The Culture of Self-interest and the Rise of ‘Old corruption’

This is work in progress and hence apologies for its rather rough and ready state! Please do not cite without permission from Mark Knights .

This paper explores the relationship between fiction and partisanship in early eighteenth century Britain and, in much less depth, in Britain America. It begins with some case studies of controversial partisans in order to show how self-interest and hypocrisy were frequently fictionalised. I then wish to account for this focus on disparities between the outward personas of politicians and their inner ‘secret’ selves and to explore how this can be related to anxieties about corruption, a term that has to be treated in its widest sense. This in turn not only challenges a narrative about politeness but also the link that has frequently been drawn between the Walpolean era and corruption. The assumption that Walpole created a new system of governance has proved remarkable enduring largely because criticism of Plumb’s thesis has focused on his claims about instability rather than on his claim that Walpole was the architect of a new system of governance. Plumb argued that it was single-party government after 1715 that first captured the patronage system and then used the overlapping of legislature and executive to produce stable government. But, as Clayton Roberts pointed out in a rather neglected intervention, partisan conflict from the 1670s onwards was instrumental in capturing the patronage system. The rage of party helped create the system more often associated with Walpole’s single-party oligarchy.

In 1709 the first woman to earn her living as a journalist, Delarivier Manley, published two volumes scandal novel, The New Atalantis, for which she was interrogated by the government and briefly imprisoned.[1] The novel was a series of satirical and thinly veiled treatments of the lives of prominent (chiefly Whig) politicians. One extended vignette, with which the first volume culminates, tells the story of a lecherous father and his two sons, Hernando and Mosco. The latter is a predatory figure who, despite being married, preys on a pretty Quaker heiress who has fallen for him. Placing her entire fortune in Mosco’s hands, Zara the Quaker implores him to cohabit with her:

Things are come to that height. I can't bear to live and not possess you all. Will you do as you promised? Will you live with me? Shall I have that sanction for my passion? My fortune may be wholly at your disposal. I will even do all that's necessary to please my mother, in whose power it is to double it. She will no longer oppose my inclinations, when she finds you give me that proof of yours. You have but to cohabit with me to make you master of hers as well as mine. I am asking no new thing. 'Twas but what your self first proposed, the artifice by which you drew me to give you the last proof of my love, and without which I should have believed that concession highly criminal. Persons of our persuasion [Quakers] promise nothing but what they are sure to perform; you well know their very word to them is a law.

But, having enjoyed her and her money, Mosco now grew tired of her frequent requests to live with her and cast her off. The distraught Zara committed suicide by drowning herself.

Mosco’s brother, Hernando, is similarly married and sexually predatory on other women. Hernando uses his lawyer’s silvery tongue to persuade his pretty young ward, Elizabeth, that bigamy was lawful. The occasion was a trip to an opera which dramatised a woman who married a second husband, unaware that the first was still alive. Elizabeth, ‘who did not often see such representations, became extremely moved at this. Her young breasts heaved with sorrow, the tears filled her eyes’. Taking advantage of this outburst of emotion, Hernando defended ‘the lawfulness of double marriages’. He admitted that:

in all ages, women had been appropriated: that, for the benefit and distinction of children, with other necessary occurrences, polygamy had been justly denied the sex since the coldness of their constitutions, the length of time they carried their children and other incidents seemed to declare against them; but for a man who possessed an uninterrupted capacity of propagating the species and must necessarily find all the inconveniencies above-mentioned in any one wife, the law of nature, as well as the custom of many nations and most religions, seemed to declare for him.

And then came his masterstroke: countries that tolerated polygamy and concubinage were in fact more moral than Europe: ‘their manners in all things are less adulterated than ours, their veracity, morality, and habit of living less corrupted: that, in pretending to reform their abuses, Europe had only refined their vices’. Although Hernando condemned promiscuity, he argued that if more than one woman was ‘appropriated to one man, they were so far from transgressing, that they but fulfilled the law of nature’. Indeed ‘a young lady ought never to oppose those good inclinations she might find in her self towards a married man because she was gratifying at one time both her passion and her duty’. Yielding at last to his argument, Elizabeth at last ‘consented to marry him’, for while she ‘could admit of polygamy’, she ‘would not hear a word of concubinage’. William hurriedly arranged a mock marriage, in which brother Mosco dressed up as a French protestant minister—a Huguenot—disguising himself further with a wig and ‘speaking à la Française’ with plum stones in his mouth, in order to conduct the bogus and secret ceremony. Spencer then disappeared in a coach, leaving his brother with his second ‘wife’.

