Illusory Consensus: Bolingbroke and the Polemical Response to Walpole, 1730-1737

This book belongs to the growing number of revisionist studies challenging traditional perceptions of party politics during the eighteenth century. Alexander Pettit, concentrating on a seven-year period during the second decade of Robert Walpole's administration, persuasively challenges the picture presented in works such as Isaac Kramnick's Bolingbroke and His Circle (1968) of a unified and monolithic "Country" opposition to Walpole shaped and defined by Lord Bolingbroke's political philosophy. The oppositional "consensus" promoted in the pages of Bolingbroke and Pulteney's Craftsman was, Pettit argues, "illusory": the opposition was what he pithily dubs a "disparate bunch that resisted, as it continues to resist, easy definitions" (30). Pettit sets out here to investigate some of the heterogeneous, cross-grained modes of opposition thought which owed little to Bolingbroke and were sometimes downright hostile to his ideas. The polemical literature generated by the likes of the non-juror, Matthias Earbery, defined by its High Church stance and its nostalgia for the close alliance between church and monarchy under Charles I, bears little resemblance to Bolingbroke's deliberately bland platform of secular civic humanism. Far from "leading" the opposition, Bolingbroke, the former Jacobite turned Revolution Principle Whig, was viewed with profound suspicion by both Tories such as Earbery and (one might add) by opposition Whigs.

Although this book is shaped by a strong argument it does not set out to offer a full or comprehensive reappraisal of the composition and nature of Walpole's opposition. Those unfamiliar with the period will find little to guide them through the main events and contours of the political scene: this is not a book for an uninitiated or even an undergraduate readership. Indeed, its focus is highly selective: it reads almost as a series of discrete, closely argued essays on various aspects of opposition polemic, including two chapters on Bolingbroke, one on the role of the 1688 Revolution in opposition debate, two on what Pettit has christened "Carolinism" (nostalgia for the reign of Charles I), and a rather detached last chapter interrogating conventional readings of opposition drama of the mid-1730s.

Although Bolingbroke features prominently in the book's subtitle and in its first two chapters, Pettit knocks him from the pedestal on which Kramnick and others have placed him by immersing his writings in the context from which they emerged--the cut-and-thrust of daily ministerial and opposition journalism and propaganda, "a version of the political debate that would have been familiar to a coffee-house politician in the 1730s, but that several centuries' emphasis on 'high politics' and 'high literature' have taught us to disregard" (29). Much excellent and detailed scholarship has gone into recreating these contexts. Particularly impressive is chapter one's sustained reading of the --Remarks on the History of England and chapter two's account of the historiographical debate over the use of analogy in a decade when writers on both sides ransacked the English past to praise or berate modern ministers and monarchs. The Remarks, enshrined as a "classic" of political thought by Kramnick's 1972 edition, was, in fact, a series of ad hoc essays whose most vital characteristic was their intertextuality and contemporaneity. Unfortunately Pettit's admirable reconstruction of the proper contexts for the Remarks is accompanied by a fair amount of dirt-dishing at Kramnick's expense: "Surprisingly, Kramnick ignores the folios in his research" (51), "Kramnick consistently ignores the topical content of the Remarks" (52), "Mindful of Kramnick's others [sic] deletions" (55). This verbal tic extends to his treatment of the inadequacies of other scholars: "Burtt does not say so, but they are the bases of Walpolite theories of government. . . . Nor does Burtt consider" (88).

Chapter three contains some shrewd analysis of the significance of 1688 in opposition debate. Pettit cleverly argues that the Revolution was the one point at which Bolingbroke's cyclical theory of history intersected with the linear theory advanced by Walpole's apologists. Bolingbroke saw 1688 as the most recent incident of the "ancient spirit of liberty" which returned through British history during periods such as Elizabeth I's reign, whereas Walpole's defenders, unabashed modernists, saw 1688 as a novel source of a modern liberty formalized by the Bill of Rights and safeguarded by the Hanoverian succession. One side claimed it as inheritance, the other as invention. Yet far from sharing this glorification of 1688, other opposition polemicists, such as the Tory authors of the Grub Street Journal, derided William III's innovations. Pettit treads a very careful path around the recently controversial issue of Jacobitism, which he dismisses as an "imprecise term" for the 1730s. In so doing he seems to be defining a third kind of opposition position: Tory "Carolinism," nostalgia for the close alliance between High Church and monarchy epitomized by the relationship between Laud and Charles I. Pettit is surely right to reinstate religious controversy into the political framework of the 1730s, notably in his discussion of the political row over dissent and the Quaker Tithe bill in the early 1730s. I am slightly uncomfortable about his invention of the term "Carolinism" for this phenomenon, if only because it inevitably calls to mind the reigning Hanoverian "Caroline," consort of George II, who was heavily involved in ecclesiastical policy. It may be true, as Pettit argues, that the "Carolinists" criticized Walpole for severing the monarchical and ecclesiastical estates and thus reviving the republicanism of England under Oliver Cromwell. However, it might be added that a more substantial sector of the opposition--notably dissident Whigs--attacked Walpole's ecclesiastical advisor, the High-Church Bishop Gibson, during the early 1730s for his odious similarity to Laud. Here I refer to Gibson's intolerance of religious heterodoxy, tight control of ecclesiastical patronage, and desire to extend into civil life the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical courts.

The final chapter on historical drama, if something of a coda to the book, offers a valuable corrective to the critical tendency to oversimplify political propaganda on the stage. Focusing on what Robert D. Hume dubbed "application plays"--historical dramas designed to comment on current politics--Pettit shows that their Bolingbrokean rhetoric is often presented ironically or inconclusively. The failure of closure in which the Patriot king figure abdicates or remains unmarried and hence heirless points to an interrogation of, rather than an affirmation of, Patriot ideals.

One final caveat. Although Pettit has perhaps sensibly confined himself to the period 1730-37, the rationale for his terminal date seems disingenuous. He argues that if there was a "Bolingbrokean moment" it was over by 1737, since by this stage the Craftsman was on its last legs and Bolingbroke had returned to France. Well, Bolingbroke returned to England in March 1738 and spent many months that year with his friend Pope orchestrating the renewed Patriot campaign behind the scenes, editing opposition drama, and writing The Idea of a Patriot King. In 1738 the Prince of Wales looked in a strong position as a "center of union" for the opposition: this was the year that witnessed a flood of opposition writing, including Johnson's London and Dialogues One and Two of Pope's Epilogue to the Satires. If there was ever a "Bolingbrokean moment" I would locate it in 1738.