogatives, were “but trusts for the people”. The will of the majority of the Commons had been ignored: “The voice of the people’s representatives in that House had been recently, repeatedly, and loudly lifted against them” (XXIV, 273). This kind of policy had deprived the system of the “vital spirit of popular government”. Erskine was also highly suspicious of the ability of Pitt’s ministry to secure the support of the majority of the people in new elections (XXIV, 275, 282). Sir William Pulteney, an independent politician, maintained that “whenever it was suspected the House of Commons did not speak language referring to the people, it ought to be dissolved” (XXIV, 289). The frustration of the Foxite majority with the prevailing situation led to some quite radical definitions of the political role of the people. Henry Dundas, a lawyer, reformulated North’s words, declaring that “the King without the support of his people was nobody; with it he was a great Prince” (XXIV, 514). General Henry Seymour Conway defined the Commons, rather optimistically, as the safeguard of the constitutional rights of the people: The spirit of the representatives of the people alone seems to ride with the dangers which threaten their privileges. It is now that the House of Commons answers the end of its institution, and proves, not in speculation but in practice, the glorious palladium of our rights. Nor is this the first time that the people and constitution of England have found a safe and permanent asylum in the magnanimity and patriotism of the Commons (PR, XII, 516).

Several appeals to the support of the people enjoyed by the Foxites were needed before Pitt responded. Pitt recognized the principle that ministers were servants of the interests of the people but he made no concessions over the popular legitimacy of the power of his cabinet. No matter what the opposition might claim, the actions of the ministry were based on the confidence of the people rather than that of the throne alone (PR, XII, 536). The assumption and rhetoric claiming that political power was derived from the people had already reached such a venerable position in British political culture that Pitt’s government needed to resort to it, despite its minority position. Pitt took a risk by

127

Fox.

Either James or Thomas Erskine may have been in question as both supported

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counting on popular support for him against Fox and North—a risk that paid off. Another attempt against Pitt’s ministry led to a further exchange of opinions on the political role of the people. Pitt found a defender in Cecil Wray, who claimed that the voice of the Commons indeed differed from that of the people. As “the voice of the House of Commons was no longer the voice of the people of England”, the House must be dissolved (PR, XIII, 31). Fox wanted no dissolution but a change of ministry and parliamentary reform. His defined the Commons as “the only constitutional asylum of genuine liberty, [. . .] even in this land of liberty”. More particularly, in the Commons, “the people of England assembled by their delegates and claimed an independence and a weight in the government, which they did in no other kingdom in the world” (PR, XIII, 36). As for Pitt’s ministry, it was acting “against the interest and inclination of the people, whose power in the scale of the constitution was being thus annihilated” (PR, XIII, 44). On 11 February, when the composition of the ministry was once again being debated, the Commons was viewed as the democratic element in the constitution in a manner originally suggested by Blackstone. Pitt himself spoke with considerable reverence about the Commons and the people, recognizing the significance of the views of the people despite his minority position. The suggestion was that new elections would reveal the real “sense of the people”: [. . .] he ought to look for the confidence of his Sovereign, and for the confidence of that House; he would go farther, he ought to look for the confidence of the House of Lords and of the people (PR, XIII, 98).

Pitt continued by stating that “the confidence of that House was absolutely necessary, and that an Administration could not last that did not possess it” (PR, XIII, 98). Nevertheless, he insisted that it was his duty to serve the King and people until the election irrespective of the opinion of the majority of the Commons (PR, XIII, 99). He knew that the opposition was unable to agree on an alternative coalition, that popular addresses supported the right of the King to nominate him as his minister, and that he would be campaigning in the coming elections with royal funds.128

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Gunn 1983, 85; Black 2001, 254.

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Pitt’s remarks caused Pulteney to emphasize the identity of the voice of the Commons and that of the people. This opposition man claimed “the House of Commons, or at least a small majority of it, when not supported by the people, to be no formidable body at all” (PR, XIII, 104). Charles Stanhope, later Viscount Mahon, a supporter of Pitt, maintained that it was, in principle, downright “criminal [. . .] to oppose the wishes of the House” but that this was a special case. Stanhope declared that he [. . .] was so great a friend to the democracy of this government, that except for the purpose of saving the constitution, he would not suffer prerogative to stand in the way of the just rights of that House (XXIV, 593).

Here “democracy”, used in a positive sense, stood for the Commons. Stanhope, who had participated in local politics during his stay in Geneva, was one of the young guard who entertained new ideas, supporting parliamentary reform, and who were capable of expressing them in debates.129 However, in Stanhope’s description, the monarch also had his rights, and any attempt by the Commons to nominate ministers would violate the constitution. Democracy was to stay in its confined sphere in the constitution (XXIV, 593–594). Democracy could thus be highly esteemed in rhetorical terms while in fact it was being subordinated to the royal prerogative. In any case, “democracy” was now being used more frequently and in more favourable senses than previously. It was considered an element of the constitution that by the mid-1780s could be referred to by almost any parliamentary speaker, and in most cases, in a neutral or positive sense. On 1 March, when Fox attacked Pitt’s ministry again, the latter replied by looking for a conventional compromise in the definition of the British form of government. The Prime Minister argued that the British constitution was neither a pure monarchy nor a pure democracy but an ideal combination of these two elements. What is noteworthy is Pitt’s readiness to simplify the description into two elements instead of three. The omission of aristocracy increased the relevance of democracy, which nevertheless remained strictly limited by monarchy. The arguments of the two sides deserve some more attention.

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Christie 1962, 92.

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Fox started by emphasizing an interconnection between the fates of the constitution, the people of England and the Commons in a situation in which the King favoured a ministry that was not supported by the majority of the representatives of the people. The implication was that “the people of England” had not received “such an influence in government as the constitution has assigned them” and, consequently, that the Commons should defend the popular cause more vigorously. The justification for such a defence was clear: measures had to be taken because “the people were the great source of all power” and the Commons “undoubtedly were competent to protect the rights of the people”. The members were “stationed as centinels by the people” and “the friends of the people”, and they were also accountable to the people for their actions. The uniform message of the Commons should be: “We wish to increase the weight of the people in the constitution,” that is to strengthen control over the administration, to call for the responsibility of the ministry to the Commons, and to dismiss a ministry which had failed to earn “the confidence of the representatives of the people” (XXIV, 687–688, 690–691, 700). Fox’s position as a frustrated opposition leader confronting a minority government nominated by the King, who despised the Foxites, thus produced a radicalized version of the doctrine of political power originating in the people. In Fox’s words, the parliamentary majority was now defending the cause of the people. William Gerard Hamilton responded to these grave accusations. In a political culture in which the people had generally come to be seen as the source of all legitimate power, Hamilton was forced to deny claims that Pitt’s ministry had failed to respond to “the sense of the nation”. The government’s interpretation of the situation was quite the opposite of these claims, and the ministry was seen as staying in power with the support of “the people at large”. Another argument was the right of the King to nominate “his own ministers” independently of the Commons. This system constituted “a limited monarchy and a good king” and was an alternative to “a dangerous democracy or a tyrannical republic” (XXIV, 700–701). Hamilton’s reply shows how democracy could, despite its revaluation in the preceding years, still be viewed as a threatening future prospect. Some of the Pittites were also distancing themselves from calls for an extended power of the people, which is what they took “democracy” to mean, and defending the monarchical element instead. Democracy was thus viewed here not only as a necessary element of the constitution but also as the oppo-

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site of a limited monarchy. The association between “democracy” and “republic” referred simultaneously to the English seventeenth-century republican Commonwealth and to the emerging form of government in America. Democracy was, perhaps, being increasingly regarded as more than a mere element of the mixed constitution—in fact, it began to be seen as an alternative to it. William Wilberforce, Pitt’s close friend who was at that time actively engaged in the Yorkshire Association movement and extraparliamentary opposition,130 set out to distinguish between popular and parliamentary support for the government. In doing so, he used a strategy which the opposition had previously favoured. It was now indeed the government side that suggested a difference between “the interest of the people” and that of the Commons. Pitt’s ministry “had the confidence of the people, although they wanted the support of that House”, as was demonstrated by the popular addresses pouring into London from various parts of the country. Through these addresses, Prime Minister Pitt could turn “implicitly to the voice of the people” and bypass Parliament. As far as the Foxite opposition was concerned, Wilberforce presented it as a mere parliamentary party that was acting against the interests of the people (XXIV, 703–704). After Fox’s and Wilberforce’s speeches, the people were represented as the self-evident source of legitimate power by both the opposition and the ministry. The disagreement was over whether the views of the Foxite majority in the Commons and those of the people at large corresponded or not. Pitt had a clear conception of the state of affairs, and he presented his views by using constitutional terminology. He emphasized his respect for the privileges of Parliament but also saw it as his duty to uphold the royal prerogative. While the Commons had the right to advise the monarch, it was, according to him, unconstitutional to demand that the ministers need enjoy the confidence of the Commons alone. The King should remain free to decide on the composition of the ministry independently of the Commons. Like Hamilton, he made the concepts ‘democracy’ and ‘republic’ near synonyms and counter-concepts to limited monarchy. Democracy was now not merely a harmless and potentially beneficial element of the system, as in his description of it in 1781, but as classical philosophy had taught, an undesirable constitutional alternative in any pure form. Pitt’s rise

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to power made him moderate his language referring to democracy and distinguish its mistaken forms more clearly (XXIV, 708–710): The constitution of this country is its glory; but in what a nice adjustment does its excellence consist! Equally free from the distractions of democracy, and the tyranny of monarchy, its happiness is to be found in its mixture of parts. It was this mixed government which the prudence of our ancestors devised, and which it will be our wisdom inviolably to support. They experienced all the vicissitudes and distractions of a republic. They felt all the vassalage and despotism of a simple monarchy. They abandoned both, and by blending each together, extracted a system which has been the envy and admiration of the world (XXIV, 710–711).

Neither monarchical despotism nor a democratic republic was thinkable in the British constitution, which was a product of the historical experiences of both. Though Pitt was defining the kind of democracy he did not want, his rejection of democracy as being a source of anarchy was a relatively moderate one in comparison with that of classical philosophy. He did not, for example, openly accuse the opposition of advocating democracy in any pejorative sense. The implication was that a degree of democracy was needed as a counterbalance to monarchy so that an ideal limited monarchy could be achieved. The Foxite opposition made yet another attack against the ministry in connection with Alderman Sawbridge’s motion for a debate on parliamentary reform. Sir Watkin Lewes, a founding member of the Society for Constitutional Information, which advocated a more radical version of reform,131 argued that reform was needed after the Commons had failed to follow the sentiments of the people as expressed in their petitions (XXIV, 759). Thomas Powys insisted, instead, that the shared interests of the Commons and the people were demonstrated by their latest Address to the King. This Address, Powys claimed, constituted “a solemn pledge on the part of that House, that it could have no interest but those of the people” (XXIV, 760). Fox did not miss a chance to criticize the Pitt ministry for its contradictory arguments regarding the correspondence between the views of the people and those of the majority of the Commons. Together with the ministry’s apparent unwillingness to advance the cause of reform, these could be

131

Wilson 1995, 260.

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interpreted as signs that the administration, which had just won an election, was already disdaining the people: [. . .] if they would assert that the present House did not speak the sense of the people, and at the same time refused to assist in forming a better, it certainly was fair to argue that they did not wish the sense of the people should be collected, or heard in any House of Commons; [. . .] (XXIV, 761).

Fox’s suggestion that Pitt was unwilling to countenance a reform was a downright insult to Pitt, who had already proposed reform on two occasions. This episode did not take the reform any further, but it demonstrates the high stakes with which language referring to the people was being used by both sides in spring 1784, at a time when a general election was approaching. During the election campaign itself, Pitt received considerable support as the advocate of the cause of the people, thanks to his challenging the Fox-North coalition. Much of his success is also explained by generous financing from the Crown. Whatever the means may have been, Pitt could, after the election, more legitimately present himself as a minister who had the support of the people.132 By 19 May, at the opening of a new Parliament, the situation had changed dramatically. Parliament had been dissolved three years before its normal term, and the elections had created a majority for the previously weak Pitt government. In the Speech from the Throne, the situation in domestic politics was presented as one of complete calm after “recurring [. . .] to the sense of my people” in the elections (XXIV, 804).133 After the constitutional confrontations of the preceding months, the speech was dominated by efforts to persuade Parliament to engage in mutual cooperation with the Crown: You will find me always desirous to concur with you in such measures as may be of lasting benefit to my people: I have no wish but to consult their prosperity, by a constant attention to every object of national concern, by a uniform adherence to the true principles of our free constitution, and by supporting and maintaining, in their just balance, the rights and privileges of every branch of the legislature (XXIV, 805).

132

Gunn 1983, 85–86; Wilson 1995, 268. Even the petitioners for parliamentary reform continued in addressing the King to use the form “your people” rather than simply “the people”. Proceedings of the General Meeting of the Freeholders of the County of York, held at the Castle of York, March 25, 1784 (York 1784), 4. 133

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The supporters of the reform obviously took this as a promise by the ministry to take the reform further. They recalled the formulation ten years later, reminding Pitt of the still unfinished project (XXX, 803). The speeches made in the Lords were particularly supportive of the alliance of George III and Pitt, seeing their measures as an appeal “to the voice of the people” (XXIV, 806–807). In such descriptions, of course, “the people” essentially remained the object of royal action, not an independent political agent. In the Commons, as expected, interpretations about whether or not the elections had communicated the wishes of the people were mixed. John James Hamilton (later the Marquis of Abercorn) argued that the elections had carried “the sentiments of the people” to the throne and proposed an Address in which the King was thanked for his “wisdom and goodness in recurring, at so important a moment, to the sense of your people” (XXIV, 829, 831). The Earl of Surrey disputed such claims, doubting whether “the genuine sense of the people” had been received in elections in which the people had been involved only nominally and which had not resulted from “the people’s free choice” (XXIV, 832–833). John Hussey, the Baron of Delaval, a convert to Pitt’s side, declared the election an expression of widespread support for the Prime Minister against Fox: The right hon. gentleman had been borne into that House through the portal, in the face of open day, on the shoulders of the people. His constituents at Berwick, and the constituents of the whole House, had declared their confidence in his characters; [. . .] (XXIV, 835).

The Pittite majority thus effectively interpreted the election results as an expression of the will of the people. It was left for the reformists to remind them that the election system by no means guaranteed a balanced representation of the people. Sawbridge’s further reform proposal in June, a deliberate attempt to demonstrate that Pitt was incapable of introducing one,134 produced some debate on the nature of democracy as well. The motion put Pitt in a difficult position in that he was in principle in favour of “an equal representation of the people” but considered it necessary to postpone the bill until the next session (XXIV, 976). Ian Christie has found evidence to suggest that Pitt was quite honest in his desire for reform but did not want to be forced to propose bill.135 Fox exploited the

134 135

Christie 1962, 204. Christie 1962, 205–206.

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opportunity to put pressure on the ministry, demanding that the new Parliament demonstrate to the people its readiness to respond to “the feelings and wishes of the great body of the people”. He insisted the ministry could no longer disregard the unanimous will of the people (XXIV, 977–979). The majority of the Commons still had their doubts about a reform, the usual suggestion being that there was not sufficient evidence that the people wished to see one. North, in a famous speech, labelled the calls for reform a dangerous democratic innovation. Any change in the current system of representation was, according to him, a risky experiment not deserving the name of “parliamentary reform”. There was no evidence that the people were calling for a reform, and even if there were, the duty of the Commons was to oppose such improper wishes and thereby also demonstrate their independence of the voters. According to North, the members did not represent a particular province, as in the Dutch States General, but the whole kingdom, and the interests of the kingdom did not require a reform (XXIV, 987–989). North went even further, arguing that the popular element was already so strong that its influence exceeded what the ancient constitution had guaranteed to the people. If some original state of representation were restored, it would actually decrease the relative power of the people, North maintained: Good God! Did gentlemen consider what they said when they talked of renovation, and coupled with it the idea of a more pure representation in parliament, with a view to give the people a larger share of power? The people had more legislative power now than they ever had. The argument held by those who were the most zealous advocates for what was called a reform, was, that they wanted to check the influence of the crown and the influence of the aristocracy, and to give more influence to the democracy. And yet these very gentlemen talked of renovating the constitution, and recurring to first principles. [. . .] In ancient times the people had no share at all in the legislature; [. . .] (XXIV, 990).

For North, the idea of reform endangered the unique British constitution and, besides, tended to “lessen the power and influence of the democracy” contrary to what the reformers seemed to be suggesting (XXIV, 991). North thus turned his reactionary argument into a seeming defence of the popular element in the constitution. He did not question the potentially good effects of democracy, but neither did he want to see any extension of it. While no-one explicitly advocated the extension of the power and influence of democracy in the debate of June 1784, there were

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spokesmen for popular power who turned to different terminology to make related points. Beaufoy maintained that the people did wish for a reform, the evidence being found in “the language of the most popular candidates in all the popular elections”. In other words, the contested elections in the London area showed that a parliamentary reform was “that which the people have most at heart.” If the current Commons was as popular as described by North, it was a proper time for reform and the extension of political freedom. By approving a reform, the members would act as proper agents of the people,136 Beaufoy implied. According to him, it was a sacred maxim of the constitution that “the House of Commons shall be appointed by the people”. As this had not been the practice, the system of representation needed to be reformed. A reform would provide an antidote to the increasing power of the Crown and an effective defence of “the people’s freedom” as well (XXIV, 993–995, 997). The subordinate nature of the representatives in relation to the people was a repeated grievance among the radical advocates of reform. James Martin, for instance, lamented that the Commons had “forgotten the relation they bore to the people, of whom they were the creatures” (XXIV, 998). Even Pitt, though opposing ideas of universal representation realized through universal suffrage, recommended a reform as a way to “have the sense of the people correctly spoken in the House of Commons” (XXIV, 999). The Prime Minister evidently held to his policy in connection with the reform. In later debates in 1784, the meaning of ‘democracy’ was discussed a few more times. Even though criticism of extended democracy did not cease, the debates on Pitt’s India Bill in July contained an argument defending democracy as the popular element of the constitution. This statement did not lead to any broader contestation about the meaning of the concept. Even so, the more frequent use of the term in debates on the constitutional position of the people provided possibilities for a redefinition of the concept, including the advent of positive connotations associated with it. In introducing the bill, Pitt denounced Fox’s bill of 1783 as dangerous to British liberties and presented his alternative as an opportunity

136 The phrase “the agents or representatives of the people” had appeared in Thomas Rutherforth’s Institutes of Natural Law . . . Second edition, (Cambridge 1779), Vol. 2, 401. The phrase was recalled in the debates of the mid-1790s as well.

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to “reconcile and secure the interests of the people of this country, of the people of India, and of the British constitution” (XXIV, 1086). He recognized that the Commons and the people tended to become jealous of their interests whenever influence was discussed. He also represented himself as the interpreter of the opinion of the people, claiming that the people were on his side and that their attitudes should direct the decision of the Commons as well: [. . .] he trusted that the sense plainly and incontrovertibly declared to be entertained upon the subject by the majority of the people of England, would prove to be the sense of the majority of that House (XXIV, 1087).

Pitt’s way of speaking was unusual for a prime minister: he was attempting to persuade the Commons in the name of the people to approve the piece of legislation he was proposing. This implied that, after an election victory, the people had become the legitimate authority in decision-making. Pitt also came to define the nature of the responsibility of the ministry, albeit in a way that rejected the notion that all power was always derived from the people as represented in the Commons. Recalling his argument in an earlier debate, he maintained that government should possess “a sufficient share of the confidence of the sovereign, of parliament, and of the people at large” (XXIV, 1092). In a mixed government, these were three distinct political forces which all needed to be taken into account. In the case of the India Bill, this meant that the Commons would not have such a prominent role in controlling the East India Company as Fox had proposed. Power was rather to be placed in the hands of the executives in India. The delayed response of the Foxites was given by Philip Francis, an Irish cleric, who had worked in India.137 Francis used the opportunity to attack the ministry for having jeopardized democracy with its proposal, thus belying its claims to defend the popular cause, and for failing to respond to charges that it did not enjoy the confidence of the majority of the people as represented in the Commons. Reviewing the speeches and writings of the Pittites in highly ironical terms, he stated that “the sense of the nation had been unanimously declared, and [. . .] the united voice of the nation could not be resisted”. Furthermore, the Prime Minister presented himself as having “come into power, 137 Cobbett let Francis correct his speeches for publication, which is, of course, no guarantee of their accuracy. Black 2004, 159.

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at the front door of the House, and on the shoulders of the people” (XXIV, 1120). Francis attempted to demonstrate that such a picture was a dramatic departure from reality. He took decisions concerning the elections in Westminster138 and the clauses of the India Bill, which did not include the principle of trial by jury, as evidence of an anti-democratic tendency in the government. Pitt had, according to Francis, abandoned democracy: The very first act of this popular administration, of a minister who came into power on the shoulders of the people, attacked the democracy of the country, and annihilated the first of all the popular powers of the constitution. The decision of the question upon the Westminster election, [. . .], carried you finally and inevitably to this conclusion; that the people of Great Britain might be governed by the laws to which they had not consented, and might be taxed by a House of Commons in which they were not represented. [. . .] The second measure of this popular administration, he insisted, attacked the trial by jury, and threatened to abolish it. Such were the instant operations of that very power which pretended to be derived from the confidence of the people (XXIV, 1120–1121).

Francis’ choice of words was ironical: the ministry did not in reality enjoy the support of the people. Noteworthy is also the extension of the concept of democracy to concern not only free elections with a popular vote but also the realization of the judicial process in the spirit of the common law. The area of reference of the concept was evidently broadening. In his answer, Pitt ignored claims concerning the legitimacy of his ministry in the eyes of the people and the constitutional role of the people in general. Endeavouring to reply to irony with irony, he depicted Francis’ speech as no more than a communication of “local information to the House” (XXIV, 1121). The Baron of Delaval, who had ostentatiously changed sides from the Foxites to the Pittites, responded, arguing that Pitt’s actions in Parliament were always based on “the real sense of the people” whereas the Foxites were unable to submit themselves “to the sense of the people” (XXIV, 1142). The administration remained firm and insisted that the majority of the people was on its side, making use of the election result as evidence of Pitt being the people’s minister.

138 This was a Pittite attempt to remove Fox from his seat in Westminster. Christie 1962, 214.

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Francis’ point is noteworthy in that he, as a self-declared defender of the political rights of the people, spoke openly about “the democracy of the country” as a self-evident phenomenon and one in need of strong defence. Francis used the concept of democracy in a very positive sense in defending “the popular powers of the constitution”. To be sure, “democracy” continued to stand for the popular element in both the political and judicial branches of the mixed constitution. It was not yet viewed as a name for an alternative, preferable, form of government that should be introduced. For Francis, and probably for the Foxites more generally, democracy meant the right of some subjects to vote in elections for their representatives and to participate in the judicial process through juries. Such a revaluation made democracy increasingly an inalienable part of the British constitution in its different dimensions. It also meant that democracy was presented as being in need of active defence. Democracy was not yet any programmatic concept, however: when Francis prepared another speech for the India debates, he chose to not talk about democracy but instead lamented the way in which “the temper and character of the nation” had changed so that neither the Commons nor the people at large were ready to protest against attempts to abolish trial by jury. He appealed to “the sense of the nation” to prevent violations of the rights of the English people (XXIV, 1179, 1181). At the opening of the session in January 1785, Pitt was unwilling to deliver any particular messages to Parliament beyond a passing reference to maintaining “the true principles of the constitution” (XXIV, 1383). However, after the controversy of the preceding year, the debate in the Commons was bound to bring up the question of parliamentary reform. Pitt took the initiative as soon as the question was introduced and assured the House that he “was willing to give it all the fair play to which the ardent desire of the people, its own consequence, and his sincere inclination, entitled it”. He is also reported to have recognized the members of parliament as “the delegates of a great and powerful people” in this context (XXIV, 1393–1394). Such a recognition was easy to make now that Pitt had such a large majority in the Commons. The above analysis has shown that the parliamentary reform movement after the lost American war had led to an increasing use of language referring to the people among various groups of the British political establishment. Despite the lack of progress in the reform itself, the movement had given general currency to such language. A

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fresh chance to express both traditional and new conceptions of the political role of the people was provided by Pitt’s introduction of his final proposal for a reform on 18 April 1785. This proposal was cautious, intended to anticipate any criticism by not increasing the size of the Commons and by giving new seats to both the counties and London.139 The deliberation over the proposal created possibilities for a redefinition of democracy which showed that the concept was no longer presented merely as a necessary (if problematic) element of the mixed constitution but as a potentially beneficial and progressive element. While ‘democracy’ was not completely redefined in 1785, some signs of an ongoing conceptual change are visible. Pitt knew what he was talking about, having campaigned for reform as an opposition politician and made two previous proposals on the issue. In spring 1785, the prevailing myth of the excellence of the British constitution and the likely opposition to the bill even within the government forced Pitt to present his reform as a moderate proposal, not as an innovation. At the same time, he claimed that it solved all the problems of proportional representation. The reform followed no “idea of general and complete representation so as to comprehend every individual”. It was not designed to give every man “his personal share in the legislature of the country”. Instead, Pitt defined “the popular branch of our legislature” and “the original principle of representation” in the following way: the Commons was “an assembly freely elected, between whom and the mass of the people there was the closest union and most perfect sympathy” (XXV, 433–435). By appealing to the original intentions of the constitution, Pitt wished to avoid any allegations that he was violating its fundamental principles. Pitt’s Parliament was to be based on popular election, but in a way that conserved much of the old system. Pitt justified the reform with the suggestion that the reorganization of the relationship between the people and Parliament would create a stronger political community. British history provided the strongest evidence for this: It was most material that the people should have confidence in their own branch of the legislature; the force of the constitution, as well as its beauty, depended on that confidence, and on the union and sympathy which existed between the constituent and representative. The source

139

Christie 1962, 213; Mori 1997, 18.

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of our glory and the muscles of our strength were the pure character of freedom, which our constitution bore. [. . .] If we looked back to our history, we should find that the brightest periods of its glory and triumph were those in which the House of Commons had the most complete confidence in their ministers, and the people of England the most complete confidence in the House of Commons. The purity of representation was the only true and permanent source of such confidence (XXV, 449).

Though he denied innovation, Pitt’s proposal strongly emphasized the connection between the Commons and the people (rather than referring to “the King’s parliament”). Pitt also underlined the responsibility of the ministry to the Commons (rather than their status as the King’s ministers). This was now the essence of the freedom of the British constitution. Pitt had ensured a majority in Parliament and no longer needed to justify his position with suggestions that “the sense of the people” and that of the Commons differed. The historic momentum of Pitt’s proposal did not go unnoticed in the Commons. Henry Duncombe gave the most forthright interpretation of the event: “It was a new and interesting object, [. . .] to see the minister of the crown standing forth in this zealous and patriotic manner, the advocate of the people” (XXV, 450). Though still formally the King’s minister, Pitt presented himself, and was viewed by the supporters of the reform, as “the advocate of the people”. The interpretation went unchallenged, which indicates that a major change in the understanding of the basic character of the political community was indeed taking place. Both the Pittites and the Foxites seemed happy with these formulations. Nevertheless, Pitt’s bill was opposed by the great majority of the House. Powys accused Pitt of attempting to change the constitution and emphasized the traditional interpretation of the Commons as being “guided equally by their loyalty to the crown, and their attachment to the interests of the people” (XXV, 453). He was actually repeating an argument made by Pitt himself in spring 1784. For Powys, the Commons continued to be a mediator between the monarch and the people rather than the centre of popular power. It listened to the petitions of the people but acted independently of them, while still conveying “the sense of the people” (XXV, 453–454). North, another consistent opponent of the reform scheme, repeated the argument that there was no evidence of the majority of the people wishing for a reform. The radicals were merely attempting to provoke such wishes. As “the

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people’s rights” were already so well established in Britain, North maintained, it did not make any difference exactly who acted as guardians of that freedom. Moreover, the established system not only protected the people against royal abuses but also “against the consequences of momentary delirium in themselves” (XXV, 458–461). The Commons was there to protect the people in every way. The most forceful supporter of Pitt’s motion came, unsurprisingly, from the opposition: Fox was strongly in favour of the reform and spoke in a way that redefined the concept of democracy as well. The language he used was a product of the potential for innovation created by the Prime Minister’s motion, his belief that the monarchy was threatening the balance of the British constitution, and perhaps his readiness to make use of any unconventional argument in his criticism of the monarch.140 In his response to the proposal, and as a reaction to what Powys and North had said in opposition to it, Fox was ready to defend democracy as an element which—together with the other essential elements of a mixed constitution—was capable of innovation (in a positive sense) and progress towards better forms of government. In his speech, “democracy” represented a dynamic concept. Fox explicitly rejected traditional pejorative understandings of ‘innovation’ and gave expression to an optimistic belief in the abilities of the people to achieve development within a political system created by them. As a consequence, the constitution could, and should, be an object of innovation. In this way, Fox was opening possibilities for seeing democracy as a progressive and future-oriented phenomenon and for distancing itself from its strictly classical interpretation, which anticipated an inherent future failure of the system if it came to be dominated by an excessive form of democracy: From the earliest periods of our government, the principle of innovation, but which should more properly be called amendment, was neither more nor less than the practice of the constitution. In every species of government [. . .], democracy and aristocracy were always in a state of gradual improvement, when experience came to the aid of theory and speculation. In all these, the voice of the people, when deliberately and generally collected, was invariably sure to succeed. There were moments of periodical impulse and delusion, in which they should not be gratified; but when the views of a people had been formed and determined on the attainment of any object, they must ultimately succeed (XXIV, 466).

140

See Mitchell 2004.

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Both democracy and aristocracy were here used in a positive sense and seen as innovative constitutional elements, despite temporary setbacks in the historical process. A belief in progress made Fox trust in the “gradual improvement” of the British combination of various forms of government, and he saw “the voice of the people” as a potentially positive force in the process. This is the first found explicit parliamentary speech that expressed such superior political potential in the people and spoke of democracy as a future-oriented goal, though still presented within the seemingly orthodox framework of the mixed constitution.141 A further demonstration that Fox was attempting to revaluate the concept of democracy is offered by William Young’s reply, which was designed to reinforce the conventional meaning of democracy as taught by classical political theory. Young referred to Tacitus in tracing “the abstract theories of the regal, aristocratic, and democratic branches of government” (XXV, 471). For him, and probably for the overwhelming majority of the House, democracy remained part of an abstract political theory that predicted how political systems developed as a consequence of each combination. According to Young, Tacitus had taught that democracy of any type was impossible in “mixed states” and would have been shocked to see the kind of democratic reform that was being planned in Britain in 1785: [. . .] the momentum of the democracy, whether acting by the body of the people, or by a representation unqualified and adapted purely to popular ideas, must quickly bear down one or both of the other branches of government; and it had been moreover told him, that in this pure and direct representation of the numbers of the people were to originate the resources of war and peace, [. . .] the doubts of Tacitus would not have been hypothetical; such a state, he could not have pre-conceived to exist a moment (XXV, 472).

For Young, ‘democracy’ remained a dangerous form of government in the classical sense. Whether it be direct democracy with immediate popular participation or democracy functioning through a representative body, the very form of government appeared as a threat to both monarchy and aristocracy. This was a major reason for preventing it from gaining true momentum in the first place.

141

Burke was far more reserved in his reaction to the motion. He suspected that the reform was after all based on the principle of “universal representation”, and he described it as a mere delusion. XXV, 469–470.

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In referring to two versions of democracy, Young happened to give expression to a notion that came close to the later concept of ‘representative democracy’. He talked about “democracy [. . .] by a representation [. . .] adapted purely to popular ideas”, the word “representation” referring to the House of Commons. Such an interpretation of ‘democracy’ was indeed emerging in the British Parliament—as a reflection of the contemporary debate in the Netherlands and elsewhere and before the publication of the Federalist Papers in America and the debates of the French Revolution on representation and democracy. The idea of democracy working through representation was mostly viewed in a negative light in the British debates of 1785, but the theoretical possibility for such a system had been recognized, and an opposition speaker like Fox could already view both representation and democracy in positive and future-oriented terms. Young also pointed out an error which the Prime Minister and his supporters were making in their proposal. Pitt had understood representation wrongly: [. . .] if he meant a representation of poll or numbers, and so every point of his reform implied, he said, we were not the representation of the people, but of the people’s interests. The consistency of that House was qualified by the equipoise of the landed, the commercial, and the popular interest (XXV, 472).

Young’s point was that the structure of the Commons reflected the balanced considerations of the interests of the landowners, commerce and the people at the same time; it was not even intended to reflect only the will of the populace. It followed that Pitt’s proposed reform would ruin the entire idea of parliamentary representation in its British form. This is again revealing in that Young actually defined the Commons as an institution representing the interests of different estates and not the people at large. In his traditionalist world-view, Parliament remained a meeting of estates; it was not a representative body of a united people in a modern sense. It was not an institution to be interpreted through the concept of democracy either, no matter how this was defined. Young’s approach may sound old-fashioned, but his stand was the one that prevailed in Westminster in 1785. The re-evaluation of the content of ‘democracy’ had started, but it did not yet lead to any breakthrough. Nor would the reformers make any progress in the immediate future. Having lost his attempt to reform Parliament

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in 1785, and moving from youthful enthusiasm to administrative pragmatism and cynicism, Pitt never again initiated another bill of this kind.142 Even so, he continued to hold to much of the concept of democracy as redefined during the early 1780s. Positive Understandings of Democracy before the French Revolution The Speech from the Throne in January 1786 made no reference to the failed parliamentary reform; indeed, it lacked political content to an unusual degree. There was no longer any specific reference to the constitution, probably because the disappointed Prime Minister wanted to avoid all constitutional confrontation. During the debates, Surrey from among the Foxites, an independent nobleman, was the only speaker to openly recall the unsuccessful project for parliamentary reform (XV, 1000). The concept of democracy, however, remained current in Parliament in 1786. On 7 March, Francis, an old opponent of Pitt, pointed out that the English procedure of impeachment (like the one of Warren Hastings over his policies in India) was a democratic procedure unlike the arbitrary tribunals of other countries. He argued in terms that widened the sense of ‘democracy’ outside its traditional reference to a popular element in the system. For Francis, democracy was a highly positive term, a synonym for the House of Commons, and also a feature that distinguished England from the rest of the world: The trial by impeachment is founded on a popular right, coeval with the House of Commons. [. . .] When the House of Commons impeaches, it is a solemn appeal to the judgement of the world. [. . .] while the democracy of England advances in person to the charge, assumes the noble office of accuser, and forces the crime to trial before every thing that is great, and noble, and wise, and learned, and venerable, in our country. The crime, the criminal, the prosecutor, the judges, the audience, and the trial, produce and constitute a scene which no other country can exhibit to the world (PR, XIX, 356–357).

The representative assembly was seen as “the democracy”, and its actions in the political system were interpreted in very positive terms.

142

Ehrman & Smith 2004; Mori 1997, 17.

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When we come to debates on a proposed amendment to the India Bill in 1786, we meet a use of the concept of democracy in equally positive senses by a somewhat surprising speaker. The usage originates from Edmund Burke, who was to become a major critic of democracy in its French form only a few years later—as soon as the Revolution started to inspire new understandings of the concept. Burke’s case suggests that, without the Revolution the history of the word “democracy” in its English context would have been different. Burke’s single use of the concept in 1786 should not be over-interpreted, of course. Burke had previously been critical of extreme forms of the power of the people. He had been far from enthusiastic about proposals to reform Parliament as he had difficulty in trusting the political integrity and independence of the masses. He had expressed his views repeatedly in parliamentary debates and published writings, arguing that the passive and ignorant people should be skilfully managed by the members of parliament. In this sense, Burke never was an uncritical defender of democracy. We can concur with F.P. Lock’s conclusion that Burke believed more in the theory than in the practice of democracy: While he endorsed the theory of political power originating from the people and was convinced that the will of the majority should prevail, he remained unwilling to follow popular opinion uncritically.143 In 1786, he expressed admiration for the democratic element of the British mixed constitution to such an extent that he appeared to be a defender of democracy. But what exactly did ‘democracy’ mean to Burke during the debates on the India Bill? Did he join Pitt and Fox in making positive comments about the democratic element? If he did, how can we reconcile such a stand with his criticism of the French Revolution? Burke had lost his position in 1783, when Fox’s India Bill was rejected. In the years between, Burke had been active in preparing the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the Governor-General of India, insinuating that there was a link between Hastings’ actions and secret government influence in British elections. The impeachment was supposed to start in just a couple of weeks’ time, which meant that Burke was using an opportunity to prepare the Commons for the coming charges against Hastings. As he was not confident about the success

143

Lock 1998, Vol. 1, 340, 394–395, 422, 462–463, 465.

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of the charge,144 he used all available conceptual resources to oppose the proposed India Bill. These resources included the use of the concept of democracy, which had been considerably revaluated during the preceding years. In speaking positively about democracy, he was referring essentially to the Commons in the Blackstonian sense145 and only through that institution to the people; he was not so much talking about any abstract ideal of how the government should be organized. ‘Democracy’ also offered a useful tool for opposing Pitt’s government thanks to Pitt’s own defence of democracy in the early 1780s. Burke’s argument was that the new bill aimed at introducing “an arbitrary and despotic government in India”. The features of the bill that annoyed him included a form of trial that he saw as violating the Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights; in this respect, the object of Burke’s criticism recalled that of Francis. The proposed method of trial seemed to Burke to constitute “a libel on the liberties of the people of England, and a libel on the British constitution”. Despotism was thereby being introduced into the British Empire in disguise. Referring to arbitrary governments of the Turkish type, Burke argued that the planned form of absolute power “was always sure to produce the reverse of energy, vigour, and dispatch”—in other words, results that were symmetrically opposed to what preceding speakers in favour of the bill had claimed (XXV, 1273–1276). Having opposed arbitrary governmental measures against the North American colonies in the 1770s, Burke now interpreted the policy on India in similar terms. In the midst of this anti-despotic oppositional speaking, Burke turned to ‘democracy’ as a way of defining exactly what he was defending in the British constitution against Pitt’s proposal for the government of India. What was needed in India was “a government by law, trial by jury, and publicity in every executive and judicial concern”. Opposing the claims of the preceding speakers that absolute power

144

Langford 2004. This synonymity is particularly evident in the formulation “the democracy or House of Commons”, printed in [Presbyterian of the Kirk of Scotland], A Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt . . . (London) [1790], 33. It is likewise visible in James Green’s definition in 1790, which drew a connection between the British constitution and that of Sparta as described by Polybius: “The British Government is composed of a due mixture of Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy, vested in their Representatives, King, Lords, and Commons; to whom the supreme legislative authority belongs.” James Green, An Attempt to Explain the Principles of the British Constitution . . . (Newcastle 1790), 2. 145

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was efficient, Burke came to view democracy and the power of the many in such highly positive terms that they may appear to represent a turning point in the use of the concept in British parliamentary debates: [. . .] where that arbitrary government existed, of which dignity, energy, and dispatch, were the characteristics. To what had democracy, in all ages and all countries, owed most of its triumphs, but to the openness, the publicity, and the strength of its operation. [. . .] It was in direct opposition to all our theories and knowledge of human nature, to expect from one more than from many; or that the opinion of an individual, in all cases respecting the government and regulation of society, should be more solid than those which result from the joint experience and wisdom of multitudes combined and matured for that purpose (XXV, 1276).

Such an argument defending the right of the many to decide as ‘democracy’ or the popular element of the government—as opposed to despotic rule of any kind—was, despite the long tradition of popular government in Britain and the contextual reasons for its use, unconventional. If the reporters got the formulation right, Burke was arguing that ‘democracy’ as the popular element of a mixed constitution could be strong and had ‘triumphed’ in a number of countries in the course of history. Furthermore, as a reply to what had been claimed about a centralized form of government, Burke associated the principles of openness and publicity with the positive influence of democracy, this term once again being understood as referring to the actual public at large rather than to some abstract ideology. Francis had used “democracy” as a sympathetic term for the role of the Commons and the people in general in the British constitution just days before. Fox had likewise spoken positively about democracy in the preceding summer. It is hence evident that Burke, too, was using the concept in this positive, even radicalized sense, in comparison with earlier customary references to democracy as one of the elements of the mixed constitution. He was talking about democracy not only as an element in the system, as had been the convention, but as a self-evident attribute of it. This hardly yet means that democracy had become much more than a mere synonym for the popular element of the constitution, but it does indicate that its potential in the mixed system had been reassessed. Evidence from the debates of the 1790s, the subject of the following chapter, shows that no abstract concept of democracy seen as the opposite of arbitrary government had yet emerged. Though

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having a positive connotation, this was not yet a type of democracy that was totally distinct from the classical concept. We need to keep in mind that the speech of March 1786 was an extreme reaction on Burke’s part, provoked by the proposed constitutional reform in Britain and India. Burke made his speech in the context of the approaching trial of Hastings. It was the situation that caused Burke to explicitly declare his sympathy for democracy. He wanted democracy, not despotism. The tone of his speeches and writings became quite different once the French revolutionaries started to redefine democracy in their own manner, one that Burke regarded as totally despicable. His turn against the French Revolution came as a surprise to many, given his previous stands, the defence of the British type of democracy in 1786 included. Indeed, Burke’s attitudes tended to change as he took a stand on each new circumstance as it arose; they were not necessarily those of a consistent philosopher contemplating political theory independently of the history of events.146 Moreover, Burke occasionally spoke purely in order to strengthen his political authority, to excel in oratory, or to serve a patron; he did not always aim at persuading his audience.147 A further possible explanation is that the formulations were fabricated by a mischievous reporting of his words. The last possibility is unlikely, and it would in itself have constituted an innovation. Whatever the explanations for Burke’s words in 1786, by 1790 his and the French revolutionaries’ conceptions of democracy were quite different. The highjack of ‘democracy’ by the French revolutionaries made Burke adopt a much more reserved attitude to the whole concept in the 1790s—a period when he was able to say what he wanted to without needing to win broad support in the House. The other members did not engage themselves in the constitutional debate in March 1786. This suggests that the meanings which Burke associated with democracy were reasonably conventional ones by that time, in that they provoked no strong opposition. Fox, speaking immediately after Burke, merely stated that he agreed with everything that Burke had said and did not consider it necessary to proceed to any further defence of democracy (XXV, 1280). The meanings of

146 147

Morris 1998, 44. Bullard 2001, xxvii–xxviii.

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‘democracy’ which Burke had introduced hardly differed radically from those that Fox attributed to the concept. The government side viewed Burke’s claims as the products of pure fantasy. Henry Dundas, Pitt’s close ally who was responsible for Indian affairs, emphasized that the liberties of the people were guaranteed in the Indian government. He told the House that the fact that the individuals constituting Parliament were themselves part of the people, having been “in a great measure [. . .] elected by the people” according to the principle of representation, ensured that the liberties of the people would always remain safe (XXV, 1284, 1289). Without saying anything about democracy, the government spokesman rejected despotism and emphasized the principle of popular representation. We might say that a democratic way of thinking was making an appearance here without the word “democracy” actually being used. Dundas further warned about the risk of large bodies, too, being persuaded to take despotic measures. This possibility made him recommend the concentration of power in the Indian Governor General (XXV, 1289). The logic of the argument may not have been perfect, but Dundas believed that it killed two birds with one stone: it rejected accusations of despotism in the British context and excluded the popular element in the Indian context. A slightly redefined concept of democracy was thus put forward by Burke in 1786. Burke spoke just three years before the French began to build a new political system, which he would label “pure democracy”. As a result of the Revolution, the concept of democracy started to take on quite different connotations in Burke’s speeches. The history of democracy clearly needs to be interpreted as a transnational phenomenon and as a debate in which British thinkers and parliamentary politicians had engaged, extending the meaning of the old concept of democracy as a part of the mixed constitution. On the basis of the above-cited instances, we can argue that a gradual progress towards an increasingly positive concept of democracy had started before the French Revolution, in a traditional representative body like the British House of Commons, but that the revolution would cause a reassessment of the concept in Britain, too. French applications of the concept caused disappointed reactions in Britain and led to further re-evaluations of ‘democracy’. On the other hand, the Revolution also reactivated previous definitions and forced the British political elite to discuss the principles of their constitution further.

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At the opening of the parliamentary session of 1787, no-one referred to the political role of the people. In printed literature, only an imprisoned radical French aristocrat suggested that the French monarchy had originally been based on democracy and wrote about “the right of sovereignty, residing solely and inalienably in the people”.148 The British debate on these matters had come to a standstill after the decline of the reform movement and probably also because of the current democratic ferment in the Dutch Republic. By November, the focus was on the Dutch crisis, and the British silence on ‘the people’ continued (XXVI, 1245). A more radical redefinition of ‘representative democracy’ and ‘popular sovereignty’ was taking place in Holland.149 “Democracy” had certainly not yet become a keyword in parliamentary debates. While its use remained strictly bound to particular contexts, it usually carried neutral or positive connotations. On 17 March 1788, for instance, the Marquess of Lansdowne (Shelburne), a political commentator and critic of George III with little real influence at that time, expressed his esteem for the democratic element of the constitution (PR, XXIV, 308). The government side favoured traditional ways of understanding democracy as merely the popular element in the constitution, but even among them rhetoric referring to the people had gained new dimensions after the parliamentary reform movement. The conventional meaning of democracy can be seen in Edward Bearcroft’s mention of “the democratical part of the constitution” as opposed to “aristocracy” in a debate on Scottish petitions on 17 June 1788 (PR, XXIV, 100). However, doubts about democracy had not disappeared either. The last pre-revolutionary series of debates in which democracy and the political role of the people were discussed concerned a constitutional crisis that arose from the inability of George III to take care of his royal duties as a result of illness. The state of the King’s health and the possibility of recognizing the Prince of Wales as regent were the topics of these debates in December 1788 and January 1789. In pamphlet literature, those speaking for the right of Parliament to decide on the regency were accused of “a democratic innovation”.150 The constitution

148 Gabriel-Honoré de Riqeti, comte de Mirabeau, Enquiries concerning lettres de cachet, the consequences of arbitrary imprisonment . . . (London 1787), Vol. 1, 13, 65. 149 See Velema 2007. 150 [Anon.], The Crisis, or Reflections on the Proposed Settlement of the British Government (Dublin 1789), 9.

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was claimed to be excessively biased “to the Democratic side”, the implication being that Prime Minister Pitt was acting like a “democratic dictator”151 or was planning the creation of “a democratic aristocracy”.152 While the opposition claimed that Pitt was an advocate of democracy, the government accused opposition writers of aiming at “a democratic anarchy and plunder”.153 This shows that the old prejudices against democracy were still there, to be revived when needed. During the opening debates of December 1788, Pitt appeared as the strongest advocate of the constitutional role of Parliament acting in the name of the people; obviously because this supported his attempts to postpone a decision on the regency issue. Pitt said that he wanted to “guard the liberties of the people from danger” and to ensure that Parliament, “on the part of the people of England”, whom it represented, settled the issue (PR, XXV, 22, 26–27). Pitt knew that the Prince of Wales was likely to favour the Foxites when choosing his ministers, and hence he wished to delay decisions to create time for George III to recover—a tactic that proved a success.154 Fox was ready to recognize the right of the Prince of Wales to act as regent without any conditions set by the Commons, as he and the Prince were united in their opposition to George III.155 Both sides emphasized the role of Parliament as a popular and national representative body156 but held differing views about the right way to proceed. To disprove doubts about his support for the royal cause, Fox, who was ill and unable to give due consideration to the implications of his argument, pointed out that the regency was “a trust, on behalf of the People, for which the Prince is responsible” and that “sovereignty was a trust depending on the natural liberties of mankind” (PR, XXV, 44). Sovereignty belonged to the monarch but was awarded to him by the people.

151 William Knox, Considerations on the Present State of the Nation. Addresses to the . . . Members of the two Houses of Parliament . . . (London 1789), viii, 66; William Knox, Extra Official State Papers (London 1789), Vol. 1, 5. 152 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, A Letter to the Most Insolent Man Alive. The fourth edition, (London 1789), 29. 153 [Tartar], The Letter to the Most Insolent Man Alive, Answered (London 1789), 28. 154 Christie 1982, 205; Ehrman & Smith 2004. 155 Mitchell 2004. 156 Beaufoy, too, described the Lords and Commons as “the Representatives of the Nation”. PR, XXV, 119.

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Pitt, stronger in argument, emphasized the necessity of safeguarding both “the safety of the Crown, and the interests of the people” (PR, XXV, 48, 50, 55).157 For him, Parliament consisted of “the rightful representatives of all the estates of the people of England” (PR, XXV, 50–51), while he himself was a spokesman “for the rights of Parliament; and, through Parliament, for the rights of the People” (PR, XXV, 54; also XXVII, 743). This was an entirely logical definition after all his emphasis on the representation of the people in connection with attempts to reform Parliament. His definition of the British constitution made a degree of democracy—in the sense of listening to the voice of the people—appear as a very positive phenomenon. Britain was not a pure democracy but a popular government based on the representation of the people as ‘estates’:158 If no provision in precedent, in history, or in law, was to be found, for the exercise of such authority, on the disability of the Sovereign, where was it to be found? It was to be found in the voice, in the sense of the People. [. . .] in this more happily tempered form of Government, equally participating in the advantages, and at the same time avoiding the evils of a Democracy, an Oligarchy, or an Aristocracy, [. . .] though the third estate of the Legislature might be deficient, yet the organs of speech of the People remained entire in the representatives, by the Houses of Lords and Commons, through which the sense of the People might be taken. The Lords and the Commons represented the whole estates of the People, and with them it rested as a right, a constitutional and legal right, to provide for the deficiency of the third branch of the Legislature, whenever a deficiency arose; they were the legal organs of speech for the People; and such he conceived to be the true doctrine of the Constitution (PR, XXV, 56).

Democracy alone might have bad attributes, but the British system avoided them by combining the three necessary elements of government. Parliament was an organ for the expression of the voice and 157 Beaufoy made the same point by talking about Parliament as “trustees for the Sovereign as well as for the People”. PR, XXV, 119; Christie 1982, 206. 158 Identical formulations can be found in An Impartial report . . . published immediately after the debate in 1789, 89. Even Lord North, though disagreeing on the right way to proceed, recognised Parliament in nearly identical terms as “the true and lawful representatives of all the estates of the people.” XXVII, 749; The definition of Parliament as “lawfully, fully, and freely representing all the estates of the people of this realm” was communicated to the Lords on 23 December and was echoed there by the Earl of Camden on 26 December. PR, XXVI, 37, 47; Pitt’s statement was again recalled on 29 January 1789 by Grey Cooper. PR, XXV, 304; Pitt himself made a nearly identical statement a little later. PR, XXV, 339.

