Since the work of Butterfield and Namier in the 1930s, it has commonly
been said that eighteenth-century England appears atomised, left with no
overall interpretation. Subsequent work on religious differences and on
party strife served to reinforce the image of a divided society, and in
the last ten years historians of the poor and unprivileged have
suggested that beneath the surface lurked substantial popular
discontent. Professor Cannon uses his 1982 Wiles Lecture to offer a
different interpretation - that the widespread acceptance of
aristocratic values and aristocratic leadership gave a remarkable
intellectual, political and social coherence to the century. He traces
the recovery made by the aristocracy from its decade in 1649 when the
House of Lords was abolished as useless and dangerous. After the
Glorious Revolution of 1688, the peerage re-established its hold on
government and society. Professor Cannon is forced to challenge some of
the most cherished beliefs of English historiography - that Hanoverian
society, at its top level, was an open elite, continually replenished by
vigorous recruits from other groups and classes. He suggests that, on
the contrary, in some respects the English peerage was more exclusive
than many of its continental counterparts and that the openness was a
myth which itself served a potent political purpose. Of the prospering
burgeoisie, he argues that the remarkable thing was not their
assertiveness but their long acquiescence in patrician rule, and he
poses the paradox of a country increasingly dominated by a landed
aristocracy giving birth to the first industrial revolution. His final
chapter discusses the ideological under-pinning which made aristocratic
supremacy acceptable for so long, and the emergence of those forces and
ideals which were ultimately to replace it.
