Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, Part III: That Old Whig Harangue, contd.

At around the mid-point of the aforementioned Part I, Section II of Observations, Richard Price put forward a rather pointed interpretation of the kind of “degenerated” government he believed would result from a break in the essential connection between public institutions and the general population. “But if they are chosen,” he affirmed, referring to the delegates intended to represent the needs of the public,

For long terms by a part only of the state; and if during that term they are subject to no controul from their constituents; the very idea of Liberty will be lost, and the power of chusing constituents becomes nothing but a power, lodged in a few, to chuse, at certain periods, a body of Masters for themselves and for the rest of the Community. And if a state is so sunk that the body of representatives are elected by a handful of the meanest persons in it, whose votes are always paid for; and if also, there is a higher will on which even these mock representatives themselves depend, and that directs their voices: In these circumstances, it will be an abuse of language to say that the state possesses Liberty.

Begging forgiveness for the length of the above citation, a number of the ideas expressed therein are worth exploring in greater depth.

The ideal term of office of members of Parliament, for instance, was a specific point of contention within the traditional Country/Court dichotomy. Whereas the latter preferred longer period between elections – normally between seven years and five years – the most ardent partisans of the former argued that the best means of ensuring that MPs remained in touch with the needs of their constituents was to have them sit for only one year at a time. As this would have represented a radical departure from the established traditions of English/British representative government, it was not adopted at any point between the pinnacle of Country Party influence in the 1720s and the time of Price’s writing in the mid-1770s. While this accordingly made it something less than a novel proposal at the time Observations was published, it was at also something more than a dead issue. Certainly Price would not have counted himself among the socio-political mainstream by thus advocating for the annual election of MPs, but nor could it be denied that the issue at hand – i.e. legislative accountability – remained an ongoing concern. Of similar provenance was Price’s fear that the task of selecting representatives to sit in Parliament might conceivably become the privilege of, “The few […] whose votes are always paid for [.]”

The contemporary Parliament of Great Britain, it bears recalling, had become fairly unrepresentative by the end of the 18^th century. Constituency boundaries had remained largely static since the Medieval era, in spite of population growth and internal migration, resulting in a number of so-called “rotten boroughs” that continued to elect MPs in spite of the fact that their qualified voting populations had declined to single digit numbers. The perhaps inevitable consequence of this radical power imbalance – i.e. thousands of people sharing a single representative in one district while less than ten in another had two MPs between them – was that certain seats in Parliament became the exclusive property of the local landed gentry. Customarily, these seats were either assigned to family members or allies of the landlord in question or they were sold to whoever was willing to pay the appropriate price. Having to buy or intimidate only a handful of voters, these borough lords were thus able to increase their influence in Parliament, reward their children or their friends with prestigious public offices, or else enrich themselves at the expense of those who were comparatively under-represented. As the 18^th century transitioned into the 19^th century, the manifest injustice of this arrangement would only grow worse. In response to the economic and demographic forces unleashed by the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution (c.1760-1840), formerly middling urban centers like Manchester and Birmingham would grow by leaps and bounds, often at the expense of neighboring rural boroughs. As constituency boundaries remained unchanged, the result was further underrepresentation of Great Britain’s growing urban population and the continued overrepresentation of its landed elites.  

Ironically enough, though Price appeared to identify both with the traditions of the Country Party and contemporary agitators for parliamentary reform, it was the rural gentry from which the former originated that benefited directly from the existence of the aforementioned rotten boroughs. Consider, by way of example, the case of Old Saurm. A former cathedral town which gradually became deserted over the course of the 13^th and 14^th centuries, the borough continued to elect two MPs even once it ceased to contain any permanent residents. The designated households – which had become essentially a legal fiction by the end of the 17^th century – were assigned by the local landlord whenever it came time to vote. Elections in Old Sarum were thus wholly pro forma affairs, conducted more for the look of the thing than because there was any need to determine whom its “residents” would send to Westminster. Bizarre though this arrangement may have been, however, the thing about Old Saurm that makes it especially curious in hindsight is that for many years it was the personal property of the influential Pitt family. Having purchased the relevant land in Wiltshire in the 1670s, East India merchant Thomas Pitt (1652-1726) proceeded to both hold the seat himself and grant it to his son Robert Pitt (1680-1727). Robert’s son – also named Thomas Pitt (1705-1761) – later came into possession of the Old Sarum properties, upon which he, too, took one of the accompanying seats in Parliament or else assigned it to his younger brother. This is worth noting because the younger son of Robert Pitt was none other than William Pitt (1708-1778), Whig luminary and noted critic of the Walpole Ministry who made a career of opposing the centralization of power in the cabinet and championed the traditional liberties and prerogatives of Parliament.

Not only was William Pitt one of the most influential Whig statesmen of his era – having led Britain, alongside the Duke of Newcastle (1693-1768), to a successful conclusion in the Seven Years War (1754-1763) – but he had been one of the leaders of the “Patriots,” a political faction in the mold of the Country Party whose avowed enemies were corruption, ministerial tyranny, and political patronage. Richard Price, it should by now almost go without saying, was very much of this same ideological persuasion. Price’s patron Lord Shelburne was one of Pitt’s closest allies in Parliament, he hosted Pitt in his home in Newington Green more than once during his residence there, and his opposition to political centralization, government corruption, and the influence of banking on politics placed him squarely in the contemporary Pittite camp. In spite of the fact that Pitt was himself the beneficiary of 18^th century Britain’s unrepresentative Parliament, however, the text of Observations makes it clear that Price was very much in favor of constituency reform. As given voice in the passage cited above, his desire seemed generally to be amenable to the Country Part/Patriot position – i.e. that Parliament ought to represent the whole of Great Britain rather just the wealthy magnates whose personal fortunes helped fund the government’s debt. Doubtless Pitt himself would have raised no objection. The same perhaps could not be said of Price’s caution that, “The very idea of Liberty will be lost, and the power of chusing constituents becomes nothing but a power, lodged in a few, to chuse, at certain periods, a body of Masters for themselves and for the rest of the Community.”

