Government under William and Mary (AQA A-Level History): Revision Notes

Government under William and Mary

Introduction

William and Mary's co-monarchy (1689-1702) marked a watershed in English constitutional development. Two lasting and interconnected transformations occurred during their joint reign: England developed an effective system of administration and taxation capable of discovering and extracting the wealth of individuals and institutions, and the process established a constitutional monarchy in which Parliament effectively constrained the power of the Crown. Although the monarch retained considerable authority, the kingdom would never again face the threat of arbitrary rule.

The development of limited monarchy

Historians have long debated the causes behind England's transition to limited monarchy. Earlier interpretations emphasised the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89 as the decisive moment, viewing the Bill of Rights as a document that formally restricted monarchical power and established Parliament's constitutional role. More recent scholarship, however, has redirected attention towards the war with France that followed the revolution. William's primary objective in invading England had been to attach Britain to the anti-French coalition he was constructing on the continent. Once crowned, his focus remained fixed on continental warfare, and to prosecute this conflict successfully he needed to accept changes in British government that placed additional constraints on royal power.

These changes centred on two interconnected developments. First, a new Triennial Act mandated that Parliament must sit at least once every three years and compelled the King to summon fresh parliamentary elections every three years. This requirement forced William to work more closely with Parliament and stimulated the development of the Whig and Tory parties as they competed regularly for seats in the House of Commons. Second, the state constructed a more efficient bureaucracy - what modern observers would recognise as a civil service. Parliament levied new taxes and supervised more closely how the Crown spent this revenue.

The financial revolution

The old system

Before the Civil War, the King's regular revenue derived from Crown lands and feudal dues, occasionally supplemented with 'extraordinary' revenue through parliamentary subsidies. Because parliament convened only intermittently, these subsidies were not standard taxation. When parliament approved a subsidy, counties received allocated targets and county sheriffs bore responsibility for taxing individuals to meet these quotas. This system operated without any rational assessment of wealth or income, relying instead on precedent, tradition, and the sheriff's discretion to adjust demands according to local circumstances.

During the Civil War, Parliament implemented the essential elements of a more effective taxation system. The excise taxes on beer and salt, though unpopular, represented taxes on purchases rather than wealth. More effective still were the monthly assessments raised by county committees comprised of individuals appointed by Parliament rather than local magistrates, who investigated individual wealth more thoroughly and were less inclined to exempt their friends from taxation. This financial revolution enabled Parliament to win the war, but in the longer term proved unsustainable because it threatened the very 'traditional liberties' for which Parliament was fighting.

Unsurprisingly, the system was dismantled at the Restoration. For the subsequent three decades Parliament attempted to control Crown power by limiting its revenue estimate to $1.2 million per annum. The Crown never received this amount until the 1680s, and the figure consistently underestimated actual requirements.

Taxation and the national debt

Developments during the 1670s and 1680s were already pointing towards more efficient administration and income. From 1670, the Crown replaced the system of farming out the customs (whereby businessmen leased the authority to collect customs revenue for a fixed sum) with the collection of customs duties by paid royal officials. During the 1680s this enabled the Crown to benefit directly from expanding trade, giving Charles II a healthy surplus provided he remained at peace. The expansion of the Royal Navy, combined with naval defeats requiring boards of enquiry, produced closer parliamentary scrutiny of royal accounts. Though impressive, these changes proved inadequate for William III's task of defeating Louis XIV.

The immense cost of achieving this objective is reflected in available expenditure statistics. Between 1689 and 1697 the costs of warfare averaged $5.5 million per annum, rising to $7 million per annum between 1702 and 1713. To secure this revenue, the Crown had to accept substantially greater parliamentary scrutiny of royal accounts. In 1690, William agreed to the Public Accounts Act, which established a Public Accounts Commission to examine government income and expenditure. This public accountability opened the way for a new approach to royal expenses and much greater access to national resources through taxation.

During the 1690s the Excise Tax was extended to cover a wider range of commodities, alongside a series of revenue-generating schemes that included a state lottery. Another important innovation was the Land Tax, introduced in 1692, levying four shillings in the pound (20 pence) on income from land. This became a regular tax, voted annually by parliament, though not consistently levied at such an elevated rate. By 1710, the Crown was receiving over $5 million annually from taxation, of which over 30% derived from the Land Tax.