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sense of the people, indeed “the organs of the people’s speech”. Pitt’s repeated argument was that the people should decide about filling the throne through Parliament (XXVII, 742). In practice, this meant spending so much time in deliberation that the King would recover. Pitt won also the argument in the public sphere as a result of Fox’s inconsistencies.159 Edmund Bastard160 referred to “the will of the people, expressed by the House of Peers and the representatives of the people in parliament assembled” as the origin of all royal power (XXVII, 749). This formulation emphasized—for the very first time in the analysed parliamentary debates on constitutional issues—“the will of the people” as the ultimate mover of political life. This was a stronger expression for popular sovereignty than the conventional references to “the sense” or “the voice” of the people. Fox used vocabulary that was nearly identical to Pitt’s, despite the opposite goals of the two men. He referred to variation in the British constitution: just as absolute tyranny and aristocracy had sometimes dominated, “sometimes the democracy prevailed, and all the oppressions of a democratical government were practised in the fullest enormity” (PR, XXV, 72). In Fox’s interpretation of national history, there had been lamentable periods of pure democracy such as the Civil Wars. This kind of pure democracy appeared as far less progressive than Fox’s concept of democracy during the debates on parliamentary reform (PR, XXV, 72). An unprejudiced positive understanding of democracy remained difficult to maintain consistently in the late 1780s. Fox seems to have used radical arguments when they suited him and to have returned to traditionalist ones when needed to advance particular political ends. The contemporaries were perplexed by such inconsistencies, which partly followed from his absence because of illness and his unrealistic belief in the possibility of successfully opposing George III by allying himself with his son.161 The revaluation of democracy had been far from total: even parliamentarians who had at one time spoken in favour of democracy were not uncritical advocates of the power of the people. Burke, for instance, advised his colleagues not to make the people believe that

159

Christie 1982, 206. Alternatively, the speaker may have been John P. Bastard. Both were new representatives and supporters of Pitt. Edmund is known to have voted with Pitt in this case. 161 Mitchell 2004. 160

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they as a collective possessed all political power; instead, he declared himself ready to “speak against the wishes of the People, whenever they attempted to ruin themselves”. Parliamentary wisdom and power bypassed that of the people where the delegation of executive power was concerned. Only if the fundamental rights of the people were to be violated by the monarch, did “all right and power [revert] to the people”, Burke recalled, with an obvious reference to the Glorious Revolution of 1688 (PR, XXV, 125, 129). This suggests that Burke’s democracy had remained one that was constituted by a representative institution. While the example of the Dutch rising may have influenced Burke to reintroduce old senses of democracy, there were other explanations. Burke was sceptical of the motives of popular politics in large constituencies. He was likewise cynical about how the people had rejected an independent Commons in favour of the Crown. In 1788, he supported the Foxite line in the regency crisis,162 which explains his anti-populist statements in that context. The common denominator for Burke and Pitt was that both now defined Parliament “as the representatives of the nation” (XXVII, 846; PR, XXV, 148). This choice of words, though implying no major turn in prevailing conceptions, illustrates a Europe-wide tendency to emphasize the political centrality of ‘the nation’ and to treat it as synonymous with ‘the people’ in a political sense. The state of British discourse was not that different from that of France, where preparations for the meeting of the States General were being made. The concept of ‘national representation’, forcefully articulated by Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès in France, was emerging, and its appearance was not limited to the pre-revolutionary French debate: it also appeared in the British Parliament. In Britain, “the people” remained the usual term used in definitions of the political community, but by 1789 it was being treated as almost synonymous with “the nation”. In the Lords, Lansdowne made a connection between “a government known to be approved by the unanimous and genuine voice of the people, through their representatives” and “the general sense of the whole nation” (XXVII, 879–880). This independent peer and Pitt’s former mentor even maintained that “the People have rights, but Kings and Princes have none.” He also referred to foreign peoples with oppressive regimes:

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Langford 2004.

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chapter four [. . .] it might be not only discussed but decided, that the eyes of all mankind might be opened to the important fact which must result from the discussion and decision, that the People had most essential rights of their own, but that Kings and Princes had no rights whatever (PR, XXVI, 62, 64–65).

Such a statement had become possible as a result of the gradually radicalizing discourse on the political role of the people and bitter dissatisfaction with George III in some opposition circles. During the debates in mid-January 1789, the political role of the people in the British system was generally recognized, but the debaters disagreed about how the will of the people should be determined. In the opposition, Powys criticized Pitt’s suggestions as an insult to the Crown, the power of which was “derived from the same source, from which that House derived its power. It was an integral part of the power of the People” (PR, XXV, 196–197).163 William Wyndham Grenville, the Speaker of the House, stated that all power or authority that had not been delegated by law “still resides with the People at large”. The Speaker urged the Commons to do its best to maintain the allegiance of the masses of the people to the King and Parliament (PR, XXV, 218, 233, 236).164 By 1789, the popular origin of power could be appealed to by anyone if it supported his argument. This shows how far the principle of political power being derived from the people had been established in British parliamentary language. Views about how the will of the people should be determined varied a lot, of course. The Solicitor General, John Scott, summarized the expressed views in these ironical terms, obviously directed at Fox: How was the sense of the people of England to be collected on the subject? Perhaps, if a right hon. Gentleman were asked, he might adopt his first opinion, and say “the sense of the people was spoken by their representatives in that House;” or he might take up his second opinion, and say, “the sense of the people can only be known from the people of England at large;” or he might go back again to his old doctrine, and say, “the sense of the people of England can only be collected in the House of Commons” (XXVII, 1024).

Whatever the proper way of ascertaining “the sense of the people” might be, it had become difficult to legitimate any decisions without 163

Thomas 2004. In addition to the first-rank speakers, Joseph Mawbey stated that all power was originally derived from the people. PR, XXV, 301. 164

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reference to the sense (if not the will) of the people. Archibald Macdonald, the Attorney General, therefore addressed the Commons in February 1789 as “the representatives of the People, the true source of power” (PR, XXV, 344). A shared conception of the popular origin of political power, though not yet called ‘the sovereignty of the people’, had obviously been radicalized in the Westminster Parliament in the course of the debates of the 1780s. Indeed, it lacked little in comparison with the initial ideals of the French Revolution, which explains the positive reception of the Revolution in Britain in its early stages. But did it differ from those of the American alternative? The Rise of a Representative Republic in America: no Comment from Westminster The formulation of the American Constitution in the late 1780s became a major moment in the history of the political role of the people. As Margaret Canovan puts it, the American Revolution had meant that the initially Roman ideas of ‘the sovereign people’, ‘popular government’ and the political role of the common people were once again connected and turned into an “enduring myth of the sovereign people in action”. In this way, the people could be viewed simultaneously as “an abstract authority in reserve” that was absent and as “a concrete power in action” that was present. This was realized in a popular representative government in which all the elements of the constitution were seen as the ‘agents’ of the people, while the people remained the sovereign power that was needed only in special circumstances. In Canovan’s words, “popular sovereignty” was “institutionalised” by the American Constitution.165 Despite its being a major event in world history, references to the new American state in contemporary British parliamentary debates remained few. The lack of explicit commentary on the new republic is understandable given the recently lost war and the fact that the American Constitution was still in the making. Its influences were more indirect as can be seen from the fact that discussions about the extension of franchise in Britain arose only after similar debates in the colonies.166 In public debates, on the other hand, the American example 165 166

Canovan 2005, 27–28, 91, 107. Brewer 1976, 209, 214; Dickinson 1977, 217.

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was rather more visible. Interest certainly existed among the radicals, language was no barrier, and some key American constitutional texts were also reprinted in London. As we have seen, the concept of democracy had begun to have increasing significance in British parliamentary discourse in the era of the American Revolution. The American rebels, however, still built their political arguments on foundations provided by the classical tradition, viewing their emerging new political systems through analogies with ancient Rome. As Bernard Crick puts it, their revolution made it possible to see the precedents of Roman republicanism—perhaps even Athenian democracy—in new terms, no longer as threatening examples but rather as experiences opening visions for organizing politics in the same way as in the past, or perhaps in some better way.167 In America, the War of Independence did not bring about any dramatic change in prevailing understandings of “democracy”; the word did not yet belong to the programmatic vocabulary of the revolutionaries. Even Thomas Paine continued to argue in the early phase of the American crisis that the British constitution was likely to “degenerate into democracy; a government which, [. . .], I hope to prove ineligible”.168 Paine saw democracy as “flattering to the pride of mankind” and hence easy for demagogues to “hold up” to people even if they knew that it would never function in practice. Citing Rousseau, Paine pointed out that “there never existed, nor ever will exist a real democracy in the world”.169 For the American revolutionaries, ‘representation’ remained the key concept.170 The most crucial period of constitutional debate in America did not take place until 1787–1788, preceding the outbreak of the French Revolution by no more than a year. The concept of the people played a central role in this debate, while statements about ‘democracy’ continued to be full of prejudices and reservations. The most significant result of the debates as far as the rhetoric of popular power is concerned would be the opening of the American Constitution with the words “We, the people of the United States”, which outspokenly placed the high-

167

Crick 2002, 3, 5. Thomas Paine, Common sense; addressed to the inhabitants of America . . . [London] (1776), 2. 169 Paine, Common Sense, 1776, 5. 170 Paine, Common Sense, 1776, 38. 168

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est political authority in the hands of the people.171 In the American Republic, the people prevailed, at least in theory. ‘Democracy’, however, was not re-evaluated in positive terms in the same way. Indeed, much American political theory in the late 1780s was anti-democratic despite the fact that it has been seen as embodying the rise of popular sovereignty.172 The key texts of the American constitutional debate were printed in The Federalist, authored mainly by James Madison and published by Alexander Hamilton. These two architects of the new constitution distinguished sharply between the republic they were designing and direct democracy, something that they consistently rejected. The Federalist characterized “a pure democracy” as “a society, consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person”. It was an arrangement that “can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction”.173 Madison argued: [. . .] such democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security, or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives, as they have been in their deaths.174

Democracy remained merely an object of speculation for “theoretic politicians” entertaining mistaken ideas of equality.175 Madison saw the emergent United States instead as a strong representative republic, thus combining the notions of representation and republic. The American political system would by definition differ from “pure democracy” because of the delegation of government, the larger size of the state, and the avoidance of faction. In a republic, the “representatives and agents” of the people took care of the administration, not the people themselves.176 Modern interpreters suggest that Madison’s outspoken conceptual distinction between democracy on the one hand and popular government and republic on the other, and the denouncement of the failures of democracies as the mistakes of republics, were conscious speech

171 Plan of the New Constitution for the United States of America, Agreed upon in a Convention of the States . . . (London 1787), 6; Markoff 1999, 666, 673. 172 Among attempts to explain this, see Miller 1991, 105–106. 173 The Federalist, Vol. 1, no. 10, 57–58; Hansen, 30. 174 The Federalist, Vol. 1, no. 10, 58. 175 The Federalist, Vol. 1, no. 10, 58. 176 The Federalist, Vol. 1, no. 10, 58, 60; Vol. 1, no. 14, 80.

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acts aimed at vindicating the republican form of government.177 It may also have reflected an entirely logical, even unconscious, way of thinking within the context of a long tradition of seeing democracy as based on direct citizen participation in decision-making, realizable only in small communities. In the Anglophone debate, it had not been the rule to associate republics and democracies; it was rather in the French Enlightenment debate that these concepts had been sometimes combined. Madison followed mainstream in eighteenth-century British political thought and was highly sceptical about democracy, in which “a multitude of people exercise in person the legislative functions” and were because of their lacking qualifications subject to manipulation. He continued to view democracy as a society with only a small number of members who governed themselves in person and often suffered from factions and individuals who were ready to sacrifice the interests of the others. Madison believed, like most thinkers for over two thousand years before him, that democracies tended to lead to constant conflicts, to violate the rights of individuals and to last only for short periods of time. He just could not conceive of a democracy of perfect equality.178 Nevertheless, interestingly, he found (quite anachronistically) some instances of representation of the people even “in the most pure democracies of Greece”.179 The leaders of the American republic thus ruled out democracy, even if they were willing to view the United States as a “popular government”.180 “The people in their collective capacity” were expressly excluded from government in the American system. In the American “popular or representative constitution”, the institutional solution for governance differed from that of direct democracies: the representatives of the citizens would govern instead of the people themselves.181 The American Constitution meant the victory of the concepts ‘republic’ and ‘representation’, but it did not yet produce any concept of representative democracy.

177 The Federalist, Vol. 1, no. 14, 80–81; Dahl 1998, 16–17; Miller 1991, 107–109, 119; Much of the “confusion” and “contradictions” discussed in scholarship may actually arise from a lack of respect for the eighteenth-century history of concepts. 178 The Federalist, Vol. 2, no. 61, 103; Dunn 2005, 77, 80. 179 The Federalist, Vol. 2, no. 63, 196–197. 180 The Federalist, Vol. 2, no. 39, 21. 181 The Federalist, Vol. 1, no. 21, 128; Vol. 2, no. 63, 197; Dunn 2005, 77–79.

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Sovereignty, too, resided in America with the states rather than the people. John Adams wrote, however, that already among the ancient Germans “the democratical branch” had been “so determined, that the real sovereignty resided in the body of the people”.182 This was a possibility, but it was not the express choice of most American theorists.183 According to Jonathan Jackson, the greatest risk for the states was [. . .] their proneness to an highly democratical government; a government in which they would be directed by no rule but their own will and caprice, or the interested wishes of a very few persons, who affect to speak the sentiments of the people.184

There were individual writers at that time like William Vans Murray, however, who defended “American Democracies” irrespective of whether they were based on direct or representative government.185 Despite the prevailing strong doubts about democracy, the admiring way in which the American republicans talked about the principle of all power originating from the people certainly supported the arguments of the British parliamentary reformers. In the rhetoric of The Federalist, “the people of America” were to decide about the constitution and hand over some of their power to the government. The planned system would “rest on the solid basis of the consent of the people” so that “the whole power of the proposed government is to be in the hands of the representatives of the people”, all of their power being “derived from the people” or “from the great body of the people”. The representatives remained “agents and trustees of the people”, that is, servants of the people. The ultimate authority would reside “in the people alone” as “the people are the only legitimate fountain of power”.186 As a popular republican government of this type, the Americans regarded theirs as unique. In the Dutch Republic, for instance, “no

182

John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (Philadelphia) [1787], xv–xvi. 183 Cf. Wood 2006, 621–623, on debates on popular sovereignty and the rise of the notion that all magistrates were agents of the people. James Wilson, among others, argued that all political power was borrowed from the people. 184 Jonathan Jackson, Thoughts upon the Political Situation of the United States of America . . . (Worcester, Massachusetts) [1788], 55. 185 William Vans Murray, Political Sketches, Inscribed to his Excellency John Adams . . . (London 1787), 62–63. 186 The Federalist, Vol. 1, no. 2, 6; no. 22, 143; no. 28, 175; Vol. 2, no. 37, 4; no. 39, 21–22; no. 46, 84; no. 68, 108; no. 78, 293–294; For further evidence of the prominence of the language of the people in Revolutionary America, see Miller 1991, 118.

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particle of the supreme authority is derived from the people”. Britain did not deserve the name of republic at all.187 In Britain, in fact, some members of parliament would soon start to view themselves as no more than agents of the people, probably motivated by the American model of popular government. For quite some time, the notion of the people rather than Parliament as the ultimate source of power had been gaining strength. The reform movement, in particular, used arguments referring to the power of the people with increasing frequency.188 The British political establishment would soon receive another model to comment on: the French Revolution, which has customarily been regarded as the time when modern notions of popular sovereignty, national representation and representative democracy were born. As we have seen, however, a related debate had been going on in the British Parliament for some time. In the last chapter, we shall focus on how the British members of parliament and commentators in printed literature received the French Revolution and its redefinitions of the common classical tradition of the power of the people and democracy. To what extent did they totally refute them, redefine their own concepts in response, or actually adopt revolutionary ideas in their parliamentary discourse?

187 188

The Federalist, Vol. 2, no. 39, 20–21. Goldsworthy 1999, 215–216.

CHAPTER FIVE

REACTIONS TO THE REVOLUTIONARY CONCEPTS OF DEMOCRACY AND POPULAR SOVEREIGNTY IN WESTMINSTER, 17891800 The French Revolution—as a “paradigm shift” to more modern notions of nationhood and sovereignty and as the starting point of numerous ideological confrontations—also affected the history of the concept of democracy in many ways.1 John Dunn, a leading scholar of the history of democracy in the Anglophone world, emphasizes the unexpected rise of the concept of democracy during the French Revolution. Building on older research, Dunn argues that the popularity of the word “democracy” emerged only in the course of the Revolution. The rising new concept was not based on any idea of the restoration of an age of democracy in ancient Greece. Rather it took on an entirely new, future-oriented content, referring to what democracy was able to accomplish.2 Viewed in the context of the previously analysed British parliamentary debates of the 1780s, however, the rise of democracy in a positive and future-oriented sense in the early 1790s was not quite as unprecedented and unexpected as Dunn suggests. The concept obviously has a pre-revolutionary history in the debate on the relative roles of the different elements in a mixed government. This has previously escaped the attention of many scholars, particularly in works where the focus has been on leading theorists rather than on debating politicians or on the structures rather than linguistic content of politics. In the francophone academic world, Pierre Rosanvallon has likewise argued that democracy retained its classical connotations of the direct exercise of legislative and executive power—and consequent political instability—until the days of the French Revolution. The survival of this classical sense of the concept was also a major reason for its not being adopted by the revolutionaries in 1789.3 Rosanvallon is certainly

1

Hampson 1983, 3; Cranston 1988, 97; Baker 1990, 252; Livesey 2001, 2, 10; Powell 2002, 19; Hampsher-Monk 2005, 1–2; cf. Monnier 2005, 42. 2 Dunn 2005, 39. 3 Rosanvallon 1995, 143.

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right in that no fundamental redefinition of democracy had taken place before the French Revolution. Even so, the re-evaluation of the democratic element by British parliamentary speakers in the course of the 1780s described in the previous chapter deserves attention, as do related redefinitions in French Enlightenment literature and the Dutch Patriot debate on representative democracy. The evolving British concept remained relevant in the 1790s and was then contrasted with the French revolutionary alternative, as a result of which it was modified and thus further ‘modernized’. Dunn and Rosanvallon agree in that as soon as the word “democracy” was adopted more widely after 1791, like much of the revolutionary vocabulary, it began to be increasingly applied in new senses with connotations of the future possibilities that it opened up. The French revolutionary concept of democracy thus initiated a debate for and against a prospective democratic system. This meant that democracy was no longer just one of the three classical theoretical forms of government or one of the elements of a mixed constitution but was turning into a concept that could be used to describe and define the political community and its goals more widely. Even if it is evident that this rise of a future-oriented conception of democracy as an ideal form of government was connected with the French Revolution, we would benefit from a longer-term perspective that includes earlier attempts to re-evaluate and redefine democracy within traditional representative institutions. This means that we interpret conceptual change as a gradual process involving mutual debate between various political thinkers and actors rather than as a sudden and unexpected change introduced by innovative ideologists. While there were not yet really any revolutionary redefinitions in Sweden at the turn of the 1760s and 1770s, the rise of language referring to the people in Britain after the late 1760s and particularly in the 1770s, together with the American War of Independence, led to the first distinct revaluations of democracy as part of the mixed constitution of Britain in the early 1780s. These revaluations turned democracy into an inalienable characteristic of the political system to be actively defended and developed to answer future expectations. This was not yet a conceptual revolution of the French kind; it was rather a conceptual transformation taking place through transnational public discussion and parliamentary debates related to practical decision-making. The long-term significance of such conceptual revisions should not be overshadowed by the more dramatic revolutionary conceptual change

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 345 and the related transformation of political culture in France in the early 1790s. In France, Enlightenment political philosophy had produced texts that slightly redefined the concepts of the people and democracy and led to the emergence of the explicit phrase “the sovereignty of the people”. Montesquieu rejected democracy, with the people as the possessors of sovereign power, as incapable of securing liberty. Rousseau regarded democracy as inconsistent with human nature and as a system that had never really existed, although he recognized the original sovereignty of the people. Jaucourt, for his part, viewed democracy as an “admirable government” in the Encyclopédie.4 Even in spring 1789, however, most of the French intellectual elite continued to denounce democracy after suggestions for equal suffrage in the States General were made. At the time of the outbreak of the Revolution, democracy was still generally associated in France with the power of the people as a whole and with a theoretical form of government that produced nothing but anarchy, especially in a country the size of France.5 The public debate which preceded the convocation of the French States General on 1 May 1789 included Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès’ famous pamphlets. Sieyès, a clergyman, argued in favour of the equality of the citizens, inalienable national sovereignty and a representative government, but the language of democracy played no particular role in his thinking. Like in the Federalist papers in America, representative rather than participatory government was the ideal to be followed. Sieyès actually recycled conventional notions of democracy as the direct rule of the people, which led him to consistently denounce it as a system. In his conception of representative government, “representatives are not democrats; [. . .] since real democracy is impossible amongst such a large population”. Sieyès did recognize the need for a democratic spirit in the States General, but such a view was easy to reconcile with the classical tradition of mixed government. In accordance with classical political thought, he argued that only in small political communities could the demos come together and actually make laws. France was not such a country, and hence the people simply could not constitute an efficient political agent there. A much more efficient solution for securing liberty was provided by a representative system

4 5

See Maier 1972, 841; Dippel 1986, 61–64; Monnier 1999, 50–52. Rosanvallon 1996, 143.

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with a limited group of qualified elected citizens who were specialized in governing. Such a system, in which the people elected deputies, could not be called democratic.6 Much of this argumentation is actually consonant with the established ways of viewing representation in the British Parliament. There were two differences, however: the association between the nation and sovereignty was stronger in Sieyès’ description, and a further-reaching re-evaluation of democracy had already taken place in Westminster. “Democracy” was hence not initially a word typically used in connection with the French Revolution. Whenever it occurred in 1789, it was used in a conventional pejorative sense.7 Soon after the outbreak of the Revolution, however, circles that supported the court attempted to introduce a conceptual model known as démocratie royale.8 The term démocrate, though first used in France in 1789 in a highly pejorative sense, did not appear so often in 1790 or 1791.9 Few leading revolutionaries spoke positively about democracy in the early phase of the Revolution. In 1791, Jacques-Pierre Brissot still distinguished between ancient ‘pure democracy’ and French republicanism, emphasizing representation as a preferable alternative to direct democracy.10 No revolutionary newspaper bore a name referring to democracy before 1793; up to then the words of “people”, “national”, “patriotic”, “republican” and “sovereignty” remained much more important.11 The history of the concept of the sovereignty of the people is quite different. The idea of the sovereignty of the nation had been strongly present ever since Sieyes’ pamphlets and the declaration of the National Constituent Assembly by the Third Estate on 17 June 1789.12 The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 26 August 1789 contained the concept of national sovereignty in the sense that it found

6 Rosanvallon 1995, 144–145; Wright 2002, 302; Dunn 2005, 104, 110; Urbinati 2006, 164. 7 Tackett 1997, 98–99. 8 Hampson 1983, 3; Dippel 1986, 73. 9 Palmer 1953, 205–207; The term had been used in Denmark in 1760, in the Dutch Republic in the mid-1780s and in the Austrian Netherlands in the late 1780s. Meier 1972, 854; Dippel 1986, 83. 10 Rosanvallon 1995, 145–146; Observe, however, the highly positive sense which “democracy” took on in Claude Fauchet’s political sermon in February 1791. See Ihalainen 2008b; cf. Maier 1972, 859, who questions the “political” significance of Fauchet’s use of the term. 11 Palmer 1953, 213; Rosanvallon 1995, 143; Monnier 1999, 54–55. 12 Tackett 1997, 94; Wright 2002, 302; Baker 2006, 630.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 347 “the source of all sovereignty [. . .] in the nation”. No authority was conceivable but one that proceeded from the nation. Yet the practical implications of this principle continued to be understood in conflicting ways: while the moderates merely saw the nation as the ultimate source of power, the radicals placed sovereignty directly in the general will. Theorists such as Sieyès, furthermore, spoke for a representative body speaking on behalf of the nation. The concept of representation made a parallel breakthrough in the formulation “all citizens have the right to participate personally, or through their representatives, in [the formation of the law]”.13 Rousseau was made into a pioneer of the sovereignty of the people, even though initially he had not advocated the notion that clearly. His writings could, however, be interpreted as placing sovereignty permanently in the hands of the people. They have been generally seen as supporting “radically democratic” ideas in which the deputies of the people were mere agents, not representatives.14 The Abbé Fauchet, for example, actively reinterpreted the concept of sovereignty as used by Rousseau in his Social Contract.15 Some revolutionaries, motivated by the writings of Rousseau, maintained that all adults were eligible to participate in decision-making on public affairs.16 In practice, of course, this was never the case in revolutionary France. To sum up the early revolutionary contribution to the history of democracy, Rousseau’s political thinking about the political role of the people was radicalized soon after the outbreak of the Revolution. Ideas about the sovereignty of the nation or the people became slogans of the Revolution quite early on, and they received increasingly radical formulations in the course of the revolutionary debate. “Representation” was likewise a key term, though it was not yet generally associated with democracy. “Democracy” made no breakthrough during the first two or three years of the Revolution; only from 1793 onwards did it become more widely used as a political term that had a significance beyond mere classical constitutional theory. By 1793, “democracy” was taking on more positive and future-oriented senses in the French

13 14 15 16

Baker 1990, 271, 285, 301; Wright 2002, 303; articles 3 and 6. Cranston 1988, 100, 103; Crick 2002, 52; Monnier 2002, 392; Fetscher 2006, 577. Rosanvallon 1995, 144; Ihalainen 2008b. Crick 2002, 12.

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language. The concept of representative democracy was also gradually emerging.17 While the early phase of the Revolution already made Burke reconsider his interpretation of “democracy”, the alternative revolutionary concept of democracy and the connected notion of the sovereignty of the people only began to constitute a clear challenge for the British Parliament from latter part of 1792 on. The clash between the conventional British and alternative French concepts led to some interesting debates, but it did not involve any simple rejection of the French revolutionary alternatives or total denouncements of democracy in the mixed constitution either. Indeed, I suggest that British parliamentary conceptions of the political system were redefined in significant ways as a result of the debates of the 1790s. The transformation of the concept of democracy and its association with the concepts of the sovereignty of the people and representation also took place within a traditional representative institution, not merely as a result of the exportation of the Revolution outside France. Initial Responses to the Revolution in Britain The impact of the French Revolution on the British language of politics was ambivalent: On the one hand, the Revolution led to the introduction of new or modified political ideas into the debate, acting as a catalyst for change in political thought and practice. On the other hand, it strengthened the hold of the traditional language of politics, delaying such political and conceptual change as had already started, although this had anyway been slowed down by the failure of parliamentary reform and perhaps also by the Dutch model of the democracy of the streets.18 The debate on democracy as an element of the mixed constitution that had led to a revaluation of the concept, as described in Chapter Four, assumed a quite different tenor among British members of parliament as a consequence of the emergence of the revolutionary alternative.

17

Rosanvallon 1995, 140–145; Rosanvallon 2000, 13–14, 20–25, 56, 63; cf. Monnier 2001, 2–3, 19; Monnier 2005, 68–70. 18 Dickinson 1989b, 1. Dickinson has also emphasised the impact of other eighteenthcentury revolutions, including the industrial one, on British political discourse.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 349 The most important context for the following analysis of the parliamentary debates of the 1790s is provided by an increasingly intense public debate on democracy19 and the sovereignty of the people.20 For this chapter, all political writings containing the phrase “the sovereignty of the people” that I have found have been consulted. Likewise, all works containing references to democracy and published in London in the 1790s have been taken into consideration. The emphasis has been on originally British comments on democracy in the British context rather than on comments on the French regime, whether written by Frenchmen or Britons. A corpus compiled with these thematic and geographical limitations enables a sufficient contextualization of parliamentary debates, particularly as many of the analysed speeches were published individually in printed form in London and commented upon in London-based public discourse. Such interconnections between the parliamentary and public debates had become very close by the 1790s, many speakers evidently addressing the wider public rather than their fellow members only. The relationship between the two forms of debate was reciprocal: while innovations in the public discussion could be introduced into, and developed further in, parliamentary debates, it was often a new use of language in Parliament that popularized novel ways of political speaking. A wider conceptual

19 The sheer extent of the available printed literature has made selectivity essential: full-text searches with the abbreviated keyword “democr*” in the ECCO database produce some 5146 titles from the 1790s, including multiple editions and works containing several occurrences of “democracy”. A limited search focusing on books classified under “social sciences” produces 1717 hits. The trends in frequencies of use are slightly more visible in the latter corpus: it shows an almost six-fold rise in the number of titles from 30 in 1789 to 175 in 1793. Another summit was seen in 1798 with 217 titles. This was followed by a rapid decline in frequencies. We can thus conclude that the 1790s saw two peaks in the use of “democracy” in British, London-based printed literature, the first early in the decade and the second in the years 1797–1799. See also Palmer 1964, 327, on 1798 as “the high tide of revolutionary democracy” and Monnier 2002, 396, on the rise of the concept of the people in the French revolutionary discourse. 20 The frequencies of use of the phrase “the sovereignty of the people” are more approximate than those of “democracy”. Even so, the results reveal a parallel trend in the global corpus of ECCO and in “social science” titles. The first rise in frequencies comes somewhat later than in the case of “democracy”, in connection with the introduction of the republican constitution in France and the outbreak of war, which is a clear indication of a time lag in the British reception of the concept. The number of titles rose from practically none in 1789 to 45 in 1793. Another summit of 43 followed in 1799 simultaneously with one in Parliament, but the frequencies declined thereafter.

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change could thus also be initiated by the active use of new linguistic resources in parliamentary debate. At the first sight, the events in Paris in 1789 caused little concern in London. In some respects, right up till 1791, they were observed with curiosity and even enthusiasm, regardless of party or group. The French Revolution was generally viewed as a welcome parallel to the development of the British liberty and limited monarchy. The propaganda of the centennial celebrations of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 contributed to this association and revived hopes for a parliamentary reform. If some parliamentary reformers and radical societies expressed sympathy for the French Revolution, this too was usually seen as mere harmless enthusiasm.21 After 1790, however, British understandings of the nature of the French Revolution became more diverse, and disagreements between the various interpretations were becoming inevitable.22 Sympathy for the French began to wane as soon as the goals of the revolutionaries seemed to diverge from the sanctified British model of 1688. When the French Revolution was seen as threatening the established order in Britain, it became easy to reinforce inherited loyalist conceptions of the political community, particularly as these had been suitably recalled in connection with the centennial celebrations.23 The French Revolution also began to make the concepts of the people, and particularly the sovereignty of the people, contestable in an entirely new way. Press reports and numerous translations of French texts made Continental revolutionary vocabulary familiar in England, and domestic radicals were inspired by the Revolution. The confrontation with the language of the Revolution inhibited the revaluation of democracy which had been going on in British parliamentary debates for quite some time. Disagreements between the sympathizers and opponents of democracy of the French type took the debate on the concept to an entirely new stage.

21 Dickinson 1977, 232, 236; Goodwin 1979, 19–20; Christie 1982, 209; Cannon 1994, 116; Mori 1997, 78–79; Mori 2000, 31; Royle 2000, 13. 22 David Williams, after describing various British responses to the French Revolution, argued quite correctly that the French did not intend “to introduce a democracy in any sense familiar” and did not aim at imitating the English Revolution. It remained unclear what the result was likely to be, but the old constitutional terms did not suffice to describe it. David Williams, Lessons to a Young Prince, on the Present Disposition in Europe to a General Revolution (London 1790), 70–72. 23 Dickinson 1989, 36–37.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 351 There was also a considerable time lag in linguistic change in British parliamentary speaking. ‘Democracy’ already had established meanings, and it took time before the entirely new meanings given to it by the revolutionaries were adopted in Britain. In the year of the outbreak of the Revolution, most British authors continued to understand ‘democracy’ as if no revolution had taken place. David Williams, for instance, described ancient democracies as having “generally exhibited only the caprices of a rabble” as a result of the dominance of passion over reason and virtue. As Montesquieu had taught, democracies tended to become despotic. The only positive aspect of democracies was the rise of the public morale as a consequence of the involvement of the people in governing. Furthermore, political liberty benefited if “the people, though incapable of the ordinary business of government, should be organized into a capacity of forming judgment and exerting force to correct abuses of power”.24 For Williams, it remained clear that the British system was not based on any “Folkmote [sic], or a constitutional exercise of democratic power”.25 The ferment of the times sometimes brought democracy into political debate. The Annual Register of 1789 reported after some delay on the Patriot rising in the Dutch Republic in 1787, telling about “the prevalent democratic spirit” and the rise of “the democratical interest” there and referring to “the democratical parties” and finally to “democratical government” on the other side of the North Sea.26 By 1789, such reports from Holland no longer caused particular concern as the emerging Dutch democracy had already been suppressed by Prussian troops two years previously, but they show how an extended vocabulary of democracy was evidently developing on the Continent. In the domestic debate of 1789, there was only one major contribution that broke with the conventions of talking about the political role of the people: on 4 November, Dr Richard Price, inspired by the French Revolution, preached a sermon to the London Revolution Society, in which he accorded to the people of England a right

24 David Williams, Lectures on Political Principles; the Subjects of Eighteen Books, in Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws: Read to Students under the Author’s Direction (London 1789), 36–37, 50–51, 60, 140. 25 David Williams, Letters on Political Liberty, and the Principles of the English and Irish Projects of Reform; Addressed to a Member of the English House of Commons. The third edition (London 1789), 15. 26 The Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature, for the Year 1787 (London 1789), 8–9.

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to choose their rulers. Furthermore, Price, a leading Dissenter, saw “the Majesty, or Sovereignty of the people” as a power to be actively exercised so that new governors should be elected whenever old ones abused their power. As to the current system of representation, it did not adequately express popular opinion and needed to be reformed, following the example of the American and French revolutions.27 It was this particular contribution to the otherwise moderate British public debate of 1789 that made Burke respond first in Parliament and then in a book, thereby opening a new phase in the debate on democracy. The Heated Debate on Democracy in 1790 By 1790–1791, an increasing number of British politicians began to regard the French Revolution as embodying a kind of democracy they did not want. The members of parliament had to reconsider their relationship to the established British concept of democracy and to take a stand on the emerging new French one. The concept of the sovereignty of the people had also become central in French revolutionary ideology, which differed from the mainstream British language of politics. Most reactions to the sovereignty of the people were highly condemnatory, but there were also some exceptions. The new contestability of these concepts among the members of parliament, though seemingly dominated by reactionary attitudes, did move the British language of politics in a direction that made it possible for some circles to view both democracy and the sovereignty of the people as key principles of the British constitution. It is, therefore, not quite correct to argue that the British political elite simply remained suspicious of democracy, adopted the word reluctantly from France and only used it in order to criticize the concept itself.28 It is my purpose to show that there was a continuous debate on democracy in Britain in the 1790s, based on a conception of it as an element of the mixed constitution that was already becoming transformed. The nature of the debate on democracy was not simply deter27 Richard Price, A Discourse on the Love of our Country, Delivered on Nov. 4, 1789 . . . to the Society for Commemorating the Revolution in Great Britain . . . (London 1789), 24; [A Free-Born Englishman], Paine’s Political and Moral Maxims; Selected from the Fifth Edition of Rights of Man, Part I. and II . . . (London 1792), 21; Dickinson 1977, 233; Royle 2000, 13. 28 Palmer 1953, 207, 223; Maier 1972, 855.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 353 mined by reactionary opposition to the French Revolution; rather, the British debate on democracy had a history of its own that was affected by the Revolution. British comments on democracy put forward in Parliament have often been bypassed in previous research. It is therefore worth reconstructing the debate and seeing how a traditional representative institution reacted to the ideological challenge of revolutionary understandings of the political role of the people. George III made no explicit mention of the French Revolution in his speech opening Parliament in January 1790, which is an indication that what he called “our excellent constitution” had apparently remained unaffected half a year after the fall of the Bastille (XXVIII, 300). The concept of the people played only a marginal role in the ceremonial speeches on all sides. The positive stance of Edward Boscaven, the Earl of Falmouth, towards the Revolution in the Lords’ debate illustrates the prevailing notion of the Revolution as a struggle for liberty motivated by French envy of the British constitution. It followed that Falmouth saw no reason for any concern among the British people (XXVIII, 301). Not everyone viewed the Revolution as such a harmless event. In February 1790, both Burke and Fox spoke more extensively about the Revolution and democracy. Burke had described democracy as a part of the mixed constitution in positive terms in 1786, but by February 1790, provoked by Price’s sermon a few months earlier, he was already turning into an outspoken critic not of just the French Revolution but also of what he saw as mistaken forms of democracy. It is worth examining exactly what29 Burke said about democracy before interpreting him as an opponent of all kinds of democracy at that stage. It is important to focus on the attributes that Burke ascribed to the French type of democracy and on how he redefined his own previous, rather more positive concept of it. And how did Fox, who had used the concept of democracy in highly optimistic terms in 1785 and welcomed the Revolution in 1789, respond to Burke’s devaluation of democracy, given that the two men were old ideological allies? The debate of February 1790 already revealed conflicting conceptions of the political role of the people, but it did not lead to any simplistic rejection of democracy in the British Parliament. The topic under discussion was not the constitutional status of the people but

29

A variety of of reports on the debate were published, of course. Harris 2007, 126.

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the army estimates. Even so, Prime Minister Pitt introduced a constitutional dimension to the issue by pointing out that it was one of the main guarantees of “the liberties of the people” that the Commons should decide on military spending (XXVIII, 339). In response, Burke made a speech that was designed to provoke the audience both inside and outside the Commons. He reinforced this act by having a version of the speech printed soon afterwards (XXVIII, 351–352).30 Reviewing the relative strengths of the European powers, Burke considered the French nation as no serious threat to her neighbours after a revolution that had effectively destroyed the infrastructure of the country. More dangerous than confusion in France was excessive enthusiasm towards things French among some Britons, false notions of liberty of the French type included (XXVIII, 353–355). An important conceptual re-description occurred when Burke defined the Revolution as a transition from despotism to an undesirable kind of democracy and accused some Britons of wishing to follow the dangerous French model: In the last age, we were in danger of being entangled by the example of France in the net of a relentless despotism. [. . .] Our present danger from the example of a people, whose character knows no medium, is, with regard to government, a danger from anarchy; a danger of being led through an admiration of successful fraud and violence, to an imitation of the excesses of an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy (XXVIII, 355).

In brief, the French had transformed a despotic monarchical system into a form of government which, as a result of its attacks on property and religion,31 deserved no other names than anarchy and democracy. Such a system, if weak at the moment, could develop into a danger to the political future of Britain. For Burke, the French version of democracy appeared as one that violated the principles of reason and property; it was the worst kind of democracy and certainly different from British democracy as discussed in the preceding decade. Burke was challenging not only Price but also Fox and other politicians who had expressed sympathy for the Revolution. Burke, for his part, was “strongly opposed to any the least tendency towards the 30

Edmund Burke, Substance of the Speech of the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, in thr [sic] Debate on the Army Estimates . . . (London 1790), 12. The formulations are the same as in Cobbett. 31 Harris 1993, 299–300.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 355 means of introducing a democracy like theirs”, a democracy characterized by “the spirit of innovation, so distant from all principles of true and safe reformation” (XXVIII, 356–357). When Burke talked about “democracy like theirs”, his statement did not necessarily imply the denial of other types of democracy. The French nation had acted unwisely in rejecting the order of a balanced constitution in favour of anarchy and giving traditional concepts new revolutionary and mischievous meanings.32 Such a rejection of the model offered by the British constitution and linguistic usage meant contempt for true freedom and the rise of a distorted form of democracy—an “innovation” in a negative sense. Burke appealed to classical political theory when pointing out that democracy never worked in a country the size of France. This led him to conclude, in terms parallel to the contemporary French public debate, that the result in France might be the rise of an anarchical multitude of independent democracies of various kinds, leading to outright tyranny:33 [. . .] if they should perfectly succeed in what they propose, [. . .] and establish a democracy, or a mob of democracies, in a country circumstanced like France, they will establish a very bad government; a very bad species of tyranny (XXVIII, 358).

The French model would never constitute a regulated democracy of the British type but rather an anarchical form consisting of small democracies. Burke was not denouncing all forms of democracy, only the French version.34 In speaking of soldiers who rioted, he was actually lamenting the way in which democracy was being abused in France: Their conduct was one of the fruits of that anarchic spirit, from the evils of which a democracy was to be resorted to, by those who were the least disposed to that form, as a sort of refuge (XXVIII, 359).

32

Blakemore 1984, 284–307. Burke was actually echoing much of Sieyès’ argument against the rise of “democracies” in France. Baker 1990, 300; Urbinati 2006, 163; he may have been aware of P.F.J. Robert’s suggestion in 1790 of creating representative democracy at the level of departments. Dippel 1986, 75–76; Stanhope viewed this statement as a reproach to the French nation and the National Assembly in particular. Charles Stanhope, A Letter from Earl Stanhope, to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke: Containing a Short Answer to his late Speech on the French Revolution. The second edition (London 1790), 27. 34 Cf. James Livesey’s suggestion that a “European” model of democracy, as an alternative to the Anglo-American liberal democracy, emerged during the French Revolution, especially after 1792. Livesey 2001, 2–3. 33

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The French revolutionary masses did not represent true democracy but constituted “a furious, licentious populace” (XXVIII, 359). They had, indeed, hijacked the classical concept of democracy and developed a degenerate form of it.35 It was this menace that made Burke, a former advocate of the British type of regulated democracy, view its current applications in France in such reactionary terms. After Burke’s speech, Fox—who had been a spokesman for an extended political role of the people and a defender of the democratic element in the British constitution since about 1780—also felt a need to distance himself from the French type of democracy. Many Foxites had visited France frequently and applauded the Revolution, but Burke’s ideas, and perhaps also the radicalization of the French revolutionary process, made Fox choose his words more carefully than was typical of him. He, too, argued that the French Revolution represented a kind of democracy he did not wish to see in Britain. He was not to be considered “a friend to democracy”36 of the French type in supporting the idea of a standing army. Instead, he emphasized his advocacy of the mixed constitution of Britain, limiting his statement to what was acceptable to say about democracy in the aftermath of the French Revolution:37 He declared himself equally the enemy of all absolute forms of government, whether an absolute monarchy, an absolute aristocracy, or an absolute democracy. He was adverse to all extremes, and a friend only to a mixed government, like our own, in which, if the aristocracy, or indeed either of the three branches of the constitution, were destroyed, the good effect of the whole, and the happiness derived under it, would, in his mind, be at an end (XXVIII, 364).

Fox further explained his good intentions in welcoming the Revolution and declared, in an orthodox fashion: “[T]rue liberty could only exist amidst the union and co-operation of the different powers which composed the legislative and the executive government.” It followed that a French type of constitutional innovation was unthinkable in Britain. 35

See also Blakemore 1984, 284–285. In the account published by Burke, Fox is reported to have stated that “he did not affect a democracy”. Burke, Substance 1790, 33. 37 According to Burke’s account, Fox “always thought any of the simple, unbalanced governments bad; simple monarchy, simple aristocracy, simple democracy; he held them all imperfect or vicious: all were bad by themselves: the composition alone was good.” Burke, Substance 1790, 33. Burke and Fox thus understood the matter in the same way despite some variations in their choices of attributes. 36

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 357 Fox needed an explanation for the French excesses in the building of democracy and found it in the harsh despotism which they had rejected (XXVIII, 364–365); despotism had caused this counterreaction. Democracy as such was not wrong. Fox continued to support the democratic element of the mixed constitution and moderated his views on the Revolution to play down suggestions—put forward previously in print and now in Parliament—that his party, with their French connections, aimed at a similar kind of revolution in Britain. Fox’s support for the Revolution as such had not withered away, but a vindication of his attitude to democracy had become timely.38 Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the playwright and a parliamentary reformist, was more willing than Fox to defend the revolutionary regime. He disputed Burke’s claims that the National Constituent Assembly was involved in actions that deserved to be called “bloody, ferocious, and tyrannical democracy”. Sheridan regretted the disrespectful manner in which Burke had talked about democracy and the National Constituent Assembly as an institution of the French nation (XXVIII, 368–369). In response to this stubborn defence of the Revolution, Burke made an even more outspoken onslaught on “the outrageous democracy of the present government of France, which levelled all distinctions in society.” This interpretation of the Revolution was unavoidably leading to a critical attitude towards democracy of all kinds, even though the qualities that Burke attributed to the French democracy still made it appear as a particular perverted version. Burke denied that he had accused the National Constituent Assembly of advocating “a bloody, cruel, and ferocious democracy”. It was rather “the republic of Paris” which was to be blamed for such political anarchy (XXVIII, 370–371). In 1790, even this growing critic of the Revolution recognized the legitimacy of the main institution of the French revolutionary regime. He warned of the democratic spirit of some of the revolutionaries and of their mistaken constitutional innovations, but he did not denounce all types of democracy as mischievous. Pitt looked for a compromise, acknowledging the arguments of both Sheridan and Burke but refraining from taking any clear stand on the 38

Mitchell 2004; Ayling has argued that Fox remained “deeply suspicious of democracy and [was] on the whole hostile to it”. Ayling 1991, 173. Fox’s own words do not quite support such an interpretation. The prevailing diverging understandings of democracy need to be taken into consideration.

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concept of democracy. His criticism of the French system was rather expressed with such phrases as “the unqualified nominal liberty” and “the most absolute, direct, and intolerable slavery” (XXVIII, 373). Despite such pejorative language, Pitt was not particularly worried about the French menace in 1790. He obviously retained the basically positive concept of democracy which together with Fox he had proposed in parliamentary debates in the early 1780s. He certainly did not see democracy as opposed to the British constitution. Burke’s definition of the Revolution as productive of democracy of a distorted kind changed the character of the parliamentary debate on other occasions as well. His attack on the Revolution was recalled by fellow members later in spring 1790. In debates on the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in March, for instance, after Burke had opposed Fox’s motion, William Smith, a radical independent politician with a Unitarian background, criticized Burke for his attitude towards the French. Smith found it hard to accept that Burke [. . .] attacked a whole nation, while engaged in the very act of struggling for their liberties, and called them ‘an irrational, unprincipled, proscribing, confiscating, plundering, ferocious, bloody, and tyrannical democracy’ (PR, XXVII, 187).39

Many parliamentarians continued to be amazed at Burke’s untypical attack on French democracy and preferred to retain their optimistic expectations about the outcome of the Revolution, particularly as the concept of democracy had taken on quite positive connotations in the course of the 1780s, including those given to it by Burke himself. Some radicals, at least, considered that Burke was only misusing the concept. When the diverse understandings of democracy became evident, members felt a need to define the concept more clearly. Having quite consistently defended the democratic element in the British constitution in the 1780s, Pitt contrasted “a limited monarchy” of the British kind with “the purest democracy” of the French type and rejected the view that the French alternative was a system where “the most perfect equality” reigned. Exploiting the rising discussion on democracy to support his arguments in the debate on the Test Act, he maintained

39 Also printed in The Debate in the House of Commons, on the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, March 2nd, 1790 . . . (London 1790), 50.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 359 that even in a pure democracy the majority excluded any religious group “whose tendency might be to destroy the democratic equality” (PR, XXVII, 157). Pitt implicitly suggested that the Foxite faction and the Dissenters, in admiring France, favoured a wrong type of democracy and that even in such a system religious discrimination for political reasons was considered necessary. His point was that restrictions on the political rights of the Dissenters were still needed in order to protect the British constitution; he was not so much rejecting democracy in general. On 4 March 1790, Henry Flood’s motion for a parliamentary reform led to further uses and definitions of the concept of democracy. Flood was an independent member of parliament who, without gathering support in advance, took up the shortcomings of representation that had been repeatedly discussed in the Commons in the early 1780s. He argued that the Commons in its current form was not “freely and frequently elected by the body of the people” and proposed the creation of a hundred new seats as a solution to the problem. With reference to Fox’s recent rejection of absolute forms of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy, Flood argued that all three elements were needed. His premises were, firstly, “all just Government must be founded in the choice of the people” and, secondly, “the popular order of government is at least as indispensable, and as valuable as either of the other.” Flood certainly did not present himself as an advocate of “democracy”; he rather talked about “popular order” and the strengthening of “the popular form of government” or simply “the representation of the people” in the British constitution. The system as such remained a mixed one and better than any of the alternative ancient models. Representation was the key concept here, just as it had been in the American Constitution and in revolutionary France: Through representation even “a great people can possess an efficient influence in their own legislature, without being legislators themselves”. According to Flood, this would be reached more efficiently if virtual representation was developed into an actual one so that the majority of the people were allowed to vote. Counting on support from Pitt and the Foxites, he appealed to authors such as Blackstone and Hume as defenders of an increase in popular influence on Parliament. After the suggested reform, “the entire representative of the nation” would no longer be elected by a minority of the people; instead, the Commons would no longer be “under another influence than that of the people.” Without the proposed kind of a reform, the Commons remained “a

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second rate aristocracy, instead of a popular representation”, Flood concluded (XXVIII, 453–455, 457, 460–462, 464).40 The reception of Flood’s speech was far from enthusiastic. Flood’s questioning of virtual representation, in particular, was seen as inappropriate.41 William Windham, a friend of Fox who had been enthusiastic about the Revolution during his visit to Paris in 1789, opposed the suggested kind of parliamentary reform with arguments recalling those of Burke. In his view, a mere “triumphant appeal to the people” could not prove inadequacies in the representative system. The people at large hardly wanted the suggested kind of reform, and theorists provided no answers to practical political problems (XXVIII, 465, 467–468). Prime Minister Pitt also disappointed Flood’s expectations by rejecting theoretical speculations and the timing of Flood’s motion. The reform as such was needed but not at the proposed moment (XXVIII, 469). Not even Fox considered the moment right for a reform (XXVIII, 471–472). James Johnstone, the Earl of Hopetoun, dismissed the motion by saying that it belonged to “another century” (XXVIII, 470), probably meaning the seventeenth. Finally, Burke’s doubts about a parliamentary reform had turned into an outspoken criticism of constitutional innovations and a denial of the claim that the Commons did not represent the people. His major constitutional argument against a reform was that governments which had been “completely and purely popular” so that “the people held the power entirely in their own hands”—such as those of Athens and Rome—had been militant to a ruinous degree (XXVIII, 477).42 Flood’s motion found only one outspoken supporter, the Foxite John Courtenay, and with typical irony he denied suggestions that a reform was likely to lead to revolutionary developments parallel to those in France. In reply to a preceding remark by Powys, Courtenay ridiculed the fears of the parliamentary majority about the French type

40 Identical formulations can be found in Henry Flood, The Speech and Proposition of the Right Honourable Henry Flood, in the House of Commons . . . on a Reform of the Representation in Parliament (London 1790), 4. 41 Cannon 1994, 117–118; Mori 1997, 81. 42 Late in 1790, Edmund Burke published his famous critique of the French Revolution. In his speeches in Parliament he put forward many of the same points.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 361 of democracy, suggesting with an absurd description43 that the opponents of parliamentary reform were behaving [. . .] as if the members of the national assembly had come over and inoculated the people of this country with democracy, and a rage of infection had spread the new French disease (XXVIII, 478, cf. 470, 475).

The parliamentary reformists, aware of their minority position, did not dare to explicitly associate their proposal with revolutionary ideas such as democracy. Some members of parliament like Courtenay, however, held unprejudiced views about democracy and endeavoured to make the majority reconsider their attitudes by presenting prejudices against the French revolutionaries, the National Constituent Assembly and democracy as irrational and comparable to popular conceptions of diseases.44 French democracy was not to be seen as an alien phenomenon threatening Britain through a foreign conspiracy and popular insurrection but rather as a natural part of the British constitution. The British type of democracy as an element of the balanced constitution was still to be considered a positive phenomenon.45 Democracy had no outspoken defenders in this debate, but it was not openly attacked either. Flood’s independent attempt to launch a reform failed, and the proposer withdrew it without a division. Despite his obvious talents, Flood failed to win a seat in the elections of 1790.

43 Hamilton, a Pittite, who published a collection of advice on parliamentary speaking, recommended the use of absurd claims to demonstrate that opponents’ arguments were irrational. William Gerard Hamilton, Parliamentary Logick: To which are subjoined two speeches delivered in the House of Commons of Ireland, and other pieces (London 1808), 31. I am grateful to Taru Haapala for bringing this connection to my attention; see also Palonen 2008, 159–160. 44 The medical parallels referred to the eighteenth-century English fashion of calling the most feared and reprehensible venereal disease, syphilis, “the French disease” and to the widespread fear of inoculation against small-pox, which was regarded as ridiculous by enlightened people. 45 John Courtenay used a similar ironical style in a pamphlet in which he ridiculed the way in which the Anglican clergy had expressed their concern over “the dangerous and rapid progress of democracy in France”, “the fermentation of democracy”, the innovations which it entailed and French plans to establish “a shocking system of universal democracy” based on an alliance between “atheism and democracy”. The implicit suggestion was that many of the reforms in France were entirely welcome. John Courtenay, Philosophical Reflections on the late Revolution in France, and the Conduct of the Dissenters in England; in a Letter to the Rev. Dr. Priestley (London 1790), 1, 58, 63, 79.

