“The Name of Steele carries off an Impression of Polities at any time, as sure as that of Partridge does an Almanack.”Footnote 1
In the present-day critical imagination, Richard Steele is now almost always seen as Joseph Addison's friend and collaborator, as one half of the periodical essay-writing team devoted to the promotion of civility, urbanity, and a moral and well-mannered lifestyle.Footnote 2 Most scholars of Addison and Steele, like those of early eighteenth-century periodicals more generally, focus exclusively on the Tatler (1709–11) and the Spectator (1711–12, 1714). Those two papers, along with Steele's sentimental comedy The Conscious Lovers (1722), have formed the basis of his modern reputation as cultural critic and sentimental dramatist. His other journals—including the Englishman (1713–14, 1715), the Reader (spring 1714), the Plebeian (1719), and the Theatre (1720), among others—have received almost zero attention from anyone but Steele's biographers, who pass over them with varying degrees of rapidity. Even less gets said about Sir Richard's substantial canon of party-political pamphlets. Partly because of Steele's bitter and extensive quarrel with Jonathan Swift—or because most scholars assume that Swift got the best of him—he is now rarely taken seriously as a political player in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England.
Biographers do better than other scholars with Steele because they have to reckon with his entire output, which is more abrasively partisan than the work that literary critics tend to read. Calhoun Winton's impressive two-volume account of Steele's life and writings (1964–1970) highlights the focus on “Steele's career as a political journalist and politician,” rightly stressing Steele's role as “a political journalist of national importance.”Footnote 3 Charles A. Knight's Political Biography (2009) foregrounds its subject's political contributions, and though the Tatler and the Spectator still loom disproportionately large for Knight, he is spot on in emphasizing Steele's overarching concern for “the authority of writers … to speak of political matters.” What neither biographers nor critics have done is to distinguish Steele's outlook from Addison's. He and Addison have almost invariably been conceived of as allies with essentially similar ideological profiles: they support Revolution principles, a balanced government, the growth of commerce, and religious toleration.Footnote 4 “The works of Addison and Steele,” Lawrence E. Klein concludes, represent “foundational” Enlightenment texts.Footnote 5 Most critics form their conclusions about Steele drawing largely or even wholly on the collaborative part of his canon: the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian. Winton, because he does not do that, gets closer to the truth, briefly (if dismissively) suggesting that Steele's “political philosophy, if it can be dignified with such a term … looked to the left, toward a radical Whiggery.”Footnote 6 Both Winton and Knight emphasize that Steele “was not an original political theorist,”Footnote 7 and neither finds much unique about Steele's political outlook or polemical mission. Is this really who Steele was as a party writer? What is the nature of the polemical canon now ignored, and what does it tell us about his religio-political role in the early eighteenth century?
The present essay focuses on Steele the party journalist and pamphleteer, and especially on his attitude toward religio-political authority and the sanctity of vox populi. Though Steele is now described as (like Addison) “not so enthusiastic about the potential for public politics,”Footnote 8 he was for excellent reasons regarded by contemporaries (friends and foes) as a writer not only trying to politicize the people but actually succeeding in doing so. What follows is an attempt to do justice to Steele's notions about the popular basis of authority and the politicization of ordinary citizens, which in practice represents a challenge to both state and church authority. The first section offers a précis of his preoccupations as a polemical writer. The second deals with Steele's attitudes toward popular politics and with his reputation as either a liberating or a dangerously destabilizing champion of popular political engagement. The third section addresses his contributions to the prominent anticlerical campaign in late Stuart and early Hanoverian England: critics of “priestcraft” challenged the abuse of power by Church of England clergy, and, as historians have shown, their challenge tells us something important about the religious dimension of debates about authority in these years. Steele's attitudes toward authority are inseparable from his commitment to Protestantism and the principles of a reformed church. The fourth section highlights some of the ideological differences between Addison and Steele. They arrive at significantly different answers to a vitally important question: What role should private citizens play in the governing of the country? Steele is in fact closer to the dominant twenty-first-century political ideology one finds among academic humanists than either Swift or Addison—a fact that makes his virtual erasure from the culture of politics in this period both surprising and disappointing.
The time has come to recontextualize Steele's polemical contributions; he has been read alongside the Whig wits but rarely figures in discussions of the history of political ideas in early eighteenth-century England. Especially after the Tatler and the Spectator, his writings contributed to late Stuart debates about authority, resistance, and the nature of obligation; public religion and liberty of conscience; the political implications of heterodoxy; and the use of reason as a challenge to dogmatic clerical authority. The questions and controversies cogently explored and analyzed by historians such as Justin Champion and Mark Goldie represent essential context for Steele's polemical agendas.Footnote 9 Historians of early modern popular politics have extensively and fruitfully debated how such political engagement can best be measured and how to assess various politicizing agents, such as the daily news, participation in local governance. The concern here is more rhetorical, with how Steele attempted to engage his audience, his position on the role of “the people” in the political process, and his attitude toward the basis of secular and spiritual authority.