To a twenty first century reader this is, perhaps, not great literature; but it was great satire. For Manley’s fiction was a version of the lives of two prominent Whig politicians, Spencer and William Cowper. Their father, Sir William Cowper, had been one of the first Whigs, an associate of his namesake Anthony Ashley Cowper, first earl of Shaftesbury. Both his sons joined William III at the revolution of 1688, riding to join his army and subsequently became Whig MPs. William eventually rose to become Lord Chancellor and his brother became a provincial judge. Manley’s story about them had some basis in fact. The family’s electoral hold over the town of Hertford, where they lived, was temporarily destroyed when in 1699 Spencer, Cowper was tried for the murder of a Quaker heiress, Sarah Stout, a prosecution encouraged and even made possible by the testimony of three local doctors, all part of the same family (the Dimsdales) that had very close ties to the Tory, High Church opponents of the Cowpers. Indeed one of them, doctor John Dimsdale, was Sir William Cowper’s long-time enemy and the town’s serving mayor, who had tried to monopolise power by remaining in office for four consecutive years. Spencer Cowper’s trial had thus became part of the contest for power between the two contending interest groups. Rival groups of doctors gave evidence on both sides of what proved to be one of the first cases in which forensic evidence played a significant role. Amongst Cowper’s expert medical witnesses were the foremost anatomist in Europe, a prominent Whig wit and the future founder of the British Museum.

Allegations of self-interest featured prominently in the trial. Spencer, a grasping lawyer, was alleged to have embezzled Sarah Stout’s money - her father, a wealthy brewer, had left her a fortune that Spencer sought to invest for her, though Sarah’s family suspected him of greed and malpractice. Spencer’s defence turned on a rival notion of selfishness for, he claimed, Sarah Stout had fallen in love with him, a passion frustrated by his marriage and her Quaker roots; her self-obsesses melancholia drove her to commit suicide. In his version of events, rather than Christ living within her, as Quakers believed, she had made room for her own selfish desires, an interpretation lent weight by her apparent desire to buy fine silks, carouse with her friends and sing songs, all things forbidden by Quaker morality. The trial was sensational and, perhaps because of the number of unanswered questions, prompted the publication of a number of imagined scenarios. Indeed, it was repackaged in fictional terms from the outset. A printed Dialogue between a Quaker and his Neighbour (1699) imagined a conversation between Hertford’s citizens about the possible motives for murder and invented speeches that Spencer Cowper might have made to Sarah Stout just before her death. Delarivier Manley’s novelistic treatment of the scandal therefore drew on lower but nevertheless fictionalising forms of partisan print.

If Mosco was thus a fictional version of Spencer Cowper, Manley’s Hernando represented his brother William, who, in Swift’s hands, became known as Will Bigamy. Both William’s mother Sarah Cowper and his daughter (another Sarah) reluctantly conceded in their diaries that Manley’s version was not entirely invented. Sarah Cowper copied out large sections of Manley’s story relating to both her sons, concluding that although there was ‘more Scandalous Stuff than I can beleive to be True; yet withall so much as may justly be acknowledg'd the due punishment of those that Do Ill’.[2] She recognized that Manley had embellished the story—‘the Main Matter is but Old Dirt grown So Dry it may not Stick if it be not Mixt with New Stuff’—and was inclined herself to put most of the blame on Elizabeth (‘Betty’) Culling, who had had a ‘Soul harden’d in Wickedness’ and ‘an impudent Face of Brass’ to live in such ‘open adultery’, claim to be William’s wife and bear him children. Betty’s motto, she noted, was that ‘every one had some Fault and she had but one’; but Sarah thought that the fault of ‘robbing another woman of her Hus[band]’ was ‘a Swinger’.[3] And when Elizabeth died in November 1703 Sarah was shocked that she had been buried ‘Close by the Ewe tree’ in the parish Churchyard ‘for which Fancy I can imagine no other reason unless it be to Suggest this Motto, Where I lost my Virginity I lay my Body’.[4] Even William’s daughter, Sarah, reading Manley’s tale some twenty years later, also had to admit that the stories had ‘some foundation of truth’.[5]

