Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (82 page)

But the court’s social and cultural lead began to evaporate even before Charles II died. First, continuous money problems and successive retrenchments under Charles II and James II reduced the opportunities at, and so the attractiveness of, the court. In addition, the brief attempt at a Catholic restoration under James, William III’s obsession with foreign policy and lack of social graces, Anne’s poor health, and George I’s desire to be left alone all put a damper on court life. Simultaneously, the “rage of party” followed by the post-1714 Whig ascendancy dictated that at any given time, one half of the political world felt unwelcome at court. Finally, and perhaps above all, the diversion of government revenue to the period’s wars left the Crown unable to sustain patronage of the arts and finer pleasures on a grand scale. This is part of the point of the Matthew Prior anecdote told in the previous chapter: while Louis XIV poured French treasure into both Versailles and a series of losing wars, later Stuart monarchs neglected their courts to win those wars. The destruction by fire of the vast palace of Whitehall in 1698 both sealed and symbolized the court’s social and cultural decline; it would be a century before the monarchy once again possessed a great palace in central London.

The decline of court culture did not mean the decline of elite culture. As we have seen, the landed aristocracy took up much of the slack in both town and country. They had always found entertainment and companionship at the public theater, taverns, cock matches, and horse-races. After the Restoration, the concert hall, the pleasure garden, the coffee-house, and the all-male club also competed for their attention. Some of these institutions were open to the general public as well. Taverns, pleasure gardens, sporting events, and, from the 1650s onwards, London’s coffee-houses (see plate 25, p. 345) mixed aristocrats with monied men, merchants, and professionals. Rather than cater to a particular social rank, individual coffee-houses tended to attract those with specific interests: overseas merchants congregated at Lloyd’s, stockjobbers at Jonathan’s and Garroway’s, poets at Will’s, prose writers at Button’s, scholars at the Grecian, Tory politicians at the Cocoa Tree, Whigs at the St. James’s.

But other aristocratic pursuits were more exclusive. The Restoration and eighteenth-century theater was more expensive, and so less accessible to the “groundlings,” than its Elizabethan forebear. Private clubs were, in part, an aristocratic reaction to the openness of the coffee-house: their membership was more narrowly restricted to the upper classes and their interests more focused. This is not to say that those interests were more elevated: White’s catered to gamblers, the Beef-steak Club to gluttons, a series of Hell-fire Clubs to rowdy nobles interested in general mayhem. Political clubs, the Kit-Cat in particular, operated by 1700 like small kingless courts, toasting a roster of beauties who, a few years earlier, might have been painted by Lely or Kneller for a royal patron. Elite women helped shape this new sociability – which in the eighteenth century would establish “gentility,” not honor, as the standard for elite social conduct – as balls, musical assemblies, and promenades became an important part of aristo-culture from 1700. It was increasingly in these venues, and not at court, that art and literature were commissioned, business transacted, political plots laid, and the latest fashions put on display.

Aristocrats also supported artists individually. In 1710 Georg Frideric Handel, the greatest opera composer of the age, came to London to work for Queen Anne; by the end of the decade he was composing anthems for the fabulously wealthy James Brydges, duke of Chandos (1674–1744), whose estate at Cannons, Middlesex, boasted a full orchestra. Lord Somers gave important early support to Swift and his fellow essayists Joseph Addison (1672–1719) and Richard Steele (1672–1729), while Lord Halifax did the same for the playwright William Congreve (1670–1729). Lord Treasurer Oxford employed a stable of writers, including Swift and Defoe, to support his administration. This reminds us that aristocratic patrons had political as well as aesthetic motivations: a talented writer was a valuable asset in the propaganda wars fought between the two parties. Oxford (Harley) also provided a model for eighteenth-century connoisseurship by assembling a magnificent collection of books and manuscripts which later became part of the nucleus for the British Museum (and, today, the British Library).