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When Parliament convened in Westminster after the general election in November, both the monarch and the two houses had little to say about the constitutional role of the people. The only mention referred to the general election as “an opportunity of collecting the immediate sense of my people”. The ministry rather made the King speak of his subjects, whose will was identical with that of their monarch (XXVIII, 891–895). The Pittite Philip Yorke, the Earl of Hardwicke, maintained that with their unanimous Address the Lords communicated to the King not only “their own sense, but that of all the people of Great Britain” (XXVIII, 898). The notion of the Lords as representatives of the voice of the people thus still appeared entirely plausible from an aristocratic point of view. The Commons, too, saw it as their duty to “faithfully represent the sentiments of a loyal and grateful people” (XXVIII, 905)—a formulation which combined an assurance of the loyalty of the people and Parliament to the monarch with the constitutional principle of parliament representing the people (XXVIII, 905). In public debates, concern for the consequences of the Revolution was growing, partly as a reaction to Richard Price’s and Joseph Priestley’s argument about the applicability of revolutionary ideas to Britain. After replying to Price in Parliament in February, Burke responded to Priestley’s “democratic and levelling principles” concerning the rights of the English people over their monarch—a king who ruled out of “the choice of the people”.46 In Reflections on the Revolution in France, first published in November 1790, Burke attacked the British sympathizers of the French Revolution, denied analogies between the revolutions of 1688 and 1789 and defended “a representation of the people” in its current British form, rejecting the French political system as “new democracy”. While the French political establishment “affects to be a pure democracy”, Burke saw such “perfect democracy” as “the most shameless thing in the world” as a result of the will of the people having been made the highest authority. As in his speech in Parliament, Burke continued to distinguish between “pure democracy” or “perfect democracy” in France and democracy in the British constitution, which he had previously advocated. In Britain, he insisted, “we are resolved to keep [. . .] an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy, each in the degree it exists,

46 Priestley had argued that Parliament was the only proper sovereign. Goldsworthy 1999, 219.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 363 and in no greater”.47 The recognition of the three equal elements of the constitution corresponded with what Burke had argued before. Burke was still attempting to defend the classical concept of democracy as it had been slightly redefined in late eighteenth-century parliamentary debates before the French Revolution. Burke did not completely rule out democracy. He even conceded that, in some rare circumstances, “the purely democratic form will become necessary”, but a country the size of France was not such a case. Aristotle had ruled out “an absolute democracy” as a form of government because of its corrupted, degenerated, tyrannical and intolerant nature. Only in a mixed constitution could democracy have good effects.48 The latter case was the concept of democracy which Burke had previously defended. Burke’s definition of the French system as a mistaken kind of democracy continued the line he had followed in his parliamentary speech, irrespectively of the fact that the revolutionaries themselves did not yet universally view their regime as a democracy.49 Burke was particularly concerned about the destruction of the traditional institutions of the monarchy and the church as a consequence of putting unlimited power in the hands of the pretended representatives of the people.50 Harry Dickinson has suggested, in fact, that he spoke for most of the British political elite in condemning the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people and maintaining that the people had no power separate from that of the King and Parliament.51 Not everyone shared Burke’s views, however. George Rous, for instance, pointed out that problems linked with popular assemblies in democracies could be removed through the machinery of representation. Provided that the French maintained some aristocracy together

47 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, 16, 83, 121, 135–139, 185; Goodwin 1979, 130. 48 Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790, 185–187. 49 According to Antoine Louis Claude Destutt de Tracy, the French were not building a democracy but a representative government. Translation of a Letter from Monsieur de Tracy . . . to Mr. Burke, in Answer to his Remarks on the French Revolution (London 1790), 14. 50 Langford 2004. Some commentators replied to Burke that drinking in honour of the sovereignty or majesty of the people was mere harmless fun. John Scott, A Letter to the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, in a Reply to his “Reflections on the Revolution in France, &c.” (London 1790), 50. 51 Dickinson 1976, 205; Burke’s denouncement of the concept of the sovereignty of the people only came later, in 1791 and more clearly towards the end of 1792, after the rise of its republican interpretation in France.

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with democracy, they could actually achieve “a well-regulated democracy”,52 something that, by implication, was possible in Britain as well. Rous obviously defended the old concept of democracy as a positive element of the mixed constitution. Even the French notion of the sovereignty of the people found its defenders in Britain. Fox was reported to have rejoiced at the fall of the Bastille in 1789. As we shall see, he referred to the sovereignty of the people as a universal principle in some of his parliamentary speeches in the 1790s and drank in honour of “Our sovereign lord, the people” in 1798.53 Fox’s enthusiasm is partly explained by his francophile disposition: he had made the acquaintance of several French aristocrats who supported the Revolution.54 Thus two leading British members of parliament, Burke and Fox, responded to the Revolution in conflicting ways: Burke led the Old Whigs, who were suspicious of the Revolution, whereas Fox’s relatively modest group retained a sympathetic attitude towards the Revolution until the outbreak of the war with France in February 1793, and even beyond it. Strengthening Criticism of the French Model of Democracy in 1791 In France, the popularity of the concept of democracy was growing and its meanings evolving. In April 1791, Jacques Pierre Brissot, a critic of “pure democracy”, argued—still within the ideal of a mixed constitution—for “a popular monarchy, tending to the popular side. Such is my democracy”.55 However, associations between sovereignty originating from the nation and democracy were emerging. This led to a clearer distinction between democracy and monarchy and controversies for and against representative and perfect democracy. In some circles, Rousseau’s concept of democracy had already been developed in a more radical direction after 1790.56 Representation was not yet generally combined with the concept of democracy, some revolutionaries fearing that the representatives would turn into a new aristocracy 52 George Rous, Thoughts on Government: Occasioned by Mr. Burke’s Reflections, &c. Second edition. (London 1790), 7–8. 53 Crick 2002, 16; Evans 1996, 3; Mitchell 2004. 54 Mitchell 2004. 55 Palmer 1953, 213. 56 Dippel 1986, 74–76.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 365 free from popular control.57 However, associations between republic and democracy were becoming increasingly frequent.58 Simultaneously, “democrat” was, for the first time, becoming a positive term for self-identification, indeed to such an extent that any supporter of the Revolution could adopt the appellation. While being a democrat did not at first necessarily entail support for a form of government called “democracy”, by 1792 one dictionary defined a democrat as “the subject of a democratic government” and someone who “is a partisan of democracy.” Democrats were depicted as honest citizens, good patriots and true Frenchmen who supported popular government. Later on, under the Jacobin republic, however, “democrats” tended to turn into a discriminatory party denomination reserved for the supporters of direct democracy as opposed to the Jacobins, who supported representative democracy.59 Clearly, the Revolution was changing the meanings of “democracy” in ways that made a return to the classical concept quite impossible. It produced derivations referring to a political agent (“democrat”), to political allegiance in a positive sense (“democratic”), to democratic action aimed at reconciling politics with the idea of popular sovereignty (“to democratize”) and to a political ideology (“democratism”). As a result of this semantic change, the concepts of democracy and the sovereignty of the people thus came to be seen as synonymous. It also meant that “democrat” was transformed, albeit only temporarily, from a partisan appellation into a name borne with honour. Furthermore, a vision of creating a democracy for the benefit of all the people emerged.60 For British parliamentary speaking, the emergence of revolutionary understandings of democracy was problematic; they involved a new concept of democracy that differed radically from the re-evaluated old one. A confrontation between the two interpretations became unavoidable, particularly after Burke’s criticisms of the French type of democracy. During 1791, numerous writings both supportive and critical of Burke were published in Britain. Thomas Paine, in particular, popularized the revolutionary senses of democracy, but the old

57

Markoff 1999, 671. Dippel 1986, 77. 59 Rosanvallon 1995, 144–145; Dippel 1986, 83–85; Markoff 1999, 665. 60 Dippel 1986, 89–90; Monnier 1999, 49–50; Monnier 2005, 42–43; Dunn 2005, 16–17. 58

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interpretation of it as an element of the mixed constitution also found its defenders. The radicalization of the Revolution and the domestic debate made ‘democracy’ a concept that simply could not be bypassed in political debates. In public discourse, views on democracy were many and contradictory. One author hoped that the French would not establish a democracy, which “though speculatively the best, is practically the worst form of government.”61 James Mackintosh, by contrast, defended the revolutionary regime against Burke by distinguishing between it and other democracies. According to Mackintosh, “the application of the word Democracy to it is fallacious and illusive” if it were not used in a broad etymological sense “as the power of the people”. Once the supposedly original sense of democracy was applied, all legitimate government should be called ‘democracy’. Mackintosh could not accept Burke’s association between the French regime and ancient democracies, which had lacked representation and the division of power. In such “a degenerate democracy”, “the rabble”, “the multitude”, “the mob” and “a corrupt and tumultuous populace” had indeed constituted “the despotism of the rabble, not the domination of the people.” In contemporary France, by contrast, the legislative authority belonged to the representatives of the people. Such “a direct emanation from the sovereignty of the people” was, according to Mackintosh, as legitimate a political system as that of Britain.62 This was a radical claim with regard to the British constitution, too. Catharine Macaulay called for a parliamentary reform to strengthen the democratic element of the mixed constitution and the legitimacy of the form of government in general.63 Priestley wrote about a compact of sovereignty between the King and the people, implying thereby that, as the servant of the people, the King was bound to observe its will.64

61 [Anon.], A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly: Containing Remarks on the Proceedings of that Legislative Body; Strictures on the Political Doctrines of Mr. Burke and Mr. Paine; and a View of the Progress of the British Constitution (London 1791), 12. 62 James Mackintosh, Vindiciæ gallicæ: Defence of the French Revolution and its English Admirers Against the Accusations of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke . . . (London 1791), 222–223, 297. 63 Catharine Macaulay, Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke, on the Revolution in France . . . (Boston 1791), 20. 64 Joseph Priestley, Letters to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Occasioned by his Reflections . . . The third edition (Birmingham 1791), 7, 27–28, 32.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 367 The most sympathetic reactions to the Revolution thus far were published in the first part of Paine’s Rights of Man in March 1791, a further reply to Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution. Rejoicing at the end of monarchical despotism in France, Paine claimed that governments emerged as “the individuals themselves, each in his own personal and sovereign right, entered into a compact with each other to produce a government”. Furthermore, he argued, “This is the only mode in which governments have a right to arise, and the only principle on which they have a right to exist.” Challenging the established order in Britain, he further maintained that government arose “either out of the people, or over the people”.65 Paine suggested that the sovereignty of the people was, initially, the sovereignty of every individual. This led to the conclusion that the sovereign will of the people could and should be actively and constantly expressed.66 Such a radical claim was immediately condemned as anti-monarchical and the author declared an outlaw. In 1791, Paine did not yet emphasize the concept of democracy to any great extent; he merely wrote about the superior potential of politicians who had been born “on the democratic floor” or out of “democracy”.67 In the written reviews of his book, however, Paine’s ideas were associated with democracy. He was seen as aiming at democracy and propagating a senseless “individual sovereignty” that subverted all government. The conventional counter-argument was provided by ancient Athens, which had shown that democracy produced nothing but “anarchy, faction, private interest, and metaphysical equality”.68 Aristotelian voices recalled how “the evils of an unqualified democracy [. . .] resemble those of a no-government”, particularly as soon as virtue was lost and human passions took over.69 The concept of the sovereignty of the people was also interpreted in various ways, often in attempts to play down its most radical implications. Frederick William

65 Paine, Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke’s Attack on the French Revolution . . . (London 1791), 52, 57; Urbinati 2006, 167. 66 Dickinson 1977, 244. 67 Paine, Rights of Man, 1791, 71. 68 [Anon.], Letters to Thomas Paine; in Answer to his late Publication on the Rights of Man: Shewing his Errors on that Subject; and Proving the Fallacy of his Principles as Applied to the Government of this Country (London 1791), 17, 39–41. 69 [Anon.], Rights of Citizens; Being an Inquiry into some of the Consequences of Social Union, and an Examination of Mr. Paine’s Principles Touching Government (London) [1791], 114–115.

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Hervey, the Marquess of Bristol, for instance, viewed the sovereignty of the people as authority delegated by God.70 The radicalization in France together with the related public debate in Britain placed the members of parliament in a new situation in spring 1791. The controversy between Burke and Paine, in particular, had given ‘democracy’ new senses and increased the frequency of its use. An opportunity to discuss these interpretations was provided by the need to reorganize the administration of Quebec, an overwhelmingly French-speaking colony liable to be affected by French revolutionary ideas and the republican constitution of America. The case opened up several constitutional questions, including one on the nature of democracy after the French Revolution. ‘Democracy’ needed to be defined, either in its traditional sense as an element of the mixed constitution, or in a new, potentially more extensive revolutionary sense, at a time when a constitutional development of the French type inside the British Empire was either feared or hoped for. Fox, who had not lost his enthusiasm for the French Revolution, opened the debate by talking in an admiring tone about the progress which the “enlightened principles of freedom” had made in various countries. His attitude towards the Quebec Bill, on the other hand, was negative: it undermined “popular government in Canada” in that the suggested assemblies were not truly popular (XXIX, 105–107). Such an accusation was answered by suggestions that Fox wished to see a regime resembling the French rather than the British kind in Canada. These reactions in turn forced Fox to explain that he was not promoting French or American “republican principles” in calling for popular government in Canada (XXIX, 361). In the days of the Revolution, any speech on popular government could be treated with suspicion, especially when it came from someone like Fox, but Fox evidently had enthusiastic supporters as well. Burke could not use the opportunity to attack Fox in a protesting House but promised to return to the issue. An open confrontation between Fox and Burke on popular government and democracy seemed to be unavoidable. On 6 May 1791, Burke took the initiative and turned the debate on the form of government in Canada into an attack on French revolutionary ideas and their advocates in Britain. Though suspicious of

70 Frederick William Hervey, Marquess of Bristol, A New Friend on an Old Subject (London 1791), 13.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 369 American republicanism, Burke acknowledged its avoidance of the absurdity of a total popular government. The French Revolution, by contrast, had produced a constitution “involving every principle to be detested, and pregnant with every consequence to be dreaded and abominated”. This had recently been demonstrated by the prevailing anarchy in the French West Indies (XXIX, 365–367). A similar kind of revolutionary anarchy might creep into Britain if Quebec were given the wrong kind of constitution. If “the absolute authority” were given to a popular assembly, as had happened when it was taken over by the National Constituent Assembly in France, this produced not organized government but a pure democracy based on nothing but the abuse of the monarchy. According to Burke, the National Constituent Assembly had “contented themselves with enjoying the democratic satisfaction of heaping every disgrace on fallen royalty.” (XXIX, 368). After Fox had defended some of the achievements of the Revolution, Burke carried on his attack. The verbal duel with Fox over interpretations of the French Revolution caused Burke to speak about the French constitution and its admirers in Britain as “the French malady” (XXIX, 371–372), exploiting the connotation with syphilis to describe the ideological position of his political opponents. Given the provocation of this statement, the Foxites remained surprisingly calm, attempting to avoid further associations that were potentially detrimental to them. Fox merely continued to defend his original understanding of the Revolution, maintaining that “the original compact between the people of England and its government” was “a recognition of the original inherent rights of the people as men” in the same spirit as in revolutionary France (XXIX, 379). Fox regarded the French Revolution as similar to the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the people having defended their liberty with similar means in both cases. It was evident to all that Burke and Fox, former political allies and advocates of the democratic element of the constitution in the 1780s, were clashing over interpretations of popular government in the aftermath of the French Revolution. All sides felt a need to define the concepts of democracy and popular government in a clearer fashion and in relation to the French Revolution. Burke was uncompromising in his stand: no “wild theories” endeavouring to “methodize anarchy” were to be applied in Canada. Instead, forms of government based on “the wisdom of antiquity” should be followed (XXIX, 403); in other words, a mixed constitution was the only conceivable alternative. Pitt, too, asserted that the goal was to

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create “a free constitution, in the English sense of the word.” (XXIX, 404) Fox considered it wise to join the advocates of a mixed constitution at this stage, describing how “every part of the British dominions ought to possess a government, in the constitution of which monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy were mutually blended and united” (XXIX, 409). This was an orthodox formulation of the British mixed constitution by a politician who had recently been accused of holding revolutionary principles. It reflects the ambivalence of Fox’s politics: contemporaries wondered whether Fox saw himself as a reformer complaining that many people remained unrepresented in the democratic branch of the constitution or whether he shared the loyalist notion that the British mixed constitution had already achieved the most important of republican goals.71 This last apparent rejection of revolutionary ideas by Fox was received with cries of amazement in the Commons (XXIX, 409–410). The growing suspicions about revolutionary France were forcing the Foxites to retreat from their previous constitutional positions. The existing pressures also affected Fox’s following description of democracy. He argued, for instance, that an element of aristocracy was needed “in democracies, and was there considered as an essential part of the constitution” (XXIX, 410). The task of aristocracy was to function as a counterweight against constitutional innovations no matter whether they originated from the people or the monarchy. This distanced Fox from the French revolutionary hatred of aristocracy but retained the interpretation of the British constitution as democratic in some respects. By “democracies” and “republics”, Fox meant Athens and Rome, adopting the French Enlightenment understanding of the two concepts as synonyms (XXIX, 410–412). Their synonymous content was not quite as self-evident in Westminster as it was in French political philosophy and revolutionary rhetoric. For Fox, both classical models were significant, but the British application of the concepts was that of a mixed constitution: he did not advocate “republican” or “democratical principles” and wished to see democracy or republicanism only in the limited senses which they had in America. Quite early on, Fox interpreted the American Constitution as a compromise between a mixed constitution and extreme democracy, thus associating

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Morris 1998, 79.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 371 himself with the American moderate revolution rather than with the French radical one. His argument was that it came closest to the British ideal: Americans [. . .] had acted wisely, [. . .] they had [. . .] made that form of government which was best for themselves; consisting of the powers of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy blended, though under a different name (XXIX, 412).

Thus by 1791, after the emergence of the French alternative, the American republican model with its limits on democracy already appeared as acceptable to Fox. Even the inherently pejorative denomination “republican”—with its reference to popular participation in government—was applicable, and Fox declared: [. . .] he was so far a republican, that he approved all governments where the res publica was the universal principle, and the people, as under our constitution, had considerable weight in the government (XXIX, 414).

Republicanism connected with monarchy and aristocracy was a conceivable, even positive, phenomenon. In his speech, Fox made clear his stance on the British constitution, the French Revolution and the American republican constitution all at the same time. Pitt’s reply was based on a fairly commonplace admiration of the three elements of the British constitution. The Prime Minister recognized a degree of democracy in Britain but only side by side with the other two elements of the constitution: [. . .] aristocracy reflected lustre on the crown, and lent support and effect to the democracy, while the democracy gave vigour and energy to both, and the sovereignty crowned the constitution with authority and dignity (XXIX, 414).

It was unthinkable to diminish the roles of monarchy or aristocracy but, at the same time, the positive function of democracy in the mixed constitution remained equally unquestionable. Unlike the French concept of the sovereignty of the people, the monarchy remained the sole possessor of sovereignty in the British system. Pitt’s constitutional views remained consistent: thanks to their mixed form of government, the British “felt the blessings of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy all united.” (XXIX, 415) Aristocracy was represented as a force supporting democracy against monarchy and democracy as a source of dynamism for the entire political community. Though viewing democracy as no more than an element of the mixed constitution, Pitt

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remained convinced of its positive effects. In spring 1791, his constitutional views had hardly yet been changed by the French Revolution. The debates on the new constitution for Quebec constituted the context for a kind of negotiation between the members of parliament on how democracy was to be understood in the aftermath of the French Revolution. “Democratic principles” were almost exclusively associated with French revolutionary ideas, particularly after members who had been accused of harbouring them did their best to demonstrate that they did not support such ideas. For Burke, in particular, “democratic principles” remained a set of ideas to be rejected. He denied denigrating Fox’s image by accusing him of the advocacy of such ideas; however, he did not exclude the possibility that Fox held such principles anyway. Burke stated that he continued to hold the same views on the French regime that he had put forward in his book: France was not a republic but a mere monster (XXIX, 417–419, 423). Even if a regulated democratic element in the British constitution was seen as necessary by all sides, including Burke, the French type of regime was increasingly viewed as a threat to such a mixed constitution. The relations between the democratic, aristocratic and monarchical elements of the constitution also needed to be reconsidered. According to Burke, democracy called for a counterbalance so that aristocracy would be allied with monarchy rather than with democracy: In a monarchy the aristocracy must ever be nearer to the crown than to the democracy, because it originated in the crown as the fountain of honour; but in those governments which partook not of any thing monarchical, the aristocracy there necessarily sprang out of the democracy. In our own constitution undoubtedly, [. . .] our aristocracy was nearer to the crown than the people, because it reflected the honours of the sovereign (XXIX, 420).

Burke opposed an elective council in Canada as that would make it “a democratical council” (XXIX, 420). In Quebec, too, the balanced constitution with three elements should be maintained and nothing resembling a pure democracy should be established.72 Burke implied that some British opposition politicians still advocated political ideas of the French type. Proof could be found in pamphlets

72 Wilberforce put forward the same argument: such an elected body “would be a democracy under another name, and give the popular branch of government too much power.” An aristocracy was a better choice (XXIX, 427).

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 373 “holding out a parade of democracy, in order to irritate a mob against the crown” (XXIX, 422). Democracy based on mob rule appeared as a looming threat, a subversive combination of ideas aimed at provoking the masses against the monarchy. But such revolutionary democracy was to be distinguished from a democratic element, the positive effects of which Pitt, Fox and Burke had all emphasized in the 1780s. Justifying his current stand in relation to his previous statements in Parliament, Burke argued: [. . .] he now supported the monarchy, not that he thought it better than the aristocracy or the democracy, but because it was attacked and endeavoured to be run down (XXIX, 422).73

Even in the midst of Burke’s criticism of “democratical principles”, it remained essential to recognize the potentially beneficial effects of democracy as an element of the British constitution. In British parliamentary culture, as it had been formed in the course of the eighteenth century, it was unthinkable to deny the political role of the popular element completely. It was there, but it had to be completely integrated into the structure of the mixed constitution. Defending monarchy and aristocracy at the cost of democracy would have been risky in a political culture in which the popular element was already regarded as a self-evident part of the political system. The opposition, including Burke, had for a long time criticized the ministry for trying to extend the royal prerogative. Fox’s reply to Burke’s defence of the monarchy followed this traditional opposition strategy: “[T]he constitution of this country was more liable to be ruined by an 73 Burke repeated this in a printed text, arguing that the constitution consisted of three elements, all of which should be supported independently of each other. He also added an explicit claim that the Foxites were advocating a new “Whiggism” imported from France. The new Whigs made use of a peculiar and mistaken sense of the concept of the people, limiting it to refer to “their own faction” only. Their concept of sovereignty was perverted as well. While Burke at this stage accepted the notion that sovereignty originated from the people, he rejected ideas that “in the people the same sovereignty constantly and unalienably resides” to such an extent that the people were free to depose kings and change the form of government for any reason. It was likewise unacceptable to maintain that “the people are essentially their own rule, and their will the measure of their conduct”. Edmund Burke, An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs, in Consequence of some late Discussions in Parliament, Relative to the Reflections on the French Revolution (London) [1791], 31, 39−40; Burke was answered by Capel Lofft, who emphasised the accountability of the rulers to the people and questioned the perfection of the combination of “an established monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy” in the British constitution. Remarks on the Letter of Rt. Hon. Edmund Burke . . . (Dublin 1791), 45.

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increase of the power of the crown, than by an increase of the power of the people” (XXIX, 425). The Foxites had by no means rejected language referring to the people despite their attempts to avoid accusations of sympathy for the Revolution. In the final stages of the debate, Fox continued to argue for a more representative council for Canada, demanding “a proper share of democracy” for the country side by side with aristocracy (XXIX, 427). For Fox, democracy remained an element of the mixed constitution, but one which needed to be strengthened in comparison with the other two elements, not limited, as Burke suggested. In the Lords, the debate on the Quebec Bill was not so clearly directed against “democratic principles” or extreme “democracy”. William Wyndham, Baron Grenville, pointed out that the Canadian government should not be “democratic” but mixed. The latter kind of constitution was much more likely to secure a proper degree of liberty than any other model: It was undoubtedly a mistake to suppose that any government was free only as it approached to democratic principles. Absolute monarchy, absolute aristocracy, absolute democracy, had, in the history of mankind, been tried in the scale of experience, and had been found wanting (PR, XXX, 225).

The majority of the British political elite continued to denounce all absolute forms of government, including “absolute democracy”, which was at that time associated with the French version of “democratical principles”. The French threat was still seen as modest, however, Britain having declared its neutrality and refusing to join any alliance against France. It remained easy for all sides to retain the positive concept of democracy in its regulated British sense. However, the members of parliament had to constantly reconsider their conceptions of democracy. The political atmosphere outside Parliament changed again during the latter half of 1791. In July, a loyalist mob rioted in the name of Church and King to oppose the celebrations of Bastille Day in Birmingham.74 In writings supporting the ministry, the concept of democracy was losing its positive senses in a reaction to the French Revolution and the writings and activities of its supporters in Britain. The reactionary response included an interpretation of the British constitution as developing excessively towards democracy as 74

Mori 1997, 91.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 375 a consequence of the misuse of the indefinite concept of the people and tendencies to favour “an excess of popular power”.75 The opposition was represented as having been a source of “democratic intoxication” and “democratic poison” ever since the Wilkite affair. The Foxite group was viewed as representing “the life of democracy” attempting “to render Parliament democratical, and themselves the head of that democracy.”76 In this kind of polemic, democracy was no longer seen so much as a necessary element of the balanced constitution but as an imported subversive and factional plot. It followed that in 1792 “democracy” increasingly became a term of disdain. Proper British and Extreme French Democracy Contrasted in 1792 The French Revolution had turned out to be something else than a supportable struggle for the British kind of liberty. The concept of the people was defined in France in ways that challenged many of the basic premises of British parliamentary discourse. In Speeches from the Throne, Pitt’s ministry decided to avoid the use of the concepts of the people and the nation altogether and in January 1792 advised the King to refer instead to “my subjects” (XXIX, 745–746, 787). The revolutionary potential of language referring to the people was thus recognized indirectly: no appeals to the people were to be made in a country which increasingly regarded itself as being engaged in a struggle against an extreme form of popular rule. The official truth was that the established constitution ensured both liberty and order in the realm. The reactions of the two houses to the Royal Speech were more diverse than previously, reflecting both concern and ideological disagreements. In the Lords, David Murray, Viscount Stormont and the Earl of Mansfield, a Scot who had made a long career in the diplomatic service, rejected what he saw as “modern reforms” propagated in printed literature and public meetings, and he emphasized the united character of the voice of Parliament and the people (XXIX, 749). There

75 Rice Hughes, A Letter on the Meeting at the Crown and Anchor Tavern, on the Fourteenth of July, 1791, for the Purpose of Celebrating the Anniversary of the Revolution in France . . . (London) [1791], 27–28. 76 [Common Sense], A Letter from Common Sense, Addressed to the King and People (London) [1791], 6, 25.

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was a slight change here in that Parliament as a whole was seen to be communicating the unanimous voice of ‘the people’, no longer that of the King’s people. Grenville also opposed constitutional innovations by appealing to the voice of the people, which declared: “Our constitution shall be immutable” (XXIX, 749). The Lords’ Address was obviously formulated for the general public rather than for the ministry alone. In it, all references to the people were replaced with the traditionalist concept of subjects, just as in the Royal Speech. All of this suggests an awareness of the new kind of political potential which the Revolution had given to the concept of the people. The Commons likewise refrained from making any reference to the people or the nation. Only two Foxites used politically significant senses of the concept during the debate. Charles Grey, an active member of the Whig Friends of the People (an exclusive reform association whose revolutionary name made it sound as more dangerous than it actually was), proposed a reference to the royal care for the people’s happiness, but this was rejected (XXIX, 761). Fox suggested that the Royal Speech made the people believe that the King wished to decrease taxation whereas their representatives did not. Fox could not accept the idea of the ministry appealing to the people and bypassing Parliament, to the detriment of the latter (XXIX, 772). The events of 1792 forced the ministry to take an ever firmer stand on the Revolution. Associations like the London Corresponding Society and the Friends of the People were founded in 1792 to campaign for parliamentary reform. Their demands entered parliamentary debates in the form of renewed proposals for a reform of Parliament. Printed literature occasionally made the challenge quite explicit: in the free propaganda of the Corresponding Society, the Commons was presented as “so frequently and so falsely called the Democracy of the Nation”.77 This claim disputed Blackstone’s definition of the Commons as a synonym for the democratic element of the British constitution. Even among the reformists, we find the Duke of Richmond wishing to avoid a situation in which the Commons was “reduced to its natural dependence on the people alone” as that would make the system approach “a pure democracy”. A mixture of the democratic, aristocratic

77 The London Corresponding Society’s Addresses and Resolutions, (Reprinted, and Distributed Gratis.) (London) [1792], 8.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 377 and monarchical elements remained preferable despite the need for a parliamentary reform aiming at “universal representation”.78 Authors loyal to the established order replied with an anonymous treatise on “democracy in practice against democracy in principle”. The propagation of reform was rejected by emphasizing the inability of the majority of the nation to be virtuous and wise and the impossibility of achieving “a perfect national representation”. According to an anonymous writer, the British constitution differed radically from democracy and avoided “the spirit of democracy”, as had been witnessed during the Civil Wars. In dangerous times, the extremes of absolutism and democracy were to be avoided and the combination of the three elements retained in opposition to “democratic opinions”.79 At the same time, popular action against radicalism was also growing, with the loyalist mob on the move. The nation was becoming divided in its attitudes towards revolutionary France, the great majority having become highly suspicious of the country across the Channel.80 The most radical views were propagated in the widely circulated second part of Paine’s Rights of Man, published in February 179281 and commented on by members of parliament and a number of authors. Paine’s book took the escalating debate between radicals and loyalists one step further. An anonymous pamphleteer supporting a parliamentary reform claimed that Burke had first introduced the French revolutionary debate into Britain with his book in 1790 and that Paine had reacted to what Burke had claimed, and his book, being widely read, had given rise to such grievances among the people that had not

78 Charles Lennox, Duke of Richmond and Lennox, A Letter from His Grace the Duke of Richmond to Lieutenant Colonel Sharman, Chairman to the Committee of Correspondence . . . (London 1792), 11; Richmond’s ideas on parliamentary reform continued to provoke reactions as late as 1794. An anonymous pamphleteer then argued that his revolutionary ideas about universal suffrage and shorter parliaments would “promote the confusion and horrors of Democracy, by giving equality to the thoughtless, restless and tyrannic Multitude”. It was, after all, the tendency of democracy “under colour of the best principles to produce the greatest confusion and mischief, not knowing where to stop when the great Body of the People is raised and has gained an ascendancy.” [Anon.], An Answer to the celebrated Letter of the Duke of Richmond on a Parliamentary Reform . . . (London 1794), 22, 25. 79 [Anon.], Remarks on the Proceedings of the Society, who Style Themselves “The Friends of the People”: and Observations on the Principles of Government, as Applicable to the British Constitution . . . (London 1792), 17–18, 31, 49, 54, 63. 80 Evans 1996, 3; Mori 2000, 31. 81 The highest estimate is 200,000 copies and twice that number of readers. Dickinson 1995, 243.

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previously existed. It had supported the rise of “democratic societies” and the emergence of a “democratic” party, which in turn was challenging the ruling elite to such an extent that a civil war loomed as a likely end result. This author did not see “a democracy” as the way out of the crisis. It would be better to wait and see what happened with “the bold experiment of a democracy extending over a large country; that of America, that of France”. To avoid the risk of experiencing a revolution in Britain, it was, however, important to proceed to “immediate and radical reforms”.82 Paine extolled “the democracy of the Athenians” even though he recognized that it had degenerated as a result of the growth of the state and the lack of the modern idea of representation. A major failure in Burke’s reasoning on democracy was that he could not distinguish between such simple democracy and representation, which was a modern idea. Burke could not see that representative government constituted a fourth form of government that could solve the problems of simple democracy.83 According to Paine: By integrating representation upon democracy, we arrive at a system of government capable of embracing and confederating all the various interests and every extent of territory and population.84

This was truly an unconventional definition of both democracy and representation.85 Increasingly modern concepts of an active sovereignty of the people and dynamic democracy were clearly emerging in Paine’s thinking.86 Paine also presented an interpretation of the American Republic as democracy, as “representation ingrafted upon democracy” and as a model for all other nations.87 For him, the republican government of 82 [Anon.], Is All We Want Worth a Civil War? Or Conciliatory Thoughts upon the Present Crisis (London 1792), 10, 19, 22, 32. 83 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man. Part the Second. Combining Principle and Practice, . . . The second edition (London 1792), 28–29. 84 Paine, Rights of Man, 1792, 33. 85 Cf. William White, who regarded representation as a modern and noble improvement but saw it as productive of “a popular form, in contradiction to the democratical, in which the people acting collectively acted generally with violence”. A Dissertation on Government, with the Balance Considered; or, a Free Enquiry into the Nature of the Constitution, and the Probable Effect of a Parliamentary Reform (London 1792), 18. 86 Dickinson 1995, 173. 87 Thomas Paine, Rights of Man. Part the Second, 33; References to “American democracy” had already been made in France in 1789. Dippel 1986, 72.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 379 the United States was an updated version of Athenian democracy.88 Its combination of democracy and representation was simple and practical for any national context and avoided the risks connected with either monarchy or simple democracy.89 This was an interpretation that neither the Americans nor the British readily accepted; yet Paine’s innovation certainly changed the nature of the debate on democracy. He openly advocated a democratic republic based on representation over a representative government with monarchy, whether in its French (until the autumn of 1792) or its British form.90 Obviously, Paine’s understanding of democracy was no longer derived from the classical concept of direct democracy; he argued for the combination of democracy and representation into a system that was later to be known as “representative democracy”.91 Paine’s claims were generally rejected in British public discourse. By the time of the trial against his book, which took place in December 1792, when war against France already looked likely, the existence of two distinct concepts of democracy in Britain had become ever more apparent. The Attorney General accused Paine of “not considering that the Constitution possesses such an infusion of the spirit of democracy, as prevents either monarchy or aristocracy from exercising the powers of tyranny”,92 in other words, of ignoring that there was already a “spirit of democracy” in the British system. But democracy in its British form was limited, as the attorney continued: “[. . .] this Constitution possesses a very powerful infusion of democracy; but our Government is not entirely democratic; God forbid that it should be!” No pure democracy was conceivable: Hobbes had been right in describing democracy as “an aristocracy of orators, interrupted sometimes by

88

Parker 1953, 224; Markoff 1999, 670; Dunn, 113. Dunn 2005, 113. 90 Urbinati 2006, 167. 91 Palmer 1953, 223–224; Dunn 2005, 112. 92 The Trial of Thomas Paine, for Certain False, Wicked, Scandalous and Seditious Libels Inserted in the Second Part of the Rights of Man, Before the Right Hon. Lord Kenyon and a Special Jury, at Guildhall, on Tuesday the 18th December, 1792. Taken in Short Hand by an Eminent Advocate. Original Edition, Copied from the Minutes Taken in Court (London), [1792], 20; Another way to put the same point was to argue that the freedom of the English “consists in their enjoying all the advantages of democracy” with some elements of monarchy as well. Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World; or, Letters from a Chinese Philosopher Residing in London to his Friends in the East . . . (London 1792), Vol. 1, 260. 89

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the monarchy of one orator.”93 It was likewise a libel by Paine not to consider the other necessary elements of the constitution and to extol only democracy: Democracy is his sole delight. To democracy are all his raptures confined; [. . .] to democracy is to be attributed all the advantages that have accrued to man from the foundation of the world.94

There was evidence from America demonstrating that Paine had been planning to “convene the people of Great Britain [. . .] to establish a Government proceeding directly from the sovereignty of the people”.95 In December 1792, it had become criminal to argue so outspokenly in favour of unlimited democracy and the sovereignty of the people in the printed media. This would not prevent members of parliament from doing the same in Parliament, of course, as we shall soon see. Indeed, a public debate that was curtailed by judicial means could be continued under the protection of parliamentary immunity by a few daring radicals. The debates of spring 1792 on the possibility of a parliamentary reform provide further evidence of an ongoing conceptual change in Britain caused by the radicalization of the Revolution in France. Disappointed in their hopes for cooperation with Louis XVI, the revolutionaries were increasingly using “democracy” as their slogan. As a result of the anti-monarchical nature of the emerging French concept of democracy, the pejorative connotations of “democratical principles” tended to strengthen further in Britain. Several attempts at parliamentary reform had been made in the early 1780s and in 1790, sometimes with statements openly defending the democratic element of the constitution, but they had met with no success. In spring 1792, radical societies were active and were able to persuade Grey among the Foxites to bring up the possibility of a moderate reform in the Commons. Grey was a founding member of the Society of the Friends of the People. He and his associates were no supporters of Paine or French revolutionary extremes, but his opponents hardly drew such distinctions. Quite soon, Grey’s activities

93 94 95

The Trial of Thomas Paine, 1792, 26. The Trial of Thomas Paine, 1792, 25. The Trial of Thomas Paine, 1792, 32.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 381 appeared unwise even in Fox’s eyes.96 Given Paine’s book and the rise of anti-monarchical democracy in France, an interesting question is whether Grey’s group dared to associate their reform proposal with the concept of democracy. In fact, Grey chose to use language that recalled the reformist discourse of the early 1780s rather than that of the 1790s. The language of democracy in the revolutionary sense was absent in his introduction to the motion. Grey maintained, however, that the people were calling more actively than ever for a reform, in the hope of saving the constitution. “The minds of the people” were “agitated” and hence “a true representation of the people” should finally be established (XXIX, 1300–1301). Pitt’s immediate reply shows that the Prime Minister continued to take democracy seriously as an element of the constitution, even if he was unwilling to increase the relative weight of democracy in the current state of international affairs. Considering the implementation of a parliamentary reform to be impossible without the risk of anarchy, Pitt expressed his support for the reform in principal and suggested that it could be discussed at a more appropriate time (XXIX, 1302– 1309).97 Even in April 1792, the leadership of the British government seemed to be open to the possibility of reform, at least at the level of parliamentary rhetoric. Pitt was not content with recognizing the centrality of a democratic element in the constitution but deliberately defined the British system as a model supporting “proper democracy” with “a representative assembly”.98 This re-description of the British representative political

96 Smith 2004; The leaders of this society included Lauderdale, Grey, Sheridan, Francis, Erskine and Whitbread. Cannon 1994, 122. 97 Counter-arguments were soon presented in the press. According to the radical James Mackintosh, an immediate reform was indispensable to prepare the constitution for the likely rise of either “the spirit of extreme Democracy” or despotism in Europe as a consequence of the French Revolution. The reform would reinvigorate “the democratic part of the Constitution” and prevent popular discontent motivated by “the fascinating example of their superb Democracy” in France. It would also prevent the constitution from changing into “a pure Democracy” of a tumultuous kind and, with the maintenance of monarchy and aristocracy, curb “the most magnificent and seductive visions of democratic enthusiasm”. In brief, parliamentary reform was needed in order to stop the progress of the wrong kind of democracy. A Letter to the Right Honourable William Pitt, on his Apostacy from the Cause of Parliamentary Reform . . . (London 1792), 30, 32–34. 98 Pitt was also thanked for uniting the King and the people so that he “has directed the sceptre of the crown, and wielded the shield of democracy” in an anonymous

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system was a direct reply to Paine and to the emerging French constitutional alternative of representative democracy. It emerged out of a combination of already revaluated, positive conceptions of democracy and representation in the mixed constitution that Pitt himself had helped to mould in the early 1780s. While providing a rhetorical re-description designed to maintain the status quo in Britain, Pitt’s formulation actually contained elements of the emerging revolutionary notion of ‘representative democracy’. Paine had presented a more radical interpretation of related ideas, and Robespierre would take the idea to the extreme in less than two years time. After his definition of the British political order in seemingly revolutionary vocabulary, Pitt distanced himself from parliamentary reform and presented Grey’s proposal as a mere unhelpful questioning of an already existing democratic and representative system. Pitt presented himself as a defender of democracy, understood in the sense of the trust of the people being placed in their representatives: [. . .] he was sorry to confess, that there were persons who thought that the people were not adequately represented in parliament. It was essential to the happiness of the people, that they should be convinced that they, and the members of that House, felt an identity of interest: that the nation at large, and the representatives of the people, held a conformity of sentiment: this was the essence of a proper representative assembly; under this legitimate authority, a people could be said to be really free; and this was a state in which the true spirit of proper democracy could be said to subsist (XXIX, 1309).

Pitt’s formulation emphasized the ideal character of the British representative system and the need of the political elite to maintain the trust of the people in it. Pitt interpreted the British political order as one combining representation and democracy of the right type. There was, he implied, a difference between “the nation at large” and “the people” who were truly represented in Parliament, but even so “the true spirit of proper democracy” was included in the system. In defending the British form of government as allowing for a “proper democracy”, Pitt was providing an alternative to the mistaken “liberty” of the French revolutionary regime. As the head of government, he was, for the time being, forced to argue that reform was not possible. Pitt concluded his pamphlet, “democracy” appearing here in the positive sense consistently given to it by the Prime Minister. [Member of the Jockey Club], An Answer to Three Scurrilous Pamphlets, Entitled The Jockey Club. The second edition (London ) [1792], 119.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 383 speech with harsh condemnations of opposition papers and meetings agitating the people to complain about the form of government at a time when such complaints were inappropriate. The unique strength of the British system constituted by the three elements of the constitution was not to be questioned in 1792 (XXIX, 1310–1312). The danger was that French anarchy might enter Britain as a result of such agitation. Pitt is known not to have been particularly alarmed by the French threat in the spring of 1792, but he warned Parliament about it anyway.99 What could the opposition do to counter the ministerial definition of the current state of representation as sufficient to guarantee “the true spirit of proper democracy”? Fox responded with language referring to the people, not with any programmatic concept of democracy. He suggested that there was desire for a reform among the public and that his party, unlike Pitt’s supporters, remained consistently in favour of one. Measures “to quiet the minds of the people” who were unhappy with the current policies and their lack of representation were needed, Fox maintained, emphasizing the role of the Commons as “the organ of the public voice”. However, Paine’s model was not to be followed; Fox denounced the latter’s approach as mere abuse of the British form of government by a foreigner.100 But a reform was essential: the very essence of the British constitution was its openness to innovation, improvement and reform. Fox’s overall picture of the state of affairs remained much more optimistic than that of the other speakers: he continued to be convinced that liberty was making progress in France, Poland and America. Britain, to join this trend of improvement, now needed to introduce a parliamentary reform (XXIX, 1313–1317). Burke again became the major opponent of the Foxites. He maintained that the calls for reform did not genuinely arise from among the people but were a result of agitation by the leaders of the opposition. Burke saw no evidence to demonstrate the truth of Fox’s interpretation of “the public voice” or “the sense of the people”. In Burke’s view, the Commons always remained a platform of confrontation for the political establishment rather than the people at large:

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Christie 1982, 212. According to Mitchell, Fox was as critical of Paine’s book as Burke. Mitchell

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chapter five Let democracy get to its greatest extent in this country, or in that House, still it would be found that there were, and would continue to be, great men in that House upon different sides of any question, that must and ought to have influence (XXIX, 1319–1320).

Burke also pointed out the risks of activating the people excessively in the name of reform and innovation: What would the opposition leaders do when, as in France, “the ideas of the people, may probably carry them to an ungovernable length, upon a subject of which they understand so little?” The risk would be particularly grave if the representation of the people was changed. Paine’s book in particular, with its unfounded accusations of “a conspiracy against the privileges of the people”, was not to be recommended. Such a recommendation alone was for Burke an attack on the constitution (XXIX, 1320–1322).101 William Windham opposed the reform scheme by echoing Burke, emphasizing the diversity of views among the people after a mixed public debate (XXIX, 1325–1326). Having visited Paris in September 1791, he had been converted to Burkean views on the necessity to curtail the progress of French ideas. Henry Dundas, again, accused Fox and his allies of intentionally trying to “excite the people” (XXIX, 1337). Thomas Erskine, Fox’s ally and a rival of the Dundas family, argued that the intention of the constitution was that the Commons “should be a representation of the people” whereas that was not currently the case, as “the sense of the House and the people were diametrically opposite” in questions of foreign policy. The risk involved in not reforming the system was popular activism: “[W]hen the people began to act for themselves, it was to be feared, that their demand might not be so reasonable as at present” (XXIX, 1328–1330). According to M.S. Taylor, “it was necessary to go back to the people, and under the sanction of their authority to compel that House to do its duty” (XXIX, 1338). This statement placed the people above Parliament in an unconventional and downright radical way. The radicals obviously had

101 Thomas Cooper also replied to Burke in the public sphere, citing French ideas of the rulers being “no more than the Delegates of a Democracy”. A Reply to Mr. Burke’s Invective Against Mr. Cooper, and Mr. Watt, in the House of Commons, on the 30th of April, 1792 (London 1792), 55.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 385 no hesitation in exploiting the fears of revolutionary developments in their calls for reform. Sheridan, a member of the Society of the Friends of the People, challenged Pitt’s inconsistent opinions about reform. The Prime Minister seemed to change his views according to his current ambitions, advancing either the royal prerogative (in 1784) or joining “the wildest advocates of democracy” (referring to the reform proposals of the early 1780s) (XXIX, 1334). The provocation was a pre-planned one, suggesting that Pitt had, contrary to his claims in the 1780s, abandoned the democratic element in the constitution. Sheridan also made a pertinent observation about how the concept of the people tended to be used by speakers in Parliament: “Just as it answered the purpose for argument the people were lowered or exalted” (XXIX, 1334). Both concepts, democracy and the people, had become contestable in the Commons, though their meanings were still to a great extent determined by the legacy of the reform debates of the 1780s rather than by some French revolutionary principles. Even if the anti-monarchical, republican and outspokenly “democratic” nature of the French Revolution was challenging previous understandings of the democratic element in Britain in 1792, democracy continued to be discussed in favourable terms by some peers. Alexander Wedderburn, Lord Loughborough and the Earl of Rosslyn, defined the British system in May conventionally as “a monarchy, something of an aristocracy, and a sober and temperate democracy” (PR, XXX, 207). The positive element of democracy was thus included, recognized by a nobleman who had recently moved from the opposition to become a member of Pitt’s wartime cabinet. Lansdowne (Shelburne), known for his original use of language, found democracy in the British nobility in that while a seat in the Upper House was inherited by the oldest son, the younger sons could be elected to the Commons. As a consequence of this practice, “a degree of democracy was necessarily infused in every noble family throughout the kingdom, and the general interest united and strengthened” (PR, XXXIII, 442). It was this noble combination of aristocracy and democracy, familiar to Lansdowne thanks to his experience in both houses, that made the British system so strong. Lansdowne’s statement shows a disregard of French revolutionary conceptions of a necessary antithesis between aristocracy and democracy. Lansdowne had contacts with Mirabeau, Talleyrand and other French revolutionary aristocrats and obviously

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continued to believe that the French Revolution was ultimately leading towards a peaceful system resembling the British one.102 Not all aristocrats were so unconcerned. Charles Townshend, the Baron of Bayning, a Portland Whig, expressed his disgust at what he saw as the absurd doctrines and socially levelling practices of the time, referring to annual parliaments and extended suffrage in particular. The lengthy disputes on contested elections demonstrated to him what excessively frequent voting led to: the British would soon “have no Parliament at all, but a democratic Government of the streets” (PR, Vol. 33, 476). “Democratic government” stood for mob action, and that was definitely something that the political elite rejected. Lansdowne countered Bayning by referring explicitly to d’Argenson and demanding the municipal regulation of popular disturbances. In his view, “this was no doctrine of wild democracy—it was a doctrine set forth by an aristocratic author” (PR, XXXIII, 479). D’Argenson provided the equally unconventional Lansdowne with a means to argue that the British people would defend the constitution in case of any uprisings. And he urged the nobility not to oppose public opinion and ally themselves with the monarchy against the people. Such an unwise action would only strengthen calls for the rights of the people (PR, XXXIII, 479, 482). Lansdowne had welcomed the French nobility joining the Third Estate103 and obviously wished to see a similar union between the aristocracy and the people in Britain. Though politically marginal, Lansdowne’s reasoning demonstrates how some reconsideration of the constitution was going on among members of the British high nobility as well. Lansdowne’s unconventional way of thinking led him to join the diminishing group of Foxite sympathizers with the Revolution in the Lords.104 In the meantime, the events of autumn 1792 in France, which led to the radicalization and internationalization of the Revolution, caused the Pitt ministry to publicly adopt an anti-revolutionary policy. The monarchy was vulnerable in France, and ideas about the permanent sovereignty of people as opposed to the original sovereignty of the people were rising. The relations of the two powers were deteriorating towards an open conflict, the intentions of the French exiles in

102 103 104

Cannon 2004. Cannon 2004. Cannon 2004.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 387 London were suspect, and British radical societies gave cause for concern with their campaigns for parliamentary reform and suggestions that violent means could also be used bring it about.105 Francophile comments were seen as alarming, as British accounts and translations of French texts communicated pejorative images of violence, absurd ideas and warning precedents which the notion of “the sovereignty of the people” seemed to be inspiring on the Continent.106 Attacks on the monarchy and the church in France caused deep disgust and fear among a great majority of Britons. As a consequence, Pitt adopted a policy that aimed at combining the support of the landowning, industrial, commercial and Anglican elements of the British establishment with an ideological defence of the established political and religious order.107 The notion of ‘the sovereignty of the people’, one of the major ideological innovations of the Revolution, also found its way into British parliamentary debates in late 1792, after the monarchy had been abolished in France, “direct democracy” adopted in Paris, the French Republic declared, and the trial of Louis XVI started. The balance of power on the Continent seemed to be threatened as well, particularly after the new National Convention declared its support for peoples attempting to restore their liberty.108 This second revolution in France, the rise of the Jacobin republic, also changed the meaning of the concept of democracy in ever more radical directions. All previous associations between democracy and monarchy were abolished and those between democracy and equality emphasized instead.109 A war between the two countries already seemed unavoidable. These confrontations initiated a new stage in the history of the concept of democracy in Parliament. When Parliament was opened on 13 December 1792, the state of affairs led to the reintroduction in royal speaking of vocabulary referring to the people and the nation, with 105 Palmer 1964, 35; Mori 1997, 108; Rosanvallon 2000, 53; Royle 2000, 16–17; Monnier 2002, 401. 106 See [Anon.], An Historical Sketch of the French Revolution from its Commencement to the Year 1792 (Dublin 1792), 161, 273; Jacques Necker, An Essay on the True Principles of Executive Power in Great States . . . (London, 1792), Vol. 1, 388; Vol. 2, 136; [Anon.], The Misfortunes of Geneva; or, a Picture of the Calamities that Threaten, in the Present Crisis, the most Moderate Governments of Europe . . . (London) [1792], 7, 19, 29, 40. 107 O’Gorman 1989, 28, 34. 108 Christie 1982, 215–216. 109 Dippel 1986, 78–79.