In Manley’s novel the Cowper brothers epitomise a self-interested rapaciousness - both political and sexual - that, she implied, characterised the Whig party as a whole. At the start of the second part of the novel (and hence following immediately from the Cowper allegory) a character personifying ‘Virtue’ is shocked that marriage has now become the result of interest not love: what prevailed now was ‘avarice! Contemptible covetousness! Sordid desire of gain!’ In this self-pursuing world, friendship was impossible and only ‘war! Murder! Desolation!’ could win. Everything was subordinated to the men’s ‘interest, conducive to their pleasures, companion in their riots and injustice, fearless of the avenging deities’. Profit ruled: ‘Who in this age would serve without reward? Who put on the old, unprofitable robe of innocence and virtue? Mankind was now ‘only fired by sensual pleasures…revenge, cruelty, ambition, ingratitude and covetousness, nothing could withold them from committing whatever crimes their appetites call loudly for’.[6] Manley was thus attacking what she saw as an opening of the sluice-gate of self-interest. Interest and appetite now prevailed; and this was manifest not just in the state but in personal relationships, in the cruelties of lecherous men using women for their own pleasure and advancement.

This is precisely the world of publicly revealed scandal and fictionalisation explored in Patricia Bonomi’s study of the Tory lord Cornbury, governor of New York in the reign of Queen Anne.[7] Bonomi’s work suggests that accusations of fiscal and sexual corruption swirled in the colonial sphere just as they did in England.[8] The son of Henry Hyde, second duke of Clarendon and nephew of Laurence Hyde, first earl of Rochester, Lord Cornbury was a Tory whose governorship of New York 1701-8 made him a target (as many governors were) for accusations of financial impropriety. In 1707 the New Jersey Assembly accused him of taking bribes and in New York of having embezzled £1500 of tax intended to be used to strengthen the port’s defences. In this sense he was the Tory reverse of Spencer Cowper who was alleged to have embezzled the £1000 given to him by Sarah Stout. And, as with the depictions of the Cowper brothers, there were also sexual allegations against Cornbury, who was said to have publicly dressed in women’s clothing. His life, it appeared, was thus full of vice. But Bonomi argues that the smear that Cornbury dressed as a woman was a malicious fiction, put about by his political enemies who also knew how time and distance between New York and London could amplify the rumours. One of Cornbury’s principal accusers, Lewis Morris, later became governor of New Jersey 1731-46; he lived most of his life in a muck-raking, vituperative world. Cornbury had accused him and his allies of being men ‘known to have neither good Principles nor Morals’.[9] Cornbury added that Morris and his ally Samuel Jennings were ‘two men notoriously known always to have been Disturbers of the Quiet and peace of this province, men always possest with Passionate heats and the transports of the most Vindictive Tempers’.[10] Morris and his predecessor Governor Hunter turned to writing as well as spreading fiction: the two men wrote a play Androboros (1714) that provided a thinly veiled satire on their enemies, rooted in a real incident in which the clerical robes of a local minister were defiled with excrement.

II

How, then, do we make sense of Manley or Morris and the culture of scandal that they fictionalised in a novel and in a play? It is of course a commonplace that satire could be political and make use of sexual innuendo. We could also point to the liberation of the press from pre-publication licensing in 1695 which meant that print culture became ever more pervasive and permissive on both sides of the Atlantic.[11] Literary critics interested in the rise of the novel have also pointed to the phenomenon of what Leonard Davis suggestively calls ‘factual fictions’.[12] I have argued elsewhere that partisan culture was intrinsically a fictional culture: as one pamphleteer put it in 1716, ‘now we have nothing but fictions instead of truths’.[13] Parties were themselves fictions whose identity was created by polemicists and the print culture spawned by the rage of party created rival versions - fictions - of truth, about the present or the past.[14] The political and religious plots that proliferated in the later Stuart period were, to sceptics, simply inventions; the petitions and addresses which poured in to Westminster and Whitehall in huge numbers during the period were also, to their detractors, exercises in creative writing; and the financial revolution brought about after the revolution of 1689 created forms of finance (stocks, national debt, paper money) that were forms of fiction.