The new wealth flooding into later Stuart England enriched not only the landed elite but also merchants and professionals. Some of that money eventually found its way into the hands of artists. The theater was already a “public” venue at the end of the sixteenth century; a little over a century later it was dominated by great entrepreneurial producers, like John James Heidegger (1666–1749) or Christopher Rich (1647–1714) and his son John (1692–1761), who were adept at appealing to changing aristocratic and popular tastes. For example, when, as part of the “reformation of manners” campaign of the 1690s, clergy attacked the comedy of manners as immoral, producers more or less abandoned it in favor of opera and revivals of Shakespeare. In 1708, Heidegger pioneered the first masquerade balls in London, the major attraction of which was that attendees could transcend their own class and personal reputation by hiding behind masks. In other words, a well-dressed army officer or tradesman could hob-nob with a countess.

Sometimes artists banded together to act as their own impresarios. John Banister (1624/5–79), a royal musician disgruntled at his uncertain pay, organized the first public concerts in Europe in December 1672. They were put on a more regular basis by Thomas Britton (1644–1714), a small coal merchant who presented professional musicians in the room over his London shop from 1678. Conditions were not ideal: the room was “not much bigger than the Bunghole of a Cask.”
¹⁵
But Britton’s concerts featured the best artists of the day, including Handel, and they were supported by the nobility. English Church musicians, who by 1714 were called on less and less to perform at great court ceremonial occasions, used the annual Festivals of the Sons of the Clergy, a glittering charity event, to showcase their talents. By 1714 London boasted a number of regular concert halls as well as Vauxhall Gardens, where music could always be heard by a paying public. The English metropolis was “on the circuit” of great musical capitals that any touring musician had to conquer. Beyond London, the Three Choirs Festival drew singers to the cathedral cities of Gloucester, Hereford, and Worcester from 1713, while music societies were founded in a variety of English provincial cities.

The literary equivalent of a Heidegger or a Britton was the publisher and Kit-Cat Club member Jacob Tonson (1655/6–1736). He made a fortune (£50,000) selling the works of Addison, Congreve, Dryden, Milton, Prior, Swift, Vanbrugh, and Wycherley, often through subscription lists, whereby sponsors would undertake to support publication collectively. More occasional work – newspapers, essays, almanacs, political broadsides, advice books, travel books, true crime narratives – was churned out by an army of hack writers who congregated in the area around Moorfields, London, known as “Grub Street.” In particular, the late Stuart period saw the rise of the regular newspaper. There had been newspapers from before the Civil Wars, but most had ceased publication after a few issues, and the Cromwellian regime shut down all but pro-government newspapers in the 1650s. The Restoration regime continued this policy of censorship with the Licensing Act of 1662 (see chapter 9). In 1665 it established the
Gazette
as its official mouthpiece still published today. Licensing lapsed briefly during the Exclusion Crisis and several partisan newspapers flourished. After the Licensing Act expired for good in 1695,
The Post Boy, The Post Man,
and
The Flying Post
offered their own slant on the news three times a week with print runs in the thousands. In 1702 the first daily newspaper,
The Daily Courant,
appeared. By the end of George I’s reign a number of provincial newspapers would be founded, including
The Worcester Post Man, The Newcastle Courant,
and Norwich’s grandly named
Transactions of the Universe.
Not all periodical publications were strictly news-oriented. Defoe’s
Review
(1704–13) and Swift’s
Examiner
(1710–11) offered political commentary, while Addison and Steele’s
Tatler
(1709–10) and
Spectator
(1711–12 and 1714) delivered social and cultural criticism in brilliant prose essays which did much to perfect the English language and entertain the literate reader. On a less sublime level, John Dunton’s (1659–1732)
Athenian Mercury
(1690–7) answered questions on any and all subjects, popularizing the latest ideas in science and philosophy. Dunton particularly encouraged questions from women. This period saw the appearance of the first published female authors, including the playwrights Aphra Behn (1640?–89) and Susannah Centlivre (1669?–1723), the novelist and political satirist Mary Delarivière Manley (ca. 1670–1724), and the feminist social critic Mary Astell (1666–1731), whose
Some Reflections on Marriage
(1700) posed the provocative question “If all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves?”
¹⁶
But the biggest sellers were occasional, topical publications: Sacheverell’s notorious sermon on
The Perils of False Brethren
(1709) sold 100,000 copies; Defoe’s equally topical
True-Born Englishman
(1701), which satirized the xenophobia of those who opposed the Hanoverian succession, sold 80,000.

