Once the Hanoverian succession had taken place, Whig ministers became as eager to remain at peace with France as the Tories had been. Walpole certainly adhered to this view, and for good reasons. Although Britain now possessed the world’s most powerful navy, it could not match France in land forces. War with France, moreover, was likely to lead to an invasion of Hanover, which was naturally unwelcome to George I and his successor. It would also give the Old Pretender the prospect of French military aid to launch an invasion against Britain itself. In 1717 Stanhope negotiated a Triple Alliance with the French and the Dutch. This treaty was maintained by Walpole and Townshend throughout the 1720s. By 1730, however, it was attracting considerable criticism from the Opposition, and in the Second Treaty of Vienna, signed in March 1731, Walpole jettisoned the Anglo-French alliance in favour of an alliance with Austria. But whether forming an alliance with the French or the Austrians, Walpole always considered it his primary aim to keep Britain out of war in continental Europe. In 1733 Austria, Saxony, and Russia went to war against France, Spain, and Sardinia in the War of the Polish Succession (1733–38). The Austrians asked for British aid under the terms of the Treaty of Vienna, but Walpole refused to give it. By keeping out of European entanglements for so long, Walpole appeased some of the traditionally insular Tory MPs. He also kept direct taxation low, which pleased many landed families. The land tax was cut to two shillings in the pound (10 percent) in 1730 and to one shilling in the pound two years later. Religious policy
Walpole’s religious policy was also designed to foster social and political quiescence. Traditionally the Whig party had supported wider concessions to the Protestant dissenters (Protestants who believed in the doctrine of the Trinity but who refused to join in the worship of the state church, the Church of England). They had been given freedom of worship under the Toleration Act of 1689 but were barred from full civil rights and access to university education in England. In 1719 the Whigs had repealed two pieces of Tory legislation aimed against dissent, the Schism and the Occasional Conformity acts. These concessions ensured that Protestant dissenters would be able to establish their own educational academies and hold public office in the localities, if not in the state.
There was always a danger, however, that too many concessions to Protestant dissent would alienate the Church of England, which enjoyed wide support in England and Wales. There were 5,000 parishes in these two countries, each containing at least one church served by a vicar (minister) or a curate (his deputy). For much of the 18th century these Anglican churches provided the only large, covered meeting places available outside of towns. They served as sources of spiritual comfort and also as centres for village social life. At religious services vicars would not only preach the word of God but also explain to congregations important national developments: wars, victories, and royal deaths and births. Thus churches often supplied the poor, the illiterate, and particularly women with the only political information available to them. Weakening the Church of England therefore struck Walpole as unwise, for at least two reasons. Its ministers provided a vital service to the state by communicating political instruction to the people. The church, moreover, commanded massive popular loyalty, and assaults on its position would arouse nationwide discontent. Walpole therefore determined to reach an accommodation with the church, and in 1723 he came to an agreement with Edmund Gibson, Bishop of London. Gibson was to ensure that only clergymen sympathetic to the Whig administration were appointed to influential positions in the Church of England. In return, Walpole undertook that no further extensive concessions would be made to Protestant dissenters. This arrangement continued until 1736. Economic policies
Finally, Walpole’s long tenure of power was assisted by national prosperity. The gross national product rose from £57.5 million in 1720 to £64.1 million in 1740, an increase of 11.5 percent. Walpole encouraged trade by abolishing some customs duties, but his main economic concerns were to reduce interest payments on the national debt and to foster agriculture by switching taxation from land to consumption. He succeeded in reducing interest payments on the debt by 26 percent during his time in office, but his efforts to reduce the land tax in favour of more excises almost led to political disaster. In 1732 he revived a duty on salt, which enabled him to cut the land tax to one shilling in the pound. In 1733 he proposed to levy excise taxes on the sale of wine and tobacco, but the Opposition in Parliament launched a ferocious and successful campaign against these proposals. It claimed that excises weighed unfairly on the poor, whereas the land tax was mainly paid by the prosperous. It claimed, too, that excise collectors, and there were more than 6,000 of them employed by the state by this time, intruded into citizens’ private affairs and were a danger to British liberties. This crisis led to nationwide riots and demonstrations, and Walpole’s House-of-Commons majority seemed in jeopardy. In April 1733 he decided to retreat. He continued, however, until 1740 to keep the land tax at a low rate, thereby winning important support from the nation’s dominant landed class. The electoral system
The fiasco over the excise might have toppled Walpole, since a general election was scheduled for 1734. In fact, however, his administration retained a comfortable majority in the House of Commons. One reason for this was that Britain’s electoral system at this time did not adequately reflect the state of public opinion. Until the Reform Act of 1832 England returned 489 MPs. Eighty of these were elected by the 40 county constituencies; 196 smaller constituencies called boroughs returned two MPs each, and two other boroughs, including London, the capital city, returned four MPs each. Oxford and Cambridge universities were also allowed four representatives in Parliament. Wales returned only 24 members of Parliament and Scotland 45. Their limited representation indicated the extent to which these countries were subordinated to England in the British political system at this time.
The system was not even remotely democratic. Power in this society was intimately and inextricably connected with the possession of property, particularly landed property. To be eligible for election as an MP, a man had to possess land worth £600 per annum if he was representing a county constituency and worth £300 per annum in the case of a borough constituency. To vote, adult males had to possess some kind of residential property or, in certain borough constituencies, be registered as freemen. Women were not given the vote until 1918.
In all, some 350,000 Britons may have been able to vote in the 1720s, which was roughly one in four of the adult male population. There was no secret ballot, and voting took place in public. Consequently, many voters were liable to be influenced or coerced by their landlords or employers or bribed by the candidates themselves. Bribery was particularly widespread and effective in the smaller boroughs where there were often fewer than 100 voters and sometimes fewer than 50. These constituencies were called rotten or pocket boroughs. In the borough of Malmesbury, for example, in the English county of Wiltshire, there were only 13 voters, few of whom voted strictly in accordance with their own conscience or opinions: “It was no odds to them who they voted for,” one inhabitant declared, “it was as master pleased.” Large electorates could be found, however, in some areas. The northern English county constituency of Yorkshire had 15,000 voters in 1741. In Bristol, a major port on the western coast of England, 5,000 men had the vote—approximately one-third of the city’s adult male population. In these larger constituencies public opinion could make itself felt at election time. The problem for the Opposition in 1734 was that there were few such populous, open constituencies but very many rotten borough seats such as Malmesbury. Since government candidates usually had more to bribe voters with in the way of money and favours, Walpole was able to win the majority of these boroughs and therefore retain his majority in the House of Commons despite his unpopularity after the excise crisis. Walpole’s loss of power