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an emphasis on their union with the Crown (XXIX, 1556). An idea of a monarchy supported by a people through the institutions of a popular government was constructed with statements such as: “Our joint efforts will, I doubt not, be rendered completely effectual, by the decided support of a free and loyal people” (XXIX, 1559). Despite the grave state of affairs, Lansdowne, now Pitt’s leading opponent in the Lords, protested against the way in which the current Parliament had been belatedly convened and addressed the necessity of reforming representation in order to conciliate “the people”. “If the people called for a parliamentary reform, he thought the House of Commons, [. . .] should [. . .] hear them constitutionally state their grievances” (XXIX, 1569). This was all the more necessary because, according to Lansdowne, “the people were too enlightened to be blindfolded” (XXIX, 1569). Lansdowne’s speech acted as a catalyst in the debate, as he was known to have connections with French revolutionaries and British radical societies. Grenville, a government spokesman, next attacked societies that had contacted the National Convention with the suspected intention of superseding the British Parliament and establishing a British Convention “as the only genuine organ of representation.” By doing so they had questioned the status of the King as “the representative of the people” in foreign affairs (XXIX, 1570).110 Grenville’s definition of the monarchy was similarly provocative in its traditionalism, seeing the monarch as the representative of the people. The threat of war and the activities of the Corresponding Societies brought revolutionary concepts into the British Parliament among both the minority who called for parliamentary reform and the majority who opposed all developments that could be interpreted as originating from the French Revolution. Stormont, who knew French intellectual currents well after working as Ambassador in Paris and as Foreign Secretary in London, quoted Condorcet in order to demonstrate the threat which the French revolutionaries and their misled advocates in Britain—“levellers” as he called them with reference to the 1640s—presented to the security of the British constitution. Condorcet’s advice to the Dutch, recommending the establishment of 110 The said Convention, associated both with the Convention of 1689 and that of France, was actually holding its meeting in Edinburgh on 11–13 December 1792. Royle 2000, 17.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 389 “a democracy like that of France”, proved to Stormont that the French aimed at destroying all limited hereditary monarchy. This was against the sentiments of Parliament and “a vast majority of the people” of Britain. Fortunately, according to him, the French had no chance of succeeding in Britain thanks to the universal adherence there to the most balanced constitution that ever existed (XXIX, 1571–1572). Stormont himself was moving from the opposition to become a supporter of Pitt’s ministry at this time, in recompense for which he was finally given office. In their Address, the Commons confirmed “the decided support of a free and loyal people” (XXX, 8), though considerable criticism of the formulations of the Royal Speech was presented during the debates. John Henry Petty, the Earl of Wycombe, argued that the speech had “calumniated the people of England” as it had made unfounded suggestions of a planned rebellion by the radical societies. Ministerial claims about the constitution being in danger had no justification as it was essentially “the government of the people’s choice” (XXX, 10). The sharpest critic of the ministry’s policy was Fox, however, who saw its attack on the radical societies as “an intolerable calumny on the people of Great Britain” (XXX, 13–14). Emphasizing “the rights of the people” as the foundation of all government, he insisted on the right to speculate as necessary over “our liberties as a people” and argued that the power of the Hanoverians, too, originated “from the choice of the people” and “the will of the many” (XXX, 19, 21–22). As for the Commons, it should demonstrate that it represented every individual Briton even if not everyone was allowed to participate in elections. The problem with the current ministry was that it had, according to Fox, made every attempt to make the people lose their trust in the Commons, trying to show that it “is not the true representative and organ of the people” and thus decreasing its power (XXX, 30, 32–33). Grey was another opposition speaker who referred to the political role of the people. This major proponent of parliamentary reform could not believe in the possibility that the people would reject the constitution. In his view, the grievances of the people should rather be solved with reforms (XXX, 41). Erskine also joined in the argument, suggesting that the whole panic over the danger to the constitution had emerged only after the opposition had called for the extension of the representation of the people (XXX, 56). Fox again returned to his favourite topic of the rights of the people, suggesting that the only free

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government was one which the people regarded as such (XXX, 61). The Foxite opposition was actively applying language referring to the people against the ministry despite the risk of being associated with the French republicans. Two days later, Fox’s motion for negotiations with the French republican regime initiated a further exchange of views on democracy and the current French form of government. The concept of the sovereignty of the people, which had been central in revolutionary rhetoric for some time, appeared for the first time in the British Parliament during this debate. A stand on the sovereignty of the people had to be taken after the French had publicly recommended its introduction into the British system as well. A reasoned debate was not possible under the threat of a military confrontation, however; the idea of popular sovereignty was simply condemned by an overwhelming majority. Fox hardly intended to instigate a constitutional debate on the political role of the people, but even his suggestion for reconciliation irritated his opponents, causing them to reveal that their animosity towards France arose increasingly out of its constitutional development. Fox also made himself a target of accusations of poisoning the minds of the people with sedition (XXX, 82). North rejected Fox’s attempt to influence foreign policy as questioning the royal prerogative and dismissed the motion to negotiate with the French National Convention as unthinkable after this organ had declared the British “an oppressed people” whom the revolutionaries should assist to recover their liberty (XXX, 86). Robert Jenkinson, a 21-year-old eyewitness of 14 July 1789 in Paris and an opponent of the Revolution ever since, denounced all cooperation with France, which was a “natural enemy and rival” irrespective of its form of government. Jenkinson warned particularly that the recognition of the French regime by the Commons, as distinct from George III, would give “a sort of oblique confirmation of the justness of their principles, in the democratic appearance it would have” (XXX, 87, 90). The Commons could not be associated with the revolutionary regime in a way that could be viewed as “democratic”; it would lead to the type of internal confrontation which the revolutionaries had been insinuating already existed in Britain. William Windham went further, maintaining that even if “the temper and feelings of the people” must be consulted in a free government, that was not the case in decisions on war and peace (XXX, 102). In his eyes, the situation was so grave that he denounced cooperation with Fox and changed sides to support Pitt instead.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 391 The support for the Foxites was evaporating, although Samuel Whitbread II, a defender of the Friends of the People, still emphasized the role of the people in decision-making. Whitbread attempted to define his political creed in a seemingly conventional manner: “[H]e loved the monarchy, he loved the aristocracy; above all he loved the democracy of this country; but he had no attachment to abuses in any department” (XXX, 102, 105). Even this appeared to many not as just an appropriate defence of the democratic element but as an attempt to introduce an extension of democracy into the country. Whitbread’s distinction between British democracy and the French revolutionary regime was unlikely to be understood in sympathetic terms in the circumstances of December 1792. After Whitbread had invoked ‘democracy’, his opponents responded by taking up the concept of the sovereignty of the people. Sir William Grant, a lawyer, initiated the criticism of this principle by referring to a transition from monarchical despotism into “the still more wild and unlimited despotism of the people” in France (XXX, 106). Burke next declared the sovereignty of the people to be the most pernicious element of the French regime. The radicalization of the French Revolution was leading to a denunciation of all associations between the British constitution and the sovereignty of the people, which was seen as an essentially French doctrine. No British parliamentarian had previously spoken explicitly about the sovereignty of the people;111 now Burke employed the concept only to denounce it as a new doctrine totally inconsistent with the British constitution. The pejorative content attributed to the concept was overwhelming. Pointing to the treatment of Continental monarchs and contrasting this with the British monarch, who was loved by his people, Burke declared: “Kings are anointed with oil—the new sovereignty of the people with blood!” (XXX, 108, 111). Burke did add an important qualification, however: he spoke specifically about “the new sovereignty of the people”, thus implying that the French had reinterpreted the sovereignty of the people wrongly. Even in the heat of the debate, Burke was not denying the

111 As we saw in the Introduction, a number of scholars focusing on the seventeenth century have suggested that the concept of popular sovereignty had already become established in British political culture in the 1640s. However, no definite concept of the sovereignty of the people existed in British parliamentary discourse before 1792. See also Quentin Skinner’s criticism of the interpretation of the Levellers as champions of democracy in Skinner 2002, 76.

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popular origin of political power as a theoretical assumption; he only questioned the French innovation and was ready to fight a war against the regime that had introduced it (XXX, 112, 115). Views on the political role of the people divided the House: Burke’s speech was interrupted by Thomas Whitmore. Sheridan attempted to reply to Burke with the irony befitting a dramatist. In his words: “These gentlemen must have all the democratic metaphysicians of France extirpated, or they cannot sleep in their beds” (XXX, 121). According to Sheridan, Burke had gone too far in his condemnation of revolutionary and republican ideas, many of which were harmless and even amusing rather than threatening. Sheridan himself rejected war, particularly one fought to restore the French monarchy (XXX, 124–125). There were thus still some who opposed an ideological war against France, but they were waning in strength in the Commons. Combating both French and Domestic Conceptions of Democracy in 1793 During the next few months, the content of the concept of democracy was redefined in a number of debates. Its revolutionary associations with the sovereignty of the people were generally condemned, but the old concept of democracy as an element of the mixed constitution was also defended, at least implicitly. In the midst of a debate on the Alien Bill, for instance, Burke and Fox made points about the political role of the people in the revolutionary world. Burke held the initiative for most of the discussion, looking for an opportunity to say more about the French republican notion of the sovereignty of the people. He considered sovereignty in Britain to be monarchical, not popular, and representation parliamentary, not national: In talking of the English nation, they talked of the sovereignty of the people: the constitution of this country knew no such sovereignty; the king was sovereign of the Lords and of the Commons; the King, Lords, and Commons, were the representatives of the country at home; the king was its only representative abroad. They talked of the nation: we knew of no nation as a distinct body from the representative powers. We talked indeed of the people, but the sovereignty of the people was a phrase not recognized by law, and inconsistent with our constitution (XXX, 184).

Burke maintained that the King-in-Parliament, as a representative institution, formed the only imaginable “nation” in Britain; no larger

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 393 nation outside Parliament—contrary to what the opposition had been suggesting—was conceivable. The people did have a recognized role in the British system but not as a source of constant sovereignty; sovereignty in everyday politics could only come from the monarchy. An ideological confrontation was leading to a war between a mixed monarchy and a newly-declared republic based on the principle of the sovereignty of the people. Burke drew the ultimate conclusion that the call of the National Convention for the introduction of the sovereignty of the people in Britain was, in itself, a declaration of war. War was unavoidable as “the National Convention will not acknowledge any institution derogatory from the sovereignty of the people” (XXX, 184). Burke maintained that the King-in-Parliament held all power in Britain, a power based on popular consent, but this parliamentary system was totally irreconcilable with the French revolutionary concept of popular sovereignty. The British system was free without such a doctrine: Where the crown had its power enlarged or diminished by the people, according to times and circumstances, there the people could not be justly said to live under despotism, but to be perfectly free (XXX, 188).

After the debates of mid-December, the opposition wanted to avoid statements that could be interpreted as treasonous. Without engaging himself in the debate on the sovereignty of the people, Fox expressed his concern about “the word ‘people’ ” being consciously “expunged from our political dictionary” (XXX, 226). Fox further reminded the House of the role which the people should play in the British political system, replying thereby to Richard Philips, the Baron of Milford, who lamented the entry of revolutionary phrases such as “the national will” into the resolutions of some Corresponding Societies and even into reports on parliamentary debates.112 According to Milford, concerned about undesirable linguistic innovations, only Parliament could express the national will, and no more than “the national opinion” could exist beyond it (XXX, 218). The role of the people was marginalized in the language of the government under the threat of war. The attitude of Prime Minister Pitt had changed to the extent that even he now justified preparations for

112 Milford suggested, perhaps in order to deprecate the phrase, that these words may have been inserted into a speech of Thomas Erskine by the reporter.

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war with the claim that the French constitution challenged the British one. The sovereignty of the people and universal representation of the French type were out of the question for the British mixed constitution: They had seen within two or three years a revolution in France, founded upon principles which were inconsistent with every regular government—which were hostile to hereditary monarchy, to nobility, to all privileged orders, and to every sort of popular representation short of that, which would give to every individual a voice in the election of representatives (XXX, 232).

According to Pitt, the French challenge seemed to be finding advocates in Britain as a consequence of the propagation of revolutionary ideas (XXX, 232). After Pitt reported to the Commons on 1 February 1793 about the actual opening of hostilities after the French declaration of war and call for English republican help, he also addressed the constitutional justification for the war, which, together with references to violence against religion in France, demonstrates the highly ideological motivation of the confrontation.113 The war was fought against revolutionary principles, and thus it also affected the way in which democracy and the sovereignty of the people were understood. The goal, according to Pitt, was to defend the British constitution, which was based on a uniquely happy combination of “the sacred person of the sovereign” with “a mixture of aristocratic and democratical power in the frame of legislation”.114 The prevailing system protected the British not only from absolute power but also from “the still more dangerous contagion of popular licentiousness”, the destructive character of which had been seen in France (XXX, 270–273)—in the execution of Louis XVI less than two weeks earlier. Pitt was particularly annoyed by the French claims that their imposition of models of government on neighbouring nations was “dictated by the will of the people”, which was

113

Christie 1982, 216; Mori 1997, 143. The Parliamentary Register had reported in nearly identical terms how the Prime Minister had referred to the monarchy and “the Legislature [. . .] composed of a mixture of democracy and aristocracy”. PR, XXXIV, 386; An offprint of the speech gave an identical formulation. William Pitt, Speech of the Right Honourable William Pitt . . . on Friday, Feb. 1, 1793 (London 1793), 8–9. 114

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 395 determined by the National Convention alone (XXX, 278–279, 285). The Prime Minister considered that Britain was defending democracy as a classical element of her mixed constitution against the French version of democracy based on the so-called sovereignty of the people and popular representation. She was also fighting against the attempt of the French to dominate the rest of Europe. More particularly, the British opposed the French attempt to separate “the king and parliament of Great Britain from the people, who are called republicans” (XXX, 286). Pitt’s war politics did not go entirely unchallenged. Lord Beauchamp reminded Pitt that, in a free country, the Prime Minister “must wait with patience for the will of the people” (XXX, 290). Samuel Whitbread II pointed out that “the national will was supreme in every country”, and that the power of the British monarch was also based on “the will of the nation” (XXX, 296–297). Even if not necessarily intended to be provocative, mentioning “the will of the people” or “the national will” in this context was taken as such by the audience, who hardly missed the introduction of these French conceptual innovations into the Westminster debate. Fox went even further: his reply to Pitt’s announcement constituted a turning point in that he argued that the British political system was also, in principle, based on the sovereignty of the people. Such an argument was an outright provocation, made as it was in the face of the outbreak of war with a regime that advocated the very notion and despite strong opposition to the idea in previous debates. Furthermore, Fox was linked to the need to listen to the people in deciding on war policies. Fox’s claim was hardly moderated by his condemnation of the execution of Louis XVI, and it was certainly reinforced by his claim that Pitt’s war was all about the French form of government. This kind of positive characterization of the sovereignty of the people had never been heard in Parliament before. It did not help much that Fox immediately applied the phrase to the British regime with references to the Revolution of 1688 and the Succession Settlement of 1701 (XXX, 302, 306–307, 310, two entirely legitimate cases of the people deciding on who should possess executive power. The opening of the Revolutionary War thus coincided with the first open claims in the British Parliament that the British constitution was based the sovereignty of the people rather than on the sovereignty of parliament only. The course of international affairs and previous

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disputes between Burke and Fox led to the following conceptual revisions by Fox, as reported in the written sources:115 [. . .] the people are the sovereign in every state; [. . .] they have a right to change the form of their government, and a right to cashier their governors for misconduct, as the people of this country cashiered James 2nd, not by a parliament, or any regular form known to the constitution, but by a convention speaking the sense of the people; that convention produced a parliament and a king. [. . .] He could not admit the right to do all this but by acknowledging the sovereignty of the people as paramount to all other laws (XXX, 302, 306–307, 310).

Fox’s interpretation implied that the British had no right to intervene in French affairs. But it also meant that the British monarchy was founded on nothing else but “the right and choice of the people”, the reference being to the Revolution Settlement of 1689 and to the Succession Settlement of 1701. Furthermore, Fox maintained, the people had never given their sovereignty away forever (XXX, 310). Or, as another printed version of Fox’s speech stated more explicitly: “[. . .] the present Family enjoyed the throne from the sovereignty of the people.”116 The reformulated constitutional stand was that the British constitution, including its monarchy, was derived out of the sovereignty of the people. Such a notion found few proponents in the public debate in 1793.117 115 In a version of the speech published separately, possibly on Fox’s own initiative, the formulation was slightly more radical in that it referred to individual sovereigns in the Painite fashion and took up the possibility of abolition of the monarchy as well: “That the People are the sovereigns in all countries.—That they might amend, alter, and abolish the form of government, under which they lived, at pleasure—that they might cashier their monarchs for misconduct.” Charles James Fox, The Speeches of the Right Hon. C.J. Fox, in the British House of Commons, on Feb. first and twelfth, M,DCC,XCIII (London 1793), 17. 116 Cartwright, An Appeal, 1799, 17. 117 Fox’s views were echoed by Norman Macleod, a Scottish member: “The Constitution, as established by its fundamental laws, maintains, that all Sovereignty is derived from the People—that all the powers lodged in the King, Lords, and Commons, in Parliament assembled, proceed from the People, and ought to be exercised only for their good.” Macleod also provided a definition of the concept of the people as the source of “social authority, the measure of political value, and the pedestal of legitimate power”. Letters from Colonel Macleod, Member of Parliament for Inverness-shire, to the Chairman of the Association for Parliamentary Reform in Scotland [London 1793], 6–7; A more traditional application of the notion can be found in [Officer], Letter on the Present Associations. . . . (London 1793), 10, according to which the British monarchy constituted a practical application of power being delegated from the people. The existence of a king constituted “the Sovereignty and Majesty of the People, which can only remain vague and ideal, till thus collected, as it were, into

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 397 William Windham, who had deserted the Foxites, opposed what he saw as Fox’s approval of “French principles”. Windham’s reactionary Whig group denounced any application of revolutionary principles to the British constitution. The people had a say in British politics but not in the spirit of the sovereignty of the people: As to what had been said of the sovereignty of the people, he should at present go no farther into the discussion than to enter his protest against the doctrine, that the people, or a majority, have a right to make and unmake governments according to their caprice; though he admitted that it was a general subject of intricate and important discussion (XXX, 315).

It would have threatened the war effort to open a more extensive constitutional debate and, therefore, Windham chose to pass over Fox’s provocation, branding it as excessive admiration of the already damned French regime. The sovereignty of the people was simply not a British principle. The Lords, too, were generally critical of the French constitution. According to the Earl of Kimont, there was no real government at all in France “be it of either monarchical, aristocratical, or even democratical form” (PR, XXXVI, 82). Some opposition lords were critical of the British government as well. Stanhope, a former chairman of the Revolution Society, pointed out that the war was not that of “the people of Great Britain” but that of the Pitt ministry, aimed at the French form of government (XXX, 323). James Maitland, the Earl of Lauderdale, “professed himself to be one of the people” when expressing compassion for the victims of French counter-revolutionaries (XXX, 326). Lauderdale, a Foxite Scottish representative peer since 1790, had joined the Society of the Friends of the People, visited Paris in the autumn of 1792, met Jacques-Pierre Brissot (a leader of the moderate Girondin faction), started to call himself a citizen and to wear a Jacobin costume.118 If there was a single Jacobin in the British Parliament, it was Lauderdale. Parliamentary immunity allowed this radical aristocrat to freely express his views despite the war.

one focus, and so rendered efficient and permanent.” A third author recognised the sovereignty of the people but insisted on “the will of the people” being controlled as well as the other parts of the constitution. [Anon.], The Expediency of a Revolution Considered: In Which the Advantages held out to the People are Examined and Refuted (London 1793), 13. 118 Thorne 2004.

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Fox’s suggestion that the British system was based on the sovereignty of the people was answered more extensively on 28 February when the Commons met to discuss the alleged existence of seditious practices in the country. Burke had prepared his response well and reacted as soon as the opposition suggested that the government was conspiring against the rights of the people (XXX, 524–525). Burke opposed not only calls for reform but also used the opportunity to denounce the French idea of the sovereignty of the people, which he, unlike the opposition speakers, associated with reform and any sympathy towards the revolutionary regime. According to Burke, the idea was impossible to realize and conducive to nothing but vicious mob rule: The sovereignty of the people was the most false, wicked, and mischievous doctrine that ever could be preached to them. It was false, because they had no means of exercising their sovereignty. [. . .] If the majority of the public was to be taken not by weight, but by tale, the most ignorant would elect, and none but the crafty and wicked would be elected. [. . .] The moment that equality and the sovereignty of the people was adopted as the rule of government, property would be at an end, and religion, morality, and law, which grew out of property, would fall with it (XXX, 551, 554).

Burke rejected the idea of the sovereignty of the people completely. However, the reformist side did not give up their struggle, and in May they revived the debate on a moderate reform and the representation of the people. A petition compiled by the Association of the Friends of the People, in which Foxites such as Grey and Sheridan were involved, was then introduced to Parliament. The formulations of the petition were challenging to the highest degree; even Fox had difficulties in agreeing with them.119 The petition suggested that the lack of appropriate popular representation tended to lead to either “a despotic monarchy” or “a dangerous oligarchy”. French revolutionary language was unashamedly applied in the definition of “a third estate” as “created by, representing, and responsible to, the people themselves.” (XXX, 788) In previous parliamentary debates, “the third estate” had often referred to the monarch; now the radical Foxites made it a synonym of the people in the French fashion.

119

Dinwiddy 1992, 2; Mitchell 2004.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 399 Furthermore, the petitioners demanded the use of the concept of representation “in its fair and obvious sense” and not in the unconstitutional sense in which it was currently used to refer to Parliament. They also urged the Commons to admit that they thought that the people of England did not deserve full representation or that they believed that the people already were fully represented (XXX, 788). Finally, the petitioners insinuated that private parliamentary patronage not only excluded “the great mass of the people” from parliamentary elections but actually constituted a threat to all the elements of government, aiming at a takeover of “the sovereignty of the country” (XXX, 795). No mention of the sovereignty of the people or universal suffrage was made; rather the document appeared as a defence of the combined sovereignty of the King, the Lords and the Commons. The reformers themselves saw their proposal as an effective way to curb the growth of the radical societies.120 Even so, the challenge to the political establishment was outspoken. The attempt was doomed to failure, given the ongoing Terror in France, the war against that country and the split among the opposition Whigs.121 All that followed was a highly confrontational debate on the political role of the people. Grey urged the Commons to take a positive stand on what he saw as an “enlargement of popular rights”. In its current form, Grey argued, the Commons did not constitute any real representation of the people. The creation of “a free and fair representation of the people” was inevitable in that the people would sooner or later make it happen in any case. It was not democracy but “the popular part of the constitution” that Grey was defending, however. He tried to show that the British case should be discussed separately from the French Revolution, and hence he linked the proposal with previous corresponding motions, Locke’s and Blackstone’s ideas and the promises of reform made in the Royal Speech of 1784, written by Pitt (XXX, 800–803, 805–807). Many members protested against Grey’s claims. Robert Jenkinson, who had encountered related terminology during his studies in Paris, was the next to import the vocabulary of democracy into the debate. The timing and methods of the motion were wrong, he argued, because the reformers were agitating a people that had not complained independently. The French case demonstrated what kinds of extremities

120 121

Dickinson 1977, 237; Christie 1982, 213. Goodwin 1979, 280–281; Christie 1982, 217–218.

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such a malicious excitement of the people produced. Jenkinson also considered it wrong to justify constitutional innovations with speculative theories. He did not rule out all reform, but used the opportunity to lobby the interests of the professional classes (including military officers, his future reference group) whose entry into the Commons, side by side with the landed and moneyed interests, was enough to make it “the representation of the people”, even “the people at large” (XXX, 809–810, 813–814). Such an approach made Jenkinson take a positive, Pittite, view of the Commons as a democratic institution based on virtual representation and independent deliberation among the members: The House of Commons, as the democratic part of the constitution, as the virtual representatives of the people, certainly, to a degree, ought to be affected by public opinions in their operations. It must, however, never be forgotten, that the first quality of the House of Commons is, that of being a deliberative assembly. If public opinion is necessarily to affect their decisions on every occasion, it will cease to be that deliberative assembly, [. . .] Public opinion, then, ought to have a certain weight in the conduct of that House; but public opinion ought never to have so great a weight, as to prevent their exercising their deliberative functions (XXX, 816).122

No French type of volatile public opinion was to steer the superior Commons. The danger involved in such opinion was obvious: [. . .] he was fearful lest our government should become too democratic. Every man who pushed the democratic principles of the constitution too far was, in fact, an enemy to it. [. . .] It was certainly the principle of the British constitution, that monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy should serve as a control on each other; but it was likewise a principle, that on ordinary occasions they should and must co-operate. If the monarchy, the aristocracy, and the democracy are too much unconnected, the purpose of control may be answered, but the purpose of co-operation will be defeated (XXX, 818).

In all circumstances, the balance of the British constitution should be maintained, Jenkinson argued. There was already a sufficient amount of democracy in the British system, and the introduction of

122 The entire debate was printed with identical wordings in Authentic Report of the Debate in the House of Commons, on the 6th and 7th May, 1793, on Mr. Grey’s Motion for a Reform in Parliament . . . (London 1793), 14ff.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 401 additional “democratic principles” would constitute a threat to the whole system. ‘Democracy’ as a constituent of the mixed form of government was acceptable but “democratic principles” of the French type were extreme and potentially very dangerous. By talking in favour of moderate forms of monarchy and aristocracy, Jenkinson was able to implicitly speak in favour of “moderate democracy” of the British form as well. It was much better than “a simple democracy” of the French kind. This meant no “exclusive attachment to the democratic part of our constitution”; it meant the avoidance of a (French) “democratic tyranny” that was just as bad as monarchical or aristocratic tyranny (XXX, 819). Democracy in its regulated form appeared as equal with the other elements of the constitution with regard to its good and bad sides and preferable to the French perversions.123 Jenkinson left no doubt as to the undesirable nature of “the turbulent, factious, and unsettled disposition of democracy” if adopted on its own, without the balancing effect of the other two classical elements of government (XXX, 820).124 Thomas Powys admitted no such optimistic applications of the concept of democracy. According to him, the petition had nothing to do with the opinion of “the crowds of the people” and was designed to lead to a similar kind of upheaval to that which had been seen in France. He, too, argued that the Commons was already “an organ, not merely to speak the public voice, or register the public opinions, but possessing judgment to deliberate” (XXX, 821). Windham elaborated on this point, rejecting what he saw as a mistaken idea among new political philosophers that “all government proceeded from the people”. What these philosophers seemed to be demanding was “pure democracy” and assemblies “emanating from the people”, the results of which were being seen in France (XXX, 823, 825). This was dangerous, as the Commons should, in his view, never become pure “agents

123 For related views in the public sphere, see John Almon, The Causes of the Present Complaints Fairly Stated and Fully Refuted (London 1793), 9. According to Almon: “[W]e all approve and admire a state of democracy in our government; but it is constitutionally, and must be a democracy under certain limitations. If it were permitted to embrace all ranks of people, to put all persons upon an equality, it would here, as it has done in France, destroy every thing else.” 124 The distinction between democracy in general and its French form can be seen in Francis’ amazement after Archbishop John Moore had compared his fellow party member to Marat and Robespierre as “two of the most abandoned and desperate ruffians [. . .] that ever disgraced the cause of democracy” in June 1793 (PR, XXXV, 640).

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of the people” in the French fashion but should instead remain wiser than the people: With respect to a perfect coincidence in opinion with the people, he contended that all good proceeded on a difference in opinion with the people, and that nothing could be so calamitous to the House as to become the agents of the people (XXX, 825).

Representation in its parliamentary form did not mean behaving like “the agents of the people” or being subject to the direct supervision of constantly fluctuating popular opinion.125 Windham was implying that the French revolutionary understanding of democracy either in its direct Sansculottic form or in the form of representation as formulated in the Jacobin constitution of June 1793 was not applicable in Britain. If a reform in that direction was begun, Windham saw no end to the people’s yearning for more power (XXX, 825). This former Foxite and enthusiast for the Revolution had indeed reconsidered his views as a consequence of the radicalization of the French Revolution: language appealing to the people was no longer his chosen idiom. However, his phrase “the agents of the people” survived and was reintroduced into the debate later on. The reformists were unable to defend democracy after Jenkinson’s and Windham’s arguments. Thomas Erskine pointed out that the petition only aimed at supporting the existing government but did not advocate “universal representation”. Turning to history, he presented “the free spirit of the English people” as the source of the principle that the Commons was based on “the people’s authority”. This “popular branch of the constitution” was not functioning properly any more, however, because of corruption. He justified this claim by citing Burke’s Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents from the time of the Wilkite controversy, in which Burke had warned of the rise of an authoritarian government and viewed the Commons as “the express image of the feelings of the nation” and “a control for the people” (XXX, 827–830). In 1770, Burke had, without doubt, called for measures to reform the government rather than to punish the

125 Not everyone rejected this idea, however. Some two hours later, Sheridan talked about the members of parliament as “agents” of the people. XXX, 904. He repeated his argument more clearly two years later.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 403 discontented.126 Burke’s change of attitude towards popular government had not gone unnoticed by his opponents.127 On the second day of the debate, a major contribution was made by Richard Colley Wellesley, the Earl of Mornington, Pitt’s loyal supporter. He considered that the danger of the motion lay precisely in an attempt to turn democracy into the dominant element of the constitution. Mornington had initially had a positive attitude towards parliamentary reform, but in 1793 he opposed all constitutional changes, including the attempt [. . .] to separate those elementary principles of monarchy, of aristocracy, and of democracy, which are now mixed and blended in the frame of this House, and by combining them again, according to some new and different rule of proportion, to create a system, of which we at present know nothing more [. . .] (XXX, 850).

All experience and recent observations from abroad spoke against such an experiment. In Mornington’s description, the British element of democracy was not unique, but its fortunate combination with the other two elements was: We know, that in many other countries a large share of political power has been directly exercised by the people. The form of all such governments is, in the common acceptation of the word, free; but the practical result has been the most odious and intolerable tyranny; [. . .] (XXX, 851).

Mornington found the origins of the reform proposal in Rousseau, a canonical saint of the French Revolution. He refuted the idea of “universal suffrage” by demonstrating the logical inconsistencies of both Rousseau’s thinking and its application by the revolutionaries. Rousseau had himself argued that the sovereignty of the people and representation were irreconcilable concepts: The author of the Social Contract maintains, that the national will or sovereignty of the people cannot be represented at all; [. . .] that the people of England are never in a state of freedom, excepting when they are in the very act of exercising the elective franchise; and that they become

126

Reid 1985, 30. A posthumous text of Burke denied the existence of “any tenets of democracy” in the quoted pamphlet which, according to him, had rather advocated an open aristocracy. Edmund Burke, Two letters on the Conduct of our Domestick Parties, with Regard to French Politicks . . . (London 1797), xxix. 127

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Furthermore, Rousseau had recognized, and the ancient Greek experience had demonstrated, that the exercise of “the national sovereignty” caused individuals to neglect their other duties, which would lead to economic disaster. The events in France showed “the miserable error of those who imagine, that by infusing a greater portion of the spirit of democracy into the frame of parliament” they would improve on the British constitution. For Mornington, France was “that democratic government” where “the spirit of democracy” had also led to the militancy and expansionism typical of such regimes.128 The French had produced a peculiarly French interpretation of the sovereignty of the French people as “the assumed sovereignty of the universe” (XXX, 871, 874, 876):129 Their first proposition was, that the sovereignty of every nation resided essentially in the people at large of that nation. From thence they drew a most extraordinary inference, that, for the present, the people of France were the only legitimate representatives of all the nations in the world (XXX, 876).

Mournington’s speech illustrates how the Enlightenment and revolutionary debates influenced the long-drawn-out British parliamentary debates on the political role of the people. Thus far, reconsiderations of what the proper share of power in the people seem to have been rather minimal.

128 William Godwin disagreed on this, see Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on Morals and Happiness. The second edition corrected (London 1796) [1793], 138. 129 The point about “a democratic people” generally disturbing the peace of both themselves and their neighbours was also made by William Young in The Rights of Englishmen; or, the British Constitution of Government, Compared with that of a Democratic Republic . . . (London 1793), 8, and by an anonymous writer in A Letter to the Rt. Hon. Lord Grenville, one of His Majesty’s Principal Secretaries of State, &c. in which the Present State of the British Nation is Considered . . . (London 1793), 16–17. The latter saw “the arch democrat Cromwell” as a warning example of “republicanism” based on “democracy”. A further metaphorical revision in the description of the French military and ideological menace was provided by George Dallas’ phrase “propagation of this islam of democracy by fire and sword” in his Thoughts upon our Present Situation, with Remarks upon the Policy of a War with France (London 1793), 50.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 405 Democracy in its traditional British sense as one of the three elements of the constitution was by no means rejected by the speakers, even if criticisms of excessive popular involvement continued. Samuel Whitbread II insisted that the interests of the people and the Commons should, after the people had elected their representatives, be identical and that the direct influence of “the popular will” on the decisions of the House would be ruinous. However, he set it as a goal “to restore to the democracy that power which it ought to possess”, with “the democracy” standing here for the Commons in a conventional sense (XXX, 885–889).130 This can be seen as an early version of democracy based on representation in the British Parliament, without the active involvement of the people in the political process. The reaction of Prime Minister Pitt also shows what was acceptable in the definition of the British constitution as opposed to the French. Pitt was not at all enthusiastic about the motion. He recognized the central role of the Commons as “the representation of the people” but rejected any association between this and the sovereignty of the people. According to Pitt, the French had “added new words to the dictionary”, including the definition of “the nation itself in a state of sovereign insurrection” (XXX, 900–902).131 Without calling it “democracy”, he gave the French system the following definition and excluded the possibility of a similar regime emerging in Britain: In what is called the government of the multitude, they are not the many who govern the few, but the few who govern the many. It is a species of tyranny, which adds insult to the wretchedness of its subjects, by styling its own arbitrary decrees the voice of the people, and sanctioning its acts of oppression and cruelty under the pretence of the national will (XXX, 901–902).

Fox, too, was cautious about Grey’s motion, doubting the practical implications of universal suffrage. Yet he continued to argue consistently for “government originated not only for, but from the people” and restated the provocative notion of the people being “the legitimate

130 For a positive use of vocabulary referring to democracy in the public sphere, see [Impartial Observer in London], Fact Without Falacy: or, Constitutional Principles Contrasted with the Ruinois Effects of Unconstitutional Practices . . . (London 1793), 57, according to whom: “The democratical privileges of the people are rooted in the vitals of our constitution.” 131 Pitt was obviously referring to the notion of the sacred right of insurrection in the people, included in the Jacobin constitution of June 1793. Baker 2006, 649–650.

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sovereign in every community.” Furthermore, he considered that “representation was the sovereign remedy for every disorder” (XXX, 915, 920, 922). The advocacy of the principle of the sovereignty of the people could hardly have been expressed more outspokenly than by Fox in spring 1793, attempting desperately to distinguish the principle from French revolutionary developments. The public response to debates on parliamentary reform varied, but the reaction to the idea of the sovereignty of the people was overwhelmingly negative. One response was to reprint Robert Walpole’s speech against shorter parliaments from 1734. Almost sixty years later, Walpole’s arguments were still presented as an orthodox definition of the character of the British constitution. In the introduction, the anonymous editor reformulated Walpole’s arguments in the vocabulary of the revolutionary period in order to deal a final blow to all opposition claims about the existence of the sovereignty of the people: [. . .] a sovereign people, [. . .] is a perfect solecism in politics. The people are the subjects of every state to which they belong, and the description of sovereign subjects is an absurdity in terms. Indeed adventurers, such as the restless, the factious, and seditious, who amuse the people, to betray them, may stile the people the sovereign power; but, even such pests of society know that the sovereignty is not in the multitude, but in the constitutional authority [. . .] The supremacy is, beyond a doubt, in the government of all countries, and not in the people governed. It is quite as absurd to say, the sovereignty of the people at large, as the sovereignty of the aristocracy or the democracy. It is impossible there can exist a sovereignty in the people, or a state of equality. Even in France, [. . .], the sovereignty is not in the people, for that is absolutely impossible, but in their representatives who usurped the sovereignty and controul the people [. . .].132

“Subject” rather than “citizen” continued to be the word used to define the political role of individual members of the community; the sovereignty of the people was seen as a mere propaganda device of the French rebels. There was no point in Britons adopting the concept to describe their constitution as it simply was not based on any popular

132

“Preface” to The Celebrated Speech of Sir Robert Walpole, Against Short Parliaments; to shew that a Parliamentary Reform is both Unnecessary and Dangerous. With a Preface on the Times, to the Right Honourbale Henry Dundas . . . (London 1793), 9–10.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 407 sovereignty but on the sovereignty of the nation lodged in the Kingin-Parliament: Were the English, after the example of the French, to talk of the sovereignty of the people, they would talk like madmen. The sovereign authority is vested by the constitution not in the people at large but in a limited monarchy, consisting of three estates or component parts of constitutional government, which makes a happy mixture of powers, [. . .] the component parts of the constitution, [. . .] together create the sovereignty of the nation, but not the sovereignty of the people, for there cannot be any such popular sovereignty, since a supremacy, or controul of them, must be lodged some where.133

The conventional view continued to be that “the political Trinity” of monarchy, aristocracy and democracy prevented the absolute, ambitious and tyrannical power which each component respectively was likely to produce. The worst scenario was that of the rage of the uncontrolled sovereignty of the people in a “popular or democratical” government. As Walpole had once put it, democracy produced an unstable, inefficient and divided system open to abuse by the people and should thus be avoided by all possible means. In the circumstances of 1793, this meant the rejection of all plans to shorten the term of parliaments and the avoidance of “too frequent an appeal to the people”.134 Little seemed to have changed in the mainstream public debate since the days of Robert Walpole’s ministry. Both government officials and the loyalist mob readily used the concept of democracy pejoratively in attempts to silence their opponents.135 Democracy was seen as possible only within the confines of the mixed constitution, not in any democratic republic.136 The idea of “a new language” of “the exclusive sovereignty of the people at large” in a moderate government was ridiculed as absurd.137

133

“Preface” to The Celebrated Speech of Sir Robert Walpole, 1793, 10, 13. “Preface” to The Celebrated Speech of Sir Robert Walpole, 1793, 13–16. 135 For example, Vicesimus Knox reported about the reactions to his sermon in Brighton: “Out with him—a Democrat, a Democrat, a Democrat—da capo—a Democrat.—No Democrat, a d—d Democrat.” This made him wonder why the audience did not instead shout out “No people! No people! No people for ever.” 136 Oliver Goldsmith, The English Constitution [London 1793], 1, 3; William Young, The Rights of Englishmen; or, the British Constitution of Government, Compared with that of a Democratic Republic . . . (London 1793), 54. 137 Thomas Hearn, A Short View of the Rise and Progress of Freedom in Modern Europe, as Connected with the Causes which led to the French Revolution (London 1793), 75–76. 134

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Further inspiration for innovative rethinking in politics emerged from philosophy, however. William Godwin wrote a radical reply to Burke, but Pitt’s government saw no reason to prosecute the author because it was published in the exclusive genre of philosophy. Godwin pointed out that democracy was, despite its disadvantages, preferable to either pure monarchy or aristocracy. In ancient Athens, this form of government had inspired patriotism, independence and virtue.138 Godwin’s notion of democracy was highly optimistic, even idealistic, in comparison with most other writers of the day: Democracy restores to man a consciousness of his value, teaches him by the removal of authority and oppression to listen only to the dictates of reason, gives him confidence to treat all other men as his fellow beings, [. . .].139

Godwin believed in improvement in politics, setting a new kind of democracy as a future goal of the political community: [. . .] if a form of political society can be devised in which men shall be accustomed to judge strictly and soberly, and habitually exercised to the plainness and simplicity of truth, democracy would in that society cease from the turbulence, instability, fickleness and violence that have too often characterised it.140

With the combination of democracy and representation it was, according to Godwin, possible [. . .] to call upon the most enlightened part of the nation to deliberate for the whole, and may thus generate a degree of wisdom, [. . .] which it would have been unreasonable to expect as a result of primary assemblies.141

Such speculative radicalism was, for the time being, overshadowed by classical and condemnatory understandings of democracy. There was no doubt, however, that Godwin’s ideas of democracy as the most likely system to advance the common good opened a new utilitarian vision of democracy.142

138

Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1796, Vol. 2, 114. Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1796, Vol. 2, 115–116. 140 Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1796, Vol. 2, 117. 141 Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, 1796, Vol. 2, 118–119, 173; cf. Dickinson 1995, 197, 250. 142 Dickinson 1995, 180. 139

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 409 Reactions to Robespierre’s Redefinition of Democracy in 1794 As the British debate has already revealed, the popularity of the concept of democracy was growing in the Jacobin republic during 1793. These radicals saw direct government by the people as a solution to the problems of the Revolution. In May 1793, Maximilien Robespierre was still speaking about “representative government”, not “pure democracy”, but in the proposed Jacobin constitution of June 1793 the French political community was already defined as “a democratic republic” and sovereignty placed in the people as a unified political body. The expression “representative democracy”, which had been used rarely after 1790, was also becoming more popular. In February 1794, Robespierre already combined the concepts ‘democracy’, ‘republic’ and ‘representation’, making ‘representative democracy’ a goal for the republic and a vision for the future. This happened at a time when the most ferocious phase of the Terror was in full spate, a new state religion was being introduced and the people was becoming a major political actor in the Revolution.143 Since 1789 Robespierre had defended the idea of broad representation based on the principle that “sovereignty resides in the People, in every member of the populace”.144 In 1794, following the Jacobin trend of using the language of democracy to legitimate their power and developing Louis de Jaucourt’s definition in the Encyclopédie, he set democracy as the goal of the republic, both at home and abroad. The Jacobins hence demanded that the English should “democratize themselves”.145 After this change of parlance in France, an English author, who had declared himself “democratic [. . .] as every Englishman ought to be”,146 considered it necessary to defend himself “from the charge of democracy”, lamenting “the malicious interpretation which has lately been given to a word of considerable import to mankind”.147 Robespierre himself, like other revolutionary leaders of the time, used the concept of democracy in confusing ways.148 In a speech to the

143 Dippel 1986, 79; Rosanvallon 1995, 146; Monnier 1999, 53; Monnier 2001, 3, 19; Dunn 2005, 92, 114–115; Baker 2006, 650. 144 Dunn 2005, 115. 145 Palmer 1953, 213–214; Maier 1972, 859; Dippel 1986, 80–81. 146 William Augustus Miles, A Letter to the Duke of Grafton . . . (London 1794), 17. 147 William August Miles, The Author of The Letter to the Duke of Grafton Vindicated from the Charge of Democracy . . . (London 1794), 5. 148 Rosanvallon 1995, 146–148.

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National Convention on 5 February 1794, he saw the revolutionaries as fighting for a democratic republic based on representation. Robespierre attempted a redefinition of the concept of democracy, rejecting the old negative understandings of direct democracy: Only democratic or republican government: these two words are synonymous, despite the vulgar abuse of language, [. . .] Democracy is not a state in which the people, continuously assembled, itself directs all public affairs, [. . .]. Democracy is a state in which the people, as sovereign, guided by laws of its own making, does for itself all that it can do well, and by its delegates what it cannot. It is therefore in the principle of democratic government that you must look for the rules of your political conduct.149

Robespierre argued, furthermore, that “the French are the first people in the world to establish a true democracy, by calling all men to enjoy equality and the fullness of civic rights [. . .].”150 According to Pierre Rosanvallon, Robespierre was trying to identify the people as the source of power through representation; he was not arguing in favour of direct popular government. Even Robespierre denounced “absolute democracy” or “pure democracy”. He was able to connect the concepts of democracy and representative government by interpreting both as originating from the principle of the sovereignty of the people.151 By 1794, the French Revolution had already provoked numerous debates for and against the principle of the sovereignty of the people in Britain. Conceptions of democracy, on the other hand, had retained the relatively positive tone which they had taken on in the 1780s, as the proper British and degenerated French forms of democracy had been consistently distinguished from each other. When the Revolution reached its most radical phase in 1793–1794, its redefinitions of democracy were bound to influence British debates as well. The revolutionaries aimed at the creation of a democratic republic based not only on representation but also on the revolutionary principle of national sovereignty. Britain had already become the major military opponent of the revolutionary regime, and Robespierre’s redefinitions now made most Britons join a reactionary consensus against ‘democ-

149 150 151

Palmer 1953, 214; Palmer 1964, 115–116; Dunn 2005, 116–117. Palmer 1953, 215. Rosanvallon 1995, 147–148.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 411 racy’ as well.152 Another phenomenon supporting the rise of loyalty to the British monarchy and criticism of democracy was the organization of a number of radical meetings calling for parliamentary reform in spring 1794.153 When the parliamentary session was opened in January, the Royal Speech aimed primarily at motivating the political community in fighting the war. This was done in a new language of nationhood that was coming into being around Europe. The war was being fought to defend “all that is most dear to us, and relying, as we may with confidence, on the valour and resources of the nation”; it was a joint battle of the national community against another nation (XXX, 1046–1047). The debates that followed reveal that the battle concerned the ideological concepts of democracy and the sovereignty of the people as well. While some lords were convinced that the English would never follow the French example (XXX, 1065, 1075, 1086), others rejected French anarchy in forceful terms. Viscount Stormont exploited prejudices against extreme forms of democracy: “We know, and did know even before the sad example of France, that a wild and lawless democracy is the sharpest tyranny that can be endured by man” (XXX, 1079). The French advice that the British should rise against their political system led to denouncements not only of the revolutionary regime but of democracy of all kinds, the traditional positive associations of the democratic element of the mixed constitution being bypassed. The Commons assured the monarch that loyalty was only what “might well be expected from a brave and free people” (XXX, 1092). In the debate itself, a turning point in the understanding of democracy was heard when the Earl of Mornington, a major spokesman for the Pittites, attacked both popular sovereignty and democracy. His speech, obviously provoked by Robespierre’s speeches in 1793, reflects the conceptions of the revolutionary regime that prevailed in the administration.154 Mornington’s speech preceded Robespierre’s speech of 5 February 1794 by approximately two weeks, which, in principle, allowed time for Paris to be informed about ideological developments in London. It was on 21 January that for the first time the revolutionary concepts of democracy and the sovereignty of the people were used

152 153 154

Powell 2002, 19–21. Mori 1997, 191. Mori 1997, 166–167.

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in the Commons debates on the Address of Thanks. This introduction of revolutionary vocabulary to British high politics did not go unrecognized, as Sheridan replied to Mornington, sarcastically pointing out his choice of words: “Have we not adopted the very words as well as spirit of democratic tyranny?” (XXX, 1218). The Commons debate focused on the French form of government. The loyal approach was to be horrified by the cruelties committed by the revolutionaries. Isaac Hawkins Browne, a Pittite, maintained that the war was not being fought with the intention of restoring French monarchy or moulding the form of government on the other side of the Channel, provided that it did not threaten the established order in Britain: [. . .] while they adopted a form of government that endangered that social order, whether it was monarchical or democratical, such government was aggressive, and provoked opposition from a principle of selfdefence (XXX, 1105).155

This was the general spirit of the debate. Colonel Banastre Tarleton, a Foxite who had been denied entry to Jacobin clubs during his visit to Paris, was one of the few members who complained about the British ministry undermining the authority of Parliament in the eyes of the people (XXX, 1100). The most thorough presentation of the stand of the Pitt ministry in relation to the French revolutionary ideas of democracy and popular sovereignty came from Mornington,156 who argued, among other things, that the revolutionary ideology threatened all government and order. The revolutionaries had distorted Enlightenment philosophy into combinations of ideas that could never work. One of these was the combination of a new notion of political liberty with the “sanction of the whole collective body of the people” (XXX, 1133–1134).157

155 In 10 April, Major Thomas Maitland saw the war as a “favourable opportunity of overturning the democracy of France”. PR, XXXVIII, 99. 156 The speech was also printed in Richard Wellesley, Substance of Lord Mornington’s Speech in the House of Commons, on Tuesday, January 21, 1794, on a Motion for an Address to His Majesty at the Commencement of the Sessions of Parliament (Dublin 1794). 157 A related point was put forward by John Stewart, who argued: “The active sovereignty of the people in populous nations can have no existence; the present plebocracy of France must terminate in some democratical constitution.” The Tocsins of Britannia: With a Novel Plan for a Constitutional Army (London 1794), 22–23.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 413 The revolutionaries were propagating a “theory of universal liberty, founded upon universal insurrection”, a “system of exciting the people against all regular government, of whatever form, against all authority of whatever description” and a “plan for the instruction of the mob in the advantages of disorder, and in the facility of outrage and plunder” (XXX, 1113–1114). In their ideology, “insurrection became both the most sacred right, and the most indispensable duty, not only of the people at large, but of every portion and division of them”. Such ideas could emerge only in the mind of “the most wicked conspirator in the cause of absolute and unqualified democracy” (XXX, 1135). French democracy simply meant that: [. . .] in defiance of the sovereign people, a new and unheard-of species of government was established, which, growing out of the theory of impracticable liberty, was to be maintained by the practice of the most unmitigated tyranny (XXX, 1136).

In reality, the Jacobin government abused the principle of “the sovereignty of the people” to suppress the will of the people, to persecute dissidents, to deny individual liberty, to take over private property and to blunder (XXX, 1136, 1168, 1171, 1191). The principle had turned into “the sovereignty of the Jacobin faction” (XXX, 1180–1182) with the result that the French were forced to adopt the principles of their rulers against their will (XXX, 1195). Furthermore, the absurd notion of “the indefeasible sovereignty of the people” seemed to give the French the right to reinterpret the political system of every other state (XXX, 1116). The British had consequently been advised by the Jacobins to rebel against their established order. Robespierre had attacked the British people, their constitution and above all their monarchy, monarchs being to him no more than “slaves in a state of insurrection against the sovereignty of the people” (XXX, 1207). After such a devastating interpretation of the French “sovereignty of the people”, one which did not arouse any clear counter-arguments in the House, the possibilities of the concept entering the language of the British members of parliament in a positive sense seemed nonexistent. The ongoing war had been justified as being waged against the ideologies of the sovereignty of the people and the French type of democracy, possibly democracy of any kind. It would take some time before alternative, positive, understandings of democracy could be convincingly presented in Parliament.

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On 10 February 1794, just days after Robespierre’s famous speech, the Commons debated Grey’s motion concerning the landing of Hessian troops in Britain without the prior consent of Parliament. Grey had defended the French Revolution and campaigned for parliamentary reform even though he did not accept extreme forms of democracy.158 The key issue in the debate was the impact of the arrival of foreign troops on the balance of power in the constitution, and the motion denounced what Grey saw as unparliamentary practice. The concept of democracy was actively employed in the debate, and mostly with utterly pejorative connotations, particularly on the government side. However, it was first used by Samuel Whitbread II, Grey’s old friend, who argued that the royal prerogative was being increased in circumstances in which [. . .] the artful deceit and misrepresentation of ministers held forth an idea, that much was to be feared from the democracy of the times, and if it were not checked, tyranny of the worst kind would soon overwhelm us.159

The French version of democracy had been used as a deterrent by the British government, but this also brought counter-arguments from the opposition. From the opposition’s point of view, the risk of the monarchy being strengthened excessively was much greater than the possibility of a popular uprising of the democratic kind. This was a clear suggestion that the government was abusing the word “democracy” in order to strengthen its own standing.160 The government replied by accusing the opposition of overreacting to the strengthening of the royal prerogative. This was particularly inappropriate at a time characterized by “the general alarm against democratic principles”.161 John Thomas Stanley rejected opposition criticism and interpreted it by using a phrase (“democratic principles”) that had been given a pejorative connotation in Parliament ever since the outbreak of the French Revolution as “calculated to encourage complaint and discontent with those who held democratic principles”.162 The excesses of the Revolution had thus been added to the 158

O’Gorman 1997, 256; Powell 2002, 20. An Impartial Report of the Debates That Occur in the Two Houses of Parliament, ed. William Woodfall (London 1794), Vol. 1, 325. 160 Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1794, Vol. 1, 325, 328. 161 Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1794, Vol. 1, 327. 162 Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1794, Vol. 1, 330–331. 159

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 415 existing negative classical associations of the concept of democracy. ‘Democracy’ had become a concept about whose meaning the parliamentarians were in open disagreement. To Pitt’s government, democracy seemed more suspect than before, and any opposition criticism of government measures could be easily presented as “democratical” political ambitions. The opposition, in turn, accused the government of exploiting the new associations of democracy for its own purposes. However, even during all the criticism of democratic principles in spring 1794, older favourable meanings of democracy also survived. Viscount Mahon (Stanhope), for instance, after recently moving in vain for the recognition of the French Republic and the ending of the war, called the Commons “the democratic House below” (PR, XXXIX, 219). Fox once again took up the concept of the people during the debate of 10 February. He had defended the Revolution, opposed the war against France, criticized royal influence and advocated a parliamentary reform. Not even the extremes of revolutionary radicalism had made him change his mind. He argued that the liberties of the people and the privileges of Parliament were both in danger if royal power was extended on the grounds of the war in the planned manner. Fox urged “the Commons [to] prove true to the people, and the people would remain obedient to the Commons”, who continued to defend their rights and safeguard the balance between the elements of the constitution. With reference to the failed attempts to reform Parliament, Fox argued that the concerns of the public would abate if Parliament proved that the Commons were “virtually, if not literally, the representatives of the people” by opposing both the rise of the monarchical prerogative and “any too popular party”.163 This last statement demonstrates the limits of Fox’s desire for reform. He defended the status of the Commons as representatives of the people, but he did not really want a system of universal suffrage.164 A debate on 17 March regarding Britain’s policy over the imprisonment of the Marquis de Lafayette—a former French revolutionary leader and a supporter of limited monarchy who had been forced into exile in 1792 and was being held in prison by the Prussians—gave rise

163 Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1794, Vol. 1, 345–346; Fox did not regard his Whig group as belonging to “the democratic or popular party”. Dinwiddy 1992, 2. 164 See O’Gorman 1997, 258, 269.

