The change in the status of the farmer came at a time of a general growth of luxury. All classes above the poor adopted a more extravagant and ostentatious style and scale of living. This was true, for example, of sporting England. Fox-hunting dates from this century. Before the eighteenth century the amusement of the aristocracy was hunting the stag, and that of the country squire was hunting the hare. It was because Walpole kept beagles at Richmond and used to hunt once a week that the House of Commons has always made Saturday a holiday. In the Peninsular War, Wellington kept a pack of hounds at headquarters, but they were fox-hounds. In its early days fox-hunting had continued the simpler traditions of hare-hunting, and each small squire kept a few couple of hounds and brought them to the meet. Gray has described his uncle’s establishment at Burnham, where every chair in the house was taken up by a dog. But as the century advanced the sport was organised on a grander scale: the old buck-hounds and slow horses were superseded by more expensive breeds, and far greater distances were covered. Fox-hunting became the amusement both of the aristocracy and of the squires, and it resembled rather the pomp and state of stag-hunting than the modest pleasures of Walpole and his friends. In all other directions there was a general increase of magnificence in life. The eighteenth century was the century of great mansions, and some of the most splendid palaces of the aristocracy were built during the distress and famine of the French war. The ambitions of the aristocracy became the ambitions of the classes that admired them, as we know from Smollett, and Sir William Scott in 1802, speaking in favour of the non-residence of the clergy, ‘expressly said that they and their families ought to appear at watering-places, and that this was amongst the means of making them respected by their flocks!’[387]
The rich and the poor were thus growing further and further apart, and there was nobody in the English village to interpret these two worlds to each other. M. Babeau has pointed out that in France, under the ancient régime, the lawyers represented and defended in some degree the rights of the peasants. This was one consequence of the constant litigation between peasants and seigneurs over communal property. The lawyers who took the side of the peasants lived at their expense it is true, but they rendered public services, they presented the peasants’ case before public opinion, and they understood their ideas and difficulties. This explains a striking feature of the French Revolution, the large number of local lawyers who became prominent as champions of revolutionary ideas. One of Burke’s chief complaints of the Constituent Assembly was that it contained so many country attorneys and notaries, ‘the fomenters and conductors of the petty war of village vexation.’[388] In England the lawyers never occupied this position, and it is impossible to imagine such a development taking place there. The lawyers who interested themselves in the poor were enlisted not in the defence of the rights of the commoners but in the defence of the purses of the parishes. For them the all-important question was not what rights the peasant had against his lord, but on which parish he had a claim for maintenance.
The causes of litigation were endless: if a man rented a tenement of the annual value of £10 he acquired a settlement. But his rental might not have represented the annual value, and so the further question would come up, Was the annual value actually £10? ‘If it may be really not far from that sum, and the family of the pauper be numerous, the interests of the contending parishes, supported by the conflicting opinions of their respective surveyors, leads to the utmost expense and extremity of litigation.’[389] If the annual value were not in dispute there might be nice and intricate questions about the kind of tenement and the nature of the tenure: if the settlement was claimed in virtue of a contract of hiring, was the contract ‘general, special, customary, retrospective, conditional, personal’ or what not?[390] If the settlement was claimed in virtue of apprenticeship,[391] what was the nature of the indentures and so on. If claimed for an estate of £30, was the estate really worth £30, and how was it acquired? These are a few of the questions in dispute, and to add to the confusion ‘on no branch of the law have the judgments of the superior court been so contradictory.’[392]
Thus the principal occupation of those lawyers whose business brought them into the world of the poor was of a nature to draw their sympathies and interests to the side of the possessing classes, and whereas peasants’ ideas were acclimatised outside their own class in France as a consequence of the character of rural litigation and of rural lawyers, the English villager came before the lawyer, not as a client, but as a danger; not as a person whose rights and interests had to be explored and studied, but as a person whose claims on the parish had to be parried or evaded. It is not surprising, therefore, to find that both Fielding and Smollett lay great stress on the reputation of lawyers for harshness and extortion in their treatment of the poor, regarding them, like Carlyle, as ‘attorneys and law beagles who hunt ravenous on the earth.’ Readers of the adventures of Sir Launcelot Greaves will remember Tom Clarke ‘whose goodness of heart even the exercise of his profession had not been able to corrupt. Before strangers he never owned himself an attorney without blushing, though he had no reason to blush for his own practice, for he constantly refused to engage in the cause of any client whose character was equivocal, and was never known to act with such industry as when concerned for the widow and orphan or any other object that sued in forma pauperis.’ Fielding speaks in a foot-note to Tom Jones of the oppression of the poor by attorneys, as a scandal to the law, the nation, Christianity, and even human nature itself.