As this implies, a ready market for literature of all kinds replaced the court and noble patrons as a writer’s chief means of support. Alexander Pope, whose poetic career was just getting started as this book ends, is often described as the first writer to be able to ignore royal and aristocratic patronage almost entirely (necessarily because he was a Roman Catholic) and rely solely on his sales to an appreciative public. Behn preceded him, however, in having a successful literary career with a minimum of royal and noble encouragement. Perhaps Defoe best represents the changing relationship between writer and reading (paying) public. Today, he is best known for his great novels
Robinson Crusoe
(1719),
Moll Flanders, Journal of the Plague Year
(1722), and
Roxana
(1724). Cheap, abbreviated versions of the first two were stock-in-trade for chapmen to sell to the laboring English poor for decades, but incomplete enforcement of copyright laws (on the statute books from 1710) made it unlikely that Defoe realized much profit. Rather, it was the mercantile boosterism of his
Tour Though the Whole Island of Great Britain
(1724–6) which enriched him by its popularity among readers of the upper and middling orders (seven editions within 50 years). Increasingly after 1660, members of the merchant and professional classes could afford to imitate their betters and, so, create demand here and in other areas of consumption as well, by stocking a library, having a portrait painted, purchasing maps and prints, or outfitting themselves with clocks and watches. Engraved prints by the likes of George Vertue (1684–1756), based on portraits or landscapes, disseminated royal and aristocratic images to a wide populace. But such prints could also be political or bitingly satirical, as in
The Rake’s Progress
(1735) and other famous series’ by William Hogarth (1697–1764). Watches proclaimed status, indicating not only a certain level of wealth, but also that their owners were important enough to have to be at certain places at precise times.

Still, despite the rise of middle-class consumerism, the tone was set and the tune called by the ruling elite. If the culture of the Stuart royal court was baroque, then that of the Hanoverian aristocracy was neo-classical. That is, it consciously attempted to hearken back to a classical, especially a Roman, past. For centuries Europeans had looked to ancient Rome in the belief that the Romans had known the secret of good government, enabling them to rule over a Golden Age.

The recovery of that secret was especially appropriate for a nation that was building a great empire. British aristocrats saw themselves as latter-day Roman patricians, living in a new Augustan Age, presiding over a hierarchical society held together by patronage, paternalism, and deference. They particularly embraced the idea of
noblesse oblige
; that is, the obligation to their social inferiors to serve them in government, charity, and paternal concern. Given these attitudes, it was perhaps inevitable that the British aristocracy should imitate the Roman in culture and style as well. Members of the ruling elite learned Latin in school and often had themselves painted as Roman senators in togas. After about 1714, Britain’s neo-Palladian architects and noble patrons adapted the ideals of Andrea Palladio (1508–80) based on ancient Roman villas: exteriors should be imposing but plain, thus evoking a sense of Cato-like or Ciceronian virtue. It is true that some scholars at the time questioned whether the ancients or the moderns (i.e., their own contemporaries) possessed the greater wisdom, but most aristocrats and educated professionals would have sided with the ancients. It is also true that some modern historians would argue that Augustan
noblesse oblige
cloaked a ruthless combination of snobbery, entitlement, and acquisitiveness which ensured that its members almost always acted out of self-interest, even at their most apparently altruistic. But that is not how they would have seen it.