Pitt, for better or worse, was one of those few, and one of those masters. Whatever he had made of his career in public service – i.e. a great deal – it undeniably began when he used the rotten borough that his grandfather had purchased in the 1670s to become the MP for Old Sarum in 1735. This was, of course, a matter of public record. By that it should be taken as a given that Price was aware of the fact itself. From this seeming contradiction – Price being a friend and ally, in his battle against corruption and for reform, of a man who benefitted directly from the unreformed state of Britain’s political institutions – one might fairly extrapolate that not every conviction he held and expressed coordinated exactly with those nurtured by the traditional currents of opposition thought. Price was most definitely influenced by the earlier agitations of the Country Party. And he was also almost certainly among the Patriot Whigs that emerged in opposition to the centralizing Walpole governments of the 1730s and 1740s. But none of these associations or influences should be imagined to have restrained him from adopting positions that were more radical than – or that even defied the power – the foundering members of these very same factions. Price was, after all, a Non-Conformist Protestant minister whose youth was shaped by that community’s necessary penchant for self-reliance. It perhaps also bears noting that a number of his friends and allies – the aforementioned women’s rights campaigner Elizabeth Montagu, for example, or the chemist and metaphysical theorist Joseph Priestly – were supporters of the kinds of radical socio-political improvement that would have caused even the generally liberal Whig mainstream to raise a skeptical eyebrow. While it is therefore far from inaccurate to describe much of what Price advocated for in the text of Observations as falling within the established orthodoxy of the Country Party and its successors, this assertion should not be held to apply to every conviction he expressed therein. 

That being said, it would be difficult to read Price’s warning that if, in the context of a elected legislature, “There is a higher will on which even these mock representatives themselves depend, and that directs their voices: In these circumstances, it will be an abuse of language to say that the state possesses Liberty [,]” without being reminded very distinctly of one of the Country Party’s principle complaints. By their reckoning – as by that of the Patriots, the Old Whigs, and whatever other pseudo-populist opposition group was then making waves – the greatest threat to the liberties of the British citizen was the usurpation of the authority of the traditional elite at the hands of a shadowy cabal of bankers, merchants, and bureaucrats. These financial and mercantile interests notably included the directors and shareholder of the Bank of England, none of whom were appointed by or accountable to either Parliament or its constituents. In spite of being functionally a private venture, the Bank had become – since its inception in 1694 – integral to the fiscal-military apparatus of the contemporary British Empire. Its loans funded expansions of the army and the navy, it sold shares in joint-stock ventures that often depended on government support and included cabinet ministers among their shareholders, and it managed the national debt on behalf of the Treasury. It was thus have been far from alarmist or excessive to say that the Bank held a fair bit of sway with whatever government happened to hold the confidence of the sitting House of Commons.

This state of affairs understandably made people of a certain persuasion anxious. One of the fundamental principles of the British Constitution – affirmed most recently during the Glorious Revolution (1688) – was that there existed in Britain no authority superior to that of Parliament. Even the Crown, for all its accustomed prerogatives, was bound by the laws that the House of Commons and the House of Lords collectively affirmed. While the mere existence of the Bank of England didn’t necessarily call this precept into question – though it perhaps bears noting that the Glorious Revolution occurred before the Bank was chartered – the effect of its existence certainly seemed to threaten the erosion of its validity in practice. Parliament may well have remained legally superior, but what was that superiority worth if governments were functionally bound to conduct all of their financial business through a privately owned and operated corporation? What did it matter that Parliament’s laws were paramount if the unelected directors and shareholders of the Bank of England could determine their character by threatening to withhold critical loans? The events of the 18^th century – during which the British economy expanded and industrialized at the same time that its military seemed to engage in one sustained conflict after another – begged exactly these kinds of questions, particularly as Britain’s colonial empire grew and its financial commitments in North America, the Caribbean, and particularly India increased. In light of how wealthy the British state had become, and how much of that wealth the Bank’s funding had made possible, it would have been far from idle to wonder to what extent Parliament alone – and though its members, the voting public – continued to shape public policy.

That Richard Price gave voice to precisely this anxiety in his published Observations – printed, again, in the early months of 1776 – accordingly says a great deal about his ideological convictions and the way that he viewed the state of public affairs in contemporary Britain. As discussed above, the Bank of England had been around for over eighty years by the time of Price’s writing. In that time it had more than proven its usefulness to Britain’s governing elite. Facing an incipient rebellion in the Thirteen Colonies – and having just concluded a tremendously expensive war with its most powerful continental rivals – the prospect of paying out the necessary costs would doubtless have seemed inconceivable without the loans that the Bank could guarantee. For Price to nonetheless lament the supposed influence of a “higher will” upon the affairs of state would thus seem to place him at odds with a long-established status quo on which far too much had come to depend for a reversal to realistically be made. Perhaps the Bank had indeed taken to exerting more sway over public policy than was strictly healthy in a society that continued to pride itself on its regard for individual liberty. But Price would have been among the minority of those who continued to identify themselves as Whigs whose convictions would evidently not allow them to see the Bank as anything other than a threat. It would thus appear reasonably fair to characterize him as a particularly ardent – and, in some sense, retrograde – devotee of at least this core aspect of the traditional Country Party ideology.