There was another class that might, under different circumstances, have helped to soothe and soften the isolation of the poor, but the position and the sympathies of the English Church made this impossible. This was seen very clearly by Adam Smith, who was troubled by the fear that ‘enthusiasm,’ the religious force so dreaded by the men of science and reason, would spread among the poor, because the clergy who should have controlled and counteracted it were so little in touch with the mass of the people. Under the government of the Anglican Church, as set up by the Reformation, he pointed out, ‘the clergy naturally endeavour to recommend themselves to the sovereign, to the court, and to the nobility and gentry of the country, by whose influence they chiefly expect to obtain preferment.’[393] He added that such a clergy are very apt to neglect altogether the means of maintaining their influence and authority with the lower ranks of life. The association of the Anglican Church with the governing class has never been more intimate and binding than it was during the eighteenth century. This was true alike of bishops and of clergy. The English bishop was not a gay Voltairean like the French, but he was just as zealous a member of the privileged orders, and the system over which he presided and which he defended was a faint copy of the gloriously coloured scandals of the French Church. The prelates who lived upon those scandals were described by Robespierre, with a humour that he did not often indulge, as treating the deity in the same way as the mayor of the palace used to treat the French kings. ‘Ils l’ont traité comme jadis les maires du palais traitèrent les descendants de Clovis pour régner sous son nom et se mettre à sa place. Ils l’ont relégué dans le ciel comme dans un palais, et ne l’ont appelé sur la terre que pour demander à leur profit des dîmes, des richesses, des honneurs, des plaisirs et de la puissance.’ When Archbishop Dillon declared against the civil constitution he said that he and his colleagues acted as gentlemen and not as theologians. The Archbishop of Aix spoke of tithes as a voluntary offering from the piety of the faithful. ‘As to that,’ said the Duke de la Rochefoucault, ‘there are now forty thousand cases in the Courts.’ Both these archbishops would have found themselves quite at home among the spiritual peers in the House of Lords, where the same decorous hypocrisies mingled with the same class atmosphere. For the English bishops, though they were not libertines like the French, never learnt so to be Christians as to forget to be aristocrats, and their religious duties were never allowed to interfere with the demands of scholarship or of pleasure. Perhaps the most distinguished product of this régime was Bishop Watson of Llandaff, who invented an improved gunpowder and defended Christianity against Paine and Gibbon. These were his diversions; his main business was carried on at his magnificent country seat on the banks of Windermere. He was bishop for thirty-four years, and during the whole of that time he never lived within his diocese, preferring to play the part of the grand seigneur planting trees in Westmorland. He has left a sympathetic and charming account of what he modestly calls his retirement from public life, an event not to be confused with abdication of his see, and of how he built the palace where he spent the emoluments of Llandaff and the long autumn of his life.
