7 - The Challenges of Peace

Summary

PEACE CAME AS a relief after more than two decades of war. Instead of drawing political dividends from the victory, however, Liverpool faced a hostility that limited his options. While most governments undergo the most strain at their start or end, his administration faced its greatest challenge in its middle years when public discontent and parliamentary opposition kept ministers on their heels. Its strengths as a wartime government, as Liverpool had recognized earlier, dissipated or became liabilities in peace. Country gentlemen and others who backed ministers during the struggle now blamed them for economic distress or court profligacy. Loyalism became a rapidly depreciating asset while the charge of sympathizing with a foreign enemy no longer checked parliamentary opposition. The scale of wartime dislocation also made postwar economic adjustment more painful. While a younger generation accepted wartime patterns as the new normal, those who remembered conditions before 1793 sought a return to what they considered normalcy. Ministers thus faced competing pressures. Any decision aroused complaint which newspapers amplified. Sharp downturns in the economic cycle and political agitation catalyzed unrest. Thrown on the defensive, Liverpool struggled to respond amidst successive crises.

The war had imposed a heavy financial burden. Taxes normally between 8 and 10 percent during the eighteenth century peaked between 1793 and 1815 at 20 percent of England's national income. Revenue not only paid current expenses, but also covered interest on loans and a sinking fund to repay debt. Peace brought demands for retrenchment. Renewed concerns about taxes reinforced much older rhetoric attacking the supposedly parasitical system known as “old corruption” that enabled the elite to feed its appetite for money and power at public expense. War had expanded the size of civilian administration since the 1790s, along with the armed forces and national debt. William Cobbett, a loyalist turned radical, joined in attacking government pensions, church preferment, and contracts funded by burdensome taxation, along with financial policies that benefitted vested interests in agriculture, shipping, and finance at the expense of consumers.