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to some positive arguments related to democracy. The Commons did not approve the motion that Britain should support Lafayette despite his opposition to “democratic principles” during his leadership. Richard Fitzpatrick, a leading Foxite, a founding member of the Whig Club and a personal friend of Lafayette, introduced the motion, in which he divided the French into four groups: those advocating traditional absolutism; those advocating a limited monarchy; those who supported “a popular form of government by a representative assembly”; and those “who, possessing democratic principles, had established the present tyranny which exists in the country”. Those Frenchmen who defended a limited monarchy appeared to be closest to the spirit of the British constitution. By the spring of 1794, some of the Foxite opposition were thus denouncing the French democrats and distinguishing between popular government and extreme democracy. Lafayette was thanked for having opposed “popular excesses”, for suppressing “the violence of an outrageous multitude” (also referred to as the “populace” and “the mob”), for rejecting “the fury of democracy in Paris” and for denouncing “the democratic fury of the ruling power of France”. The argument was that the people should be resisted like this when they rejected lawful government. By supporting Frenchmen like Lafayette, Fitzpatrick argued, the British could “confound and falsify the invectives of democrats against kings in general”.165 Fitzpatrick’s motion was, after all, a demonstration of loyalty to the established order from a man who had been critical of the Friends of the People, and this implied a more critical conception of “democratic principles” of the French type and those who advocated them, the “democrats”. There was a tendency to associate the latter term with the British opposition, and this had to be opposed by rejecting revolutionary radicalism.166 Even in this dispute on British and French varieties of democracy, the concept still found some cautious advocates in the British Parliament. Courtenay was one who viewed democracy in positive terms, though only if it constituted no more than a temporary period of upheaval. Courtenay could well take such a stand as he was known for

165

Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1794, Vol. 2, 339–346. On 28 March 1794, an alarm about “the proceedings of the Democrats in Britain” in their societies had reached the Lords. Marquis Townsend cited Fox’s speech in defending the formation of a citizen militia to combat such activities. This should be recruited from “the middle classes”, who knew those who might be disaffected with the British constitution. PR, XXXIX, 189. 166

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 417 his sympathies towards the Revolution, had ridiculed fears of democracy in 1790 and visited France in the autumn of 1792. He frequently used humour to get his points across, and he knew the potential of metaphors as rhetorical figures which could be interpreted in a variety of ways and used to present controversial points. Hence the other members of parliament may not have been all that surprised when this Foxite with contacts in radical circles declared that he considered:167 [. . .] democratic insurrections to be useful: From the nature of things they could last but a short time, and, like hurricanes and thunder-storms, they cleared the stagnant atmosphere; and he would rather be tossed about in the wildest blasts and tempests of democracy, than breathe for an hour the still and pestilential breath of regal despotism.168

Courtenay knew that he was presenting a provocative argument in viewing democracy as a natural though temporary phenomenon and seeing the type of dynamic change it effected in political systems as positive. Even the French Revolution was not to be condemned completely; it might accomplish something positive in the end. Such a modern notion hardly won much acceptance despite its metaphorical re-description of democracy, particularly as it evoked old opposition claims about the despotic tendency of the British monarchy and saw democracy as a remedy. There was an opposition point hidden in all this: Courtenay reminded the House of the risks of an increase in the royal prerogative in Britain during the war against France if Pitt’s policies were pursued without check. His argument was parallel to Godwin’s suggestion in the preceding year that it was better to experience “turbulence and fluctuation” in democracy than “unwholesome calm” under monarchy or aristocracy.169 While Godwin’s book had presented mere theoretical speculation that was inaccessible to the general public, Courtenay was popularizing the notion to the members of parliament and through reports of the proceedings of the House to a wider audience. Courtenay, with his straightforwardness expressed with metaphors, was an exception. Democracy was mostly rejected in a debate at the end of March on government borrowing without the consent of Parliament, but the language of the opposition was also strong.

167 168 169

Thorne 2004. Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1794, Vol. 2, 368. Godwin, Enquiry concerning Political Justice, 1796, Vol. 2, 115.

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Sheridan condemned the practice of the government as violating “a representative system”.170 Fox criticized the government’s measures for alarming the public at a time when “a dangerous democratic sprit” was said to be prevalent throughout the country.171 The government side responded by maintaining that the opposition shared constitutional views with “a set of men, whose wild and frantic ideas of democracy, if brought into practice, would accomplish universal destruction”.172 There was a particular reason for the caution of the opposition and for the government’s readiness to attack democracy: it was planning an investigation into the entertainment of French ideas of democracy among the British radicals. In May 1794, the ministry suspended Habeas Corpus, and soon a group of leading radicals were arrested. The country was entering an increasingly authoritarian phase, with the majority of the politicians supporting Pitt, and the Foxite opposition becoming further depleted in numbers. In June 1794, Parliament saw a very concrete breakthrough in the use of the language referring to democracy and the sovereignty of the people when the Committee of Secrecy published two reports on socalled seditious practices and attached documents confiscated from the Corresponding Societies as evidence. The language of the societies, as reported by the Committee, undeniably demonstrated that much French revolutionary discourse had been adopted by some of them, even though a number of their members were only innocently curious about the Revolution and continued to base their claims on rights accorded by the ancient constitution rather than on a theory of universal natural rights. The conclusion of the Committee was that the societies were prepared to challenge the British form of government with revolutionary violence.173 Paine, the presumed founder of the radical movement, was accused by the Committee of recommending to the public the replacement of the established British constitution with “a democratical senate, as the sole legislative and executive power of the state” (XXXI, 709), associating his suggestions with French revolutionary assemblies. Paine’s work had certainly inspired the foundation of

170

Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1794, Vol. 2 535–536. Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1794, Vol. 2, 562. 172 Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1794, Vol. 2, 567. 173 Goodwin 1979, 333–337; Christie 1982, 225; Dickinson 1989, 9; the quotations presented here were published in the documentation on seditious practices. These do not, of course, provide a trustworthy picture of the activities of the societies. 171

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 419 these societies, which appealed to the middle classes, after 1791, but few of the members were ready to go as far as Paine.174 The membership of the societies was considerable: 2000 in Sheffield and perhaps 10,000 in London, mainly drawn from the middle and lower classes.175 Correspondence between the Norwich and London Societies in November 1792 indicated that some of the members themselves had suspected that the activists were aiming at the replacement of “monarchy” with “democracy” (XXXI, 798). However, the members had not necessarily regarded themselves as campaigning for democracy at that stage. One member in Leeds complained in May 1793 about how the aristocrats had abused “democratic ignorance” among the people in order to incite them to oppose the society (XXXI, 819). The attitudes of the corresponding societies towards the established political order in Britain had become more radical—and potentially revolutionary—in the course of the French Revolution. Royal prerogatives, the privileged aristocracy and the intolerant clergy had all been verbally attacked, even though many societies had denounced Paine’s most far-reaching conclusions on the British constitution. The foundation of the first French Republic in September 1792 was a turning point towards further radicalization as well as the condemnation of the societies.176 In the course of 1793, the outspoken denial of the existence of a British version of democracy increased among the members, and this developed into a radical version of the criticism that the parliamentary opposition had previously presented. In April 1793, the secretary of the Society for Constitutional Information pointed out in a letter to Norwich: “The supposed democracy of the country has become a matter of property and privilege, and that we have therefore no longer that mixt government” (XXXI, 813). In other words, the current system of representation in the Commons had weakened the democratic element to such an extant that there was no longer a mixed constitution with three elements. In November 1793, the secretary of the Sheffield Society declared himself “a staunch democrat” (XXXI, 833), associating himself with the revolutionary kind of activism. By the spring of 1794, the phrase “the sovereignty of the people” had also entered the language of the societies. In their meetings of

174 175 176

Cannon 1994, 121; Dickinson 1985, 14. Christie 1982, 211, 225; Royle 2000, 15. Goodwin 1979, 125–130, 171–173, 200, 241–242.

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April 1794, the London and Sheffield Corresponding Societies saw “all sovereign, legislative, and judicial powers” as “the rights of the people” and viewed the people as “the true and only source of government”. This could also be expressed with the French formulation, according to which “the people is the sovereign”. The Norwich and Sheffield branches even spoke about “the majesty of the people”, employing a phrase which had been seldom used since the polemic against the colonists during the American war (XXXI, 706, 715, 736, 821), but which had been used by Richard Price with reference to the British monarchy in 1789. According to Price, civil governments should be seen as servants of the people, as they had been created by the people, were maintained by the people, and remained responsible to the people.177 When published in Parliament, all this correspondence showed that the challenge of democracy and the sovereignty of the people no longer came just from outside the country but also from within. Such a proven ideological development automatically affected the meanings of the key concepts in parliamentary debates. Democracy could no longer be viewed merely as a positive element of the mixed constitution; it now appeared as a threatening concept that implied an admiration of the French Revolution. Even if there was no longer any doubt as to the existence of the challenge to the established order, references to democracy were avoided in the Commons’ debates of 16 June 1794 on radical societies.178 The activities of the societies were about to be declared seditious, and consequently the members also denied their legitimacy by deliberately not mentioning the democratic element of the constitution. At the same time, the idea of the sovereignty of the people, which had already been forcefully denounced during the preceding one and a half years, became made a major target of criticism. When the Prime Minister questioned the legitimacy of the societies by describing how they had been planning French kind of national conventions as “the representative of the national sentiment, and the sole organs of the sovereign

177

Cited and analysed in Morris 1998, 42. The Lords had debated the same issue three days earlier, viewing the societies as a conspiracy aiming at the importation of “the tyranny of France”. Lord Grenville had expressed his disgust at the societies sending misleading reports to France about the people of England opposing their government. As for the language of the societies, he saw it as identical with that of the French Convention. XXXI, 910–911. 178

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 421 will of the people” (XXXI, 916),179 he made it clear to everyone that the position of both the monarchy and Parliament were being challenged by the societies. Pitt, increasingly concerned about the emergence of Jacobinism in Britain,180 had adopted the language of Burke and Mornington to depict treasonous ideas such as the right of the people to be in a sovereign state of insurrection, the sacred duty of subverting established governments, the propriety of investing conventions with a species of despotic power (XXXI, 916).

Such language appeared to have been copied from the Jacobins. Pitt did not attack democracy; he rather refused to define the radical societies as democratic and instead presented them as aiming at an outright “tyranny”. This discussion on the nature of what had initially been a movement for parliamentary reform was awkward for the opposition, who wanted to avoid excessive associations with radicalism. Fox was forced to respond in order to demonstrate the integrity of his supporters. He did so by emphasizing “the good sense of the people at large, and their attachment to the system” and by warning the Commons “against the fatal error of bringing the constitution into contempt with the people”. He insisted on the right of the people to meet and to discuss politics. As an old proponent of popular political activity, he maintained that, in cases such as the Revolution of 1688, it had actually been “the duty of the people, assembled by their delegates in convention, to call upon parliament to do what parliament would not do of itself ” (XXXI, 922, 925). Though not defending the sovereignty of the people181 or democracy here, Fox emphasized the legitimacy of popular activism as corresponding with the spirit of the constitution. In some cases, the people might even act collectively and independently of Parliament, if the latter did not fulfil its responsibilities.

179 Such a Convention had been demanded in a meeting in London on 14 April 1794, held after the suppression of the Edinburgh Convention. Goodwin 1979, 27; Royle 2000, 17. 180 Ehrman & Smith 2004. 181 In a letter to Christopher Wyvill, Fox made the same point as in the Commons in February 1793 about the British monarchy being based on “the sovereignty of the people”. Political Papers, Chiefly Respecting the Attempt of the County of York, . . . to Effect a Reformation of the Parliament of Great-Britain: Collected by the Rev. Christopher Wyvill . . . (York) [1794–1802], Vol. 6, 21.

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This was an argument that the Attorney General John Scott (later Lord Eldon), the leading prosecutor of societies accused of treason, disputed. In his view, no reasonable link between 1688 and 1794 could be drawn to legitimate “the extraordinary powers of the people”. The difference was, according to this official interpretation of events, that the revolutionaries of 1688 had rightly asserted “the privileges of the people” as understood in Britain, while the French rebels of 1794 wanted nothing but “to tyrannize over the people” (XXXI, 930). This was not a real revolution for the benefit of the people. Neither was it to be described as “democracy” of any kind. The French system had already been so widely discussed and condemned in 1794 that the members of parliament saw no reason to debate it further at the opening of a new session in December. The King merely summarized the criticism by referring to “the instability of every part of that violent and unnatural system, which is equally ruinous to France, and incompatible with the tranquility of other nations.” (XXXI, 959–961). The Lords used the words referring to democracy in their debate to an unprecedented extent, mainly for derision and sarcasm. Once the enemy government had adopted democracy as its goal, it had become impossible to bypass the concept. The Pittite Henry Phipps, Lord Mulgrave, a former army officer, suggested an identity between the foreign policy goals of the despotism of Louis XIV and those of “the present democratic tyranny of France” (XXXI, 981), associating democracy with what was regarded as the worst kind of European tyranny thus far. Grenville scornfully used the derogatory phrase “these despotic democrats” in talking about their economic state (XXXI, 989). Mulgrave made an ironical point on “the entertaining democrat” who had written about the Corsican crisis in a way that he found impossible to approve (XXXI, 984–985). There were still also some solitary speakers who suggested that the French were hostile not to the British as a people but rather to their administration. A further suggestion was that the ministry was manipulating the British people by revealing conspiracies that did not necessarily exist at all (Mahon & Stormont, XXXI, 987). In the public discourse of 1794, some defences of democracy and the sovereignty of the people as realized in the British parliamentary system still appeared. Arthur O’Connor defined the Commons as the “representative democracy of England” but criticized noble influence

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 423 and narrow representation.182 This took Blackstone’s original definition further and gave it a highly positive connotation. Others also challenged clerical authors for their opposition to the notion of the sovereignty of the people, claiming that it was indeed “a doctrine professed and practised in this country.”183 Radical writers maintained not only that the people was the origin of all sovereignty, but that this was a truth already generally held in Britain.184 The revolutionary challenge thus remained present in the public sphere, even if loyalist criticism of democracy prevailed. The Political Rights of the People in a Time of Crisis The year 1795 saw perhaps the most intense discussion on democracy and the sovereignty of the people in the Westminster Parliament in the entire eighteenth century. Public discourse, by contrast, had calmed down somewhat as a consequence of the measures against radical societies. Parliament thus continued to address the conceptual challenge presented by the French regime. The majority of the two Houses and most authors were disillusioned with the French Revolution and

182 Arthur O’Connor, The Measures of Ministry to Prevent a Revolution, are the Certain Means of Bringing it on. Third edition (London 1794), 36, 64; An pseudonymous author recognised that the British constitution contained “some portion of democracy”. [A graduate of the University of Cambridge], Considerations on the Causes and Alarming Consequences of the Present War, and the Necessity of Immediate Peace (London 1794), 29; Another anonymous author found the “exact share of democracy which is necessary to constitute a good government” in that members of Parliament gave “speeches for and against every question of importance, (and these speeches published as they are, with great care and correctness, generally contain all that can be said on both sides of the question)” and, consequently, that “the public are able to form a very just opinion of its merit or demerit.” If unhappy with the measures, the public could force the ministry to change its policies. [Anon.], Dialogues Between a Reformer and an Anti-Revolutionist (London 1794), 68. This is, indeed, a surprisingly far-reaching definition of modern parliamentary democracy. 183 David Jones, The Welsh Freeholder’s Farawell Epistles to the Right Rev. Samuel Lord Bishop (lately, of St. David’s) now, of Rochester . . . (London 1794), 28; Robert Hall, An Apology for the Freedom of the Press, and for General Liberty. To which are Prefixed Remarks on Bishop Horsley’s Sermon, Preached on the Thirtieth of January last. The third edition. (London 1794), 64. 184 [Gracchus], An Appeal to Britons (London 1794), 4.

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rejected its vocabulary referring the sovereignty of the people185 and perhaps democracy, too, particularly after evidence that revolutionary ideas had found supporters among the lower orders of Britain. In a time of war, such attitudes were often understood as synonymous with treason. While it remained unthinkable for most to accept the French definition of democracy, attempts to vindicate the old democratic element in the British constitution, which had been widely adopted before the Revolution, still emerged. There were also those who wanted to let the French themselves decide on their political system. In one posthumous publication, the concept ‘democrat’ could still be defined in a positive and progressive sense as “one who maintains the rights of the people”, was “an enemy to privileged orders” and advocated “peace, economy, and reform”.186 One pamphlet suggested after the French fashion that in Britain as well there were two parties, the aristocrats constituting the majority and the democrats a suspect minority.187 John Cartwright, an old supporter of parliamentary reform, suggested that Britain should actually be called “a mixed democracy” rather than “a mixed monarchy”. His “democracy” stood for the electors of the Commons rather than the House as such.188 The year 1795 was also one of economic troubles, high inflation and food riots, which contributed to the radicalization of arguments on both sides in Parliament. A debate on the situation was opened with Grey’s motion in January to conclude peace with France. The motion forced Pitt to justify the war again. He did so in ideological terms, arguing that there was nothing in the French system on the basis of which a peace could be concluded, whereas its challenge to the British system remained obvious. Pitt asked:

185 John Bowles took “the sovereignty of the people” in its French sense to be a “preposterous, disorderly, and antisocial term” standing for “organized anarchy and unbounded licentiousness”. The Dangers of Premature Peace . . . (London 1795), 12. 186 Charles Pigott, A Political Dictionary: Explaining the True Meaning of Words . . . (London 1795), 14. While Pigott recognised Aristotle’s condemnation of democracy as a danger to liberty, he argued that Montesquieu had regarded democracy as “the nursery of virtue”. 187 [A.L.], An Impartial Address to all Parties: By a Well-Wisher to the Constitution (London 1795), 6, 13. 188 John Cartwright, The Commonwealth in Danger; with an Introduction, Containing Remarks on some late Writings of Arthur Young, Esq. (London 1795), 98–99.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 425 [. . .] whether the manner in which they had cried up the sovereignty of the people, whether the manner in which the pride and passions of the populace had been erected into the criterion and rule of government, afforded any rational ground of security to any peace that could possibly be made (XXXI, 1217).

Britain continued to fight against a regime that advocated the rejected principle of “the sovereignty of the people”, defined here in a way that recalled classical prejudices against a system in which “the pride and passions of the populace” set the agenda (XXXI, 1212). When the motion was discussed in the Lords, Dr Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, set out to define the character of the ongoing war and also the meaning of democracy. Watson, who held Lockean views and had even defended the French Revolution in its early phase, recognized the principle that the French had “the sacred right” to choose their own form of government themselves. Respecting this principle was essential in “a free nation” like Britain (XXXI, 1257, 1259). As far as the reasons for the war were concerned, however, he had reconsidered his views on the Revolution: it had become necessary for Britain to curtail extreme forms of “democratical principles”, as extreme democracy of the French type threatened the foundations of all sorts of government: That the war was [. . .] entered into by ourselves, with a view of stopping the propagation of democratic principles, is a proposition which I believe to be true. There may have even some other causes [. . .] but I take this to be the chief; nor do I see any dishonour in avowing it. Every government has within itself an inherent principle of self-preservation; from this principle springs a right of resisting every attempt which evidently tends to the subversion of established governments (XXXI, 1259).

Extreme forms of democracy needed to be opposed, but Watson was not sure that the methods used in this war “to impede the progress of democratic principles” were the right ones. Perhaps with religious persecution in mind, Watson argued for a degree of toleration for the democrats: [. . .] an unsuccessful war is more likely to accelerate than to impede the progress of democratic principles, and a successful war will not stop them. The history of the world informs us, that opinions are not subdued but confirmed by persecution; they are seated in the mind, and the mind is not suspectible of change from that coarse instrument of government-force (XXXI, 1259–1260).

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Watson recommended “a seasonable attention to popular requisition” instead of any total dismissal of democratic ideas. Such a readiness to listen to the popular voice, in his view, well befitted “this enlightened state of Europe” and “a free people”. As for the loyalty of the British people, Watson was convinced that it could be counted on: not only the majority of Parliament but also the majority of “an enlightened people” outside it “detest a republic” (XXXI, 1260–1261). Watson’s speech was not so much for or against democracy but essentially analytic, which is quite unusual for debating speeches in the eighteenth-century British Parliament. He continued with a classification of the elements of the mixed constitution and the current forms of government, combining the ideals of classical political theory with a political vocabulary that was typical of the 1790s. Watson divided the parties of the British constitution in conventional terms into the monarchy and “aristocratical” and “democratical” men, all of whom were needed to keep the due balance in case some excess of the other elements should emerge. All parties preferred the British legal, parliamentary and monarchical system to things French. As they preferred to stay “a free people”, the British constitution had nothing to fear from the foreign republicans. All was well when “the people is with the crown, and [. . .] the crown is with the people, and [. . .] both are with the constitution” (XXXI, 1261–1262, 1268). Republican forms of government may appear to be expansionist, but the British form of government was sure to prevail. According to Watson, it continued to be the common goal of all Britons to support the monarchy and aristocracy and “to protect the people themselves from the insidious machinations of their own demagogues, from the bloody tyranny of French fraternities” (XXXI, 1268). As an essential element of the mixed constitution, the people needed to be protected from themselves as well as from the other two elements. Watson’s discourse on republics is equally noteworthy. He made a tripartite division which recognized the claims of both the American and French revolutionaries, although he continued to regard republican forms of government as inferior to the mixed constitution. Robespierre and other French revolutionaries seem to have succeeded in their combination of republic and democracy to such an extent that an Anglican bishop could—just a year later—characterize the French republic indirectly as a “democratical republic” instead of merely calling it a tyranny. Rather surprisingly, Watson also accepted the association of the French republic with “the democratical republics of ancient

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 427 times, and especially that of Athens”, in which he saw “something like a prototype of the French republic” (XXXI, 1262–1263). This recognition of identity between Athenian democracy and French republicanism and the adoption of Robespierre’s phrase “democratical republic” demonstrates the degree of conceptual change that had taken place despite the war. Informed contemporaries in Britain recognized the change by combining ‘republic’ and ‘democracy’ in a new way. We should not overestimate the extent of the transition, of course. Watson’s basic attitude towards democracy remained unchanged in that, for him, both Athens and France created only “a dreadful tyranny exercised by pestilent men, through the instrumentality of the multitude”. In democracies, power was “exercised over valour, learning, justice, over every thing that was great and excellent among mankind”. Watson denied the claims by the Americans and the French that “the representative republics” were “essentially different from all republics of either ancient or modern times” and that they were “machines of government, built upon a new construction”. Before believing such claims, he wanted to see these republics function for more than a century, just as the British mixed constitution had remained unchanged for over a century. He was sure that people in both Britain and in “the present aristocratical republics” of Europe knew that the British system was better than any of the novelties of the time (XXXI, 1262–1263). A few weeks later, the Lords deliberated political theory again, focusing on the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. Francis Russell, the Duke of Bedford, opposed the measure, considering it excessive at a time when no serious treason had been discovered in spite of numerous trials (PR, XLII, 120). This wealthy heir of a Whiggish aristocratic family had become the leading advocate of Fox’s policies among the tiny number of lords that remained loyal to the opposition leader. Now he wished to define the political role of the Lords in a way that recognized democracy in its traditional British sense, as a part of the mixed government. He did so in paternalistic terms but also emphasized the centrality of the popular elements in the British Constitution: [. . .] they were placed as a barrier between democracy and despotism; [. . .] they were not only the guardians of the rights of the Throne, but of the privileges of the people; and [. . .] they ought equally to beware how they permitted themselves either to trample upon the one, or to trifle with the other (PR, XLII, 120).

This view of the Lords remained exceptional; in the 1790s few nobles endorsed a description of the House as a defender of the rights of

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the people. Nevertheless, there were three other radical lords—the Earl of Guildford, Lauderdale and Charles Howard, the Duke of Norfolk—who opposed the suspension of Habeas Corpus. The protesters referred to “the national spirit of English freedom” and to the fame of “this free and enlightened nation” as further reasons for Parliament to refrain from such an anti-libertarian measure (PR, XLII, 124). As pointed out above, democracy was not very actively discussed in printed literature in 1795. At the beginning of September, however, John Thelwall, a leading radical, gave three lectures on “the State of Popular Opinion, and the Causes of the rapid Diffusion of Democratic Principles”. Thelwall popularized the views of William Godwin in his lectures, which he also had printed, with an innovative language. He put forward highly unorthodox views on democracy—ones that may have affected some opposition circles in Parliament as well. The main point in the lectures was to demonstrate that “there was a considerable increase of the democratic principle in this country” caused by the repressive policies of the authorities.189 The lectures contained a major re-description not only of the concept of democracy but also of the British political system in general. Thelwall started his redefinition by locating two conflicting senses of democracy, suggesting that “the Aristocrats” had deliberately given the concept inappropriate meanings: If we look at the real meaning of the term, we shall find it to be a government by the great body of the people. Now, a government by the great body of the people, taken in its strict and original sense, does certainly describe a pure republic. Nay, more, it describes a republic without any intermediate order, such as we now call a representative assembly. But this is a system whose advocates, in the present day, if any, are extremely few; [. . .] Modern legislators [. . .] have invented what is called a representative democracy, which is, in reality, if you adhere to the strict definition of terms, no democracy at all; [. . .] This representative democracy is the real essence of what was formerly, theoretically, called aristocracy.190

Thelwall proceeded to redefine the British constitution within this revolutionary conceptual framework as a “glorious constitutional democ189 John Thelwall, The Tribune, a Periodical Publication, Consisting Chiefly of the Political Lectures of J. Thelwall. Taken in Short-Hand by W. Ramsey, and Revised by the Lecturer . . . (London 1795–1796), Vol. 2, No. 24, 185–186; Goodwin 1979, 28; up to 150,000 people may have been listening to Thelwall in a meeting held on 26 October 1795. Royle 2000, 22; Livesey 2001, 42. 190 Thelwall, The Tribune, No. 25, 209–210.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 429 racy” which every Englishman, as a democrat in the right sense of the word, should support. As the Commons constituted “the democracy of the country, who by their representatives are (ought to be I mean) represented”, the entire British constitution should be seen as a democracy with some aristocratic and monarchical elements. Thelwall went on to challenge the conventional definition of the constitution as “mixed monarchy” and defined it as “a limited or restrained democracy” instead. It was democracy in the sense that it was the great body of the people that passed all the laws and delegated all political power to its users.191 To avoid the impression that he was introducing a total innovation, Thelwall insisted that democracy was the original foundation of the British constitution and that “representative democracy” had been the implicit goal of the revolutionaries of 1688 as well. What was now needed was “the purification and support of the democracy of this country, and a zealous attachment to the principles of that democracy”—in opposition to men fearful of democracy.192 This was, indeed, a challengingly new understanding of democracy albeit one seemingly derived from the old use of “democracy” as a synonym of the House of Commons. These were views which the majority of the political establishment hardly wished to hear. However, it was they who, quite soon, took the conceptual change one step further. The Lords continued to discuss the possibility of peace in late October. Grenville maintained that negotiations with France were possible only “so far that it rested upon principles different from those of a wild and restless democracy” (PR, XLV, 31). Constitutional changes in France were still seen as the way to reconciliation between the two countries. Grenville suggested, with reference to the Speech from the Throne, that “when the present Constitution of France should be actually accepted by the People”, then it would be time for Britain to conclude peace (PR, XLV, 39, 55). While France could not be allowed to remain a degenerated kind of democracy, some other kind of constitution acceptable to the French people would do. This interpretation was to a great extent shared by the Duke of Norfolk, who maintained that the French Revolution had not been initiated by either the philosophers

191 Thelwall, The Tribune, No. 25, 211, 213; cf. Dickinson 1977, 251, on Thelwall’s reservations about genuine democracy. 192 Thelwall, The Tribune, No. 25, 217–218.

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or the people but by the mistaken policies of the French government (PR, XLV, 54). This old aristocratic defender of the cause of the people and Enlightenment philosophers had not changed his views, which he could freely entertain thanks to his status and wealth.193 Seventeen ninety-five was also a year of the continued persecution of radical societies. There was evidently a tendency among the political establishment to reject democracy as a form of government that had not worked in the past and worked even less well in the era of the French Revolution. In November and December, the idea of the power of the people and the newly redefined concept of democracy were debated extensively when the Treasonable Practices Bill against publishers and the Seditious Meetings Bill against public meetings and political associations in general—two more measures by Pitt’s government against the Corresponding Societies—were placed on the agenda. Any written or spoken expression of contempt for the constitution was to be punishable by transportation. Not even 95 petitions with 130,000 signatures against such legislation could stop the parliamentary majority from adopting this policy.194 Lauderdale’s criticism of the bill in the Lords, however, demonstrates the determination of some Foxite noblemen to defend the political rights of the people despite the war against France, accusations of Jacobinism and investigations into their political activities. Lauderdale himself was coordinating the opposition with Fox, whom he accompanied in protest meetings,195 and hence he did not hesitate to characterize the bill as “the severest and most dangerous to the rights and liberties of the people that had ever been introduced.” (XXXII, 246). He was particularly unhappy with the new way in which the word “people”—his favourite in the revolutionary context—had been used in the text of the bill. He argued that “the people” were referred to in a way that differed from the conventional legal use. Lauderdale insinuated that the government actually tended to commit “new crimes by new phrases” (XXXII, 251).

193 Norfolk continued to entertain revolutionary ideas, offering a toast to “Our sovereign’s health—the majesty of the people” before 2000 people in January 1798 and thereby angering George III. He was attacked for attempts to present the British monarchy as based on the sovereignty of the people in [Anon.], Sound an Alarm to all the Inhabitants of Great Britain . . . Third edition (London 1798), 8–11. 194 Goodwin 1979, 387–388; Christie 1982, 228; Dickinson 1995, 243–244; Royle 2000, 23. 195 Thorne 2004.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 431 Dr Samuel Horsley, the Bishop of Rochester, a champion of traditional monarchy, defined the political role of the people in highly traditionalistic terms, emphasizing deference and limiting popular political activities to mere petitioning. Horsley’s attitude was probably the real object of Lauderdale’s criticism of the misuse of “the people”: [. . .] the bill was merely directed against those idle and seditious public meetings for the discussion of the laws where the people were not competent to decide upon them. In fact, he did not know what the mass of the people in any country had to do with the laws but to obey them, with the reserve of their undoubted right to petition against any particular law, as a grievance on a particular description of people (XXXII, 258).

Horsley’s interpretation of the marginal political role of the people forced Lauderdale into an immediate reply. Even if his opposition was unlikely to gain any considerable support, he continued to defend the popular cause by associating Horsley’s argument with oriental despotism. This provocative association was accompanied by a reminder of the proper role of the Anglican clergy in a free state: He should have supposed the noble prelate had been educated in a foreign country, and not in England, when he declared that he did not know what the people had to do with the laws, but to obey them. If he had been in Turkey, and heard such a declaration from the mouth of a Mufti, he should have attributed it to his ignorance, the despotic government of his country, or the bias of his religious opinions; but to hear a British prelate, in a British house of parliament, declare that he did not know what the people had to do with the laws but to obey them, filled him with wonder and astonishment (XXXII, 258).

Nor was Lauderdale alone in his opposition to the bill and what appeared to him as the negation of the political relevance of the people. Two days later, the Duke of Bedford emphasized the necessity of the people finding an interest in politics and actively discussing it. In his view, an active people of this kind would guarantee the survival of the British political order. The words of this Bloomsbury aristocrat mentored by Fox demonstrate the survival in the British political elite of a tiny Foxite group ready to advocate a vital political culture characterized by an increasing degree of popular participation: If the privilege of political discussion was allowed on matters of trivial concern, how much more ought it to be permitted on subjects of general interest? The ministers might go on for a time in the ruinous measures which they have adopted, but he warned them of the danger of driving a once free and high spirited people, to those rash and violent steps which

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Once again it was Horsley who responded to these opposition claims. He was unwilling to withdraw anything he had stated about the political role of the people. He did know the political system of his country, contrary to what his opponents had claimed, and he was convinced of the correctness of his views. He was deeply hurt by the suggestion that he had advocated despotic views and reacted by insinuating that Lauderdale himself was a spokesman of what he called “Genevan ideas”. This probably had multiple connotations: on the one hand, Geneva was the cradle of Calvinism, from which the doctrine of the Puritans, who had murdered a king and abolished the Church of England in the mid-seventeenth century, originated. The suggestion was that Lauderdale was a disciple of the generally denounced tradition of republicanism. On the other hand, of course, Geneva was also the hometown of Rousseau, the philosopher who was generally held responsible for having introduced the revolutionary principle of the sovereignty of the people in the first place. Furthermore, the damage which revolutionary ideas had caused to the moderate government of Geneva had been recently discussed.196 Horsley defended his traditionalist views by repeating the statement that “the individual has nothing to do with the laws, but to obey them” and by attacking “democracy”, “democratic tyranny” and “a capricious democratic sway”, as reported by two versions of the same debate, given here to demonstrate the differences that reporting could produce:197 But the noble Earl has stated, that the bill before this House is more calculated for the meridian of Constantinople than of Britain. Does the noble Lord recollect, that in that miserable and despotic country, the inhabitants are neither called to study, nor obey the laws—for, unhappy people! they have none! I would say then, that this bill is not calculated for the meridian of Constantinople; I would say also, that it is not calculated for the meridian of Geneva, whose inhabitants are subjected to a

196

[Anon.], The Misfortunes of Geneva (London 1792). These two quotations illustrate some differences in formulations of the argument as conveyed by the different reports, but they contain the same basic argument and confirm Horsley’s use of references to “democracy”. However, not even Horsley attacked all kinds of democracy (including the old element of the British constitution) as he used the attribute “turbulent” to define the Genevan version. 197

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 433 capricious democratic sway. The rule of our conduct, as Britons, is to be found in the statute-book of this kingdom. This is a truth, which nothing shall prevent me from advancing, or deter me from repeating, were even the unhappy time arrived, when Nobles and Prelates were forced to bend their necks to the guillotine (PR, XLV, 114). My lords, the noble earl is mistaken; the maxim is not calculated for the meridian of Constantinople. The miserable inhabitants under that dismal sky have no law to study or to obey; they have only to obey the changeable will, caprice, or whim, of their tyrant. My lords, it is a maxim not calculated for the meridian of Geneva, or of any other turbulent democracy; in such governments, the people have only to obey the uncertain veering humour of popular assemblies. But in this country, . . . [with lawbased government] the individual subject, [. . .] “has nothing to do with the laws but to obey them.” My lords, it is a maxim which I ever will maintain,—I will maintain it to the death,—I will maintain it under the axe of the guillotine, if, [. . .] the time should ever come when the prelates and nobles of this land must stoop their necks to that engine of democratic tyranny (XXXII, 267–268).

Enthusiastically engaged in the defence of what he saw as the established order against any sort of radicalism and countering the claims that the people should discuss politics, Horsley further questioned the publications of the day: Have not the minds of the common people been turned by such publications to subjects to which it had been better if their minds never had been turned? Have they not been poisoned with false and pernicious notions? And has not a great change in the demeanour of the lower orders actually been produced? (XXXII, 269).

To use anachronistic terms, it might be possible to see here a “conservative” voice opposing a more “liberal” one, but these were not yet the party denominations of the mid-1790s. Bedford and Lauderdale considered it best to reply to Horsley’s speech by referring to the parliamentary practice of avoiding personal attacks. Both pointed out how Horsley had changed his formulations from one speech to another. The Duke of Abingdon wanted to challenge the bishop—and perhaps thereby the involvement of the Anglican clergy in the reactionary propaganda of the 1790s—one more time. Opposing the bill as an unnecessary restriction on the liberty of the people, this radical nobleman, who never considered the revolutions of 1688 and 1789 to be comparable, questioned the bishop’s understanding of the Christian religion and the British political system as formulated after 1688:

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chapter five He wished to ask the reverend prelate, whether vox populi was not vox Dei? He would prove it was; and that God Almighty always inspired the people upon such occasions, and would do so still: [. . .] if the compact settled by the Bill of Rights was broken, the government might happen to be in a state of rebellion against the people (XXXII, 270).

Abingdon’s words demonstrate the readiness of some members of the secular elite with a radical background to participate in the ongoing redefinition of the state religion in ways that supported more democratic understandings of the political system. Such views had been developing in the scholarly discourse on contractual political theory for some time and had been applied by some radical clerics as well.198 A similar readiness to reinterpret the political teachings of the Christian religion can be found in speeches made in the Commons. There was a tendency to use the vocabulary of sacred rights and holy duties increasingly to refer to political rather than religious issues.199 The Lords passed the Treasonable Practices Bill by an overwhelming majority, but even in the final debate both the concept of democracy and broader references to the people were employed. Explaining the tough measures in domestic policy by the ongoing war with France, William Wentworth-FitzWilliam, Earl FitzWilliam, pointed out that there had been no major changes in the French constitution and that the war should therefore be continued. The French type of democracy was still not to be trusted: Of the probable stability of that Government, no experience which they had had, could allow them to pronounce any opinion; but in its principle, he affirmed it to be precisely the same as those which had preceded it. It was still a pure unqualified Democracy, containing the seeds of dissention and anarchy, and affording no security for religion, property, or order (PR, XV, 184–185).

The opponents of the bill avoided references to the French democracy and instead focused on the rights of the British people. Bedford was unhappy with several details in the bill, and especially with the limitations on petitioning which it introduced. However, he rejoiced at the amendments which the opponents, acting as the conveyors of the wishes of the people, had managed to have made to the original proposal: “I cannot help rejoicing that the voice of the people, which

198 199

See Ihalainen 2009. For the French equivalent, see Monnier 2002, 398, 403.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 435 I in common with others exerted myself to bring forward, has produced so salutary and beneficial an effect.” The suggestion was still that the government was aiming at something resembling the enslavement of “the whole people of England” because of the sedition of a marginal group of people and that this denial of the enjoyment of freedom by the people was only likely to lead to abuses (PR, XL, 186, 188–189). Bedford turned to a prophetic mode in advising the Lords not to accept the bill: “[. . .] there is a spirit rising in the people, which must finally defeat the mad and futile attempts of those, who seek to curtail or abrogate the privileges of their free Constitution.” (PR, XL, 190) Bedford was one of the few noblemen in the kingdom who could afford to present such calls for concessions from the nobility to the people without endangering his position. It remains doubtful, however, whether he actually wished to see any radical reform.200 Three more lords joined the defence of the popular cause in December 1795. Lansdowne, already accused of being a Jacobin in the press, claimed that the people “still possessed the feelings of Englishmen, and would not tamely be deluded into a base surrender of their rights” (PR, XL, 195). Lauderdale complained that the bill demonstrated to the people nothing but a desire to restrain their liberties. Particularly regrettable was the tendency among the ministers to think that nobody could wish “the lowest order of the people to meet upon public questions”. In Lauderdale’s view, derived from revolutionary ideas of equality, no division of the people on the basis of their wealth was defensible, as all orders were equally entitled to enjoy British liberties (PR, XL, 198–199). Lauderdale carried his pro-revolutionary politics so far that he was no longer re-elected a representative of the Scottish lords in 1796.201 Finally, Thurlow pointed out that “the poisoned part of the people” was only a marginal one and could be easily controlled without measures “which insulted the good sense, and stigmatised the loyalty of the great mass of the English people.” According to this former Lord Chancellor, the bill was merely “a libel on the people of England” and should therefore be opposed (PR, XL, 201, 203). The opponents also signed protests against the bill, representing it as a violation of “the rights of the people” and emphasizing “the sacred occasion of a free

200 201

Smith 2004. Thorne 2004.

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people applying to their Legislature” (PR, XL, 207–208). In 1795 the Lords was still clearly a forum in which the constitutional role of the people could be advocated by a handful of Foxite aristocrats. Conceptions of the political role of the people had been transformed to the extent that an invasion of popular rights produced this kind of organized resistance among some members of the British higher nobility. Grenville was another nobleman who discussed the political status of the people, but he did so as a supporter of the bill. He consistently denied the possibility that the bill would alienate the people from their monarch. He also disputed claims that the situation in France was developing in a more favourable direction. Grenville was positive that the bill did not endanger the liberties of the people but instead provided measures necessary to protect them (PR, XL, 196–197). Most defenders of the bill did not attempt to use vocabulary referring to the people to construct their arguments. It was a recognition of the centrality of the concept that Grenville attempted to do so. The Commons’ debates on the Seditious Meetings Bill were opened by the Prime Minister, whose wartime policies were based on concerns other than the political rights of the people. Economic and political protests were widespread in the autumn of 1795, and even Pitt himself had been attacked by the mob.202 In these circumstances, Pitt presented the bill as an attempt to curtail meetings and public lectures that poisoned the minds of the people with anti-monarchical notions. The first minister assured the House that the rights of the people were not being violated but only temporarily limited to avoid their abuse. He countered claims that the legislation was arbitrary by emphasising the rights of the people to petition (XXXII, 275–276). A tiny opposition protested against Pitt’s decisive line of action during his speech, and Fox continued the attack by depicting the political role of the people in an entirely different light. Despite his loss of supporters, he carried on his criticism, expressing fear for a total loss of liberty if government policies were followed.203 He emphasized the natural rights of man as the basis of all free government and suggested that a free constitution was about to be abolished with the Seditious Meetings Bill. He urged Pitt to admit this aim. According to him, “the

202 203

Ehrman & Smith 2004. Mitchell 2004.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 437 people [. . .] had a right to discuss the topics from which their grievances arose” in meetings as well as to complain by petition. If they were not allowed to do so, they no longer deserved to be called “a free people”. Fox went on to declare the bill an attempt “to prevent all political discussion whatever” and as such a major insult to the people of Britain (XXXII, 279–280). Fox saw it as inconsistent with the principles of the Glorious Revolution that “the people are to be prevented from discussing public topics publicly: they are to be prevented from discussing them privately.” He argued that the plan had “no regard for the liberty of the people” and that it was mistaken in supposing that “popular opinions”, “popular meetings” or “a popular discussion of grievances” constituted a revolution. On the contrary, he argued, the proposed measures to curtail public debate threatened public law and order. In his view, the bill should never be passed and if it was, the people should actively oppose it: “[. . .] while we have the power of assembling, the people will assemble”. Fox concluded by interpreting the bill as a change in the British constitution and expressing his admiration of the constitution for giving “scope to the people to exercise the right of political discussion” on any occasion (XXXII, 280–281, 283). Stanley, by contrast, sought a compromise by recognizing the need of the people to be jealous of their rights but arguing that the freedom of the press was enough to maintain “all the blessings of the people” in Britain. The problem with meetings was, in his view, their tendency to inculcate sedition “to the multitude” and to seduce the ignorant into action. “The public mind” should be protected from such activities (XXXII, 284). Morris Robinson’s contribution distinguished itself from most of the others in that he focused on the relationship between monarchy and democracy in the mixed constitution. He did so with language that continued to exclude the notion of the sovereignty of the people from the British system. The assumption was that the monarchy understood what the people needed and that the people were inherently loyal to their monarch. Robinson interpreted the preceding government speakers to have meant: [. . .] the people would have a right to read, but not to speak complaints against the burdens they endured. Thus the interests of the sovereign were opposed to those of the people, whereas he had always heard that the sovereign was a third branch of the legislature, and was bound to

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chapter five understand the democratical interests as much as his own. The bill went to impeach the loyalty of the people, who, except a few indeed, had constantly shown their veneration for the sovereign: [. . .] (XXXII, 294).

John Christian Curwen, a consistent opponent against autocracy, carried on the defence of the political right of the people to freely discuss the defects of the government. Thanks to such a right “the people of this realm were never obliged to recur to acts of violence to obtain redress of their grievances”, he maintained. He suspected that the Prime Minister had good reasons “to suppress the voice of the people” because of the criticism his policies had met and because of the ability of “the voice of the people” to change his war policies. The bill should thus be seen as a result of nothing else but the willingness of the ministers to stop the people from complaining to the monarch about the measures of the administration (XXXII, 291–292). William Wilberforce, an independent member of parliament who had been concerned over both the war with France and the rise of radicalism, returned to Pitt’s basic argument, according to which the bill was necessary to protect “the minds of the people” from the poison of “French politics” and “French philosophy” as propagated through debating societies. He tried to convince the audience both inside and outside Parliament that the bill did not affect “the expressing to parliament of the national will”—this previously condemned revolutionary phrase thus entering the vocabulary of a Pittite—and that the Commons remained “a popular assembly [. . .] in which all popular grievances might be freely and safely discussed” and “to which the people might be encouraged to bring their complaints”. In the Commons, “the national humour might be suffered to ferment without danger” (XXXII, 292–294) also in the future. Wilberforce argued that such an existing system was much better than anything created in France. Sheridan, who had contacts with the radical London Corresponding Society and had been questioned in May 1794 for alleged treason,204 reacted to these views with harsh words, stating that Wilberforce did not realize the danger which the bill constituted for British liberty by trying to use magistrates to “set the people to rights”. The suggested bill made the members of parliament into no more than “the prattling representative of a dumb and enslaved people” (XXXII, 296).

204

Jeffares 2004.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 439 The debate was concluded by William Windham, the Secretary at War since July 1794 and a loyal supporter of Pitt, with a summary of the proposal. Denying suggestions that the people were being enslaved, he argued that the Foxite opposition was so closely connected with the organizers of the seditious meetings that they could not see the dangers involved. The bill was needed to counter the already witnessed plans for developments towards republicanism and the wrong kind of democracy that the French were imposing on all of Europe and more particularly on Britain, the Dutch Republic and the United States: They had endeavoured to exterminate all traces of ancient institutions, and had attempted to make the world adopt a new principle. Was there a country in Europe safe from the poison of these principles, or which had not felt the effect of this great democracy? Were not the principles openly avowed in every country, and acted on by men of information and talents? (XXXII, 297–298).

The last opposition speaker, Grey, pointed to inconsistencies in the ministerial arguments with regard to democratic principles, which the ministers seemed to be willing to undo by all possible means: The decline of democratic principles had, on a former occasion, been much dwelt on, as the happy effect of the war; yet, at that moment the prevalence of those very principles was made the ground of the bill proposed by ministers (XXXII, 298–299).

Grey argued that popular protests in Britain were a product of unsuccessful war policies rather than any democratic principles of the French type. The ministry was now attempting “to rob the people of their dearest rights and enslave the nation”. He concluded that the “ministers proposed to crush the people and must necessarily destroy the constitution under the flimsy pretence of defending it” (XXXII, 299–300). The arguments were uncompromising on both sides but the parliamentary power of the opposition was too limited to make any difference in the legislative process. When the debate was resumed in mid-November, a new kind of “sanctification” of the status of the people—characteristic of the revolutionary rhetoric of the 1790s—is observable in that their political rights and duties were described as “sacred” and “holy”.205 Despite such statements, the debate also contained repeated and categorical

205

See Ihalainen 2007.

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denials of the principle of the sovereignty of the people and arguments in favour of the influence of Parliament. Pitt, among other speakers, rejected the very principle, even in times of interregnum. He presented the principles of 1689 as better than French revolutionary ones in every possible respect. They, too, spoke in favour of the sovereignty of parliament rather than of the people: The two remaining Houses of parliament, and those two Houses alone, were then resorted to, and not the sovereignty of the people, as the means through which the other branch of the legislature [the monarch] was to be supplied. It was not to that sovereignty of the people which is now talked of, that recourse was had. Thus, therefore, the revolution itself conspired to show that it was to parliament, or to the people in parliament, and not to the people out of parliament, that the right of framing alterations in the constitution always devolved (XXXII, 357–358).

The ultimate power to regulate the form of government thus remained in the hands of “the people in parliament” in all circumstances, not in the hands of the people at large. A number of alternative understandings of the political role of the people were introduced in the debate. Solicitor General John Mitford’s opening speech illustrates the strategy which the ministry had chosen in order to win the vote. While recognizing “the sacred freedom of speech” (XXXII, 306) and the “sacred” right of petitioning, the minister consistently emphasized abuses of that right and the consequent necessity to curb it with the proposed law. Classical examples were invoked to demonstrate the need to control the engagement of the masses in politics: The most free states that had existed; the Roman Republic itself, in the zenith of its liberty and fame, had never permitted the people to assemble but in a regular body, formally collected, and under the control of a magistrate (XXXII, 308).

Britain remained perfectly free thanks to her Parliament. Unregulated meetings of the people could well be forbidden without this preventing the people from participating in “political discussions” whenever true grievances emerged (XXXII, 308). Pitt, for his part, took not democracy but “representative government” of the French type as an object of disdain. The ministry argued that such a government based on “universal suffrage” had only led to the destruction of the monarchy and all government in France (XXXII, 309–310). This suspicion of all “representative government” is interesting given the high regard

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 441 for representation expressed in earlier parliamentary language and the existence of the American model. Apparently, any French idea appeared questionable in the context of 1795. The opposition could hardly accept such an interpretation. Erskine, one of the most consistent opponents to the sedition bill, continued to argue that it constituted “a flagrant invasion of the people’s privileges” and destroyed the mixed constitution by denying the right to petition. He played down the Roman precedent with a boldly modernist assertion that only the British experience since 1688 mattered when decisions on the constitution were made. In arguing that the British Constitution as such was “sacred” (XXXII, 311–312), Erskine distanced himself from the classical conception of the mixed constitution, in which the democratic element had been traditionally kept within its due limits. Even more radical was his acceptance of popular resistance in cases where the rulers were about to abolish the rights of the people: “He would say, again and again, that it was the right of the people to resist that government which exercised tyranny.” The bill was tearing the ministry and the people into opposite sides, which created the possibility that the case would be “fairly tried between the people and the government!” (XXXII, 312–313). Erskine’s provocative speech meant that the inherited British parliamentary system was being challenged with arguments appealing to a more direct kind of power of the people. A further radical argument was Erskine’s suggestion that the bill divided the people socially: “The higher orders of the people separated themselves too much from the lower.” This had been, according to him, a major cause of the French Revolution and should therefore be avoided in Britain (XXXII, 314). Such a reference to social inequality was entirely new in the eighteenth-century parliamentary context. It provides one more instance of the degree of radicalization which the war against revolutionary France and measures against radical associations produced in British parliamentary debates. The Earl of Mornington, an old opponent of the revolutionary ideas of popular sovereignty and universal suffrage, eagerly associated such denounced notions with the British opposition. In 1795 he depicted the French model as “the wild principle that every individual had a right to share in the sovereignty”. Robespierre had, indeed, rightly characterized it as the “despotism of liberty”. The British Corresponding Societies seemed to be claiming the submission of Parliament to “the absurd and extravagant doctrines of universal suffrage and annual parliaments”, that is, to the abolition of the entire constitution

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(XXXII, 349–350). The ministry thus did not content itself with merely denouncing the sovereignty of the people but attacked British radicals in order to justify stricter legislation against the societies. Sheridan, who had links with various radical societies, spoke in defence of the British people and extended his admiration—quite provocatively—to the Americans as well. From his point of view, the members of parliament should adopt a more humble attitude towards the people. Sheridan maintained that Britons, having such a long experience of living the life of a free people, would not be carried to any French kind of excesses when participating in politics: The noble lord had represented the lower classes of the people of all countries to be alike. This was a gross misrepresentation. Nothing could be more false and absurd, than to suppose, that a people, bred up in a free country, and in the habits of enjoying and considering their rights, would ever conduct themselves like slaves just rescued from a vile, grinding, and infamous despotism (XXXII, 335).