It was natural to men who lived in this atmosphere to see politics through the spectacles of the aristocracy. To understand how strongly the view that the Church existed to serve the aristocracy, and the rest of the State through the aristocracy, was fixed in the minds of the higher clergy, we have only to look at the case of a reformer like Bishop Horsley. The bishop is chiefly known as a preacher, a controversialist, and the author of the celebrated dictum that the poor had nothing to do with the laws except to obey them. His battle with Priestley has been compared to the encounter of Bentley and Collins, a comparison that may not give Horsley more, but certainly gives Priestley less than his due. When he preached before the House of Lords on the death of Louis XVI. his audience rose and stood in silent reverence during his peroration. The cynical may feel that it was not difficult to inspire emotion and awe in such a congregation on such a subject at such a time, but we know from De Quincey that Horsley’s reputation as a preacher stood remarkably high. He was one of the leaders of the Church in politics; for our purposes it is more important to note that he was one of the reforming bishops. Among other scandals he attacked the scandal of non-residence, and he may be taken as setting in this regard the strictest standard of his time; yet he did not scruple to go and live in Oxford for some years as tutor to Lord Guernsey, during the time that he was Rector of Newington, as plain a confession as we could want that in the estimation of the most public-spirited of the clergy the nobility had the first claims on the Church. These social sympathies were confirmed by common political interests. The privileges of the aristocracy and of the bishops were in fact bound up together, and both bishops and aristocracy had good reason to shrink from breaking a thread anywhere. Perhaps the malicious would find the most complete and piquant illustration of the relations of the Church and the governing class in the letter written by Dr. Goodenough to Addington, who had just made him Dean of Rochester, when the clerkship of the Pells, worth £3000 a year, was about to become vacant. ‘I understand that Colonel Barré is in a very precarious state. I hope you will have the fortitude to nominate Harry to be his successor.’ Harry, Addington’s son, was a boy at Winchester. The father’s fortitude rose to the emergency: the dean blossomed a little later into a bishop.
But if the French and the English bishops both belonged to the aristocracy in feelings and in habits, a great difference distinguishes the rank and file of the clergy in the two countries. The French priest belonged by circumstances and by sympathy to the peasant class. The bishop regarded the country curé as un vilain sentant le fumier, and treated him with about as much consideration as the seigneur showed to his dependants. The priest’s quarrel with the bishop was like the peasant’s quarrel with the seigneur: for both priest and peasant smarted under the arrogant airs of their respective superiors, and the bishop swallowed up the tithes as the seigneur swallowed up the feudal dues. Sometimes the curé put himself at the head of a local rebellion. In the reign of Louis XV. the priests round Saint-Germain led out their flocks to destroy the game which devoured their crops, the campaign being announced and sanctified from the pulpit. In the Revolution the common clergy were largely on the side of the peasants. Such a development was inconceivable in England. As the curé’s windows looked to the village, the parson’s windows looked to the hall. When the parson’s circumstances enabled him to live like the squire, he rode to hounds, for though, as Blackstone tells us, Roman Canon Law, under the influence of the tradition that St. Jerome had once observed that the saints had eschewed such diversions, had interdicted venationes et sylvaticas vagationes cum canibus et accipitribus to all clergymen, this early severity of life had vanished long before the eighteenth century. He treated the calls of his profession as trifling accidents interrupting his normal life of vigorous pleasure. On becoming Bishop of Chester, Dr. Blomfield astonished the diocese by refusing to license a curate until he had promised to abstain from hunting, and by the pain and surprise with which he saw one of his clergy carried away drunk from a visitation dinner. One rector, whom he rebuked for drunkenness, replied with an injured manner that he was never drunk on duty.
There were, it is true, clergymen of great public spirit and devoted lives, and such men figure in these pages, but the Church, as a whole, was an easy-going society, careful of its pleasures and comforts, living with the moral ideas and as far as possible in the manner of the rich. The rivalry of the Methodist movement had given a certain stimulus to zeal, and the Vicar of Corsley in Wilts,[394] for example, added a second service to the duties of the Sunday, though guarding himself expressly against the admission of any obligation to make it permanent. But it was found impossible to eradicate from the system certain of the vices that belong to a society which is primarily a class. Some of the bishops set themselves to reduce the practice of non-residence. Porteus, Bishop of London, devoted a great part of his charge to his clergy in 1790 to this subject, and though he pleaded passionately for reform he cannot be said to have shut his eyes to the difficulties of the clergy. ‘There are, indeed, two impediments to constant residence which cannot easily be surmounted; the first is (what unfortunately prevails in some parts of this diocese) unwholesomeness of situation; the other is the possession of a second benefice. Yet even these will not justify a total and perpetual absence from your cures. The unhealthiness of many places is of late years by various improvements greatly abated, and there are now few so circumstanced as not to admit of residence there in some part of the year without any danger to the constitution.’ Thus even Bishop Porteus, who in this very charge reminded the clergy that they were called by the titles of stewards, watchmen, shepherds, and labourers, never went the length of thinking that the Church was to be expected to minister to the poor in all weathers and in all climates.