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Civic Humanism and Parliamentary Reform: The Case of the Society of the Friends of the People

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 January 2014

Iain Hampsher-Monk
Iain Hampsher-Monk*
Affiliation:
University of Exeter
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Extract

The tradition of thought known as civic humanism has recently occupied the attention of a number of commentators. Not only has it been examined in the place of its birth, Renaissance Italy, and more especially Florence, but in a recent work J. G. A. Pocock has traced the influence of the tradition in seventeenth and eighteenth-century England, and finally in the New World. The question considered here is the particular use to which civic modes of thought and argument were put by a group of moderate reformers in the debates on parliamentary reform in the last two decades of the eighteenth century. Although this period has received attention from social and constitutional historians, it has not been discussed by historians of ideas.

Civic humanism is both an analysis of a political problem and a range of recommendations as to how the problem is best to be solved. The problem is defined in terms of the deleterious effects of time on political organization. Human organizations rely on the ordered and rule-governed behavior of individuals. Such behavior exhibits, over time, a constant tendency to disintegrate into selfish action. Political and legal institutions provide the immediate incentives to prevent this happening. Yet how can these institutions themselves be safeguarded or rendered self-regulating?

The solution to the problem of achieving political stability through time is seen essentially as a moral solution, that is to say it is seen to lie in the creation of a particular set of attitudes towards political life amongst the citizens of the polity.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 18 , Issue 2 , Spring 1979 , pp. 70 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1979

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References

1. A number of the essays in Pocock's, J. G. A.Politics, Language and Time (New York, 1971)Google Scholar explore this current of thought, and the notion of tradition in general. Major studies on the tradition in Renaissance Italy have been Baron, H., The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance (Princeton, 1966)Google Scholar, and Garin, E., Italian Humanism: Philosophy and Civic Life in the Renaissance (New York, 1965)Google Scholar. Seminal to the study of English civic humanism was Fink, Z. S., The Classical Republicans (Evanston, 1945)Google Scholar; recent interest in the field was largely stimulated by Raab, F., The English Face of Machiavelli (London, 1964)Google Scholar. Use of the tradition in eighteenth-century England is discussed in Kramnick, I., Bolingbroke and his Circle: the Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole (Cambridge, 1968)Google Scholar, and in America most notably by Bailyn, B., The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, 1967)Google Scholar.

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3. A now ageing but reliable history of the period is to be found in Veitch, G. S., The Genesis of Parliamentary Reform (London, 1913 and 1965)Google Scholar.

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5. The locus classicus for this analysis is Machiavelli, , Discourses, I, viGoogle Scholar.

6. The Augustan reaction to this is discussed in Kramnick, Bolingbroke, and Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment, Ch. xiii.

7. On the role of Mandeville, see Goldsmith, M. M., “Public Virtue and Private Vices,” Eighteenth Century Studies, 9, No. 4 (1976), 477–510CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Mandeville and the Spirit of Capitalism,” J. B. S., XVII, No. 1 (Fall, 1977), 63–81Google Scholar.

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12. Ibid., 462-63.

13. See, for example, his speech on the King's message respecting seditious practices, and the suspension of the Habeas Corpus act, 12 May 1794, in Fox's Speeches during the French Revolutionary War (London, n.d.), p. 180Google Scholar.

14. For the history of the early agitation, see Butterfield, H., George III, Lord North and the People 1779-80 (London, 1949)Google Scholar.

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16. Regulations of the Society, Wyvill, , Papers III, (appendix), 132Google Scholar. Resolution …, 12 May 1792, B. L. 816.k.4 (4), pp. 3-4.

17. See, for example, ibid., pp. 6-7; Wyvill, , Papers IIIGoogle Scholar, (appendix), 167-68. Their tactical equivocation over the British Convention was flung in their face by Pitt whilst Grey was protesting the Society's loyalty and constitutionalism during the reform debate the following year. See Parl. Hist., XXX, 890Google Scholar.

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20. Quoted without reference in Cone, C. B., The English Jacobins (New York, 1968), p. 129Google Scholar.

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24. See Wyvill's letter to Brand Hollis on 24 March 1794, which seems to refer to this plan (Wyvill, , Papers, V, 234)Google Scholar. For the proposals themselves, see the Plan for a Reform of the Election of the House of Commons, in the Pamphleteer, IX (1817), p. 548Google Scholar; and in Wyvill, , Papers, V, xixGoogle Scholar.

25. See, for example, the debate over Grey's motion to bring in a reform bill, when owing to the imprecision of the demands, Burke, Pitt, and others succeeded in associating the Friends of the People with supporters of Paine. Again in the petitioning activity of 1793, the Friends failed to co-ordinate the contributions from the country (see Veitch, , The Genesis …, p. 281Google Scholar). Consequently although their own petition, the supposed culmination of the campaign, was moderate enough, many of the earlier offerings from the provinces were extreme, or improperly addressed, or had been printed beforehand, for the purpose, Burke claimed, “of influencing the country, and only come (to Parliament) in the second instance.” Parl. Hist., XXX, 786Google Scholar.

