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Robert Harley's 'Middle Way': the Puritan Heritage in Augustan Politics

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Robert Harley's 'Middle Way': the Puritan Heritage in Augustan Politics ROBERT HARLEY'S 'MIDDLE WAY': THE PURITAN HERITAGE IN AUGUSTAN POLITICS DAVID HAYTON THE character of Robert Harley, first Earl of Oxford, was a puzzle to contemporaries and has contmued to vex historians ever since. Harley's motives, objectives, principles (if mdeed he had any) are of a piece with his notoriously difficult handwriting: often obscure and sometimes quite indecipherable. Of course, for a successful politician, and Harley was by any standards very successful, opacity could well be a deliberate ploy: a little obfuscation might be just what was needed to disarm an aggrieved petitioner, or to fudge a delicate issue in Parliament. Except that in Harley's case the obscuring process became second nature. Some contemporaries considered it to be pathological. Lord Cowper referred to ' that humour of his, which was, never to deal clearly or openly, but always with reserve, if not dissimulation, or rather simulation; and to love tricks even where not necessary'. In common with other hostile observers, Cowper regarded the 'humour' as malignant: it grew 'from an inward satisfaction he took in applauding his own cunning'.^ A more favourable interpretation, advanced by friends like Swift, was that Harley was by nature compulsively secretive, even when secrecy defeated rather than promoted his intentions; that his fondness for stratagem, too, was an unfortunate, but essentially innocent, weakness; and that behind, or above, the persona of'Robin the Trickster' which was Harley's character in the popular imagination of his day, stood an altogether nobler figure: honest, public-spirited, and patriotic. On the whole, this is what Harley's modern biographers have preferred to believe about him. They have recognized the ambiguities and paradoxes of his career, but have depicted the 'real' Harley as a man of honour and probity; a patriot with feet of clay, admittedly, but a patriot none the less. The key to this reading of Harley's character has often been an appreciation of the influence upon him of his family's traditional 'Puritanism ', the self-conscious 'godliness' nurtured by his father and grandfather, which seems to have dominated his early life and to have cast its spell over him again during his enforced retirement from politics after the Hanoverian succession.^ So pervasive is the language and imagery of Puritanism in the voluminous correspondence of the Harleys that it is easy to see why so many scholars working in the great Portland collection have been struck with the same thought. Angus Mclnnes, for example, probably the most successful ofthe biographers, wrote that Harley's whole background and upbringing was blood-red Puritan, and, not surprisingly, it left an indelible impression upon his personality. Indeed, his character was...closely shaped by the 158 Puritan tradition ... His Puritanism laid him low in 1708 and 1714- But it helped too to make him, for all his faults and failings, a figure of real stature, perhaps the greatest politician of his day.^ And according to a more recent writer, Brian W. Hill, Robert was brought up in an atmosphere highly charged with ... religious fervour... Many echoes of the young boy's piety were to sound in his later life, for though he became a successful politician well able to practise the compromises with truth needed for that occupation, he retained the habit of religious observance and also, if more arguably, a basic probity which he drew from it.* The intensity of religious belief and practical devotion among the various Harley households is undeniable, and the conclusion that the young Robert must have been profoundly affected by this intellectual and emotional environment inescapable. But the precise nature of that influence still needs some elucidation. In the first place, we must be careful of assuming too readily that the child of a pious family would necessarily imbibe to the full his parents' principles. As the history of such an individual as the first Marquess of Wharton so amply demonstrates, a strictly 'Puritan' upbringing in the later seventeenth century could produce spectacular impiety. In Harley's case the traces were scarcely kicked over to anything like the same degree. A gradually increasing addiction to the bottle, and an extravagance which occasionally alarmed his more parsimonious brother, are indications of some backsliding from almost impossibly high standards, and while a whiff of a morally more reprehensible scandal did arise from his relationship with Anne Oglethorpe, nothing improper was in fact ever proved against him. In any case, the balance would seem to be outweighed by a mass of first-hand evidence of Harley's personal interest in religion and commitment to the beliefs held in his family circle. Possibly, in the hands of a determined cynic, even some of this evidence might be discounted. It falls into two categories: correspondence with members of his immediate family, father, brother, sisters and wives; and notes on the scriptures taken for his own benefit. Harley's letters are striking in their directness and the intensity of feeling they seem to express. To his father, for example, he described himself as a willing servant of divine providence, whose eyes were always fixed on the 'pure and unmixed joys' of Heaven; to his first wife, the former Elizabeth Foley, he wrote of himself, in typical Puritan phraseology, as a 'poor worm', whose small earthly triumphs were entirely owing to God's grace.'