The most transformative change of the 1690s was a revolutionary new approach to government borrowing. Monarchs had historically borrowed money, anticipating future revenue, from private creditors such as the merchant companies of London. Because they could not always repay their loans punctually, this occasionally led to embarrassing refusals of further credit and paralysis of government such as Charles I experienced in 1640. In 1672, Charles II was forced to suspend repayments in the Stop of the Exchequer (a temporary halt to loan repayment) and was only rescued by Parliament after promising to withdraw the Declaration of Indulgence (Charles's attempt to suspend the Test and Corporation Acts). In both instances the financial crisis had been employed as a mechanism for compelling the untrustworthy King to accept parliamentary demands.

With William III the nation gained its first indisputably Protestant king since James I, easing relations between Crown and Parliament and creating a new level of confidence between them. In 1693, William was authorised to raise a loan of $1 million by the Million Loan Act, which guaranteed repayments through parliamentary taxation. Then in 1694, the government created the Bank of England. In exchange for a further loan of $1.2 million, the creditors were authorised to establish the bank to provide banking services and to arrange future government borrowing. The debt was to be underwritten by Parliament, so it was no longer a royal debt, but the responsibility of the nation - a National Debt - covered and managed by future tax receipts.

To complete the transition from personal to government finance, the Civil List was introduced in 1698 to provide for the monarch's personal and household expenses as a separate item, clearly distinguishable from the costs of government. The system of personal gifts and courtier administration that had undermined attempts at financial reform and encouraged corruption during James I's reign had finally been reformed and replaced.

Military expansion

The reforms outlined above made possible an extraordinary expansion of British military power. With common objectives, King and Parliament were much more prepared to trust each other into their confidence, unlocking the kingdom's wealth and transforming Britain into a nation capable, with its continental allies, of defeating Louis XIV.

After 1688 the combined English and Dutch fleets outnumbered the French fleet, and the Royal Navy alone substantially outgunned the French fleet. The army experienced an even more dramatic increase, from 10,000 in 1689 to 76,000 in 1697. The effectiveness of this financial revolution is revealed in the growth of the English navy, which expanded from 46 ships-of-the-line in 1650 to 122 by 1705.

The Glorious Revolution and the subsequent war cleared the way for a resolution of many of the political problems that had beset the kingdom since the Stuart succession in 1603. In the 1690s England laid the foundations of sustainable military power which, in the eighteenth century, enabled it to challenge and defeat France in European and colonial conflicts. The catalyst of this transformation was warfare. Paradoxically, it was also England's small population and weakness compared to its continental rivals that forced it to modernise in ways that made it substantially different from the other great powers.

The Nine Years War, 1688-97

William III's aim in the Nine Years War was to force the French to relinquish the territories won in the previous wars, restoring the French frontier to that of 1659. The League of Augsburg, which he had helped to construct, was a formidable coalition which, with the addition of Britain, became known as the Grand Alliance. Faced with this range of enemies, Louis XIV was forced to fight a defensive war and took the form of Allied sieges of French frontier cities.

At sea, the French won a victory off Beachy Head in 1690 that gave them temporary control of the English Channel and opened the prospect of a French invasion of England, but this danger passed with an Anglo-Dutch victory at La Hogue in 1692.

The war ended in 1697 with the Peace of Ryswick. The war had not achieved William's full aim of restoring the frontiers of 1659, but the fact that Holland had been defended in the conflict and that the European struggle against France, made possible by William's invasion of England in 1688 and the development in England of more sophisticated links between government, administration and finance, confirmed Louis XIV's recognition of William III as the legitimate King of England. This represented an important step in gaining international recognition of the 1688 revolution.

The impact of administrative changes

The reforms of the 1690s introduced a new era of constitutional government, a parliamentary monarchy in which Parliament was a regular and necessary part of the administration. The Triennial Act of 1694 specified that new elections had to be held every three years, preventing any perpetual parliaments such as the Long Parliament (1640-53) or the Cavalier Parliament (1660-78). It was the administration of finance, however, that effectively deprived the monarch of the power to dissolve Parliament whenever he wished.