The members of parliament should regard themselves as representatives of all the people. This conception of representation was hardly new, but Sheridan extended it so far as to claim, in symmetrical opposition to what Windham had maintained in May 1793, that the members of parliament should indeed view themselves as the agents and servants of the people: They should consider that they were all of them the servants of the people of England. They voted and acted in that House not in their individual capacity, but as agents and attorneys for others (XXXII, 337).

Such a humble attitude on the part of the members of parliament was necessary as there was always the possibility of the people resisting legitimately if their rights were violated by the Crown (XXXII, 337). Such undesirable consequences were to be avoided with the right kind of policy. Sheridan’s formulation demonstrates the length to which an opposition radical was ready to go in appealing to the power of the people in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Whereas in 1793 it had still been unthinkable for Windham to present the Commons as mere agents of the people, in 1795 Sheridan could claim that this was the very raison d’être of the House. Sheridan’s argument demonstrates the potential of parliamentary style of debating for and against a motion to produce new ways of conceptualizing politics. The government side also contributed to the process of the re-conceptualization of politics by presenting old argu-

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 443 ments in new ways. In the eighteenth-century parliamentary debate on democracy, a leading minister quite often introduced a controversial conception into the debate only to demolish it for the purpose of defending the established order. His arguments could then be disputed by the opposition with major re-conceptualizations. Henry Dundas replied to the Foxites by representing the bill as a measure that secured the very rights that the people had been given in the Bill of Rights, a document that he called a “sacred declaration of our liberties”. Rejecting claims that the interests of the lower orders were being ignored, Dundas maintained that the English classes were more united than those of any other country. The claims themselves originated from the very principles which the bill appropriately limited. The point was that the Foxites had maliciously abused popular politics, attacking ministers not only in the Commons but also outside Parliament, where the government was unable to defend itself. It was, according to Dundas, extremely dangerous to advocate such a broad doctrine of the right of resistance of the people, as resistance never belonged to organized government (XXXII, 337–341). Fox was thus challenged to reply and to continue using the rhetoric of the sacred rights of the people, an expression used by both sides in the debate. However, he had to be careful not to take his arguments in favour of the loathed sovereignty of the people too far. Recalling the debates of the time of the Middlesex election, he maintained that he had then been “in favour of the sovereignty of parliamentary law” but he had never been “the least unfavourable to the right which the people indisputably possessed of expressing their sense of every public measure” (XXXII, 342–343). This was a statement altogether dictated by hindsight, as Fox had spoken out quite explicitly against popular involvement in the early 1770s. Now he was arguing that while sovereignty belonged to Parliament rather than the people at large, the people still possessed a universal right to express their political stands in any issue. In this debate, Fox explicitly defended the political rights of the people but avoided any outright claim that this was the same thing as the sovereignty of the people. It was necessary to use with the French concept with caution, but Fox consistently defended right of the members of parliament to maintain contacts with the people. Referring to debates on parliamentary reform in 1784, he insisted that he had never questioned “the sacred right of the people to assemble and freely discuss political subjects”. Furthermore: “Never in any one instance had he uttered a syllable

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that went to question the right, or to blame the practice, of holding public meetings of the people.” That was, however, what the proposed bill was doing (XXXII, 343–344). At this point, Fox could not avoid the temptation to comment on what Bishop Horsley had stated in the Lords six days previously. Published newspaper reports and contacts with Foxite lords facilitated such a continuation of the Lords’ debate in the Commons. Fox considered Horsley’s view that “the mass of the people had nothing to do with the laws, but to obey them” to be very strange and inconsistent with Christian teachings about the natural equality of men. The good populist that he was, Fox argued: [. . .] the people of England would not tamely surrender their indisputable and hereditary right, whatever inclination an arbitrary minister or a supercisious [sic] prelate might betray, to wrest them out of their possession (XXXII, 349).

Prejudices against the Pittite ministry and the traditionalist clergy were thus effectively combined. Finally, approaching the issue of parliamentary reform, Fox summarized the arguments on both sides as he saw them. While the proponents of the reform argued that the people were not equally represented, the ministry’s view was that “the aggregate body was to all intents and purposes, virtually represented”, that all people could appeal to “the virtual representatives of the nation.” Fox could not support the idea of virtual representation, particularly if it included restrictions on the right of petitioning to Parliament. Indeed, by doing so, the bill tended to “convert the government of the country into an aristocracy, or an oligarchy” (XXXII, 349–350). These were grave accusations. Even if the atmosphere of 1795 made Fox avoid references to democracy, he remained consistent in his defence of the popular element in the mixed government. To avoid being seen as an extremist, and also out of genuine conviction, he continued to denounce the ideas of universal suffrage and annual parliaments (XXXII, 353). Prime Minister Pitt’s rejection of the principle of the sovereignty of the people was well thought-out. Fox’s criticism of his policies had certainly strengthened his resolution to win the vote and to use suggestions that his opponents were importing French principles to Britain to do so. In answer to the suggestion that the bill widened the distinction between “the lower and the higher orders of the people”, he argued that it was designed to counter the “Jacobinism” that divided the people into orders (XXXII, 358). Still avoiding any explicit attack

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 445 on democracy, Pitt labelled the opposition outside Parliament “Jacobinism” which needed to be suppressed. Repeating his view of the British principle of virtual representation, he rejected universal suffrage, annual parliaments and thereby also the proposals for parliamentary reform. For the time being, Parliament should demonstrate to the people that it alone could change laws (XXXII, 360, 363). During the second reading of the bill, the Strangers’ Gallery remained closed for much of the debate, and hence we have a report of just one speech—by Sheridan, who repeated his arguments about the people being deprived of “their dearest and most sacred right” and the diverse natures of the people in England and France (XXXII, 364–366). On 23 November, petitions against the bill gave rise to a further verbal duel between Fox and Pitt.206 Fox compared the bill to a repeal of the Bill of Rights and described it as an attack on “the rights and liberties of the nation”. The people at large were hardly ready for such “slavery”; if they were, Fox could no longer see himself as “a profitable servant of the people”. He was assured that the people saw the violation of the constitution and “might be roused to its defence” (XXXII, 382–383). The Prime Minister condemned such violent expressions as a criminal injunction to use violence, likely to cause anarchy and bloodshed (XXXII, 384). Two more examples at the end of 1795 illustrate the prevailing state of confusion over the meaning of the concept of democracy caused by its having been made the programmatic goal of revolutionary France. ‘Democracy’ was no longer understood merely as an element of the British constitution; it could be seen as an ideology of its own, comparable to Toryism. This is shown by Stanley’s description of the state of the old Whig party, according to which the Whigs were being challenged by “the extremes of toryism and democracy” (PR, XLIII, 425). Democracy thus appeared as the radical opposite of traditional support for monarchy. At the same time, the parliamentarians held diverse views about how to deal with the French form of government after the fall of Robespierre. William Wilberforce, who shared Pitt’s longing for peace, maintained

206 Reports on the proceedings of 23 and 24 November are much shorter in Cobbett than in The Parliamentary Register.

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on 9 December that the new French government (the Directory) was more moderate and stable than that of the days of the Terror: Is there not a considerable difference between that no-government, that wild democracy, which formerly prevailed in France, and the more limited and regulated government which they have now adopted? (PR, XLIII, 657–658).

France was thus moving away from the detested “wild democracy”. Wilberforce’s suggestion was that the American system could offer a suitable model for the French people (PR, XLIII, 658). Pitt shared his interpretation that the danger of French “pure democracy” was already declining, which justified attempts to achieve a peace settlement with France: They are now far removed from a state of pure democracy, and so far the less liable to be again involved in the horrors of anarchy and confusion. Is it no material difference in situation, that in consequence of the division into two Houses, the representative body can no longer, under the influence of violent gusts of passion, rashly and wildly pass the most pernicious decrees, and are not likely to be again controlled by a sanguinary mob, a lawless rabble? Is it no material difference that they should have infused into their Constitution the elements of a mixed Government, and have placed in separate hands the legislative, judicial, and executive powers? (PR, XLIII, 666).

Pitt suggested that France was abandoning the worst kind of democracy and turning towards a mixed constitution of the British type. The war had been fought to oppose the expansion of the French type of democracy, and now that this danger was disappearing, peace seemed possible. Pitt’s advice to the French was self-confidently British: “[. . .] they do well in proportion as they come nearer that description of Government, which experience has proved to be beneficial to mankind” (PR, XLIII, 666). After the Revolution, too, democracy should remain, according to the Prime Minister, no more than a strictly regulated element of the mixed constitution in the British sense. By adding consistently pejorative attributes to the French perversion of the system, British parliamentarians, and Pitt in particular, had been able to retain at least something of a positive attitude towards democracy in general. This conception could be revived as soon as there was a prospect for peace with France.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 447 Calls for Representative Government and Defences of Democracy in 1796–1797 There was no peace settlement with France in 1795. Instead, in 1796, Spain joined the war against Britain and, after the French occupation of the Dutch Republic, the British extended their military efforts to the Dutch colonies as well. War remained a dominant subject in parliamentary debates, affecting constitutional discussions as well. In France, however, the political situation was rapidly changing. The Convention was replaced by the Directory in October 1795, which implied the end of the most radical phase of the Revolution. As much of the upper bourgeoisie was turning hostile to the totalitarian version of democracy experienced under Jacobin rule, “democrat” was by 1796 being increasingly used as a name of disdain rather than respect. Democracy, demagogy, ochlocracy and anarchy were often regarded as synonyms in France as well. Associating one’s own political views with democracy was deliberately avoided by all except the Sansculottes, who further extended the egalitarian socio-economic dimension of their conception of direct democracy and included the goal of the redistribution of property in it. By 1798 “democrats” was used in some French texts to refer to the losers of the Revolution, and especially to the politicized members of the lower orders. By the late 1790s, the winners of the upheaval thus no longer associated themselves with the Revolution, democracy and popular sovereignty. When a period of what Horst Dippel has called “Napoleon’s pseudo-democracy” started, many of the old pejorative senses of democracy as the source of instability and despotism were reintroduced.207 In Britain, the concept of democracy re-entered the debates of both Houses on 10 May 1796, with Prime Minister Pitt and Foreign Secretary Grenville taking the initiative in the Commons and Lords respectively. In the middle of a discussion on wine-duties, Pitt drew a sharp distinction between French and other types of democracy in replying to Fox, affirming his old view that a degree of democracy in the mixed government was a positive phenomenon. His estimate of the threat

207 Dippel 1986, 87–96; Monnier 1999, 57–58; Royle 2000, 23; cf. Livesey’s suggestion that a culture of democratic republicanism was actually created in France only in 1794–1799. Livesey 2001, 13.

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which the policies of the French presented to every established system of government was less optimistic than at the end of 1795: All Governments alike fell under its vengeance; the old forms were contemned and reprobated; those which had stood the test of experience, whether monarchy, aristocracy, or mixed democracy, were all to be destroyed (PR, XLIV, 686).

Pitt’s passing use of “mixed democracy” to refer to a system preferable to the French one is noteworthy. The statement implied that Britain possessed all these elements in its constitution, including “mixed democracy”. Perhaps the British system was, indeed, a mixed democracy, as had been suggested by Thelwall the year before. As usual, Fox used references to the people in his reply.208 He went back to the American war to point out how “the sense of the people without doors” and also that of the Commons had then changed (PR, XLIV, 698). Fox’s suggestion was that if a preceding national crisis had been solved by a Parliament opposing the ministry in the name of the people, this could also be the case during the current war. Both sides shared a respect for popular influence in politics but disagreed over practical politics. In the Lords, Grenville referred to French democratic practices in responding to opposition remarks about the national economy in case peace with France was concluded. Among the opposition lords, George North, the Earl of Guildford, and Augustus Henry FitzRoy, the Duke of Grafton, both complained that the ministry had declared war in the name of saving the British constitution but had itself suspended it. The war had led to the rise of a military government and produced an alliance that was hardly advancing liberty (PR, XLV, 326, 330). Stormont, now a government spokesman, attempted to explain the alliance with a reference to the French “affiliating themselves with the people of other countries, who might be disposed to resist the Government” (PR, XLV, 330). Finally, Earl FitzWilliam outspokenly urged Grenville to state whether the British government was sufficiently “fortified against the influence of French anarchy” (PR, XLV, 330). This caused Grenville to explain that the war was being fought because of the express aim of “the tyranny of Robespierre [. . .] to destroy the Brit-

208 The use of such language in Parliament should be contrasted with Fox’s definition of himself as fighting on the side of the democrats rather than the court when writing to his nephew in 1796. Mitchell 2004.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 449 ish Constitution” as “a step necessary in order to prepare [France’s] triumph over every nation in Europe, and the dissemination of her principles throughout the world”. If the war did not lead to the restoration of the French monarchy, “the system of democratic intrigue must be expected to run its course” (PR, XLV, 331). Grenville’s image of the French democracy was a dark one: it was a warning example. Burke, too, though no longer sitting in Parliament, continued to repeat his warnings in his published works, arguing that a parliamentary reform would only make England the leader of “the deathdance of Democratic Revolution”.209 Such views on the detrimental effects of “the idea of the sovereignty of the People” found support in other printed texts as well, in which conventional accusations of anarchy, sedition, rebellion, irrationality, immorality and irreligion were repeated.210 Thelwall and Paine were generally criticized for propagating democratic principles. Thomas Richard Bentley suggested, however, that the danger of “the sovereignty and the philosophy of the people” was already over as not even the French took them so seriously any longer.211 Seventeen ninety-seven was a year of adversity in that the economic crisis was deepening, naval seamen mutinied and the French made an invasion attempt. However, the difficult circumstances did not curb the debate on democracy and the sovereignty of the people in Parliament. In May, Grey put forward a further motion to reform Parliament, and Fox used the occasion to redefine the concept of democracy. The Foxites could be outspoken: Burke was no longer present to protest, and they were themselves considering the possibility of renouncing parliamentary activities completely.212 They constituted no more than 209 Edmund Burke, A Letter from the Right Honourable Edmund Burke to a Noble Lord, on the Attacks made upon him and his Pension, in the House of Lords, by the Duke of Bedford and the Earl of Lauderdale, early in the Present Sessions of Parliament (London 1796), 7. 210 [Anon.], A General Reply to the Several Answerers, &c. of a Letter Written to a Noble Lord, by the Right Honourable Edmund Burke (London 1796), 50–51. 211 Thomas Richard Bentley, Considerations upon the State of Public Affairs at the Beginning of the Year 1796. Fourth edition (London 1796), 43–45. 212 Burke’s published writings continued to contain strong counter-arguments to Fox. In a posthumous text, Burke lamented how numerous aristocrats had adopted “the new species of democracy”. He also presented fifty-four arguments for the impeachment of Fox and his circle. These included the suggestions that Fox had failed to convincingly renounce the idea of “individual representation” and that his policy was likely to lead to “wild Democracy” of the French kind. Burke, Two Letters, 1797, 5, 73; Edmund Burke, A Letter from the Rt. Honourable Edmund Burke to His Grace the

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a tiny opposition group, yet they gave expression to a major rethinking of the concept democracy following the most radical phase of the French Revolution. Fox, in particular, had re-established his contacts with radical reformers,213 had obviously read radical thinkers like William Godwin, and was ready to view the ancient democracies in a positive light, seeing them as worthy models for the British parliamentary system as well. In his opening speech, Grey argued in favour of a reformed representation of the people that would restore the constitution, which had been endangered during Pitt’s government. Challenging the authority of the Commons, Grey suggested that if the House should fail to pass a reform “the public might pass a different decision upon them; and to the public would the eventual decision belong” (XXXIII, 644). In the aftermath of the constitutional experiments of the French Revolution and radical polemic in Britain, Grey argued for what he called “universal representation”, not for universal suffrage or full equality of representation. A reform was needed because the current state of popular representation did not enable the Commons to sufficiently control the government. Members of parliament gained seats “without holding any communion with the people”, without “defending the rights of the people” and without “consulting for the good of the people”. A “full, free, and fair representation of the people” was necessary to restore “the confidence of the people” in the Commons (XXXIII, 645, 648, 650, 652). Thomas Erskine went further in his Foxite argumentation, suggesting that the Commons did not fulfil its role as “the popular branch of the constitution” and that hence there was a danger that “the people [would] have no more political existence than slaves”. The members of parliament simply did not have “a common interest with the whole body of the nation”. Contrary to the intentions of the revolutionaries of 1688, the monarchy had taken over total control of the government while “appearing to act with the consent of the people through their representatives” (XXXIII, 654–656). To demonstrate his point,

Duke of Portland, on the Conduct of the Minority in Parliament. Containing Fifty-Four Articles of Impeachment Against Rt. Hon. C.J. Fox . . . (London 1797), 76; Burke, in turn, was claimed to have missed the fact that the time of “high democracy” was already over in France. James Workman, A Letter to His Grace the Duke of Portland . . . Against the Attack made . . . by the Right Hon. Edmund Burke . . . (London 1797), 63. 213 Mitchell 2004.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 451 Erskine cited Burke’s old statement according to which the forms of government and administrators “all originate from the people”, that the Commons was “designed as a control for the people” and that it should “bear some stamp of the actual disposition of the people at large” (XXXIII, 657–658). While rejecting universal suffrage of the French type, Erskine maintained that the Commons “should emanate from the people”. This could happen through “an universal right of suffrage”, meaning that everyone could be said to be “virtually and in substance represented”. Erskine also justified his views with an explicit appeal to the people: “Whatever the House may think of this language, I shall not be condemned for it by the people who gave it its authority” (XXXIII, 654–655). His further implicit justification for the reform was that it reintegrated the people into the British constitution and thus curtailed the popularity of revolutionary theories among them (XXXIII, 660, 669–670). Erskine said nothing about democracy, avoiding superfluous associations with the French Revolution and knowing that he was likely to be attacked for his views by the loyalist press.214 Prime Minister Pitt was in a weaker position than before after political setbacks and the strengthening of the opposition in spring 1797.215 However, he continued to consistently defend the established order in Parliament, refuting claims that Parliament did not reflect the opinion of the people. Referring to the joint war effort, Pitt made two references to the people: the first when he claimed: “At no time were the functions of parliament more consonant with the feelings of the people”; and the second when he stated: “The system pursued by parliament in support of the measures of government, is the system of the people” (XXXIII, 676). No matter what the Foxite opposition claimed, the British parliamentary government was to be viewed as “the system of the people”. According to Pitt, the contested elections of 1796 showed that the opposition claims about Parliament not representing the body of the nation or the sentiments of the people were unfounded (XXXIII, 677–678).

214 See John Gifford, A Letter to the Hon. Thomas Erskine; Containing some Strictures on his Views of the Causes and Consequences of the Present War with France. Second edition (London 1797), 39–40, which set out to prove on the basis of a “true definition of the word people” that “the Majesty of the People” and “the Sovereignty of the People” were no more than “the Majesty of the Mob” and “the Sovereignty of the Mob”. 215 Ehrman & Smith 2004.

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Charles Jenkinson, Baron Hawkesbury, elaborated on Pitt’s points, questioning the claims that the decisions of the Commons were “not in unison with the opinions of the nation”. As the Prime Minster had said, “the popular power was continually improving” so that “the House of Commons was now more popular than ever it had been before this time”. The Commons was, indeed, using language referring to the people (XXXIII, 687–689). Hawkesbury introduced a new argument into the debate to demonstrate the rise in popular power. As a young man, he found it easy to regard the publication of parliamentary debates as a positive link between the members and the people: [. . .] the very proceedings of the House were continually published, by which the people had opportunities of knowing what was passing daily, which must have great influence on the House, by the opportunities that were afforded to the people of forming their opinions from time to time (XXXIII, 689).

Given that such a system connecting Parliament and the wider public already existed, there was, according to Hawkesbury, no need for opening all doors to popular participation by introducing universal suffrage of the French type. Such a reform was likely to swiftly abolish both the monarchy and Parliament (XXXIII, 689). William Young echoed this view, seeing the French Revolution as a providential demonstration of what would happen if excessive power was given to the people. Quite simply, regulation was needed “to guard people against the extravagance of their own passions” (XXXIII, 696). Fox spoke next, making a speech that was printed in thirteen extra editions in addition to the usual press reports. The speech, which was the most popular of all his published ones,216 can be interpreted as an attempt to redefine the British parliamentary concept of democracy in the aftermath of the Revolution, leading to a more positive conception of democracy as a form of government than in the past. Moreover, Fox’s formulations made it possible to view democracy as a potentially dynamic political system with a future orientation.217 It was important for Fox to demonstrate his adherence to classical political theory by denouncing democracy in its pure form. While recognizing the instability and vices of ancient democracies, however,

216

Dinwiddy 1992, 2. See Koselleck 1972, 848–853, on the transformation of the concept of democracy in the revolutionary era. 217

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 453 he also found much that was admirable in them. The support which democracy gave to national feeling in times of crisis had been their particular strength. This was something that monarchical regimes had also made use of. Though referring to history, Fox’s interpretation contained traces of ideas to be found in modern nationalist thought in that he saw a national community—preferably democratically governed—as the ideal political unit:218 When we turn to the ancient democracies of Greece, when we see them in all the splendour of arts and of arms, when we see how they aroused and invigorated genius, when we see to what an elevation they carried the powers of man, it cannot be denied that, however vicious on the score of ingratitude or of injustice, they were, at least, the pregnant and never-failing source of national strength, and that in particular they brought forth and afforded this strength in a peculiar manner in the moment of difficulty and distress. [. . .] they compel us also to admiration by their vigour, their constancy, their spirit, and their exertions in every great emergency in which they are called upon to act. We are compelled to own, that it gives a power, of which no other form of government is capable. Why? Because it incorporates every man with the state, because it arouses every thing that belongs to the soul, as well as to the body of man: because it makes every individual creature feel that he is fighting for himself, and not for another: [. . .] (XXXIII, 715).

Fox argued, like Godwin, that even if democracies could be turbulent, short-lived and vicious, “they have exacted from the common suffrage of mankind the palm of strength and vigour.” (XXXIII, 715). This was—despite Fox’s orthodox rejection of pure democracy—a radical and in many ways modern argument: Fox was saying that democracy based on universal suffrage could be more dynamic than any other form of government. The secret of this dynamism was “the democratic spirit” which it inspired among the members of the community (XXXIII, 716). An increasingly modern concept of democracy now had a spokesman in the British House of Commons, even though this did not yet stand for a regime without a monarchy.

218 The wording of the separately printed edition was slightly longer. The additions are distinguished here with italics. Charles James Fox, The Substance of the Speech of the Right Honourable Charles James Fox, on Mr. Grey’s Motion in the House of Commons, Friday, May 26, 1797 . . . as Reported in the Morning Chronicle (London 1797), 17. The widely sold offprint, which had probably been approved by Fox, thus gave a yet more positive picture of ancient democracies.

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In the circumstances of 1797, Fox’s views were unlikely to be considered seriously, let alone universally accepted; in fact, they were brushed aside by the majority of the members. A number of Foxites had been imprisoned, and Fox himself was being constantly attacked in the press for his parliamentary and extra-parliamentary speeches, particularly those which were interpreted as advocating the sovereignty of the people.219 Fox was losing hope of bringing about a change of government, believing that the battle for freedom had been lost to a despotic crown, and he ceased to attend Parliament later in 1797. By that time, his party had few ideological goals other than opposing the influence of the Crown. Some scholars have also doubted the sincerity of Fox’s willingness to promote parliamentary reform and the cause of the people in general, despite all his popular rhetoric.220 The evident popular appeal of loyal support for the monarchy during the Revolutionary War may have reinforced his aristocratic distrust of the masses. No matter what his intentions were, in May 1797 Fox had nothing to lose, and, considering the passage of the reform unlikely, he was able to give free expression to the kind of radical opinions about democracy quoted above. The practical conclusion which Fox drew out of his revaluation of democracy was equally significant. While unable to explicitly recognize the French revolutionary model, he dared to present the French case as evidence of the potential of representative government, that is, democracy—the synonymity of the terms being thus explicitly stated. France was by no means to be imitated, but even so the French Revolution demonstrated how a “representative system has proved itself capable of vigorous exertion”. The French case showed how “genuine representation alone can give solid power, and that in order to make government strong, the people must make the government”. Not only were popular government and democracy synonyms; so too

219 John Bowles recalled that Fox had presented “the Will of the Many” and “the Sovereignty of the people” as the source of all royal power. Such doctrines, he claimed, subverted all authority, destroyed all social ties and guided the multitude to conspiracy, treason and regicide. A Third Letter to a British Merchant: Containing Reflections on the Foreign and Domestic Politics of this Country, Together with Strictures on the Conduct of Opposition. The second edition (London 1797), 84–85; The accusations were repeated in [Ghost of Alfred], Letters of the Ghort of Alfred, Addresses to the Hon. Thomas Erskine, and the Hon. Charles James Fox . . . (London 1798), 55 and 58, Fox’s ideas being declared to be Jacobin principles. 220 Christie 1982, 250–251; Dinwiddy 1992, 1, 3; Mitchell 2004.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 455 were democracy and the people, in Fox’s use of the phrase “the monarchy, the aristocracy, the people”, already familiar from Thelwall’s writings (XXXIII, 714, 734). Such a revision had implications for the British system as well: it meant that the political elite should “call in the people, according to the original principles of your system, to the strength of your government.” In Fox’s rhetoric, this type of reform was neither an innovation nor an imitation of the French Revolution but rather the restoration of the original British constitution. He concluded by declaring that extending “popular representation” would make the British government stronger by winning “the hearts of the people” onto the side of government (XXXIII, 714–715). In a time of war, in particular, the people as a whole should be integrated into the political process. No-one bothered to dispute Fox’s claims, probably because of their sheer marginality. The word “democracy” made no breakthrough after Fox’s speech; it remained a term used to describe the representative governments of France and the United States at most, but it was not usually applied to the mixed British constitution.221 There was no parliamentary reform for another 35 years. Even so, the idea of representative government understood synonymously with democracy had evidently entered the British Parliament. The issue was never again removed from the agenda, and the reform itself became simply a question of time. No peace with France was reached in 1797. New translations of French émigré texts continued to depict the grave problems and catastrophic consequences of the application of the notion of the sovereignty of the people to the French regime and foreign policy, including attempts to export the notion to other countries.222 In British ceremonial speaking, the ministry endeavoured to motivate the political community to support the war effort by using nationalist language. In the

221 See John Price, The Englishman’s Manual: Containing a General View of the Constitution, Laws, Government, Revenue . . . of England . . . (London 1797), 2. 222 See Trophime-Gérard, Marquis de Lally-Tolendal, A Defence of the French Emigrants . . . Translated from the French by John Gifford, Esq. (London 1797), xviii; Jacques Mallet Du Pan, Letter to a Minister of State, on the Connection Between the Political System of the French Republic, and the System of its Revolution . . . (London 1797), 51; François Xavier Pagès, Secret History of the French Revolution, . . . (London 1797), Vol. 2, 5, 459; Jacques Necker, On the French Revolution . . . (London 1797), Vol. 2, 393, 397–398; Abbé Augustin Barruel, Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism . . . (London 1797–1798), Vol. 2, 148; Vol. 4, 545.

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Speech from the Throne of November 1797, the King presented “a great and free people” as an agent in the struggle side by side with the monarch: I have the fullest reliance, [. . .] on the zeal, magnanimity, and courage, of a great and free people, sensible that they are contending for their dearest interests, and determined to show themselves worthy of the blessings which they are struggling to preserve (XXXIII, 857).

George III also emphasized the strength of “the public spirit of my people” (XXXIII, 857). In responding to the Lords, he listed “the laws, liberties, and religion of my people” before references to the honour of the monarchy (XXXIII, 885). All of these minor rhetorical changes, though far from changing the constitutional reality, implied that the people had a significant role in the political community. Some comments in the Lords illustrate deep suspicions about any redefined concept of democracy, however. FitzWilliam attacked the “absurd conceptions of popular representation” and “false and pretended representation of the nation” in France, adding that little evidence of the existence of popular representation, “this primary principle in modern democracy”, had been seen in the enemy nation (XXXIII, 867–868). Even Lansdowne, an old sympathizer of the Revolution, rejected “the nonsense of universal suffrage” as far as popular representation was concerned (XXXIII, 876, 878). The frequency of references to the people and the nation had declined somewhat by the time of the next Royal Speech in November 1798, possibly as a result of the stronger standing of the ministry after a series of naval victories. An Irish rebellion had also been crushed, and the press at home had been put under stricter regulation. Even if the number of titles in which democracy and the sovereignty of the people were mentioned was high, few new arguments were put forward; rather it was a question of old works being reprinted. In the new titles, the idea of the sovereignty of the people and particularly its propagation among the lower classes continued to be condemned.223 The Duke of Norfolk and some other radical aristocrats were accused of “ascribing to the people the majesty of the King.”224 Likewise, “the

223

Arthur Young, An Enquiry into the State of the Public Mind Amongst the Lower Classes . . . (Dublin 1798), 8–9. 224 [English constitutionalist], A Cool Appeal to the Sober Sense of Englishmen: or, Republicanism and Monarchy, Considered (Salisbury 1798), 37–38. The author pre-

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 457 present unparalleled adoption of democratic principles” on the Continent as well as in Britain was viewed with deep concern.225 In November 1798, after a successful year of warfare, the executive power expressed an unusual degree of trust in the ability of the nation to determine its destiny. Evidently, “the security and happiness of the British nation have depended (under the blessing of Providence) on its own constancy, its energy, and its virtue” (XXXIII, 1529). The national victories were acknowledged to be due to “the zeal and spirit of my people” (XXXIII, 1543, 1558). Among the Lords, only Lansdowne used similar references to the people (XXXIII, 1533–1535, 1539). The Commons happily repeated the ministerial interpretation that the nation, rather than the Crown only, was the source of its own wellbeing (XXXIII, 1549). The naval victories of 1798 thus seem to have created a feeling of national superiority that made this update in the definition of the political community possible. This language, however, referred to the nation rather than to the people. There were no plans to strengthen the democratic dimension of the national community by means of reform. Post-Revolutionary Visions: the Sovereignty of Parliament Becomes the Sovereignty of the People Even if the late-1790s saw no triumph of language referring to democracy and the sovereignty of the people, some innovative speech acts like Fox’s constituted examples of the conceptual change that had gathered momentum with the French Revolution. It had become possible for individual politicians, particularly ones with an aristocratic independent status in either house of Parliament, to redefine democracy and the sovereignty of the people in post-revolutionary and increasingly modern terms. At the beginning of 1799, Parliament debated for nearly three months a proposed union of parliaments with Ireland. The union was concluded in March 1800 but only after complicated constitutional discussions. It is noteworthy that some members who opposed the

sented Blackstone’s famous book of the 1760s as evidence that sovereignty belonged exclusively to the king. 225 George Burges, An Address to the People of Great Britain (London, 1798), 4, 20.

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union not only advocated the universal principle of the sovereignty of the people but also defined the British system as based on this principle. Some Foxites had talked positively about the sovereignty of the people at the time of the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, but the claims of 1799 went further. They provoked fierce opposition in both houses but also found some outspoken supporters. Fox continued to play a role in this radicalization of language: the parliamentary defences of the sovereignty of the people were preceded by an incident in which Fox toasted the people as the sovereign and in consequence was dismissed from the Privy Council in 1798.226 Even in 1800, Fox publicly argued: I shall ever maintain, [. . .] that the basis of all Constitutions is the Sovereignty of the People:—and that from the People alone, Kings, Parliaments, Judges, and Magistrates, derive all their authority.227

The main questions in 1799 were whether the Parliament of Ireland was eligible to conclude a parliamentary union with Great Britain, or whether a more fundamental approval of the people was needed. The dispute allowed some opponents of the union to redefine the very basics of the British constitution. Even the more conservative side gave new formulations to conventional constitutional conceptions. Prime Minister Pitt, once again, initiated the process of redefinition by branding the opponents of the parliamentary union as champions of the sovereignty of the people. Pitt’s rejection of the notion and of the current opposition to his proposal was straightforward: [. . .] it is connected in part with all those false and dangerous notions on the subject of government which have lately become too prevalent in the world. It may, in fact, be traced to that gross perversion of the principles of all political society, which rests on the supposition that there exists continually, in every government, a sovereignty in abeyance (as it were) on the part of the people, ready to be called forth on every occasion, [. . .] (XXXIV, 281).

226 Mitchell 2004; For polemic on the significance of the toast, see The Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, Vol. 2, No. 27, 14 May 1798, 294. 227 Charles James Fox, The Celebrated Speech of the Honourable C.J. Fox, with the Proceedings of the Meeting at the Shakespeare Tavern, on Friday, October, 10, 1800, Being the Anniversary of his First Election for Westminster . . . Fourth edition (London) [1800], 18.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 459 For Pitt, this type of the sovereignty of the people was not so much democratic as it was Jacobin: “this false and dangerous mockery of the sovereignty of the people is in truth one of the chief elements of Jacobinism” designed to “inflame the passions of the mass of mankind” (XXXIV, 283). In using words like “mockery” and “sovereignty in abeyance”, however, Pitt was not necessarily denouncing the sovereignty of the people as a general principle, which may be a sign of his continuous adherence to Lockean political theory. Nevertheless, the Prime Minister remained a fervent opponent of any revolutionary interpretation of a sovereignty of the people that would constantly interfere in politics. The idea appeared to him as absurd as that of pure democracy. For Pitt, the British constitution remained an ideal mixture of the three classical elements: In every government there must reside somewhere a supreme, absolute, and unlimited authority. This is equally true of every lawful monarchy— of every aristocracy—of every pure democracy (if indeed such a form of government ever has existed, or ever can exist)—and of those mixed constitutions, formed and compounded from the others, which we are justly inclined to prefer to any of them (XXXIV, 282).228

Pitt did not denounce the ultimate origin of political power in the people, but he was uncompromising with regard to the impossibility of “the people collectively” interfering in politics in other than extreme cases (XXXIV, 282). For Pitt, the sovereignty of the people remained merely a theoretical tenet; it did not entail constant active participation by the people. As a consequence, in Pitt’s view, the “principle of the sovereignty of the people strikes at the foundation of all governments” (XXXIV, 284).229 No member wanted to immediately challenge such a categorical rejection of popular sovereignty. The official theory seemed to be that the people had once been involved in the creation of government but they could no longer appeal to any continued sovereignty of the people. In March 1799, a committee of the Commons actually condemned the advocacy of the sovereignty of the people by radical societies.230

228 This was also published separately in William Pitt, Speech of the Right Honourable William Pitt, in the House of Commons, Thursday, January 31, 1799 . . . Third edition (London 1799), 61. 229 Printed identically in Pitt, Speech, 1799, 66. 230 Report of Committee of Secrecy of the House of Commons. Ordered to be Printed 15th March, 1799 (London 1799), 14.

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Printed literature continued generally to question the religious legitimacy of, and practical possibilities for, the sovereignty of the people in any form of government.231 The loyalist press also declared that democracy was the most tyrannical, factious, sanguinary and repressive of all governments. Only “delegated sovereignty” of the people was intelligible and practicable. Robert Fellowes, among others, defined such sovereignty in the following words: [. . .] “the sovereignty of the people” means, that the power which upholds, and, in fact, constitutes the strength of the government, is essentially and physically resident in the great mass of the people; but who, not being able, of themselves, to bring this power into any simultaneous action, or to make it subservient to the protection of the state and to the several great ends of social and political economy, have devolved the right of doing it on others. They forego the impracticable right of universal sovereignty, that they may enjoy the practical benefits of universal subjection. The sovereignty of all is delegated to a few.232

Despite continuous criticisms of the notion, by 1799 it had thus become possible to define the sovereignty of the people in terms acceptable within the tradition of the mixed constitution. While the centrality of popular consent was recognized, the authority of government was not questioned. In some published comments on Pitt’s speech, the suggestion was that an active sovereignty of the people had prevailed in the Roman Republic and that the Saxon constitution had also contained elements of it.233 The most outspoken criticism came from Cartwright, who challenged “the almighty and omniscient Mr. Pitt” and, with repeated references to Locke’s ideas of a supreme power in the people, insisted: “In the primary and full sense of the word sovereignty, there is none known to the English constitution but the sovereignty of the people.”234

231

[Anon.], The Origin of the Gallic Plant, with its Baneful Influence in the Garden of Europe (Manchester 1799), 15, 18; John Bowles, Reflections on the Political and Moral State of Society, at the Close of the Eighteenth Century (London) [1800], 16. 232 Robert Fellowes, An Address to the People, on the Present Relative Situations of England and France: With Reflections on the Genius of Democracy . . . (London 1799), 18, 22, 39–40. 233 [Member of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn], Thoughts on National Independence, Suggested by Mr. Pitt’s Speeches on the Irish Union . . . (London) [1799], 60, 64; John Reeves, Thoughts on the English Government . . . Letter the second. . . . (London 1799), 62. 234 John Cartwright, An Appeal, Civil and Military, on the Subject of the English Constitution . . . (London 1799), 289–290.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 461 According to Cartwright, two types of sovereignty existed, the “underived and absolute sovereignty [. . .] inherent in the people” and the derivative and limited “vicarious sovereignty being entrusted to that legislative which the nation hath willed and created”.235 A new debate on the nature of sovereignty was coming into being, based on a radical interpretation of the original and active sovereignty of the people. A week after Pitt’s opening speech, Sheridan, who had defended the Irish rebels in 1798 and now opposed the scheme for union,236 commented on Pitt’s statements, speaking for the opposition. He thanked the Prime Minister for introducing the phrase “a sovereignty in abeyance” and presented it as identical with his understanding of the nature of political power derived from the people. The phrase referred to “rights, not in operation, nor in assertion, until the great occasion calls it forth, but always existing in the remembrance and contemplation of the constitution”. Sheridan found it problematic, however, that Pitt had ridiculed appeals to this basic principle of the sovereignty of the people: [. . .] it seems even if the right honourable gentleman were disposed to admit the existence of such a right in any case, he is still more decided that the people should never be told they possess such a right (XXXIV, 377).

Sheridan’s provocative suggestion was that both sides shared an adherence to the sovereignty of the people but that government wanted to hide the principle from the public. Such an attitude was not compatible with “the great fundamental truth on which the revolution [of 1688] was built”. Nor did it follow what theorists such as Sidney and Locke had said about the political position of the people or fit with the idea of the British monarchy as based on “the free choice of a free nation” (XXXIV, 377). Some days later, Laurence French again summed up the confrontation between Pitt and Sheridan as one in which the Prime Minister held “doctrines [. . .] against the sovereignty of the people”, while the opposition interpreted the Revolution of 1688 as based on that very principle. According to French, the latter argument was wrong: the Revolution had meant the reinforcement of the limited monarchy, not the sovereignty of the people (XXXIV, 433–434). French’s description

235 236

Cartwright, An Appeal, 1799, 290. Jeffares 2004.

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aptly summarizes the state of the debate between the Pitt ministry and the Foxite opposition at the very end of the eighteenth century. When the question of the union was resumed on 14 February, Benjamin Hobhouse, a supporter of parliamentary reform and a suspected sympathizer of the French, cited Locke on the legislative power being “delegated power from the people”. He argued that the people had originally created civil government and given all power into the hands of the legislature. In other words, “[t]he power of the legislative” was “derived from the people” (XXXIV, 474–475). Hobhouse’s application of the sovereignty of the people to the case of the union with Ireland was that “the sovereignty was with the people” and remained with them (XXXIV, 475). Like Sheridan, Hobhouse presented the Prime Minister as a supporter of the principle, something that Pitt himself never bothered to deny in later debates: “Indeed, he understood the minister himself to entertain the same sentiment, when he talked of the sovereignty of the people in abeyance.”237 This appeared to Hobhouse as fully in line with what Blackstone had written about the right of the people to petition and even possess arms to defend their liberties. The conclusion was that the entire British political system was, in fact, based on the sovereignty of the people:238 This was a recognition of the sovereignty of the people in the last instance; it was an acknowledgment that the people have a right to resist their legislature in case it attempted to destroy their liberties. Indeed, this was a doctrine which formed the basis of all free governments; [. . .] (XXXIV, 475).

Despite making such far-reaching claims, Hobhouse recognized the risk of anarchy related to this principle. Anarchy, however, was a smaller problem than the kind of despotism that the denial of the right of the people to resist in extreme cases entailed (XXXIV, 476). The practical conclusion was, he argued, that no incorporative union of parliaments should be concluded. 237 William Woodfall managed to record a slightly longer version of the same speech: “Indeed he understood the Minister himself had some idea that the Sovereignty of the People was unalterable, he understood so, when he talked of Sovereignty in abeyance.” He also noted that the audience protested against such a notion by shouting “No! No! No!” William Woodfall, An Impartial Report of the Debates that Occur in the Two Houses of Parliament, in the Course of the Fourth Session of the Eighteenth Parliament . . . (London 1798–1799), 234. 238 Woodfall reported this passage in practically identical terms.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 463 Mitford responded to Hobhouse by denouncing the sovereignty of the people as a strange Continental notion incompatible with the British constitution. The original delegation of power by the people did not deserve such a name. The views of the people were rather communicated through the existing systems of government: That doctrine had, he was aware, been lately propagated in those books which had deluged Europe; but the consequence of that principle was, that it led to anarchy and confusion. The principle upon which all governments stood, was this, that the people had delegated their power to the government, and that was the only organ by which their will could be known, or that they could do any thing by. He conceived, therefore, that as long as government continued to exist, it alone could act; and that any voice from the people, except as a voice of opinion, tended directly to subvert the power of government (XXXIV, 502).

The government thus consistently denounced the sovereignty of the people in any other sense than that relating to the original creation of government in the ancient past, and even this event did not deserve such a loathed name. Some opposition members, by contrast, defined the British constitution as based on the sovereignty of the people and suggested that the ministers, too, would do better to recognize this basic principle. A change in attitudes towards the recognition of the sovereignty of the people had obviously begun in the Westminster Parliament, but still only among a small minority of the members. A parallel confrontation on the definition of the sovereignty of the people was witnessed in the Lords on 19 March 1799. Grenville, echoing much of what Pitt had said in the lower house, associated the sovereignty of the people with Jacobinism and denounced it as an absurd innovation that was impossible to realize even in the so-called democracies: [. . .] the admission of the modern doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, would be to destroy the very frame of government; it implied in its very statement an inconsistency and contradiction. The sovereignty of the people did not exist, even in the purest democracy, for in the purest democracy, there had always existed a medium or channel by which the sovereignty of the whole was exercised (XXXIV, 668).

One reason for Grenville’s denial of the sovereignty of the people was his rejection of Robespierre’s definition of the concept of representative democracy. For the majority of the British Parliament, representation was not to be associated with either the sovereignty of the people

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or democracy. In that sense, the sovereignty of the people remained too modern a doctrine for most of the parliamentarians. Despite such a hostile environment, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, the Earl of Moira (later Marquess of Hastings) took the initiative to introduce a conceptual redefinition. As an old opponent of Pitt, Moira had nothing to lose in the case, and readily defended the Irish in the aftermath of their rebellion. In doing so he performed an important speech act, referring favourably to the sovereignty of the people and redefining the British political system by the means of this concept. In response to Grenville, Moira argued, with a hint of class consciousness: He feared that the noble lord, when he painted the ignorant peasantry as maintaining the doctrine of the sovereignty of the people, intended it should be inferred, that they who could here talk of the sovereignty of the people must be in purpose as much anarchists as the rebels in Ireland. If so, the noble lord had introduced the term unfitly and invidiously. The misconstruction of that phrase had already done great mischief in this country, [. . .] (XXXIV, 704).

The terms “the sovereignty of the people” and “democrat” were not to be used loosely to vilify all reformists as Jacobins. According to another report, Moira even repeated a definition for which Fox had recently been chastised: Of this principle, the sovereignty of the people, he must be permitted to observe [. . .], that it was that very principle in the Constitution of Great Britain which had placed the present Royal Family on the throne.239

Such a potentially anti-monarchical formulation was cut out by the more cautious reporter, which reveals its delicate nature. Moira went on to describe the lamentable consequences of these terms being used without clear definitions and turned—to avoid accusations of extremism and innovation—to a classical text written by Aulus Gellius (125–180 A.D.) to find a universal (albeit anachronistic) definition for ‘democrat’: [. . .] democrat was now become, in this country, as savage a war-whoop against any opponent as ever aristocrat had been in France; [. . .] He was astonished that nobody had fixed the meaning of the phrase, by

239 William Woodfall, An Impartial Report of the Debates that Occur in the Two Houses of Parliament, in the Course of the Fourth Session of the Eighteenth Parliament . . . (London 1798–1799), Vol. 2, 484.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 465 appealing to the definition which Aulus Gellius furnished ready prepared to their hand, in the words of Ateuis Capito: “In populo, omnes gentes, omnesque ordines civitatis, continentur: plebs vero en dicitur in qua ordines patriciae non insunt.”240 The discrimination is as strongly marked in the English language, by the distinction between people and populace (XXXIV, 704–705).

Moira thus continued, in an aristocratic fashion, to draw a traditional kind of distinction between the people in a political sense and the populace at large. But he also provided a definition for the sovereignty of the people which made the phrase wholly compatible with the British parliamentary political system: When the sovereignty of the people is asserted, it stands simply in denial of the bestial doctrine of divine right. It maintains, that the welfare of the people or nation at large, and not the interest of a single individual, is the object of government. It is nothing more than the declaration of that very parliamentary control under which [. . .] the regal functions must be always exercised in this country (XXXIV, 705).

According to an alternative report, Moira was even more precise when defining the sovereignty of the people: But a strange misconception of terms had gone abroad with regard to the sovereignty of the people. It had been stiled the sovereignty of the mob. It was the sovereignty of the property, the virtue, the talents, the genius, the intrepid courage, the honourable portions of a nation.241

The British parliamentary government was, quite simply, based on the sovereignty of the people. This did not mean the rule of all; such an idea would simply be absurd. It was a fundamental assumption for Moira, and most others, that the English system could not be founded on the power of the masses: The supremacy of the populace was a notion that never could enter into the conception of any man in his senses. No one had ever advanced, in any time or any country, a proposition so self-evidently absurd, as that the uninformed ought to rule the enlightened part of the community (XXXIV, 705).

240 “The people includes all clans and all orders of the state: the populace, on the other hand, is the name for that part of the state from which the patrician orders are excluded.” 241 Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1798–1799, 484.

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Virtual representation of the British type was, in Moira’s understanding, based on “the sovereignty of the people” and not on any “sovereignty of the mob”. Such a principle could involve “the suffrage of all that could be wise, virtuous, and respectable in a nation” (XXXIV, 705), but not every inhabitant. The functioning of the British Parliament itself was, furthermore, an embodiment of the principle of the sovereignty of the people: The sovereignty of the people was acknowledged and recognized by parliament, even on every new return of a member to its body; and the writs of general election were a universal, unequivocal, unsophisticated recognition of it, according to the principles and imprescriptible usage of the constitution (XXXIV, 705–706).242

Such a conceptual redefinition of the British constitution, repeated several times by various opposition speakers in both houses of parliament, did have its consequences in the long run. Quite soon, in fact, it was carried slightly further, when Gilbert Elliot-Murray-Kynynmond (1751–1814), Baronet Minto, entered the debate on the union with Ireland in the Lords on 11 April. The initiative for the discussion on the sovereignty of the people came from William Eden, Baron Auckland, a former diplomat, who attacked the opponents of the union by denouncing both contested concepts (‘the sovereignty of the people’ and ‘democracy’) in the same sentence. Auckland argued that the way of thinking of the opponents [. . .] has been revived in the schools of modern democracy by the admirers of the sovereignty of the people, and accordingly has the strongest claims to contempt and rejection (XXXIV, 717).243

Auckland saw no place for these revolutionary concepts in descriptions of the British system. There was evidently a need to clarify the meanings of the key concepts in the context of the union debates. The debate also repeatedly demonstrates the tendency of the conservative side to contribute to conceptual change with their insistence on keeping to the conventional meanings. While Moira had taken a positive stand on the meaning of the word “democrat”, Minto was slightly more cautious. He had studied with 242

This passage is reported identically in Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1798– 1799, 484. 243 Printed also in William Eden, Baron Auckland, Substance of the Speech of Lord Auckland, in the House of Peers, April 11, 1799 . . . (London 1799), 7.

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 467 Mirabeau in France and admired Fox in politics, but he was concerned about the possibility of the emergence of a French-inspired “Irish democratic republic, or rather anarchy” or simply “democratic anarchy in Ireland” if there was no union (XXXIV, 771, 776). He rejected the idea of the people at large running the government and saw such pure democracy as impossible “[b]ecause no people on earth, not even the smallest population in the smallest territory, could ever exercise a democratic legislation in its entire and theoretical purity”. It was also evident that “the people of England cannot make law for themselves in any democratic form of constitution” because of purely physical constraints (XXXIV, 804, 811–812). Nor was the union an occasion to awaken “the supposed dormant title of the people to administer the sovereignty in their own persons”. In Minto’s view, it was a “new and strange invention” to conjure [. . .] the latent sovereignty of the people, and [substitute] some phantom and chimera to represent that sovereignty in the room of its only true and acknowledged form, I mean that of Parliament, [. . .].244

Minto’s classical concept of democracy and conservative idea of sovereignty led him next speak in favour of “the sovereignty of parliament” and to define this concept as synonymous with the sovereignty of the people. According to Minto, [t]he sovereignty of parliament, [. . .] is neither more nor less, but identically and precisely the same with the sovereignty of the people itself, appearing in the only visible, tangible or perceptible form in which it can be recognized in this country (XXXIV, 808, 811–812).245

There was “the inherent sovereignty of the people”, but Parliament was the institution that made it real. In Parliament, there was what Minto called

244 Woodfall, An Impartial Report, 1798–1799, 621. The same words appear in Gilbert Elliot, the Earl of Minto, The Speech of Lord Minto, in the House of Peers, April 11, 1799 . . . (London 1799), 151. 245 All these passages were printed identically in Gilbert Elliot, the Earl of Minto, The Speech of Lord Minto, in the House of Peers, April 11, 1799 . . . (London 1799), 137, 140. According to Minto’s later remark, “the supposed dormant title of the people to administer the sovereignty in their own persons” had only been imaginable after the abdication of James II in 1688. XXXIV, 816.

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chapter five [. . .] an established organ of the general will,246 qualified by its frame and constitution, to apply the collective interests, and to administer the sovereign power of the state” (XXXIV, 812).

A gradually modernizing concept of the parliamentary representation of the people, connected with the initially revolutionary concept of the sovereignty of the people, was emerging in Minto’s concept of the sovereignty of parliament. It must have been a conscious speech act on the part of several members, both opponents and proponents of the union, to challenge the ministerial definition of the sovereignty of the people in this way in both Houses during the early months of 1799. This did not yet represent any breakthrough of mass democracy, of course, particularly as Minto proposed a conservative definition and anyway had difficulties in getting his political opinions accepted. The attitudes of the members of parliament to the people at large as a political force had hardly become any more favourable. Minto’s description of the popular politics of London, for instance, continued to be as full of contempt as any expressed in the early part of the century (XXXIV, 812–813). However, there undeniably existed a considerable potential for conceptual redefinition. With the reforms of the nineteenth century, it would become ever more easy to reconcile, as Jeffrey Goldsworthy has put it, “the legal sovereignty of parliament and the political sovereignty of the people”. In the reforms, the sovereignty of parliament was given a newly formulated justification, Parliament being increasingly understood as representing the whole national community.247 The last phase of the debates on democracy and popular sovereignty to be discussed within the confines of this study took place on 23 April 1799, when the Commons was debating the formulation of an Address concerning the union with Ireland. The ministry wanted to ensure that none of the radical ideas advocated by certain members should enter the Address. With this end in mind, Sylvester Douglas opened the debate with a speech in which he systematically denounced both democracy and the sovereignty of the people.248 The available reports

246 “The general will” contains a, perhaps unconscious, reference to Rousseau’s notion of volonté générale. 247 Goldsworthy 1999, 219–220. 248 Printed separately in Sylvester Douglas, Baron Glenbervie, Speech of the Right Honourable Douglas in the House of Commons, Tuesday, April the 23rd, 1799 (London 1799).

the british parliament and revolutionary democracy 469 do not record any attempts to counter the ministerial claims, and in that sense the government won the argument. According to Douglas, a lawyer by profession, “the people at large” could not be incorporated in decision-making; indeed, that was a measure that had never been implemented anywhere: [. . .] the people at large [. . .] never, I believe, in the smallest state, or most complete democracy, have exercised, in fact, by universal individual suffrage, deliberative, judicial, or legislative authority (XXXIV, 830).

