fled to Europe and to America. John Milton escaped with his life, partly due to the pleading of Andrew Marvell. They were both lucky since, with John Dryden, they had marched in Cromwell’s funeral cortege.
There was political retreat, but the state machine was not restored to its condition under Charles I. The French ambassador to the court of Charles II observed, ‘It has a monarchical appearance, and there is a king, but it is very far from being a monarchy.’62 Socially and economically it was even harder to push the wheel of revolution back. On the land feudal tenures had been abolished in 1646, a mighty blow to medieval relations in the countryside, and as soon as Charles II was on the throne he confirmed that abolition.
The Royal Society and the Bank of England can stand as the two symbols of the longer-term deep impact of the revolution. The Royal Society, established in 1660, owed its origins to a group established at Gresham College in the heart of the City in 1645, dedicated to furthering scientific study for business purposes. Scientifically and philosophically cutting-edge ideas would never be subordinate to the Church again. The philosopher John Locke was not a Leveller, but without what they did and thought, his work was inconceivable. In the movement’s wake, work like that of Locke, across the whole spectrum of science and philosophy, could no longer be suppressed. The Bank of England was not established until six years after the ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688 had put an end to absolutist ambitions once and for all, and effectively subordinated the monarchy to the wider governing classes. It made loan capital available on a greater scale, an essential feature of a capitalist economy. Guilds and monopolies were gone and the merchants and money men were now free of the Crown, even if the Crown was not free of them.
The Great Fire of 1666 marked the physical extermination of the old City that had given birth to the revolution. And although it was not rebuilt on the grid-plan that Christopher Wren favoured, it was still a new city in many ways. The Restoration had meant a loss of power for democratic movements in the City as well as in national government. Small masters were driven to the margins in the City companies. But industrial struggles began to assume a more modern form. There were strikes, mutinies and combinations in pursuit of higher wages at the Royal Dockyards in the 1660s. And in the following decade, as London was rebuilt after the Great Fire, sawyers tried to form craft unions. Machine-breaking began: in 1675 a few hundred ribbon weavers, ‘good commonwealth’s men’, broke into houses and destroyed the machines that were putting them out of a job. Cloth workers refused to work for less than twelve shillings a week. ‘The trend of economic development’, says Christopher Hill, ‘was in the direction of sharper differentiation between classes; a landless working class dependent on wage labour increased, the yeomanry and the masters declined.’63
The apprentices, so central to the London crowd of the revolution, had been growing fewer even in the 1640s. The new bosses who emerged fortified by the revolution hastened that decline and a new class was formed, and formed itself, from the same human material. But it took a century in the making. And it formed itself out of long decades of struggle for the democracy that had seemed so tantalizingly close in the 1640s, but had been receding ever since.
The settlement of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was the political expression of this new social reality. Absolutism and the Stuarts were gone for good. Constitutional monarchy, albeit a constitution in which the monarch retained real power, was its replacement. But within this new framework, even at the beginning, the new money men were more powerful than they had ever been. In the decades that followed they were set to become more powerful still.
4
Old Corruption and the Mob That Can Read
And because I am happy and dance and sing
They think they have done me no injury
And are gone to praise God and his priest and king
Who make up a heaven of our misery.
William Blake
OLIGOPOLIS
By the eighteenth century, the elite that ruled Britain and its pre-eminent city, London, was one of the most unaccountable, unrepresentative and inhumane ever known. The wealth generated through trade and a developing empire, the political success of the Act of Union with Scotland and the lack of any democratic control from below all helped to produce an oligarchy whose main aim was the creation of fabulous wealth, regardless of the human or social consequences. Politics was run by a small elite of Whigs and Tories who presided over the networks of a unified, London-based, political, business and office-holding class. Conversely, the vast majority of the population had no say in who was elected: ‘There were a few constituencies where perhaps 10 per cent of the male electorate could vote, but these were easily outnumbered by the “rotten boroughs”, where the Member was effectively nominated by his patron, a lord or a landowner or both.’1 The rotten boroughs and pocket boroughs ensured no wider democratic mandate, leading to a rampant corruption and of politics dominated by greed, self-interest, corruption and careerism.
London was the centre of this ‘Old Corruption’ and, housing more than a tenth of the whole population of England and Wales, dominated the rest of the country: ‘London was then far more important commercially, industrially, and socially, in relation to the rest of the country than it has ever been since. . . . The only place it could be compared with was Paris, and people were fond of discussing which was the larger and which the more wicked.’2
A city which grew at such speed exhibited many of the features we now associate with cities in the developing world: precarious living, slum dwelling, and no support mechanisms for the poor; unbounded and ostentatious wealth for the rich. As a result of the appalling death rate the city relied on a population born and brought up elsewhere to increase its size. That changed around the middle of the century, when mortality began to fall. ‘In towns deaths exceeded births, and yet the towns continued to grow. It was clear that they grew only at the expense of the healthier country districts; London, in particular, was regarded as a devouring monster.’3
The London of the eighteenth century was a city in transition. At its beginning, England had not long before reached the political settlement known as the Glorious Revolution which marked a compromise with its turbulent seventeenth-century past. The nation was establishing itself as the world’s number one trading and imperial power, but industry was still based on small craft and artisan production, while politics was not clearly defined on a modern class or economic basis.
Nevertheless, the city was starting to become more defined: the enclosure of the docks changed the patterns of work on and around the river and launched a new era of trade. Streets and buildings encroached more onto traditional open space, creating new areas and suburbs. Between 1720 and 1745, five of the great London hospitals, including Guys, came into existence and by 1800 there was the beginning of serious attempts to regulate the city in terms of health and housing, as well as law and order.4 In the last decades of the century, there were also improvements in London streets through paving, lighting and drainage: ‘In the [1780s] the pavements, the street-lamps, the water supply, and the sewers of London were regarded as marvels. It is worth noting that foreign visitors were deeply impressed with the safety of pedestrians in London.’5 This freedom was connected by some with the wider issues of liberty: ‘their laws are not made and executed entirely by people who always ride in chariots.’6
Politically, this was a time of hiatus among working people: they had left behind the radicalism of the English Revolution, although it lingered on in many forms. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, poets like Blake defined themselves in terms of the radical impetuses of that revolution, and E. P. Thompson recalls how ‘the wilder sectaries of the English revolution . . . were never totally extinguished, with their literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation and their anticipations of a New Jerusalem descending from above. The Muggletonians (followers of the tailor-prophet