Arguably, therefore, it was not the Glorious Revolution itself, but the Nine Years War, that was the principal cause of the development of limited monarchy in England - a monarchy constrained by Parliament. The war shaped the new constitutional arrangements and ensured that William accepted them.

On the other hand, the new structures that were put in place also reflected substantial changes in the attitudes of Parliament and the willingness and ability of MPs to take on new responsibilities. Earlier in the seventeenth century Parliament had employed finance as a political weapon to restrict the powers of the monarch. In the 1690s, however, the Bill of Rights, the Public Accounts Commission and the confidence of Whig MPs that William shared at least their basic aims, created a sense of trust and co-operation in a common enterprise. These changes would surely not have occurred had James II remained on the throne.

Furthermore, Parliament had gained considerable experience of government during the Civil War and Interregnum. The war with France in the 1690s provided the opportunity for co-operation and dictated the strategies required, but Parliament was able to draw on a fund of experience gained in earlier conflicts.

During the English Civil War and the Interregnum, Parliament had to govern the country without a King. It therefore gained administrative experience that was not normally part of its responsibility - for example, by creating county committees to oversee the collection of the excise and assessment taxes.

The importance of political parties and ministers

The need to work closely with Parliament also affected the monarch's freedom of choice regarding advisers and policies. In theory the King was still free to choose his ministers and to decide on peace, war and foreign policy without restriction. In practice, however, William discovered that he needed advisers who could manage Parliament and ensure political support, especially in the House of Commons.

This also encouraged the development of a cabinet of ministers to carry out these tasks. The term 'cabinet' was used because they met in a private room in Whitehall. In the 1690s the need to manage parliaments on a regular basis, combined with the King's frequent absence from the country while conducting the war with France, led to the selection of a small group of parliamentary advisers to carry out the tasks of government on his behalf. The death of Queen Mary in 1694 made this even more essential, because with the King still preoccupied with the war, he needed someone else to help manage the new parliamentary system.

The management of Parliament in turn encouraged the growth of political party organisation, both during and after elections. Religious differences widened the divisions between Whigs and Tories, but with parliamentary elections required every three years it was inevitable that these parties began to develop more coherent positions on a range of issues, and in turn this forced them to create a political machine in the counties and boroughs to raise money, support candidates and enforce greater party discipline. The frequency of elections also encouraged a development of what has been termed 'the rage of party', a period of bitter politics that divided the political nation.

William's successor, Queen Anne, relied on particular managers to plan government strategy and ensure parliamentary majorities on her behalf, though the position of prime minister (the term used to describe the leading government minister) did not develop until the 1720s.

During the reign of George I, the King, who was unable to speak English, relied on Robert Walpole to manage his government. Walpole was England's first prime minister.

Key dates: the development of limited monarchy

Date	Event
March 1690	Grant of excise duties to the Crown for life and customs receipts for four years
October 1690	Parliamentary grants totalling $4.6 million
December 1690	Public Accounts Act
November 1692	Land Tax introduced; Parliament approved war expenditure in excess of $4 million
1693	Million Loan Act
1694
April 1694	Bank of England established
November 1694	Triennial Act
1698	Civil List established

The political life of the English nation changed rapidly and decisively between 1688 and 1702. The change of regime brought about by William of Orange's invasion in 1688 drew Britain into the larger conflict taking place in continental Europe. Indeed, in a negative sense, British politics had been dominated by European conflicts since the Secret Treaty of Dover in 1670, because the political nation felt that the Crown was supporting the wrong side. The Glorious Revolution resolved that conflict of interests, but immediately created another: to participate effectively in this conflict, the Crown had to share power with Parliament to such an extent that the nation emerged with a 'limited', or 'constitutional' monarchy.

But this was not simply the result of the Glorious Revolution. Arguably, the growth of government administration and parliamentary oversight of royal expenditure from the 1670s was just as important as the constitutional changes made between 1688 and 1702.