The problem with the opinion of the opposition that the parliaments could not decide on the union with Ireland without consulting “the mass of the nation” was, according to Douglas, that it [. . .] leads immediately to the false and mischievous principle of the direct sovereignty of the people, and to that equally mischievous fiction to which it has given rise, viz. that an original compact between the governors and governed is the only lawful foundation of government (XXXIV, 830).

Noteworthy here is the emphasis on a “direct” sovereignty of the people—as opposed to its sovereignty in principle—and the point that the original contract had merely been a point of departure, not a premise on which all politics was to be based. A direct appeal to the people was out of question, and the union remained for the parliaments to decide. In Douglas’ view, it was fatal “to restore, as it is called, to the people the sovereignty they are imagined to have farmed out, as it were, to their rulers”; the results had already been seen in France (XXXIV, 831). The rise of “the restless and proselytical spirit of democracy” and the establishment of “a democratic republic” in Ireland was what made British parliamentarians especially concerned (XXXIV, 879, 886). The concepts of democracy and the sovereignty of the people remained highly contested ones, but a debate leading to their redefinition had evidently started. ‘Democracy’ did not yet become a dominant concept in the European political debate in the course of the 1790s. It had been a classical academic word for such a long time, and its re-evaluation had only just started. Revolutionary France took the lead in introducing a new concept of democracy, which meant that responses to the concept remained conflicting and mainly negative. Robespierre’s use of the concept during the Terror made it highly suspect in the eyes of most Europeans: The Jacobin rule demonstrated to many what the worst type of democracy could be like, and democracy hence became

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a fiercely contested concept. According to R.R. Palmer, ‘democracy’ could stand for popular government or equality of political rights, but it could also still refer to the classical idea of direct democracy run by popular assemblies. Disagreement over the meaning of “democracy” was increased by uncertainty as to how democracy and a functioning government could actually be reconciled. Despite its continuing pejorative connotations, the word “democracy” became slightly more common in European political discourse until about 1798. After that year, according to Palmer, democracy went out of fashion for quite some time.249 In the 1860s and around 1900, many British politicians would still be suspicious of and opposed to democracy.250 Yet conceptions of the role of the people in politics and democracy were already changing in the course of the nineteenth century.251 As the analysis of British parliamentary debates has shown, a conceptual debate leading to redefinitions of ‘democracy’ and ‘the sovereignty of the people’ had started in the 1780s, and continued, within a traditional representative institution, in the 1790s. In the final chapter, I shall summarize the main stages of this eighteenth-century redefinition. The debate would finally result in modern representative mass democracy, though this was not to happen until the following centuries.

249 250 251

Palmer 1953, 212, 216, 226. Palonen 2008, 17, 41–48. Robertson 1995, 4–5; Hansen 2005, 14.

CONCLUSION In this book, I have suggested that the eighteenth-century history of democracy should be studied primarily as the history of the reception, use and redefinition of the concepts of the people, democracy, representation and the sovereignty of the people in parliamentary debates, that is, in discussions in which the leading decision-makers of each political community participated. This research strategy has meant a concentration on the analysis of the original arguments and exact choices of words by past speakers—as far as they are conveyed by the extant records—in the context of the debates and in the relevant circumstances of the time, including political events and structures, debates in the public sphere and the background of the speaker. The primary objective of this study has been to estimate how and to what extent the parliamentary establishments in eighteenth-century Britain and Sweden became advocates of the emerging more modern notions of democracy and the sovereignty of the people by giving them a clearer linguistic expression, recognition and acceptance in parliamentary and associated public debates. The reception of philosophical notions of democracy and the sovereignty of the people and concomitant conceptual revaluations and redefinitions introduced by the parliamentarians have been the focus of my interest. I was interested in learning how the notion of political power being derived from the people was received by the parliamentary elites and what kinds of practical conclusions they drew from it. The gradually growing distance from the Aristotelian tradition that was critical of democracy, and related revaluations and redefinitions of the key concepts, were of particular interest, as were old and new anti-democratic arguments. I also wanted to find out whether democracy became a positively understood, progressive and future-oriented concept only as the result of the French Revolution, or whether the Revolution merely initiated a more radical stage in a process of redefinition that had already begun earlier. Here, I was seeking a solution to a contradiction between the established view of the French Revolution as a major event redefining democracy and suggestions that ‘democracy’ and ‘popular sovereignty’ had been given modern meanings much earlier in some countries.

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I also set out to examine more closely the prevalent assumption in eighteenth-century studies that innovative ideas about democracy were products of the exploitation of the developing public sphere by radical philosophy. I have suggested that the reception of such notions among political elites should not be regarded as self-evident and sometimes took place after a considerable time lag. Republican tracts awarding sovereignty to the people were seldom echoed in session chambers. On the other hand, conceptual modifications could take place within traditional systems of representation, arising out of a constant, creative and intensifying parliamentary debate for and against a variety of political subjects. Even modifications of the concept of democracy by those who wanted the political system to remain as it was could contribute to the joint reformulation of ideas in a debate. Parliamentary records turned out to provide extensive and in many ways invaluable sources for the study of the history of the developing vocabulary referring to democracy and the sovereignty of the people. Despite a certain variation in the choice of words as a result of the eighteenth-century methods of compiling the records, the available documents allow the analysis of active uses of political key concepts in actual decision-making situations. They reveal both the conscious and the less reflected recycling of previously heard conventional arguments and contributions to change in the language of politics. The change could take place as a result of pre-planned revisions, but it could also happen as a consequence of polemical encounters between conservative and innovatory voices, both using the relevant concepts in order to win the argument in a particular debate and redefining them for that purpose. As a consequence of a number of repeated redefinitions of ‘the people’ and ‘democracy’, the meaning of these concepts became modified among the parliamentary establishment and even the entire political community. Arguments for and against a particular motion presented during parliamentary debates introduced differing conceptualizations of political reality. Emerging notions of parliamentary government and existing party divisions together with the parliamentary practice of speaking for and against any proposition made for the expression of a diversity of views. There was not only disagreement between the government and opposition; there might also be considerable differences within both groups. During the debates, all sides who wanted to influence decision-making were forced to present their points clearly, and this led to the introduction of central—often contested—political

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concepts into the debates. New usage could come from the application of notions already presented in the published literature, but they could also arise out of the needs of the actual moment of speaking. Innovatory speaking in Parliament might reciprocally provoke responses in the published literature. This potential for conceptual innovation in parliamentary speaking is hardly surprising given that the debaters were highly aware of both the classical traditions of political thinking and the political discourse of their time. Many of them demonstrated considerable creativity in their use of language, aiming at controlling the debate both inside and outside the representative institution. The developing public sphere provides the most important context for the analysis of parliamentary debates. It was possible for members of parliament to influence the agenda of public political discourse as debates within representative institutions and in the published political literature became increasingly interconnected in the course of the late eighteenth century. Politicians addressed audiences outside the representative institution, and commentators became more interested in reviewing the content of parliamentary debates. The latter were closely integrated with public debates, the initiative coming either from the reporters or the parliamentarians themselves. While it could still take a long time before innovative philosophical notions introduced in tiny circles of intellectuals or ephemeral printed literature were received and applied in parliamentary speeches, conceptual reformulations introduced by debating politicians had an obvious effect on related debates in published literature. As debates in representative institutions are always combinations of numerous discourses, linear trends in the change of political attitudes may be difficult to discern. It is therefore worth once more reviewing the most important turning points and findings of our long-term analysis of parliamentary references to the political role of the people and democracy. The analysis revealed five distinct periods of conceptual change in the British Parliament and the Swedish Diet: reactions to Wilkite radicalism in the early 1770s; the (simultaneous) last two Diets of the Age of Liberty in Sweden (1769–1772); the active campaign for parliamentary reform during the first half of the 1780s; the conflict between British and French concepts of democracy during the first half of the 1790s; and, finally, the first redefinitions of the sovereignty of parliament as the sovereignty of the people in the late 1790s. In Britain, the debate of 1734 on shortening the term of Parliament, with Robert Walpole’s speech in support of long parliaments and in

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opposition to pure democracy, was significant for later eighteenthcentury debates. Indeed it was reprinted and used to oppose proposals for parliamentary reform six decades later. Walpole introduced the concept of democracy for the first time in recorded parliamentary discourse, providing it with an authorized definition that recalled the classical pejorative sense that the concept still carried in contemporary public discourse. He was replying to Bolingbroke’s extra-parliamentary accusation that the ministry was inhibiting the functioning of the democratic power in the constitution. While Walpole recognized the existence of a democratic element in the mixed constitution, he rejected pure democracy as leading to the rise of factions, an inability to reach decisions and inconsistency in executing them. For Walpole, the people was synonymous with the populace; he expressed no particular appreciation of the people and ruled out popular government. He regarded democracy—in the sense of the government observing the constantly changing “Pulse of the People” as opposed to merely listening to what Parliament had to say—as a potential catalyst for the utter destruction of a consistent and balanced system. He suggested that, in such a system, the opposition would abuse the possibility it would give them to appeal to the people constantly, while the established practice allowed the ministry to govern the people in a proper manner. The opposition debaters, while emphasizing the need to listen to the voice of the people in 1734, did not dispute the premise that the democratic element of the constitution needed to be kept in due check. There existed a more radical line in mid-eighteenth-century published literature that defined democracy as a form of government in which sovereignty was in the hands of the people. However, associations between sovereignty and the people remained rare even in theoretical definitions, “supreme power” being rather the favoured expression. The turn of the 1730s and 1740s witnessed the rise of a radical oppositional discourse in the press questioning the ability of Parliament, under the manipulation of Walpole as it was, to constitute “the People’s Power”. Seventeenth-century republican authors were cited in calls for supreme power to be reserved in the hands of the people. Democracy was sometimes represented as the best guarantee of freedom, and the executive power was characterized as “the Servants of the People”. However, such views remained fairly marginal and were countered by governmental pamphlets, which, for instance, ridiculed opposition claims that the voice of the people is the voice of God.

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Walpole’s fall in the early 1740s, a milestone in the emergence of the notion of responsible government, was connected with the introduction of the concept of popular government into parliamentary discourse, which illustrates the links between political and linguistic change. In 1741, Lord Carteret justified his call for Walpole’s resignation by defining the British constitution as a “popular government”, asking whether “in a popular government, a man who has incurred the general odium of the people, ought not to be continued in the king’s counsels”. He underlined the right of the people (the current electors) to withdraw their support from the ministry, or at least the leading minister. The implication was clear: “the voice of the people [. . .] ought always to be attended to, and generally to be obeyed.” Although Carteret’s argument was supported by Sandy’s related motion in the Commons, it did not lead to an immediate vote of no-confidence, the government successfully questioning such strong appeals to the opinions of the people, but it shows the availability of the popular argument for use in opposition to the executive power. The notion of Britain as a popular government remained a contested one; seventeenth-century theorists and the suggestions of individual contemporary tracts did not change the basic assumptions of the political establishment. In 1745, a dispute on the government of London caused the ministry to warn about the risks of an excessive form of popular government. William Yonge insisted on the need to keep popular power under strict control in order to avoid the inherent inconstancy and turbulence of popular forms of government. A few years later, in 1749, the invocation of the people by the parliamentary opposition and perhaps also the prevailing scholarly emphasis not only on the weaknesses but also on the strengths of democracy again forced a prime minister to respond in Parliament. Thomas Pelham regarded the concept of the people, as exploited by the opposition, as a mere rhetorical device: “the sense of the people” was an imaginary creation of the opposition aimed to serve the particular interests of a political faction. The Pelham ministry provided a counter-definition of ‘the people’, emphasizing the confidence of the people in the parliamentary majority and expressing their trust that the people would avoid showing excessive loyalty either to the monarch or to the ministry. The ministerial definition of the people was viewed as patronizing by John Hynde Cotton, among others; he developed the argument that popular power had declined under the Whig oligarchy: the voice of the people had had an influence in the past, when the voice of the people and

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the voice of Parliament corresponded, but this was no longer the case. Thus, by the mid-century, the meaning of the concept of the people had become an object of open dispute between a prime minister and a member of the opposition. In the 1750s, stable ministries and a victorious war that united the British nation meant a standstill in the parliamentary debate on the political role of the people. Nor did the public debate see any major developments either, the classical concept of democracy as “a monster with innumerable heads” still being seen as applicable. Some authors regarded the prevailing degree of democracy as most advantageous provided that it was regulated by the monarchy in the mixed constitution. Others suggested that democracy had thrived excessively since the Revolution of 1688, which could lead to the rule of the multitude and ultimately to despotism. The situation changed somewhat after the Seven Years’ War, and the subject of the political role of the people came to be seen as increasingly relevant in parliamentary debates as well. In his public speeches, George III had extended the political role of the Crown in relation to the people with the obvious support of Parliament. However, in November 1763, his one-sidedly monarchical speech no longer went unchallenged. The confrontations with the North American colonies, however, caused the Commons to emphasize the liberty of the people under George III in 1766. In public discourse, criticism of the Crown was growing, and midseventeenth-century republican arguments that the people constituted the fountain of all power were reprinted. The ministry reacted to claims about the growth of the royal prerogative after the contentious Middlesex election in 1768 by cutting down references to the monarch in the Royal Speech and recognizing the ability of Parliament to cooperate with the Crown on a more equal basis. The Commons was also activated to discuss the relative political power of the people and Parliament as a consequence of the controversy over John Wilkes’ election to Parliament. The Commons now defended, in their own voice, their role as the guarantors of a free constitution and the happiness of the people even against a popular vote in a general election. In 1768, “the people” appeared for the first time in a Commons’ Address as a collective political agent independent of the monarch albeit one constituted by Parliament as their representative. At this point the notion of the sovereignty of parliament strengthened, partly as a result of William Blackstone’s description of the constitutional position of

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Parliament as “a kind of democracy”. In pamphlet literature, too, the first references to “national representation” and “sovereignty” lying in Parliament appeared at about that time. The troubles in America and the Wilkite controversy at home made North’s ministry emphasize “the just rights and interests of my people” in the Speech from the Throne in 1770. When the Wilkites challenged the secrecy of parliamentary proceedings in 1771, the government side took a stand on ideas about the original sovereignty lying with the people for the first time. Welbore Ellis rejected all appeals to an “allruling supremacy in the people” and denounced an inclusive notion of the people as the source of political authority. His counter-argument was that the Commons—and not the population or even the voters at large—constituted “the only people of England which the law acknowledges”. The concept of the people, as defined by Ellis and supported by Charles James Fox, remained exclusive: popular interventions in government were unimaginable and the idea that the Commons, as “the people of England”, could violate the rights of the people was unconstitutional. This Court Whig notion of the supreme authority of Parliament rejected all active popular political participation. However, it met with fierce opposition. John Dunning argued, in Lockean terms, that the people were “the original spring from which the three streams of government proceeded, and must in fact be paramount to all”. Even before the American war, ideas of an active—rather than merely original—power in the people were thus being articulated in the British Parliament. By the early 1770s, the issue of the power of Parliament on the one hand and that of the people on the other had become highly contentious in the British debate. These constitutional debates sometimes also gave rise to comparisons between Britain and other countries with (presumably) parallel forms of government. One of the sister regimes was “the kingdom or rather republic of Sweden”, as the Speaker of the Lords called that country in 1766. At the Swedish Diet, on the other hand, the Wilkes affair was used as a warning instance of what to expect in “free regimes” if the rights of the people were not defended. Some eighteenth-century members of the British Parliament and the Swedish Estates thus took the comparability of the English and Swedish political communities as self-evident—despite their one-sided preference for their own systems. The Swedish Diet in the late Age of Liberty (1766–1772) has often been passed over in international accounts of the modernization of

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political cultures, despite the fact that Sweden (and hence also presentday Finland) then had a political system based on the extensive rule of the Estates. At the same time, there has been a tendency among other historians to overemphasize the unique role played by the Swedish Estates as forerunners of what has even been characterized as “popular sovereignty” and “representative democracy”, the suggestion being that these notions had been adopted in Sweden by 1772. Our comparative analysis has shed new light on this field, in which previous international comparisons are limited, dated and not based on the analysis of parallel parliamentary sources from Sweden and a comparable country like Britain carried out by the same historian. Sweden in the late Age of Liberty undeniably provides a significant case in the development of the notions of popular government. During their sessions, the Estates ruled the country, sometimes explicitly in the name of the people. However, it is less evident that the terms “popular sovereignty” or “representative democracy” could be legitimately used to characterize the Swedish rule of the Estates—despite the increase in the use of “the people” (folket) in political arguments and suggestions in the press that the members of the Riksdag were representatives of the people, and even despite some individual denials of the traditional pejorative senses of the concept of democracy. Although, by the end of the Age of Liberty, the concept of the people could be used to legitimate political stands by all major groups of the political establishment, any modern, post-French Revolution notions of “popular sovereignty” or “representative democracy” simply could not yet have existed. By the end of the 1760s, the concepts of the people and the nation were clearly being increasingly used at the Swedish Diet in political contexts, and sometimes in quite radical senses. Interesting changes of emphasis within and between the estates in their use are traceable during the dispute over noble privileges at the turn of the 1760s and 1770s, however. For much of the Riksdag of 1769−1770, these concepts still predominantly belonged to the vocabulary of the Noble Hat opposition and some individual allies of theirs in the Burgher Estate. In the 1720s, many Nobles had already adopted far-reaching notions of the relationship between the Noble Estate as “the people” and the King as a delegate of that people, and they reasserted them at the time of the failed royal coup of 1756. Now it was in the interest of the Hat opposition to extend their ideas to their allies in the lower orders, using the recently liberated publishing activity in order to challenge the Cap

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Senate. Many Cap noblemen also viewed the Estates generally, and the Noble Estate in particular, as the embodiment of the nation making use of its supreme power to advance the common good. The Clerical and Peasant Estates, as well as almost all members of the Burgher Estate, still avoided involving themselves in the debate on the popular origin of political power or the active realization of the sentiments of the people by the Estates, despite the rise of calls for extended privileges for the lower estates. In 1769, there were debates in the Noble Estate on the form of the constitution. Monarchy, aristocracy and democracy could all be opposed there as threats to liberty; they were not regarded as absolutely necessary elements of the Swedish constitution. The ideal balance of the Swedish constitution was seen to consist in the majesty of the monarch, the authority of the Senate and the liberties of the Estates; however, the Estates were not conventionally presented as a democratic element in the constitution, although some individual noblemen such as Carl Johan Ridderstolpe, Carl Sparre and Carl Fredrik Pechlin did use more radical references to the notion of the people possessing power in the meetings of the Noble Estate and in some special committees in 1769. Ridderstolpe spoke openly about “the supreme power of the nation” and about “the nation, the power of which is the cornerstone of our entire constitution”. Pechlin, an opportunist politician in the pay of the Russians, who counted on his ability to keep the Swedish monarchy weak, argued that there was a legitimate democratic element in the Swedish constitution. He also supported Gyllensvahn’s suggestion that democracy as part of the classical mixed constitution was to be located in the plenary sessions of the Estates. This radicalization of the political uses of the classical concepts of the people and democracy seems to have come to a sudden end in November 1769. To most Nobles, the suggestion that the Peasant Estate together with the Burghers and the Clergy should be involved in economic and foreign political decision-making appeared to be a repugnant move towards democracy. This concept, still generally understood in its classical sense as immediate rule by the common people, remained an unthinkable option for the great majority of the dominant Noble Estate. They spoke against such democracy and persuaded their allies at home and abroad to do so, too. During the Riksdag of 1771−1772, the Cap opposition with its majorities in the three lower estates effectively monopolized the use of language referring to the people, now turning it against the

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governing Hat Party, which retained a majority only in the Noble Estate. From the Nobles’ point of view, both “the people” and “the nation” continued to mean primarily their own estate and the other estates of the Diet only to a lesser extent. As further demands for privileges for the lower estates grew during autumn 1771, the Noble Hats became increasingly cautious in their use of the concept of the people. In winter 1772 they endeavoured to reintroduce it in its older senses, emphasizing obedience and the conservation of the established order. The Nobles adopted a more cautious line, and they probably regretted the propagation of a radicalized concept of the people during the preceding diets and in the printed literature for party-political purposes. The Cap majorities in the lower estates, by contrast, tried to exploit the use of the concept as effectively as possible. First the Burghers and then also the Clerical Estate actively redefined the concept during their campaigns for extended privileges, the obvious aim being to exclude the Nobility outside ‘the people’. In some speeches by Burghers and Clerics, it was the lower estates, and sometimes also the populace as a whole, that constituted the people and the nation proper. An awareness of the existence of a public opinion and a wider nation outside the Riksdag had been aired in the debates of the Nobility in 1769, and it became frequent in the discussions of all the estates in the Riksdag of 1771−1772. It has been pointed out in previous research that the confrontation between the estates in the late Age of Liberty was mainly social and economic. It seems evident that the broader concept of the people was also primarily used to legitimate the demands of the lower estates for social and economic privileges to be extended to them; none of the lower estates aimed at extending political rights outside their own estate. The Peasants continued to talk about the security of the common people and avoided drawing any challenging conclusions even when their spokesmen followed their party allies in the higher estates and activated the old concept of ‘the rights of the people’ in spring 1772. It is difficult to find any suggestions that all the adult male inhabitants of the country, rather than the Estates, should actively constitute the highest decision-making entity of the realm. Nor were any proposals for an extensive reform of the complicated electoral system put forward. Radicalization in the use of language referring to the people by some Burghers in November 1771 and Clerics in April 1772 drew a distinction between the Nobility and the other estates so that the

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meaning of the concept of the people became more contested than ever before. In February 1772, foreseeing that they were bound to lose the conflict over privileges to the lower orders, some noblemen were ready to recognize at least to other Nobles the existence of ‘the people’ in a broader sense and to concede that the nobility were not a part of ‘the people’ when the concept was defined in social terms. Some defenders of noble privileges, on the other hand, tried to invoke the wider concept ‘the nation’ in order to defend the rights of the Nobility against the demands of the lower estates at the Diet. When speaking to the lower estates in joint committees, the Noble members consistently used the concept of the people in reactionary senses, finding support from Bishop Jacob Serenius, who might have been expected to differ from them for party-political reasons. Outside the Riksdag, some leading Hat noblemen were by this time becoming active supporters of the King, hoping that he would rescue their threatened estate. Some further observations can be made concerning references to the political power of the people at the Swedish Diet. The debaters had no exact concept of popular sovereignty on which to build their arguments; the word “sovereignty” was never associated with the people as it was used exclusively to refer to a universally condemned monarchical sovereignty, in particular to the absolutism of the reign of Charles XII. At the same time, the popular origin of political power in the past was recognized by many, the supreme power of the Estates by most, and the relevance of the sentiments of the people in actual daily decisionmaking by some of the speakers. In all cases, the basic assumption was that political power had been surrendered by the people to the Estates once and for all. Suggestions that the Swedish system constituted a popular government were relatively few. References to popular government mostly appeared in warnings expressed in the Noble Estate about a development in that direction, not in positive definitions of the polity as a popular government as in some mid-eighteenth-century parliamentary speeches in Britain. ‘Democracy’ provided an even less useful concept for defining the character and future prospects of the form of government. While this concept was not relevant at all in the debates of the lower estates, most Nobles who used it during the Riksdag of 1771−1772 understood it as contrary to liberty (or privileges) and hence as a threat to the entire established system. Some publications referred to the existence of a democratic element in the Swedish constitution, but the members of the Diet were hesitant to argue in that way. Democracy continued to

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be seen as a constitutional threat rather than as an element that was truly worth advocating. The classical, suspicious attitude to democracy was not questioned by anyone in or outside the Diet. The only logical conclusion is that the Swedish system in its mid-eighteenth-century form cannot be properly characterized as a “democracy” either in the classical sense of direct democracy or some modern sense of representative democracy. As long as the members of the political establishment did not define their system as a democracy, no democracy existed. It is rather more plausible to characterize the Swedish government as “representative”, though this too has to be done with reservations. It goes without saying that only a small part of the population was represented through the estate system. Contemporaries were cautious in speaking about “representation” as the official view was that the assembly of Estates at the Diet actually constituted the people rather than merely represented it. Even so, in printed media and Carl Fredrik Scheffer’s advice to the Crown Prince we do find some instances in which the members of the Estates were explicitly defined as the representatives of the people. At the Diet, the members consistently defined themselves as “plenipotentiaries” (fullmäktige), using a word that expressed the full power given by the electors to their representatives. Sven Bunge and Arvid Schauw were among those few members who used the word “representative” during the radical phase of the noble Hat attack on the Caps in autumn 1769. All in all, there is a clear difference in the frequency of references to the representatives of the people in Britain and Sweden, the notion being more distinctly recognized in English parliamentary language. With regard to the proper translation of the word fullmäktige as “plenipotentiary”, we should take care not to assume a complete correspondence between it and the concept of representative. However, because of its semantic closeness and the prominence that it has in the history of political theory, “representative” has been used in this study side by side with the more exact “plenipotentiary” and instead of alternative terms like “delegate” or “deputy”. The favoured word fullmäktige underlined the independent status of the members in relation to their electors, something that had already been emphasized in the 1740s and was consistently maintained by the Estates. The alternative terms, by contrast, suggest rather that the members were responsible for their actions to the people. This leads us to the conclusion that Sweden of the Late Age of Liberty can, indeed, be called a representa-

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tive government, albeit one based on a traditional estate system and the concept of plenipotentiary rather than any modern parliamentary concept of representative. Sweden in the late Age of Liberty was regarded by the people of the time as a special type of representative mixed government with a strong popular element in legislative power and in controlling the actions of the executive power. This popular element was provided by the Estates, but it was seldom explicitly called “democratic” in any positive way. The rise of democracy in a classical sense was, on the contrary, genuinely feared in the Noble Estate. Even though the popular origin of the political power wielded by the Estates was recognized in the language of politics used by all of them, explicit definitions of the system as a popular government were avoided. A few solitary radical noblemen might make such suggestions, but traditionalists warned of the possibility of any development to that direction. The members of the estates regarded the representation of the interests of their own estate and attempts to widen its privileges at the cost of the other estates as more important than popular representation. Along with this dispute between the estates, the meanings of the concept of the people were radicalized by the lower estates during the Riksdag of 1771−1772 and in public discourse outside the Diet, following the model originally provided by the Noble Estate. However, this did not yet involve any conception of a “representative democracy” based on “popular sovereignty”. Nor can we talk of any kind of “democratic debate” without the reader drawing anachronistic conclusions about the meaning of the concept of democracy at that time. Such broad and positively understood concepts would become possible only after the French Revolution, and in quite different contexts. A form of government based on representation residing in the Estates in the Diet, even in cases where the political centre of gravity was located there, should not be interpreted in a simplistic and teleological way as a stage of development towards modern representative democracy. References to some “democratic” features in the system and warnings about the possibility of the advent of immediate democracy do not constitute evidence of the existence or the gradual emergence of such a system. The discussion about democracy still took place mainly among the Nobles, starting as part of the party-political rhetoric of the Hat opposition in that Estate; it led to some polemical statements in favour of certain kinds of democracy; and it ended with concern about the rise of democracy after the lower estates adopted a

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related vocabulary to advance their own oppositional and predominantly social goals. The lower orders never claimed that they were aiming at democracy; they rather used the concept of the people in radical senses to advance the interests of their own particular estates. Even the notion of the popular origin of political power was radicalized only in order to defend and broaden the privileges of each estate in relation to the others, not to reform the system in the direction of broader popular representation. This kind of rivalry was typical of systems of estate representation and in no way resembled a political revolution like the future French one. Only the French Revolution would force the political establishments of countries with estate representation such as Sweden to reconsider and modernize their conceptions of democracy. Even that would only constitute the beginning of a very long process in the actual democratization of these political systems and others that inherited their principles in the twentieth century. To summarize, there was an abundance of popular rhetoric at the Swedish Diet in the form of appeals to the rights and interests of the people, but this did not yet entail a break with the classical concept of democracy and the rise of a modern one. The Swedish coup of 1772, which ended the Age of Liberty there, necessarily aroused comment in Britain. In 1776, the Duke of Richmond considered that the British, like the Swedes earlier, were likely to lose their liberty as a consequence of the war in America and the way in which the government was misleading the people on issues related to the war. The drawing of parallels with Sweden, of course, only constituted a marginal strategy in the criticism of the government in the British Parliament. In the early phase of the American war, British parliamentarians simply ignored American appeals to the concept of the people. The British ministry began to reconsider its formulations in the Speeches from the Throne only after the entry of France into the war in 1778, when it employed references to the people more extensively in order to appeal to patriotic feelings in the political community. The King urged the British national community to fight with “the active and enterprising spirit of my people” for “the national honour and security”. Even if the American colonists never claimed to be fighting for democracy, the concept of democracy began to feature more prominently in British parliamentary debates after 1780. This is a turning point that has escaped the attention of most historians of democracy.

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The reasons for the new debate on democracy were domestic ones: there was a sense of a deepening constitutional crisis after the Crown had been accused of disparaging the democratic element of the constitution during the war, and there were calls for parliamentary reform. Published literature also contributed to the rise of the vocabulary of democracy. Radical publications in the 1770s, including some by Marat, had defended a democratic government over a monarchical one and represented the people as the real sovereign. James Burgh had defined “power in the people” as “original, inherent and unlimited”. He had even employed the phrase “the majesty of the people”, although he regarded parliamentary power as supreme. Richard Price went further, writing about “omnipotence” in the people and depicting all government as the execution of “the will of the people”. Edward Gibbon first used the exact phrase “the sovereignty of the people” in printed English in describing ancient democracies. Translations of French works supported this conceptual innovation, depicting the Swedish regime of the Age of Liberty as one based on the sovereignty of the people. Jean Louis Delolme’s writings, though highly critical of “democratic” government in both its English and its Swedish forms, provided a strong argument for representative government with a democratic element like the British one. At home, William Blackstone was criticized for promoting notions of sovereignty independent of the people. Jeremy Bentham also rejected Blackstone’s suggestion that the Commons was “a kind of democracy”. Instead, the suggestion that pure democracy was the original form of English government was put forward in 1780. Even if ‘democracy’ was more frequently referred to in the published literature and increasingly used as a neutral or even positive synonym for popular government, comments critical of democracy still predominated in the public debate. Ideas of omnipotent popular power and the majesty of the people were rejected as rebellious republicanism and democracy, and the role of Parliament as the voice of the people was emphasized instead. The British Crown certainly did not recognize ‘democracy’ in its official speeches, but it had to make concessions in its definition of the people. The battle of Yorktown constituted a turning point in this respect: as soon as the news of the defeat was received in London in November 1781, the King defined himself, for the first time, as “the sovereign of a free people”. The ministry combined the concepts of sovereignty, freedom and the people in a way that retained royal sovereignty but made the King an executive of “a free people” in a manner

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quite unprecedented in British ceremonial speaking. The Commons were likewise transformed from the representatives of the King’s people to the representatives of “a brave and free people”. The disputes that followed in debates on the Royal Speech demonstrate the existence of a major conceptual redefinition. The opposition wanted to proceed further in the redefinition of the relationship between the executive power and the people. William Pitt the Younger set out to defend democracy as a necessary element of the mixed constitution. For the first time in recorded parliamentary debates, democracy was presented in an unreservedly positive sense when he declared that the British system was unthinkable without democracy. Democracy appeared as an indispensable ingredient of the British constitution, which had been admired at home and internationally; it was now being undermined and needed to be restored. Pitt’s revaluation of democracy, repeated in 1782 and 1785 supported in all cases by Charles James Fox, contributed to a rise in the frequency of use of the concept and gave it a more positive connotation. The revaluation was a response by the parliamentary opposition to Prime Minister Frederick North’s attempt to redefine monarchical sovereignty. It demonstrates how encounters between conservative and innovative forces in Parliament could produce significant conceptual change, particularly in times of acute crisis. Pitt and Fox would retain much of their shared basic sense of democracy as a positive element of the mixed constitution even in the 1790s, when they confronted each other over the alternative French concept of democracy. Pitt continued to campaign for parliamentary reform using language referring to the people. In 1782, defining the constitution as one based on popular participation, he argued that democracy had suffered from the corrupt state of the representative system and was in need of restoration. Fox went further, representing the people as a political agent independent of both the monarch and the ministry and reliant only their representatives in the Commons. Pitt’s rise to power in 1783 made him more cautious in his references to democracy; even so, his and Fox’s revaluations of democracy had already made vindications of “the democracy of the country” part of constitutional debates, democracy being understood as “the popular powers of the constitution”. Democracy was seen, however, as no more than an element in the constitution; it was not presented as a preferable form of government in its pure form, let alone as a prospective system that opened up positive expectations for the future. In other words, the revaluation

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made democracy an inalienable and positive part of the British mixed constitution, one that needed to be actively defended, but it did not lead to the advent of an entirely new concept of democracy. The mid-1780s, with Pitt’s last motion for parliamentary reform in 1785 and Burke’s defence of democracy in 1786, provided further opportunities for the revaluation of ‘democracy’. Pitt’s supporters in the Commons willingly viewed his bill as one made by “the advocate of the people”, and not even his opponents denied the historical momentum of the reform proposal. Fox’s opposition to George III induced him to regard democracy as an element in the constitution that could lead to improvement. He was ready to view the constitution as an object of innovation and to make democracy and “the voice of the people” the engines of the process. This Foxite revaluation of democracy opened visions of a progressive and future-oriented element in the mixed constitution, distanced itself from the classical criticism of democracy and modernized the meaning of the concept in ways that have usually been regarded as products of the French Revolution. Even less consistent with the conventional history of democracy is the fact that Edmund Burke spoke in favour of democracy as an overwhelmingly positive phenomenon in 1786. The available contextual explanations cannot remove the trail-blazing nature of Burke’s argument. Indeed, his statement suggests that the history of the concept of democracy in the British context might have been different if the French revolutionaries had not given it a radically different meaning. Despite his suspicions of extreme forms of popular power, Burke joined those politicians who defended the positively revaluated democratic element of the British constitution in opposing the constitutional innovations proposed in the India Bill of 1786. Rejecting despotism, he saw in democracy (the Commons) a counterbalance to the Crown. In opposing absolute power, Burke regarded the power of the many as a positive antithesis to it and presented democracy as a universal phenomenon that was capable of inspiring great achievements, particularly if combined with the principle of publicity. Evidently, an increasingly positive, more optimistic and future-oriented concept of democracy was emerging in British parliamentary debates in the mid-1780s. To be sure, it remained linked to the traditional notion of a mixed constitution in its British form. It was a product of a representative institution of a traditional kind, and it was initiated and propagated by some of the leading parliamentary speakers. These men may have received some radical ideas from Enlightenment

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political philosophy and the polemics of the parliamentary reform movement, but mainly they were acting in their parliamentary speeches as innovative ideologists opposing monarchical tendencies in government. By the late 1780s, British published literature had already become less innovative in its statements on the nature of democracy, probably due to the simultaneous radicalization of the concept in Holland. Nor did American debates on the Constitution contribute much to the British revaluation of the concept of democracy. Among native authors, Thomas Wycliffe summarized the radical ideas of the parliamentary reformers in 1786, writing in favour of “the real sovereignty of the people” and the realization of “the will of the people” and rejecting the notion of the King as sovereign. The emerging British parliamentary concept of democracy was challenged by an alternative one during the French Revolution. The central role of the French Revolution in the rise of the modern concept of democracy has been emphasized—and possibly overemphasized—by a number of writers on the history of political theory. This study has shown, however, that the revolutionary redefinition of democracy, which started only around 1791, had a clear historical precedent, albeit a more moderate one, in the British Parliament. The rise of democracy as a goal for the future in a positive sense was thus facilitated by preceding discussions not only in radical Enlightenment philosophy but also by debates in an established representative institution: British parliamentarians had revaluated the concept within the old paradigm of their mixed constitution. The late eighteenthcentury debates on democracy clearly need to be investigated as a transnational, interactive, phenomenon. British thinkers and parliamentary speakers participated in the process by revaluating and extending the meaning of the old concept of democracy as a part of the mixed constitution. The revolutionaries would, of course, finally adopt an alternative understanding of democracy, which made the concept contested in an entirely new manner in the British Parliament as well. The rise of the radical French alternative decreased the chances for any revaluation of democracy as one of the elements of the mixed constitution of the kind that had been evident in British debates. The three British spokesmen for the redefined concept reacted in very different ways to the revolutionary challenge: Fox became an advocate of an ever more radical concept of democracy and the sovereignty of the people; Pitt

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looked for a compromise between his favoured concept of democracy as an essential constitutional element and his opposition to the policies of republican France; Burke, in contrast, turned into an arch-critic of pure democracy. After an optimistic initial response to the French Revolution in much British political discourse, confrontations between the defenders and opponents of a democracy of the French type emerged in the British Parliament. The transformation towards a positive understanding of democracy was challenged, and a period of conceptual ferment followed. This ferment has received rather marginal attention in previous research as a result of the assumption that the British were the staunchest opponents of revolutionary democracy in the 1790s and hence unable to contribute to it, the only exception being Thomas Paine. Before long, the French Revolution provided an example for many members of the British political elite of the kind of democracy they did not want. Richard Price’s positive views on the Revolution in November 1789 brought the explicit phrase ‘the sovereignty of the people’ onto the political agenda in an entirely new way. While reactions to the sovereignty of the people were mostly condemnatory, the debate of the 1790s for and against democracy and the sovereignty of the people led to a gradual transformation in the British language of politics, making it possible for some opposition members to reconceptualize the British constitution and see it as based on the sovereignty of the people and on a limited democracy. The British parliamentarians had previously engaged in a debate on their own kind of democracy, and the debate on this and other interpretations of democracy was continued in the new circumstances of the 1790s. Even this debate was not guided by mere reactionary opposition to the French Revolution but evolved into a dispute between two alternative concepts of democracy. The debate on democracy became heated in February 1790, when Burke and Fox made speeches commenting on the Revolution, the political role of the people and democracy from conflicting perspectives. Burke played a major role, defining the French Revolution as a change from despotism to an undesirable kind of democracy. He also accused the Foxites and other British radicals of being ready to adopt this French model. In Burke’s view, the French had exchanged their previous despotic system for an anarchy that endangered the British political system as well. They had introduced a version of democracy that violated both reason and property. A “democracy like theirs”

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differed both from the classical sense of the word and from British democracy as a positively defined and regulated element of the mixed constitution. It was guided by “the spirit of innovation, so distant from all principles of true and safe reformation”. In his response, Fox was forced to resort to the paradigm of the mixed constitution and to denounce “all absolute forms of government, whether an absolute monarchy, an absolute aristocracy or an absolute democracy”. In 1790, the parliamentarians emphasized the different nature of what they viewed as a mistaken French type of democracy. Burke also published his famous comments on the French Revolution in that year, rejecting “a perfect democracy” or “absolute democracy” of the French type but still defending “an established monarchy, an established aristocracy, and an established democracy” of the British type. ‘Democracy’ was not initially a programmatic concept of the French Revolution. Nor did British parliamentarians feel any immediate need to discuss the meaning of the concept before the radicalization of the Revolution in France, the publication of the first volume of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man in 1791 and the decision on the constitution of Quebec forced them to react to the rising conceptual challenge. The exact meanings of democracy and the sovereignty of the people now became subjects of public debate. Paine’s book was interpreted as a defence of democracy even though the concept was not advocated in it. Paine did write favourably about the notion of the sovereignty of the people, however. In Parliament, the rise of the French revolutionary concept of democracy forced the Foxites to publicly reject “democratical principles” in order to deny the accusations of their opponents. This did not mean the rejection of democracy in its established British sense. Nor was it a rejection of “democracy” as it existed in America—Fox, too, having adopted a new understanding of the American Republic. In 1791, even Pitt had no problem in recognizing the positive balancing effects of a degree of democracy in Britain side by side with monarchy and aristocracy. The question of the role of democracy in the British constitution became highly topical with the parliamentary reform debates of spring 1792, soon after Paine had, in his second book, presented the combination of democracy and representation as a solution to the classical problems of democracy alone. Pitt continued to give the democratic element its conventional recognition, defining the British system as a model supporting “proper democracy” with “a representative assembly” and arguing that the British form of representation, despite its short-

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comings, supported “the true spirit of proper democracy”. Thereby he combined democracy, which had been revaluated in the course of the 1780s, with the idea of representation, to provide an alternative model for the emerging revolutionary concept of representative democracy. Even if aimed at maintaining the status quo in the face of Paine’s claims, Pitt’s formulation contributed to the rise of the notion that the British parliamentary regime, too, was a form of representative democracy, and indeed a better one than its French counterpart. Such an interpretation was possible even on the basis of Blackstone’s writings. Paine, on the other hand, was prosecuted for not distinguishing between the British and French concepts of democracy. The course of events in France in 1792 and perhaps also the heated debate for and against democracy in the British press forced Pitt to choose a new line of argumentation, one more suitable for the leader of a nation that was on the point of engaging itself in a war against the Revolution. Samuel Whitbread and Edmund Burke, who had been the first to condemn democracy in its French form, introduced the exact revolutionary expression “the sovereignty of the people” in the House of Commons during a debate on whether or not to prepare for war against France. The suggestions of the National Constituent Assembly that the sovereignty of the people should be introduced into Britain had provoked Burke into addressing the issue. In these circumstances, the reactions to the concept were naturally highly condemnatory. However, the speakers still emphasized the novel character of the French version of the sovereignty of the people, which did not rule out the old principle according to which the origin of political power had resided in the people at some time in the past. For Burke, “the new sovereignty of the people” meant regicide, bloodshed and anarchy. In the British alternative, the King-in-Parliament, as a representative institution, formed the only “nation”, and no broader nation outside it was conceivable. The people could not be the source of continued sovereignty, according to Burke, as sovereignty could only spring from the monarchy once it had been established. A monarchical and parliamentary form of government was the direct antithesis of a republic based on the sovereignty of the people. When war broke out in February 1793, Pitt openly argued that the war was being waged, among other things, over the way in which democracy should be understood. The British were defending “the sacred person of the sovereign” and “a mixture of aristocratic and democratical power in the frame of legislation”. They were fighting

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for democracy as a classical element of the mixed constitution against the French mode of democracy legitimated by the sovereignty of the people and popular representation. Pitt’s reactionary formulation provoked Fox, his former ally in the revaluation of democracy, to argue— notwithstanding the seriousness of the foreign political crisis—that even the British government was, like any government, based on the sovereignty of the people, as “the people are the sovereign in every state”. This was about as controversial a constitutional claim as a British parliamentarian could make in the circumstances of 1793. It is little wonder that Fox was repeatedly attacked in the press for this statement. It is noteworthy, indeed, that democracy in its British form still remained acceptable in the debates on parliamentary reform in May 1793 despite the widespread polemic (including a reprint of Walpole’s speech of 1734) against the notion of the sovereignty of the people and the extension of democracy. In some publications, the very word “democracy” began to regain a pejorative connotation. William Godwin was one of the very few advocates of democracy based on representation as a future goal. In Parliament, Robert Banks Jenkinson contrasted British “moderate democracy” with “a simple democracy” and “democratic tyranny” in France. William Windham denounced claims in recent political philosophy that “all government proceeded from the people” and rejected calls for “pure democracy” with assemblies “emanating from the people”. Representation in its British form did not mean that the members of parliament acted as “the agents of the people”. There were also those like the Earl of Mornington who began to express prejudices against democracy of any kind. In his view, an excessively “democratic government” of the French type let loose a “spirit of democracy” that led to idiotic ideas such as “the assumed sovereignty of the universe” in the French people. Fox was left almost alone with his insistence that “government originated not only for, but from the people, and that the people were the legitimate sovereign in every community.” This became just another statement for pamphleteers to condemn. Further reconceptualizations of democracy followed in France. In early 1794, the revolutionaries aimed at a democratic republic based on national sovereignty and representation. In Britain, ministerial concern was focused on the proliferation of references to democracy and the sovereignty of the people among radical societies. After the revolutionary concept of democracy was so widely adopted by the middle

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classes, the old positive notion of democracy as a synonym for the Commons could no longer be used so easily. Pitt, responsible for leading the battle against France, denounced all language referring to the sovereignty of the people, while Fox, protected by his parliamentary immunity, insisted that the popular activism of the radical societies was entirely in line with the spirit of the constitution. In 1794, some authors endeavoured to redefine the British system as one based on the sovereignty of the people and democracy being realized in Parliament and to view the Commons as “representative democracy”, but there was widespread opposition to such ideas. By 1795, the prospects for ‘democracy’ both in the positive sense which Pitt, Fox and Burke had given it in the 1780s and in its new revolutionary sense had become poor. There were some sporadic attempts to defend the old democratic element in the British constitution, but the principle of the sovereignty of the people continued to be categorically rejected by the great majority of the political establishment. The Foxite opposition was running out of spokesmen, but we still find Richard Brinsley Sheridan arguing that the members of parliament should see themselves as the agents and servants of the people. The public debate saw John Cartwright’s suggestion that the British constitution was “a mixed democracy” and John Thelwall’s proposal that “a limited or restrained democracy”, “constitutional democracy” or “representative democracy” would be proper definitions of it. The reorganization of the French regime after late 1795 had implications for the British debate, with the menace of the French type of pure democracy and the notion of the sovereignty of the people appearing slightly less acute than before. In the reform debates of May 1797, Pitt defended the existing parliamentary form of government as “the system of the people”, while Fox set out to redefine the concept of democracy to a degree which had not been previously heard in the Commons. He viewed ancient democracies as worthy models for the British system. More particularly, he presented democracies as paramount in fostering national morale in times of crisis. Fox gave what can be characterized as an early British expression of modern democratic nationalism when he suggested that a democracy based on universal suffrage was likely to overcome other forms of government thanks to the dynamic “democratic spirit” that it inspired among the members of the community. As for the reform, he argued that the broadening of “popular representation” would win “the hearts of the people” onto the side of the government. The French revolutionary

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idea of democracy thus continued to find an advocate in Fox—and Fox’s views continued to find fierce opponents in the press. Finally, 1799 was a significant year in the history of parliamentary notions of the political role of the people in that some members from various political groups then defined the British political order as based on the principle of the sovereignty of the people. Once again Pitt took the initiative in labelling the opponents of a union between the British and Irish parliaments champions of the sovereignty of the people. While not rejecting the notion of the sovereignty of the people as a theoretical principle, Pitt opposed all appeals to a continued sovereignty of the people, something that Sheridan, as the opposition spokesman, defended. Benjamin Hobhouse went further in exploiting the opportunity for conceptual redefinition, suggesting that Pitt himself was, despite his contrary claims, a supporter of the principle of the sovereignty of the people and that the entire British regime was in fact based on that very principle. This redefinition was not universally accepted, government spokesmen still insisting that the original delegation of the power by the people should not be called “the sovereignty of the people”, but there evidently existed some pressure for the recognition of the principle of the sovereignty of the people as the foundation of the British constitution. The same way of thinking found supporters in the Lords, too. Baron Grenville opened the door for opposition redefinitions by denouncing both the sovereignty of the people and democracy as an independent form of government. The Earl of Moira responded by arguing that the British representative government was indeed based on the sovereignty of the people, though one that was distinct from any “the supremacy of the populace”. The work of Parliament itself was the realization of the very principle of the sovereignty of the people. Moira was supported by Lord Minto, who argued that “the sovereignty of parliament” was synonymous with” the sovereignty of the people”. In this redefinition of the legitimacy of Parliament and the sovereignty of the people, Parliament appeared as “an established organ of the general will, qualified by its frame and constitution, to apply the collective interests, and to administer the sovereign power of the state”. The notion that the parliamentary representation of the people was derived from the principle of the sovereignty of the people appeared in Minto’s redefined concept of the sovereignty of parliament. Such a redefinition of the key concepts of the British constitution did not yet represent any breakthrough of mass democracy, of course. The pre-

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vailing conceptions of the people at large as a political force had hardly become any more positive, and polemical publications denouncing democracy and the sovereignty of the people continued to appear. However, a potential for a conceptual redefinition had emerged, and some publications also started to write about a delegated sovereignty of the people as the fundamental principle of the British constitution. Such redefinitions of the constitution, repeated several times in both houses of parliament and in the press, would become significant in the long run. British parliamentary debates in the late eighteenth century evidently constituted a forum for conceptual revisions that would lead, later, towards more modern notions of popular sovereignty and representative democracy.

