10 - Political Conflict and the Memory of the Revolution in England, 1689–c.1745

Summary

In 1735, a purported Persian fable entered the London printing press. The ‘Tale of the Troglodytes’ claimed to capture the descent of a community into moral and political corruption, offering the sobering example of how a people might become ‘wickeder and more miserable in a State of Government, than they were left in a State of Nature’. Its narrative rested on a country delivered from conflict by a warrior prince, whose leaders proceeded, in a fatal slide into ‘innocence’, to raise him to their throne ‘without prescribing any bounds to his authority’. They had left themselves unshielded against the corruptible tendencies inherent in human politics, deluded that ‘when Virtue was on the Throne, the most absolute Government was the best’, and therefore disarmed when ambition and insecurity propelled their new sovereign into arbitrary rule. ‘From this single root sprung up a thousand Mischiefs; Pride, Envy, Avarice, Discontent, Deceit and Violence’, as the king exploited the legislative machinery to create divisions between his subjects, with fratricidal conflicts eroding the civic spirit, and a tangled matrix of debts, bad laws and social ills displacing ‘ancient Customs’, overthrowing the ‘dictates of natural justice’ and destroying ‘the natural Obligations to Virtue … by the foreign Influence of human Authority’. Such was the condition of any people ‘when they had quitted their own Nature, and so bewildered were they in the Labyrinth of their own laying out’.