26. Tierney to Grey, 20 Oct. 1792. Quoted in Trevelyan, G. M., Lord Grey of the Reform Bill (London, 1929), p. 60Google Scholar.

27. Wyvill, , Papers, III, (appendix), 156Google Scholar.

28. For the insistence, much emphasized by subsequent thinkers, on the need to return to first principles, see Machiavelli, , Discourses, III, iGoogle Scholar. In the example quoted here, the first principles seem to refer to the trusteeship between governor and governed; this was often claimed on the authority of Locke, Two Treatises of Government, II, 240Google Scholar.

29. A Defence of Dr. Price and the Reformers of England, Wyvill, , Papers, III, (appendix), 25–26Google Scholar.

30. Wyvill, , Papers, III, (appendix), 269–70Google Scholar; earlier, during the ‘county movement’, Wyvill and his associated Yorkshiremen had expressed an even more explicitly neo-Harringtonian account of English history:

The balance of our Constitution had been wisely placed by our forefathers in the hands of the counties and principal cities and towns; but by the caprice and partiality of our Kings, from Henry VI down to Charles II it was gradually withdrawn from them … irregular exercise of Royal authority have been farther increased by the silent operation of time.

(Address of the Committee of Association of the County of York, in Wyvill, , Papers, I, 310Google Scholar). As early as this period, too, Wyvill demonstrates his familiarity with Harrington's writings, citing his historical evidence in favor of the ballot during a county meeting at Middlesex, 14 Feb. 1780 (Wyvill, , Papers, IV, 325Google Scholar).

31. Report of a Debate on Universal Suffrage, B.L. 8135.c.6l, p. 5.

32. Wyvill, , Papers, V, xvGoogle Scholar.

33. The Plan …, in The Pamphleteer, IX, p. 548Google Scholar.

34. See Isaac Kramnick's excellent study of Bolingbroke from this perspective, Bolingbroke and his Circle: The Politics of Nostalgia in the Age of Walpole.

35. A Defence …, Wyvill, , Papers, III, (appendix), 76, 78Google Scholar.

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37. Ibid., 566.

38. Ibid., 563.

39. Report of a Debate on Universal Suffrage, B.L. 8135.c.61, pp. 7, 8.

40. A Letter, Wyvill, , Papers, IV, 568Google Scholar.

41. Declaration of Principles (1795), Wyvill, , Papers, V, xixGoogle Scholar. The difficulties experienced by Augustan civic humanists in coming to terms with the growth of trade were considerable, but with the sophistication of the economy it was the image of credit that largely supplanted that of trade or commerce as a threat to the polity. For a discussion of Defoe's personification of credit as a fickle woman, presented as a reincarnation of the renaissance Fortuna, see Pocock, , The Machiavellian Movement, pp. 452–55Google Scholar. Defoe attempted to show the circumstances in which Credit (Fortuna) became susceptible to human control (virtu); these involved liberty, Protestantism etc., the practice of such virtue is still capable of controlling the new forms in which the irrational Fortuna manifests herself. Pocock's succinct presentation of the dilemma facing the Augustan humanist attempting to reconcile trade and the civic mentality is on pp. 456-59.

42. The Plan …, in The Pamphleteer, IX, 557Google Scholar; Wyvill, , Papers, V, xxGoogle Scholar.

43. Report of a Debate on Universal Suffrage, B.L. 8135.c.61, p. 8.

44. Toland, John (ed.), The Oceana and other Works (London, 1774), p. 227Google Scholar; quoted by Pocock, , Politics, Language and Time, p. 91Google Scholar.

45. See Woodhouse, A. S. P. (ed.), Puritanism and Liberty (London, 1950), p. 84Google Scholar, for Ireton's willingness to extend the franchise within this principle, also the second “Agreement of the People” the Foundations of Freedom, in the composition of which he played a vociferous part, pp. 342-67.

46. A Letter, Wyvill, , Papers, IV, 562Google Scholar; see also The Plan, ibid., V, xvii.

47. A Letter, ibid., IV, 564, 565.

48. A Defence …, ibid., III, (appendix), 76.

49. Ibid., 26.

50. The Plan for a Reform, ibid., V, xx.

51. Ibid., xxi.

52. Ibid., xxii.

53. Ibid., xix.

54. Ibid.

55. Ibid., xx.

56. Reflections on the Revolution in France (Harmondsworth, 1968), p. 150Google Scholar.

57. John Thelwall attempted to explain how natural rights might still be calculated and distributed in a developed society and went some way to explaining the historical processes by which a laboring class might hope to become aware and organize itself. See his Rights of Nature against the Usurpations of Establishments (London, 1796)Google Scholar, Letter II, passim; Letter I, 19.

58. See Brewer, John, “Rockingham, Burke and Whig Political Argument,” Hist. Jo., XVIII, 1 (1975), 197–200Google Scholar.