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INDEX OF PERSONS Abingdon, Willoughby Bertie, 3rd Earl of 92 Abingdon, Willoughby Bertie, 4th Earl of 259, 269, 278, 304–305, 433–434 Acrelius, Israel 196 Adams, John 341 Adam, William 265 Adolphus Frederick, King 175 Almon, John 401 Andersson, Johan 239 Argyll, John Campbell, Duke of 46, 48, 87, 92–93, 103, 112 Aristotle 6–7, 118, 166, 363, 424 Aubyn, Sir John St 68 Auckland, William Eden, Baron 466 Bailey, Nathan 74 Balhurst, Lord 92, 94–95 Barclay, George 80 Barnard, John 83, 100–102, 105, 107–108 Barré, Colonel 154 Barrington, Lord 115 Basset, Francis 274, 293 Bastard, Edmund 334 Bayning, Thomas Townsend, Baron 386, 416 Beafoy 316, 333 Bearcroft, Edward 331 Beauchamp, Francis Seymour-Conway, Lord 395 Beaufort, Charles Noel Somerset, Duke of 69–70, 81–82 Beckford, William 120, 155 Bedford, Francis Russel, Duke of 427, 431, 433, 435 Bentham, Jeremy 33, 255, 257, 485 Bentley, Thomas Richard 449 Bergenstråhle, Rudman 187 Bertie, Willoughby, see Abingdon Billberg, Otto 230, 233 Blackstone, William 130–131, 138, 248, 255, 268, 308, 327, 359, 376, 399, 423, 457, 476, 485, 491 Bodin, Jean 9, 63 Böhnen, Johan 180 Bolingbroke, Henry, Viscount 60, 74–75, 474

Boscaven, Edward, see Falmouth Bowles, John 424, 454 Brandenburg, Henrik Albrekt 212, 219 Brander, Uno 220 Brissot, Jacques-Pierre 346, 364, 397 Bristol, William Hervey, Marquis of 261, 367–368 Bromley, William Jr. 67 Browallius, Johan 173 Browne, Isaac Hawkins 412 Buller, John 297 Bunge, Sven 192, 197, 231, 237, 240, 482 Burgh, James 249–250, 485 Burke, Edmund 26, 30, 118, 135, 138, 145, 153, 264, 271, 282–283, 295–296, 302–303, 305, 323, 326, 330, 335, 348, 352, 357, 360, 362, 369, 372–374, 377–378, 384, 391–393, 396, 398, 402–403, 408, 421, 449, 451, 487, 489–491, 493 Burlamaqui, Jean-Jacques 257 Bute, John Stuart, Earl of 127 Caesar Julius 107 Camden, Charles Pratt, Earl 132, 333 Campbell, John, see Argyll Carlisle, Henry Howard, Earl of 95 Carteret, John, see Granville Cartwright, John 255, 257, 266, 268, 290, 424, 460–461, 493 Carysfort, John Joshua Proby, Earl of 268, 290 Cavendish, John 258 Cavendish Bentinck, William Henry, see Portland Cawthorne, Joseph 293 Cedeström, Clas 222 Cervin, Frans 225 Chalmers, George 259 Chamber, Ephraim 73 Chandler, Richard 53 Charles XII 274 Chatham, William Pitt, the Elder, Lord 83, 98, 121–122, 127, 129, 131–133, 140, 259, 286, 354

518

index of persons

Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of 87, 104, 264 Cholmondeley, James, Earl 86, 95–96 Christian, Esbjörn 53, 166 Chydenius, Anders 166 Cobbett, William 53 Coke, Daniel Parker 296 Condorcet, Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, Marquis de 18, 388 Convey, Henry Seymour 307 Cooper, Grey 333 Cooper, Thomas 384 Corin, Samuel 214 Cornewall, Velters 142 Cornwallis, Charles Cornwallis, Marquess 279 Cotton, John Hynde 116, 475 Court, Pieter de la 12 Courtenay, John 274–277, 289, 360–361, 416–417 Creutz, Lorentz Wilhelm 178, 204 Cromwell, Oliver 224, 404 Curwen, John Christian 438 Dallas, George 404 Dashwood, Francis, see LeDespencer D’Argenson, Comte, Marc-Pierre de Voyer de Paulmy 13, 64, 75, 386 Delaval, John Hussey, Baron 314, 318 Delolme, Jean Luis 249–251, 485 D’Holbach, Baron 136 Dodsley, Robert 114–115 Dolben, William 275 Dormer, Philip, see Chesterfield Douglas, Sylvester 468–469 Dowdeswell, William 47, 142 Duncombe, Henry 275, 321 Dundas, Henry 307, 330, 384, 443 Dunk, George Montagu, see Halifax Dunning, John 150, 266, 271, 477 Duwall, Johan Diedric 179 Dyche, Thomas 79 Dyson, Jeremiah 144 Eberhart, Johan Hartman 166 Eden, William, see Auckland Egmont, John Perceval, Lord 115, 120 Ehrenmalm, Samuel 180–181, 190 Ekman, Anders 213, 224 Elliot-Murray Kynynmound, Gilbert, see Minto Ellis, Welbore 147–149, 300–301, 477

Engeström, Jacob von 187 Erskine, James, see Grange and Rosslyn Erskine, Thomas 307, 381, 384, 389, 393, 402, 441, 450–451 Essen, Fredric Ulric von 215, 231 Estenberg, Carl 193–194 Falmouth, Edward Boscawen, Earl of 353 Fauchet, Claude, Abbé 346–347 Fazakerley, Nicholas 120 Fellowes, Robert 460 Ferguson, Adam 134, 270 Fersen, Axel von 178, 231 Fitzpatrick, Richard 269, 416 Fitzroy, Augustus Henry, see Grafton FitzWilliam, William Wentworth, Earl 434, 448, 456 Flood, Henry 359–361 Fox, Charles James (also Foxites) 26, 40, 59, 151–154, 261–262, 264–265, 269, 277–278, 282–283, 286–290, 292–294, 296, 298–300, 302–305, 307–314, 316–319, 321–326, 328, 330, 332, 334–338, 353–354, 356–358, 368, 372–374, 383–384, 386, 389–392, 395–398, 402, 406, 412, 415–418, 421, 427, 430–431, 436–437, 439, 443–445, 447–455, 457–459, 462, 464, 467, 477, 486, 488–490, 492–494 Fox, Henry 121 Fox, Stephen 98 Francis, Philip 317–319, 325, 327–328, 381, 401 Frankenheim, Carl Nathanael 187 Franklin, Benjamin 133 Fraser, Archibald Carrybell 245 Frederick, Prince 115 Frederick II, King 280 French, Laurence 461 Frese, Otto Henrik de 202 Frietzcky, Clas 216, 238 Frink, Thomas 123 Gellius, Aulus 464 George II 89, 111 George III 123–124, 129, 245–246, 264, 279, 288, 294, 314, 331–332, 334, 336, 353, 390, 430, 456, 476, 487 Gibbon, Edward 254, 485 Gifford, John 451 Gilmour, Alexander 143 Gjörwell, Carl Christian 175, 208, 223–224

index of persons Glynn, George 142–143 Godwin, William 404, 408, 417, 428, 450, 453, 492 Goldsmith, Oliver 124–125 Goodricke, Henry 257 Gower, John Leveson, Earl of 86 Grafton, Augustus Henry Fitzroy, Duke of 135–136, 151, 448 Graham, Marquis of 293 Grange, James Erskine, Lord 84–85 Grant, William 391 Granville, John Carteret, Earl of 86, 89–93, 95, 104–105, 475 Greer, James 327 Grenville, George 83, 127, 129, 138 Grenville, William Wyndham, Baron 70–71, 336, 376, 388, 420, 422, 429, 436, 447–449, 463–464 Grey, Charles 376, 380–382, 389, 398–399, 405, 414, 424, 439, 449–450 Grey, Thomas de, see Walsingham Guildford, George August North, Earl of 139, 145–147, 151, 154, 247, 251, 257, 262, 264, 266, 289, 272, 276–277, 279–280, 286–289, 291, 294, 296, 298, 300, 302, 304–305, 307–308, 313, 315, 321–322, 333, 390, 428, 448, 472, 486 Gustavus III 161, 164, 177, 210, 226, 228, 239, 241–243, 245, 273, 280 Gybbon, Phillips 98 Gyllenborg, Gustaf Adolf 182 Gyllenhaal, Lars Herman 203, 206–208 Gyllensvahn, Fredrik 204–205, 207, 237, 479 Halifax, George Montagu Dunk, Earl of 96 Hamilton, Alexander 339 Hamilton, James, see Limerick Hamilton, John James, Marquis of Abercorn 314 Hamilton, William Gerard 310–311, 361 Hardinge, George 303 Hardwicke, Philip Yorke, Earl of 87, 92, 94, 121, 295, 362 Harrington, James 85 Harrison, John 276–277 Hasencampf, Christopher 215 Hastings, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, see Moira Hastings, Warren 325–326, 329 Hawkesbury, Charles Jenkinson, Baron 143, 452

519

Hay, William 80 Head, Erasmus 112 Heathcote, George 109 Heathcote, William 98, 109–110 Heikkilä, Gabriel 236 Henley, Robert, see Northington Hermansson, Johan 167 Hervey, John 86 Hervey, William, see Bristol Hierta, Carl 186 Hobbes, Thomas 118, 379 Hobhouse, Benjamin 462–463, 494 Hochschild, Johan Henrik 224 Holbach, Baron 136 Home, Henry, see Kames Hopetoun, George Johnstone, Earl of 252, 262, 360 Horn, Christer 203–204, 237–238 Horn, Fredric 179, 186, 190, 218, 221–222, 225–226 Horsley, Samuel, Bishop of Rochester 431–433, 444 Howard, Charles, see Norfolk Howe, John 99 Hume, David 254, 359 Hussey, John, see Delaval Hutcheson, Francis 113, 257 Ingman, Carl

211

Jackson, Jonathan 341 Jaucourt, Louis de 64, 345, 409 Jenkinson, Charles, see Hawkesbury Jenkinson, Robert Banks 390, 399–402, 492 Jennings, John 179, 196, 231 Johnson, Samuel 53, 91–92, 97–98, 118 Johnstone, George, see Hopetoun Jolliffe, Thomas Samuel 265 Kagg, Lars 221 Kames, Henry Home, Lord 427 Kepplerus, Alexander 209 Kimont, Earl 397 Kjörning, Mattias 179, 183, 193 Knox, Vicesimus 407 Kock, Johan 183 Kröger, Carl 234–235 Kryger, Johan Fredrik 208 Lafayette, Marie-Joseph-Paul-RochYves-Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de 415–416

520

index of persons

Lansdowne, William Petty, Earl of Shelbourne, Marquis of 260, 289, 294, 296, 299, 331, 335, 385–386, 388, 435, 456 Lauderdale, James Maitland, Earl of 381, 397, 420, 430–432, 435 LeDespencer, Francis Dashwood, Baron 112 Legge, Henry 111, 120 Leijonancker, Fredrik Wilhelm 137, 226 Leijonhufwud, Axel Gabriel 210 Leijonmarck, Gustaf Adolf 232 Lennox, Charles, Duke of Lennox, see Richmond Leveson, John, see Gower Lewes, Watkin 312 Lilliehorn, Per 190, 222–223, 228, 231, 233 Limerick, James Hamilton, Lord 93 Lindbom, Olof 235 Linderstedt, Eric 182 Locke, John 10–11, 78, 85, 172–173, 199–200, 247, 257, 268, 294, 399, 425, 460–461, 477 Lofft, Capel 373 Loughborough, Alexander Webberburn, Earl of Rosslyn, Marquis of 385 Louis XVI 380, 387, 394–395 Lütkemann, Gabriel 179 Luttrell, John 259, 301 Luttrell, Simon Temple 252 Lyttelton, George 105, 132 Lyttelton, William Henry, see Westcote Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de 64, 270 Macaulay, Catharine 366 Macdonald, Archibald 272, 292, 297, 303, 337 Machiavelli, Niccolò 89 Mackintosh, James 366, 381 Macleod, Norman 396 Madison, James 339–340 Mahon, Charles Stanhope, Viscount 309, 355, 397, 415, 422 Maitland, James, Earl of Lauderdale 397 Maitland, Thomas 412 Mann, Horace 47, 275 Mansfield, David Murray, Viscount Stormont, Earl of 133, 140, 267, 375, 388–389, 411, 448 Mansfield, James 277

Månsson, Gabriel 188–189, 236, 239 Marat, Paul 246, 485 Mårtensson, Eric 236 Martin, James 54, 297, 316 Mawkey, Joseph 336 Melin, Israel 214, 216–217, 220 Meredith, William 146, 154 Mitford, John, Baron Redesdall 467 Milford, Richard Philips, Baron 393, 440 Minto, Gilbert Elliot-Murray Kynynmound, Baronet 466–468, 494 Mirabeau, Honoré Gabriel de Riquetti de 385, 467 Moira, Francis Rawdon-Hastings, Marquess of Hastings, Earl of 464–466, 494 Montesquieu, Charles-Louis de Secondat de 13, 18, 64, 116–119, 164, 167, 208, 223–224, 254, 267, 345, 351, 424 Montin, Johan 167 Moore, John 401 Mornington, Richard Colley Wellesley, Earl of 403–404, 411–412, 421, 441, 492 Mortimer, Thomas 267 Mullgrave, Henry Phipps, Lord 422 Munthe, Johan Lorenz 214 Murray, David, see Mansfield 133, 375 Murray, William Vans 341 Nackreii, Olof von 176 Newcastle, Thomas Pelham, Duke of 93, 99–100, 104–107, 115–116, 119–121, 127, 475 Nedham, Marchamont 133–134 Norberg, Jonas Olofson 208 Nordencrantz, Anders 166, 181, 199–200 Norfolk, Charles Howard, Duke of 297, 314, 325, 428–430, 456 North, George, see Guildford Northey, William 120 Northington, Robert Henley, Earl of 132–133, 155 Nugent, Robert, Earl of 271–272 O’Connor, Arthur 422 Odelies, Johan 185 Onslow, George 147 Ord, John 304

index of persons Paine, Thomas 18, 254, 257–258, 338, 365–368, 377, 384, 396, 418–419, 442, 489, 490–491 Pane, John, see Westmorland Pechlin, Carl Fredrick 179, 195–197, 205–208, 231–232, 241, 479 Pelham, Thomas, see Newcastle Perceval, Charles George 281 Perceval, John, see Egmont Petty, John Henry, see Wycombe Petty, William, see Landsdowne Pfeif, Captain 218 Phipps, Henry, see Mullgrave Philips, Richard, see Milford Pigott, Charles 424 Pitt, Thomas 280, 284, 291, 299 Pitt, William, the Elder, see Chatham Pitt, William, the Younger (also Pittites) 26, 56, 269, 272, 284–287, 289, 291, 293, 298–300, 302–314, 316–322, 324–327, 332–336, 357–360, 369, 371, 373, 375, 381–384, 386, 388–390, 393–395, 397, 399–400, 403, 405, 411–412, 415, 417–418, 421–422, 424, 430, 436, 430–440, 444–448, 450–452, 458, 460–464, 486–488, 490–494 Plato 125, 219 Plumer, William 70, 303 Polybius 7, 125, 166–167 Portland, William Henry Cavendish Bemtick, Duke of 296 Posse, Gustaf Mauritz 232 Potter, Thomas 46 Powys, Thomas 271, 291, 303, 312, 321–322, 336, 360, 401 Pratt, Charles, see Camden Price, Richard 255–257, 263, 270, 351–357, 362, 420, 485 Priestley, Joseph 136–137, 257, 302, 366 Proby, John Joshua, see Carysfort Pulteney, William, Earl of Bath 83–84 Pulteney, William, Sir (born William Johnstone) 307, 309 Quanten, Carl Jacob von

188, 238

Raleif, Walter 118 Raméen, Olof 216 Rappe, Carl 196 Rawdon-Hastings, Francis, see Moira Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas François 254

521

Redesdall, John Mitford, Baron 467 Reuterholm, Christer Esbjörn 185–186 Reuterhorn, Gustaf Gottfrid 192 Richmond, Charles Lennox, Duke of 245, 258–259, 266, 281, 290, 295, 305, 370–377, 484 Ridderstolpe, Carl Johan 181, 190–191, 201, 215, 217, 228, 231–232, 237–238, 479 Rigby, Richard 266, 283, 292 Robesbierre, Maximilien 17, 382, 404–411, 413–414, 426–427, 441, 445, 448, 463, 489 Robinson, Morris 437 Robinson, Thomas 71 Rockingham, Charles Watson-Wentfort, Marquis of (also Rockinghamites) 129, 131, 138, 151, 258–260, 262, 269, 282, 289–290, 293, 303, 305 Rolle, John 292 Rollin, Charles Erskine 73 Rosslyn, Alexander Webberburn Alexander, see Loughborough Rosslyn, James Erskine, Earl of 303, 307, 385 Rous, George 363–364 Rousseau, Jean Jacques 14, 18, 64, 126–127, 196, 246, 338, 345, 347, 364, 403–404, 432, 488 Russel, Francis, see Bedford Sackville, George, Germain 142–143 Sallust 106 Salvius, David 167 Sandys, Samuel, Baron 90, 96–98, 103, 475 Savile, George 143, 148, 275 Sawbridge, Alderman 312, 314 Schauw, Arvid 198–200, 219, 482 Scheffer, Carl Fredrick 163–164, 242–243, 482 Schönberg, Anders 181, 185, 191, 195, 205 Schönström, Johan Albrekt 188 Scott, John 336, 422 Selwyn, John 104 Serenius, Jacob, Bishop 229, 481 Sharpe, Gregory 113 Shelbourne, William Petty, Earl of, see Landsdowne Sheridan, Richard Brinsley 283, 357, 381, 385, 392, 398, 412, 418, 438, 442, 445, 461, 493–494 Sheridan, Thomas 267

522

index of persons

Shippen, William 46, 81, 103 Sidney, Algernon 85, 89, 257, 461 Sieyès, Emmanuel-Joseph 335, 345–347, 355 Skelton, Philip 84 Smith, William 358 Solon 134 Somerset, Charles Noel, see Beaufort Sparre, Carl 195, 237, 479 Sparrschiöld, Carl Magnus 181 Spens, Henry 125 Spinoza, Baruch 12 Stanhope, Charles, see Mahon Stanhope, Philip Dormer, see Chesterfield Stanley, John Thomas 414, 437, 445 Stewart, John 412 Stormont, David Murray, Viscount, see Mansfield Sundblad, Johan 195, 212, 218–219 Surrey, Charles Howard, Earl of, see Norfolk Sydenham, Humprey 112 Svensson, Lars 236 Svensson, Nils 229–330 Sydney, Thomas Townsend, Baron 149, 245 Tacitus 323 Talbot, William, Baron and Earl of Talbot 121–122 Talleyrand, Charles Maurice de 385 Tarleton, Banastre 412 Taylor, M.S. 384 Temple, Willson 118 Tham, Peter 222 Thelwall, John 428–429, 448–449, 455, 493 Thurlow, Edward, Baron Tark 149–150, 304, 435 Tollstorp, Georg 193 Torbiörnsson, Lars 184, 188 Townsend, Charles, see Bayning Townsend, James 148 Townsend, John 271 Townsend, Thomas, see Sydney Tucker, Josiah 294 Turner, Charles 292 Tyers, Thomas 268, 278 Uggla, Leonhard Magnus Ungers, Hans 193 Virgin, Arvid Bernhard Voltaire 136

Wadenstierna, Carl Eric 237 Walpole, Robert 25, 71, 73, 75–77, 82–83, 86, 88–88, 91, 96–97, 99–100, 102–104, 109, 249, 269, 406–407, 473–475, 492 Walsingham, Thomas de Grey, Baron 142, 271, 280 Watson, Richard, Bishop of Llandaff 425–427 Watson-Wentfort, Charles, see Rockingham Webberburn, Alexander, see Loughborough Wellesley, Richard Colley, see Mornington Wentfort, William, see FitzWilliam Westcote, William Henry Lyttelton, Baron 83, 270 Westmorland, John Pane, Earl of 104, 111 Wetterberg, Peter 235 Whitbread, Samuel II 381, 391, 395, 405, 414, 491 White, William 378 Whitmore, Thomas 392 Whitworth, William 154 Wikman, [Caspar] 213 Wilberforce, William 55, 311, 372, 438, 445–446 Wilkes, John (also Wilkites) 25, 127–129, 136–138, 140–144, 147–148, 153–154, 181, 185, 188, 190, 245–246, 250, 252–253, 256, 258, 261–262, 268, 270, 286, 290, 476–477 Willes, Sir John 72 William III 273 Williams, David 350–351 Williams-Wynn, Watkin 69, 80 Wilson, James 341 Windham, William 54, 360, 374, 384, 390, 397, 401–401, 439, 442, 492 Woodfall, William 53, 462 Wraxall, Nathaniel 272–274 Wray, Cecil 308 Wycliffe, Thomas 262–263, 488 Wycombe, John Henry Petty, Earl of 389 Wyndham, William Sir, see Grenville Wywill, Christopher 262, 275, 290, 421

180 184–185, 189

Yonge, William Sir 72, 83, 108–109 Yorke, Philip, see Hardwicke Young, William 323–324, 404, 452, 475

INDEX OF SUBJECTS Accession Charter (konungaförsäkran, Sweden) 198, 212–215, 218–219, 222, 225–226, 231–232 Address (of Thanks) 24, 46–49 Age of Liberty (frihetstiden, Sweden) 14, 26, 34, 157–163, 165–167, 170, 172–173, 176, 206, 229, 239, 242–243, 245, 254, 273–274, 477–485 America 3–4, 17, 127, 247–249, 251–252, 254–255, 257–258, 261, 278–279, 289, 294, 302, 311, 324, 327, 337–342, 345, 359, 368–376, 378–380, 383, 427, 439, 441–442, 446, 455, 488, 490 American crisis, Revolution, war 2, 5, 7, 16–17, 26, 54, 65, 69, 120, 123, 129–133, 135, 137–138, 154, 245–246, 249, 251–254, 258–262, 268–271, 279–280, 282, 284, 288–289, 292, 296, 299–300, 302, 319, 337–338, 344, 352, 371, 381, 420, 426, 448, 477–478, 484 Anarchy 5–6, 17, 64–65, 74, 81, 113, 117, 126, 148, 152–153, 157, 188, 191, 194, 202, 232, 262, 268, 293, 312, 332, 345, 354–355, 357, 367, 369, 383, 411, 424, 434, 445–449, 462–464, 467, 489 Aristocracy, aristocratic (also anti-aristocratic) 7–8, 48, 59–60, 64–65, 73–75, 78, 81, 85–86, 89, 95–96, 108–109, 114, 116–118, 121, 123, 129–130, 132, 134, 151, 166–168, 170, 176–177, 179, 183, 188, 193–194, 206–207, 218, 220–223, 232, 238, 242, 247, 251, 253, 265–266, 272, 278, 291–292, 301–302, 304–305, 309, 315, 322–323, 327, 331–334, 356, 359–360, 362–364, 370–374, 376, 379, 381, 385–386, 391, 394, 397, 400–401, 403, 406–408, 417, 419, 424, 426–429, 444, 448, 454–455, 464, 479, 490–491 Aristotelian tradition 7, 48, 59, 355, 363, 369, 471 Association movement 262, 267–268, 275, 290, 296–297, 299, 311 Athens 59, 63, 73, 85, 118, 123, 159, 196, 202, 223, 231, 242, 249, 254, 273, 338, 360, 367, 370, 378–379, 408, 427

see also Greece and classical democracy Austria, Austrian 102, 104, 113 Authority 8–9, 11, 16, 37, 39, 45, 47, 63, 65, 73–74, 77, 85, 93–94, 97–99, 104, 118, 132–134, 137, 139–140, 143–145, 148–149, 151, 154, 199–200, 248, 250–251, 256, 259–262, 293, 305, 317, 327, 329, 333, 336–338, 342, 362, 368–369, 382, 384, 396, 401, 406–408, 451, 458–459, 469, 477, 479 see also people, the power of the, power, sovereignty and supreme power Autocracy 143, 162, 189, 194–195, 241, 438 Batavian Republic 4, 33 see also Dutch Republic and the Netherlands Bill of Rights 327, 434, 443, 445 British Parliament (Westminster) 4–5, 26–27, 33, 35–36, 38, 42–43, 45–46, 57, 59, 62, 65, 67, 73, 112, 116, 131, 133, 135, 154–155, 157, 189, 205, 245–246, 279, 324, 335, 337, 342–343, 346, 348, 353, 388, 390, 395, 416, 423, 426, 455, 463, 466, 477, 484, 488–489 Burgher, Burgher Estate (Sweden) 34, 38, 50–51, 160, 170, 173, 179, 183, 188, 190, 193–194, 198, 210, 212–220, 224–225, 227–228, 231, 239–240, 478–480 Canada 368–369, 372, 374 Ceremonial speaking 45–50, 119, 137, 239, 246, 251, 263, 279, 353, 455, 486 Citizen(s) 7–8, 114, 121–122, 126, 128, 134, 166–170, 172, 179, 181, 199, 210–211, 231, 234, 254, 280, 293, 340, 346, 365, 397, 406, 416 Civil war(s) 16, 61, 84, 107, 127, 152, 154, 334, 377–378 Clergy, Clerical Estate 51, 60, 114, 160, 170, 173, 179, 183, 188, 193–194, 213, 216, 220, 225, 227–229, 233–235, 238–240, 242, 419, 431, 433, 479–480 Common people 6, 8, 17, 60, 72, 74, 83, 84, 93, 99, 101, 117, 122–123, 125,

524

index of subjects

127, 167, 178, 183–184, 186, 188–189, 203, 208, 214, 217, 229–230, 235–236, 239, 278, 337, 433, 479–480 Conceptual change, history, innovation, modification, redefinition, revision, transformation 6, 10, 14, 18–19, 22–23, 27–28, 30, 41–42, 48, 51–52, 130, 137, 153, 279, 282, 287, 291, 320, 344, 348, 380, 427, 429, 457, 464, 466, 468, 473, 475, 486, 494–495 Continent, Continental 20, 63, 80, 105, 109, 116, 120, 136, 176, 258, 261, 273, 301, 350–351, 387, 391, 457, 463 see also Europe Corresponding Societies 376, 388, 393, 418–420, 430, 438, 441 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen 346 Deliberation 5, 19, 41, 59, 74, 86, 142, 150, 160, 170, 249, 265, 267, 300, 320, 334, 400–401, 408, 427, 469 Democracy Absolute, complete, extreme, perfect, pure, simple, wild democracy 73–74, 221, 224, 250, 255, 257, 266–269, 301, 309, 330, 333–334, 339–340, 356, 358–359, 362, 364, 369–370, 372, 376, 381, 401, 409, 413, 416, 425, 434, 446, 453, 459, 463, 467, 469, 474, 485, 489–490, 492–493 British (type of ) democracy 12–13, 348, 352, 354–355, 361, 374–375, 379, 391, 401, 410, 416, 419, 473, 490–492 Classical democracy 166, 195, 205–206, 218, 221, 223–224, 232, 242, 250, 272, 322–323, 329, 338, 343, 351, 363, 365–366, 379, 408, 427, 450, 452–453, 467, 476, 479, 482–485, 493 Direct, immediate democracy 4, 6, 159, 162, 167, 206, 222, 265, 323, 339–340, 345–346, 365, 379, 387, 410, 447, 470, 482 French (type of ) democracy 13–14, 17, 27, 54, 326, 344, 348, 349–350, 352–358, 360–363, 365, 375, 379–381, 395, 401, 410, 413–414, 416, 418, 429, 434, 439, 447–449, 473, 486, 490–493 Limited democracy 167, 489, 493 Mixed democracy 269, 448, 493

Modern democracy 155, 160, 166, 169, 203, 223, 232, 240–241, 456, 466 Representative democracy 1, 17, 157–159, 162, 167–168, 171, 174, 208, 267, 324, 331, 340, 342, 344, 346, 340, 355, 362–364, 374, 378–379, 382, 409, 422, 428–429, 448–449, 463, 478, 482–483, 495 Democrat(s) 61, 159, 345–346, 365, 407, 416, 419, 422, 424–425, 429, 447–448, 464, 466 Democratic element (of constitution) 12, 54, 59–60, 63–64, 74–75, 78, 80–81, 85, 121–122, 124, 130, 132, 147, 157, 195, 203–204, 207–210, 221–222, 232, 266, 268, 272, 275, 278, 285–287, 301, 304, 308–310, 316, 319–320, 322, 325–326, 328, 331, 343–344, 348, 352–353, 356–358, 361, 364, 366, 368–369, 371–375, 380–381, 385, 391–392, 395, 400–402, 405, 411, 419–420, 424, 431, 441, 446, 474, 479, 481, 484, 486–490, 492–493 Democratic principles 109, 163, 168, 362, 370, 372–374, 380, 400–401, 414–415, 425, 428, 439, 449, 457, 490 Democratization 6, 9, 15, 42, 166, 171, 205, 409, 484 Demos 76, 345 Denmark 4, 143, 185, 211, 245, 258, 346 Despotism, despotic 6, 125, 134, 150, 176–177, 191, 193–194, 219, 242, 245, 269, 282, 312, 327–328, 330, 351, 354, 357, 366–367, 381, 391, 393, 398, 417, 421–422, 427, 431–432, 441–442, 447, 454, 462, 476, 487, 489 see also tyranny Diet 2–4, 14, 25–26, 33–34, 37–38, 40, 46, 53, 60, 154, 157, 473, 477, 484 see also Estates and Riksdag Dutch Republic, Dutch 4, 7, 10, 12, 59, 109, 114, 165, 196, 249, 272–273, 305, 315, 331, 335, 341, 344, 346, 348, 351, 388, 439, 447 see also Batavian Republic and Holland Elections 49, 65, 67–73, 76–78, 85, 102, 108, 110–113, 120, 124, 127, 130, 133, 135–139, 143, 145–147, 160, 179, 190, 194, 198, 212–214, 233–234, 237, 248, 252, 257, 262, 269, 277, 290, 300,

index of subjects 308, 313–314, 316, 320, 362, 386, 389, 399, 403–404, 451, 466, 476, 480 Enlightenment 1, 13–14, 19, 64, 126, 152, 163, 166, 170–171, 246–247, 292, 340, 344–345, 370, 404, 412, 430, 487–488 Equality 6, 63–64, 73, 126, 166–168, 170, 212, 216–218, 222, 226, 250, 339–340, 345, 358–359, 379, 387, 395, 401, 406, 410, 435, 444, 450, 470, 477–484 Estates (ständerna, Sweden) 2–5, 8, 11, 14, 24–25, 33–34, 37–38, 40, 50–53, 60, 64, 69, 79, 115, 157–243, 274, 324 Europe 2, 4, 8, 12, 16–17, 19, 22–23, 30–31, 33, 62–63, 109, 125, 155, 158, 160, 166, 170–171, 199, 213, 249, 273–274, 335, 354–355, 422, 427, 439, 463, 469–470 see also Continental Excise Crisis 25, 71–72, 74–75, 91 Factions 75, 86, 93, 99, 103, 106, 110, 114, 123, 134, 143–144, 161, 207, 247, 274, 276, 296, 339–340, 359, 367, 373, 397, 406, 413, 474–475 see also parties Finland, Finnish 38, 230, 243, 478 Florence 217 Folket (‘people’ in Swedish) 25, 159, 172, 178, 191, 195–196, 198, 213, 229, 241, 478 Form of government (regeringsformen, Sweden) 157–158, 161–162, 167–168, 172, 176, 178, 189–190, 192, 195, 198, 203–204, 207, 219, 221–222, 225, 231–232, 236, 243 France, French 3–5, 7, 13–14, 17, 33, 63–65, 105, 119, 122, 129, 157, 161–162, 166–176, 204, 211, 222, 241, 246–247, 261, 330–331, 335, 340, 344–350, 354–357, 359–360, 362–364, 366, 368, 370, 372, 374, 377, 379, 381, 383–384, 386–390, 392, 394–398, 401, 404–405, 410–411, 416–417, 420, 422, 426–427, 429–430, 434, 436, 438, 444–447, 449, 454, 462, 469, 484, 489, 491–493 see also French Revolution Freedom 69, 71, 80, 88, 106, 118, 125, 138, 149, 155, 176, 179, 185, 188–189, 195, 201–202, 208, 214–217, 223–224, 230, 272, 316, 321, 355, 368, 379, 428, 435, 440 see also liberty Freedom of the press 24, 53, 80, 168, 170, 180, 182, 184–185, 187–188, 202,

525

206, 211, 233, 238, 251, 258, 281, 291, 299, 437, 454, 474, 485 Free state, government 4, 91, 106–107, 118, 143, 158, 174, 181, 192, 208, 245, 253, 258, 292, 389–390, 425, 431, 436, 464, 477 see also republic French Revolution 1–2, 4–5, 9–10, 12–17, 25–28, 37, 55, 57, 64–65, 153, 158–160, 163, 166, 171, 276, 324, 326, 329–330, 337–338, 342–344, 346–348, 350, 354, 356–358, 360, 362–364, 368–369, 371–372, 374–375, 380, 383, 385, 387, 391, 399, 403, 409–410, 414–415, 417–420, 423, 425, 429–430, 441–442, 447, 450–452, 455–457, 471, 478, 483–484, 487–490 Friends of the People 376, 380, 385, 391, 397–398, 416 Geneva 246, 250, 309, 432–433 Germany, Germans 4, 22, 59, 73, 81–82, 114, 341 Glorious Revolution see the Revolution of 1688 Gordon riots 47, 262, 266, 269, 271, 274–275, 283, 297 Greece, Greek 7, 17, 45, 121, 190, 196, 223, 242, 250, 253, 340, 343, 404, 453 see also classical democracy Habeas Corpus 418, 427–428 Hanoverian(s) 98, 101–102, 111, 113, 165, 389 Holland 4, 292, 305, 351, 488 see also the Dutch Republic and the Netherlands India Bill, East India Company 296, 302–303, 316–318, 325–327, 329–330, 487 Ireland, Irish 317, 456–458, 461, 464, 466–469, 494 Jacobin(s) 387, 397, 402, 405, 409, 412–413, 421, 430, 435, 444–445, 447, 454–459, 463, 469 Legislation 44, 85, 161, 165, 197, 223, 293, 317, 467, 491 Legislature 60, 95, 131–132, 154, 199, 253, 259, 277, 301, 313, 320, 333, 359, 394, 436–437, 462 see also power, legislative Levellers 12, 16, 61, 388, 391

526

index of subjects

Liberties (of the people) 14, 68, 78, 80–85, 94, 97–99, 101–102, 104, 107, 109–110, 129, 132, 138, 140, 143, 146, 148, 154, 183, 196, 209, 227, 231–232, 236, 256, 266, 271–274, 294–295, 303–305, 316, 327, 330, 332, 354, 358, 389, 415, 430, 435–436, 443, 445, 456, 465 see also freedom, liberty, people, the rights of the, and privileges Liberty 46, 73, 88, 95, 106–110, 114, 118, 125, 128, 133, 146–147, 169–170, 172, 180–181, 191–194, 198, 207, 216, 220, 223–224, 232–234, 237, 241–243, 245, 247, 257–258, 265, 269, 308, 345, 350–351, 353–354, 356, 358, 369, 374–375, 382–383, 387, 390, 412–413, 424, 433, 437–438, 440–441, 476, 479, 481, 484 see also freedom and liberties London 53, 83, 105, 107, 109–110, 128, 131, 136, 144, 147–150, 153, 264, 276, 279, 290, 311, 316, 320, 338, 342, 349–350, 386, 388, 405, 419, 421, 438, 468, 475 Lower orders 65, 81, 137, 160–161, 169, 173, 187, 198, 210, 212–213, 227, 231, 233, 239, 419, 424, 433, 435, 441–444, 447, 456, 478, 481, 483 Magna Charta 96, 140, 327 Middlesex election 136, 139, 143, 145–147, 151, 252, 290, 443, 470 Minutes 4, 34, 38, 40, 50–52, 157 see also parliamentary records Mixed constitution, government 2, 7–8, 10, 12, 15–16, 25–27, 33, 59, 64, 77–78, 84–85, 96, 114–115, 119, 134, 144, 151, 166–168, 195, 202, 205, 207, 221, 224, 249, 254, 265, 268, 271–272, 277– 278, 285, 311–312, 317, 319–320, 322–323, 328, 330, 343–345, 348, 353, 356–357, 363–364, 369–373, 382, 395, 407, 411, 419–420, 426–427, 437, 441, 444, 446–447, 455, 459–460, 476, 479, 483, 485, 487–488, 490 Monarchy, monarchical 13, 27, 32, 49, 50–61, 63–64, 66, 69–70, 74–75, 160–162, 164–165, 167, 170, 173, 175, 178, 184–185, 188, 190, 195–197, 202, 204, 206–207, 213, 215, 221, 227–229, 232, 241–242, 245–247, 254, 258, 261–262, 265–266, 270, 272–273, 279–280, 283, 285–287, 291, 293, 295, 309, 312, 322, 327, 331, 354, 356, 359, 361–362, 369–373, 376, 379–381,

385–388, 391–394, 396–397, 400–401, 403, 407–408, 412–413, 417, 419–421, 426, 429, 431, 437, 445, 448–449, 451, 453–454, 461, 476, 479, 485, 490–491 see also royal prerogative Limited monarchy 16, 121, 254, 310–312, 350–351, 389, 407, 415–416, 461 Mixed monarchy 90, 152, 167, 205, 232, 393, 424, 429 National Constituent Assembly 171, 346, 355, 357, 361, 369, 491 National Convention 387–388, 390, 393–395, 410, 420, 447 Natural rights 61, 247, 256, 260, 270, 332, 418, 436 see also people, rights of the Netherlands, see also the Dutch Republic and the Batavian Republic 59, 88, 324, 346 Nobility, Noble Estate 50–51, 60, 107–109, 117, 130, 160–161, 163–164, 168–171, 173, 175–178, 180–181, 183, 186–187, 190–191, 193–195, 201, 211–213, 215–221, 228, 230–233, 237, 239–240, 266, 385, 394, 435–436, 478–481, 483 Oligarchy 33, 72, 81, 101, 106–107, 110, 113, 118, 136, 162, 333, 398, 444, 475 Parliamentary reform 5, 17, 26, 30–31, 36, 42, 150, 154, 245, 252, 264–265, 269, 272, 275, 281, 286–289, 291, 293–294, 296–297, 299, 301, 306, 308–309, 312–313, 315–316, 319, 325, 331, 334, 341, 348, 350, 359–360, 366, 377, 380–383, 387–389, 403, 406, 411, 414–415, 421, 444–445, 449, 454–455, 462, 473–474, 485–488, 492 Parliamentary procedure 31, 33, 44, 144, 205, 238 Parliamentary records 67, 233, 452, 472 see also minutes Party, parties 26, 38, 44, 47, 61, 106–107, 120, 137, 161, 165, 175–176, 179–181, 183–184, 188, 192, 198, 201, 204–207, 209–210, 213, 217, 225, 227, 229, 231–232, 235, 237, 239, 241, 252, 298, 311, 350–351, 357, 365, 378, 415, 424, 427, 480–481, 483 see also factions

index of subjects Patriotism, patriots 12, 38, 67, 130, 235, 237, 261, 305, 307, 344, 346, 351, 365, 408, 484 Peasant Estate, peasants (Sweden) 38, 51–52, 60, 115, 160, 166, 172–173, 177, 183–184, 188–189, 193–194, 203–204, 208–209, 212–213, 216, 227–230, 233, 235–236, 239, 464, 479–480 People see also folket Agents of the people 316, 337, 339, 341–342, 347, 401–402, 442, 492–493 Delegates of the people 60, 70, 199, 210, 234, 275, 295, 307–308, 319 Interests of the people 67, 70–72, 83–84, 124, 129, 145, 153, 199, 206, 248, 250, 280, 311–312, 316, 321, 324, 333, 405, 477, 484 Majesty of the people 149–150, 249, 261, 270, 293, 352, 396, 420, 430, 451, 456, 485 Omnipotence of the people 256–257, 270, 485 Opinion of the people 93, 98, 100, 102, 271, 288, 294–295, 298, 317, 451 Power of the people 23, 26, 34, 60–61, 63, 67, 71–72, 74, 103, 104, 110, 126, 148, 165, 166, 173, 203, 248, 253, 256, 260, 263, 273, 276, 288, 293, 315, 326, 334, 336, 338, 342, 345, 366, 374–375, 430, 441–442, 452, 462, 474–477, 481 Representatives of the people 60, 70, 80, 87, 103, 121–122, 135, 143, 148, 152, 171, 227, 275, 281–282, 292, 294–295, 299–300, 307, 310, 334, 337, 341, 363, 366, 381–382, 389, 415, 442, 478, 482 see also plenipotentiaries Rights of the people 25, 68, 71, 78, 80–82, 85, 94, 111, 129, 138, 143–144, 146–147, 150, 153, 177, 180–183, 186, 191–192, 195–199, 202, 204, 206, 209–211, 214, 217–221, 225, 229, 231–232, 234–237, 240, 250, 252–253, 255, 260, 263, 268–269, 274–275, 277–278, 281, 283, 292, 301, 305, 307, 310, 319, 322, 333, 335–336, 362, 369, 386, 389, 396, 398, 420–421, 423–424, 427–428, 430, 434–435, 438–439, 441, 443, 450,

527

462, 475, 477, 480, 484 see also liberties Sense of the people 49, 66, 86, 144, 252–253, 269, 274–275, 277, 280, 287–288, 292, 294, 297, 299–300, 308, 310, 313–314, 316–319, 321, 333–337, 362, 383, 396, 421, 448, 475 Sentiments of the people 47, 60, 62, 66, 89, 92–93, 95–98, 101–102, 113, 144, 198, 238, 253, 275, 283, 298, 312, 314, 341, 451, 479, 481 Sovereignty of the people 2–6, 10–12, 16, 18, 22–23, 25–28, 57, 61–62, 68, 153, 163, 175, 177, 191, 218, 246–247, 249, 254, 259, 263, 267, 270, 290, 303, 331, 337, 345–350, 352, 363–368, 371, 378, 380, 386–387, 390–399, 403–404, 406–407, 410–413, 418–419, 421–425, 430, 437, 440, 442–444, 449, 451, 454–467, 469–473, 485, 488–495 Voice of the people 25, 48, 59, 61–62, 66–68, 77–78, 88, 91, 94, 98, 102–104, 116, 122, 142–143, 145, 151, 153, 177–178, 182–183, 186–187, 189, 191–193, 201–202, 211, 214, 228, 234, 237, 257, 260–261, 266, 268, 276, 282, 284, 290–293, 306–309, 311, 314, 317, 322–323, 333–335, 362, 375–376, 383, 405, 434, 438, 474–475, 485, 487 see also vox populi Will of the people 66, 120, 169, 173, 176, 201, 256, 263, 298, 314–315, 334, 336, 362, 367, 394–395, 397, 405, 413, 420–421, 485, 488 Plenipotentiaries ( fullmäktige, Sweden) 164, 167, 170, 172, 189, 193–194, 197–199, 208–216, 225, 234–236, 241–242, 482–483 Poland, Polish 4, 7, 10, 17, 33–34, 59, 109, 115, 117, 182, 185, 188, 194, 217, 223, 271, 383 Political agent(s) 14, 23, 48, 68–69, 141, 173, 178, 253, 255–256, 260, 280, 288, 314, 345, 365, 456, 476, 486 see also people, agents of the Political community 7–8, 10, 42–43, 45, 49, 57, 62, 78, 80, 85, 87, 105, 108, 121, 158, 162, 171, 175, 183, 193, 217, 229–230, 270, 273, 281, 320–321,

528

index of subjects

344–345, 350, 371, 408–409, 411, 455–457, 471–472, 477, 484 Political culture 18–23, 29, 33, 36, 41, 52, 62, 65–67, 136, 155, 158, 163, 248, 251–252, 307, 310, 345, 373, 391, 431, 478 Political discourse 2, 8, 20, 32, 42, 57, 65–66, 136, 146, 158–159, 169, 183, 198, 224, 230, 256, 303, 348, 351, 366, 431, 437, 440, 470, 473, 489 see also public debate Political language 1, 3–4, 12, 16, 18, 21, 40, 55–57, 116, 174, 242, 246, 277, 279, 286, 348, 352, 489 see also political vocabularies Political theory 9–10, 14, 16, 30, 34, 41, 61, 63, 65, 72, 81, 171–172, 199, 204, 224, 323, 329, 339, 355, 426–427, 434, 452, 473, 482, 488 Political vocabularies 20, 23, 29–32, 43, 56, 159, 198, 235, 426 see also political language Popular consent 61, 165, 257, 341, 343, 460 Popular government 12, 17, 24–25, 64, 89–92, 94–96, 101–102, 105, 108–109, 111, 113, 117–118, 134–135, 149, 155, 168, 203, 223–224, 238, 242, 246–247, 253, 255, 260, 267–269, 273, 276, 281, 290, 300–304, 307, 328, 333, 337, 339–340, 342, 365, 368–369, 388, 403, 410, 416, 454, 470, 474–475, 478, 481, 483, 485 Popular sovereignty 1–3, 6, 10–12, 15–21, 25–26, 31, 34, 61, 66–67, 136–137, 157–159, 163, 171, 174, 199, 242, 250, 255, 331, 334, 337, 339, 341–342, 365, 390–391, 393, 406–407, 411–412, 441, 447, 459, 468, 471, 478, 481, 483 see also people, sovereignty of the Populus 7–8, 172 Power, see also authority Absolute power 88, 169, 168, 172–173, 176, 197, 248, 328, 356, 359, 369, 394, 481, 487 Legislative power 2, 34, 74–75, 112, 125, 132, 148, 160, 169, 173–174, 177, 192, 199, 208, 250, 256, 267, 269, 315, 340, 343, 356, 366, 462, 469, 482 Political power 1, 4, 6–11, 16, 34, 61, 65, 67, 76, 78, 99, 119, 135, 150, 152, 176, 182–183, 191, 198, 201,

213, 215, 221, 240, 249, 257, 274, 284, 307, 310, 326, 335–337, 341, 391, 403, 459, 461, 471, 479, 481, 483–484, 491 Power of the many 167, 238, 328, 487 Supreme power 9, 11, 13, 81–82, 88, 116–117, 126, 131, 160, 162, 164–165, 173–174, 189, 191, 195, 201, 206, 211, 221, 223, 242, 263, 267–268, 460, 474, 479, 481 see also sovereignty Press 24, 31–32, 36, 40, 52–54, 62, 67, 81, 94, 127–128, 136, 143, 175, 180, 183, 210–211, 214, 220, 223, 227, 233, 241, 454, 456, 460, 474, 478, 491–492, 494–495 see also freedom of the press and printed literature Printed, published literature 19, 31–32, 36, 88, 141, 171, 184, 189, 235, 254, 331, 349, 375, 380, 428, 460, 473–474, 480, 485, 488 see also press and public discourse Privilege(s) 24, 31–32, 36, 40, 52–54, 62, 67, 81, 94, 127–128, 136, 143, 175, 180, 183, 210–211, 214, 220, 223, 227, 233, 241, 454, 456, 460, 474, 478, 491–492, 494–495 pro et contra 43, 472 Prussia, Prussians 176, 351, 415 Public, publicity, public opinion, public sphere 16, 19–20, 24, 29, 31–32, 36, 40, 42, 47–48, 53–54, 56, 60, 62, 66–67, 92–94, 111, 136, 141, 146, 149–150, 166, 180, 184, 197, 233, 251, 260, 264, 277, 283, 291, 302, 327–328, 334, 384, 386, 400–401, 405, 452, 472–473, 480 see also public debate Public debate, public discourse 2, 4, 11, 20, 23–24, 32, 34–36, 42, 54–55, 57, 73, 84, 107, 112–113, 118, 121–122, 125–127, 134–135, 138, 141, 145, 169–170, 172, 182, 187, 202–203, 205, 208, 210, 218, 227, 234, 248, 251, 259, 267–268, 279, 293, 337, 345, 349, 352, 355, 362, 366, 368, 379–380, 384, 396, 399, 401, 407, 422–423, 471–472, 474, 476, 478, 483, 485, 493 see also political discourse, press, printed literature and public Quebec

368, 372, 490

index of subjects Radicalism, radicalization, radicals 25–26, 128, 136, 141, 158, 162, 168–169, 172–173, 183, 193–194, 197–198, 201–202, 204, 206, 210, 212, 216–217, 219–220, 224, 227, 230, 232, 234–236, 238, 240, 243, 246–247, 252–253, 257, 259–260, 262–264, 266, 268, 270, 274, 278–279, 282, 288, 290, 298–299, 303, 306–307, 312, 316, 321, 328, 331, 334, 336–338, 347, 350, 356, 358, 364, 366, 368, 371, 377, 380–382, 384, 386–389, 391, 397, 402, 408–411, 415, 417–421, 423–424, 428, 430, 433–435, 438, 442, 447, 450, 454, 456, 458, 461, 468, 473–474, 480, 482–485, 487–488, 490, 492–493 Representation 4–5, 8–9, 11, 13, 17–18, 21, 24–28, 31, 37, 51, 57, 59–60, 64, 68–69, 100, 112, 118, 123, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135–136, 145, 149–150, 159–164, 166–167, 169, 196, 205, 208–209, 211–212, 214, 217, 235, 245–246, 249–253, 255, 262, 265, 267, 270, 275, 285, 291–293, 295, 297, 299–301, 306, 314–316, 320–321, 323–324, 330, 333, 338, 340, 346–348, 352, 359–360, 362–364, 366, 377–379, 382–383, 388, 392, 394–395, 398–400, 402–406, 408–410, 419, 423, 444–445, 449–450, 454–455, 463, 468, 471, 482–484, 490–494 see also plenipotentiaries, representative democracy and people, representatives of the Representative assemblies, institutions 2–5, 7, 10, 15, 19–20, 22, 29, 34, 60, 154, 161, 192, 248, 256, 325, 330, 335, 344, 348, 353, 381–382, 416, 428, 470, 473, 488 Representative government 2, 18, 59, 81–82, 270, 337, 341, 345, 363, 378–379, 409–410, 440, 447, 454–455, 483 Republic 7, 12, 17, 64, 73, 92, 100, 106, 114, 116, 125, 132–133, 155, 167, 206, 215, 217, 222–223, 310–312, 337–339, 342, 357, 365, 370, 372, 378, 387, 393, 409, 426–428, 477, 491 Democratic republic, state 114, 118, 134, 145, 407, 409–410, 426–427, 447, 467, 469, 492 Republicanism 12–13, 51, 61, 133, 163, 170, 188, 201, 211, 228, 237–238, 242, 261, 273, 276,

529

300–301, 305, 340–341, 346, 363, 368–371, 385, 390, 392, 394–395, 404, 432, 439, 472, 474, 476, 485, 489 Roman Republic 7, 17, 63, 73, 84, 90, 118, 127, 217–218, 230, 342, 338, 440, 460 Revolution of 1688 16, 61, 103, 266, 273, 335, 350, 362, 369, 395–396, 422, 429, 433, 437, 441, 461, 476 Revolutionary associations 397, 399, 418–419, 430, 459, 492 Revolutionary War 25, 395, 458 Rhetoric 19, 29, 33–34, 39–46, 56, 66–67, 70, 94, 111, 113, 124, 131, 141, 144, 173, 228, 230–231, 241–242, 294, 302, 305–306, 309, 331, 338, 341, 382, 417, 439, 443, 454–455, 475, 484 Riksdag (Sweden) 24, 26, 53, 162–163, 166, 172–173, 175, 178–198, 202, 204–205, 207–210, 214, 223, 229, 233–234, 236, 274, 478–481, 483 see also Diet and Estates Rome, Roman 45, 63, 73, 106–108, 114, 118, 121, 123, 127, 134, 166, 172–173, 190–191, 196, 217–218, 223, 242, 249–250, 253–254, 273, 337–338, 360, 370, 441 see also Roman Republic Royal prerogative 157, 164, 190, 196, 201, 206, 215, 232, 259, 266, 273, 286, 296–297, 300, 305, 309, 311, 373, 385, 390, 414, 417, 419, 476 see also monarchy Russia, Russians 161, 197, 206, 211, 232 Scandinavia, Scandinavian 164, 176, 236, 245 Scotland, Scottish 111–112, 247, 293, 331, 375, 396–397, 435 Secret Committee (sekreta utskottet, Sweden) 24, 51–52, 172, 175, 179, 183, 194–195, 197, 204–205, 207, 209, 213–215, 218–221, 224, 227, 231, 236 Senate (rådet, Sweden) 2, 38, 157, 161, 176–177, 179–184, 186–187, 190–191, 193–194, 201–202, 204, 207, 214, 233, 236–237, 242, 479 Septennial Act 25, 67–78 Seven Years’ War 119–124, 127–128, 476

530

index of subjects

Society for Constitutional Information 312, 419 Sovereignty 9, 12, 14, 18, 21, 24, 63–64, 69, 73, 105, 117, 119, 124, 126, 130–132, 134, 157, 159, 164–165, 168–169, 174, 176–177, 185, 188–189, 191, 194, 197, 247, 254, 256, 259, 263, 268, 270–271, 277–279, 303, 332, 341, 343, 347, 366, 373, 392, 396, 456, 460–461, 474, 477, 485–486, 491 National sovereignty 278, 346–347, 404, 407, 410 Sovereignty of parliament 132, 256, 303, 395, 423, 440, 443, 457, 465, 467–468, 473, 476–477, 481, 494 see also people, the sovereignty of the, popular sovereignty and supreme power Spain 79, 83, 86–87, 102, 146, 262, 447 Stamp Act 131–132 Sparta 114, 118, 123, 202, 249, 273, 327 Subject(s) 59–60, 68, 78, 83, 90, 98, 113, 117, 119, 122–123, 125, 131–133,

135, 140, 152, 251, 256, 258, 270, 281, 319, 362, 375–376, 406 Suffrage 9, 62, 131, 145, 194, 252, 255, 264, 266, 299–301, 305–306, 316, 337, 345, 377, 386, 399, 403–405, 415, 440–441, 444–445, 450–451, 453, 456, 466, 469, 493 Turkey, Turkish 327, 431 Tyranny, tyrants 27, 73–76, 80–81, 92, 106, 125, 144, 157, 167, 176, 195, 218, 226, 248, 253, 287, 310, 312, 334, 354–355, 357–358, 363, 377, 379, 401, 405, 407, 411–414, 416, 420–422, 426–427, 432–433, 441, 448, 460, 492 see also despotism United States see America Venice 7, 59, 73, 109, 271 Vox populi 91, 101–102, 293, 434 see also people, the voice of the