* But all this could mean no more than that he had learned to use the language of Puritan providentialism, that he spoke to his family in words they could understand and of things they wished to hear. More specifically one may suspect the heavy presence of his father's formidable personality, requiring to be appeased. Harley reserved this mode of expression for his family and a few like-minded intimates; he was also prone to adopt a Puritan voice more frequently while his father was still active, in the first half of the 1690s, than he did when Sir Edward had retired from Parliament; and after his father's death in 1700 the sound of Harley the Puritan becomes a rarer occurrence in his letters. Perhaps he outgrew his upbringing; or perhaps the excessively religious tone of much of his early correspondence was a pandering to 159 paternal prejudice in the days when he depended on his father's connexions to smooth his path at Westminster. Interestingly it made something of a comeback after 1714, when Harley's years of power were over and his back was to the wall. Religion gave him strength in adversity, under impeachment and a prisoner in the Tower. There it was that his notes on biblical texts were prepared, as a kind of therapeutic exercise. ** After his release, in an internal exile away from politics, religion provided him with one source of consolation. This would be a means to explain, or rather to explain away, Harley's religiosity, as necessary camouflage assumed to avoid his father's disapproval while that disapproval still mattered to him, discarded when time had emancipated him from his father's grip, and hastily recovered to help him in a different way in the difficult years after 1714. It has something to recommend it. Certain facts fit. But on a second examination it does not really convince. The emotion of some of Harley's letters, especially at the outset of his political career and at such crises as the death of his first wife, Elizabeth, in 1691, is simply too real to be explained away as hypocrisy. Then there are the glimpses of Harley the Puritan in his heyday as a political operator in Queen Anne's reign, phrases recalled out of habit perhaps, but certainly not as a calculated gambit: thanks given to God for the prompt completion of some secular business in time for a journey back to the country.' And there is the testimony of his children, who knew their father as well as anyone, and to whom he had no need to dissemble for political purposes. His son Edward, refiecting on the courage Harley senior had displayed at the time of Guiscard's attempt to assassinate him in 1711, wrote: 'if you had but seen the tranquillity, the easiness of his mind after this villainous action, and in what he trusted plainly appeared '.^ The very fact that both his wives were ladies from strongly Puritan families, and that his children were brought up in the same tradition, speaks for itself.^ There can be no doubting the reality of Harley's religious convictions, even though they may not represent the whole man. Devout Christianity was only one side of his character; love of the public stage and the company of wits and men of fashion was another, and sometimes, as his first wife poignantly complained, the attractions of such society made him forget the joys of family.^** And lurking too, there is the form of Harley the sharp- toothed politician, generally detectable only by his tracks but on occasion, in some particularly revealing letter or observation, silhouetted like a fox against snow. The temptation is to regard these more worldly aspects of Harley's personality as being somehow a truer reflection of the man because they seem to issue naturally and without premeditation, in contrast to the self-conscious religiosity that sometimes smacks of attitudinizing. Such an approach, however, would not be helpful. Even if one were prepared to ignore the evidence of genuine Christian commitment and disagree with Swift that Harley had 'a true sense of religion', in order to cast the politician as no more than a godly poseur, his choice of this posture and the pains taken to practise it would still be highly significant.^^ The more reasonable response, to accept the reality, or at least the importance, of Harley's 'Puritanism', is to answer the first question raised, and the simplest.
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