The Nature of Steele's Polemical Canon
Because so few of Steele's polemical pieces are read by or familiar to modern scholars, a brief overview is in order. The point is not extensive description but a nonexhaustive précis of some of his major concerns and arguments.
From 1701 through 1720, Steele wrote or substantially contributed to eleven periodicals (counting the two series of the Englishman separately); he collaborated to some extent with Arthur Mainwaring on The Medley; he published twenty-five partisan pamphlets of varying lengths.Footnote 10 The Political Writings of Sir Richard Steele appeared in 1715, reflecting and solidifying his role as primarily a commentator on state matters. In addition to The Conscious Lovers, he staged three earlier plays between 1701 and 1705. Between 1707 and 1710, while the Whigs were in power, he edited the official government paper, the London Gazette. His ephemeral papers such as the Reader and the Lover (both of which were born and died in the spring of 1714) have been largely ignored in modern accounts of his journalism—but we would do well to remember that his periodical canon largely consists of short-lived ventures. The Tatler ran for twenty-one months; his involvement in the Spectator lasted a year and a half. Granting the popularity and influence of those better-known papers, they occupied Steele only for a while, and they were succeeded by other relatively brief enterprises that also need to matter in how we understand his journalism and its fundamental objectives. Reading everything he produced suggests a career devoted less to Spectator-style moralizing, sentimental drama, and theater management and much more to intense and sustained political controversy.
Several themes preoccupied Steele in these years. He always promoted Whiggish values; he defended the rights of dissenters (though not as loudly or obsessively as Defoe); and he praised the merchant class, voicing skepticism about the behavior of the gentry toward their (perceived) social inferiors. He denounced Roman Catholicism and English Jacobitism; he was so outspoken about the threat from the Pretender that his Tory critics routinely branded him an alarmist, a deluded Quixote figure tilting at Jacobite windmills.Footnote 11 In 1713, Steele wrote against Queen Anne's constitutionally dubious creation of a dozen peers, decrying what such a maneuver did to the royal prerogative. He forcefully championed the Whig leaders officially ousted from power in the fall of 1710, including the Duke of Marlborough, who continued to lead English forces in the War of the Spanish Succession until the spring of 1712. In 1713 and early 1714, Steele's idée fixe was the port of Dunkirk, where the French fortifications were to be demolished as stipulated by the ninth article of the Treaty of Utrecht (spring 1713). The argument over Dunkirk—which concerned the protection of English shipping and thus the health of English trade interests—became in his hands an argument about the relationship between rulers and citizens. Steele's primary commitment was to the Protestant succession; his anticlericalism reflects his hostility to Roman Catholicism and his insistence that Anglican clergymen uphold the values of a reformed Protestant church—which is to say, they acknowledge the sanctity of conscience and extend toleration to all Protestants. Ever anxious about the Jacobite threat, he stressed the parliamentary rather than hereditary basis of power.Footnote 12 In 1719, he sparred with Addison over the Peerage Bill, a piece of legislation meant to limit the monarch's right to create peers. Steele's concern was preserving the powers of the House of Commons against those of the Lords—and defending his ally Robert Walpole in opposition to the Whig government of Sunderland and Stanhope. Another of Steele's fixations was the South Sea Company's proposal ca. 1720 to fund the national debt. In the Theatre (1720) and in pamphlets, Steele voiced his opposition to that proposal and offered his alternative, which involved “converting the debt to self-liquidating loans.”Footnote 13 His objections to the scheme, and his counterproposal, had to do with his contempt for wealth, privilege, and social hierarchies.
Arguments about power and authority dominate Steele's canon. He had much to say about leadership (both secular and spiritual), and he was far more vocal on the subject of monarchical sovereignty and its limits than his sometime friend and collaborator, Addison. Like Swift, Defoe, Mainwaring, and other contemporary polemicists, Steele obsessed over the relationship between the governors and the governed. He regularly reflected on what loyalty does and does not mean, on the problem of obedience and dissent, on the authority of citizens to monitor and judge the activities of their rulers, on the spiritual and rational autonomy of Protestant subjects in matters of religion, and on the limits of the secular power of the Church of England.
Steele's interest in the obligations of leaders dates as far back as his first published tract, The Christian Hero (1701). Most biographers explain this lengthy pamphlet as the improvident Steele's attempt to teach himself how to live a better, more prudent and upstanding life. As a 1799 chronicler lamented, however, the effort was in vain: “Sir RICHARD, however well he understood moral and christian duties, however much he sometimes even felt their obligation, still went on in his old course.”Footnote 14 In fact, The Christian Hero is a sober meditation representing “a religious analysis of the qualities that make a good leader.”Footnote 15
Even as early as this 1701 tract, Steele revealed his deep and abiding commitment to contractual notions of monarchy. He invoked Caesar as “an Eternal Instance [of] how much … too Believing those unhappy Princes are, who depend upon the tie of Mens Obligations to ’em, without having their Opinions on their side.”Footnote 16 Loyalty cannot be enough: leaders must earn the active, thoughtful support of their subjects. This argument connects to Steele's defense of the toleration of dissent: “The most important Instance of this Happiness is Liberty of Conscience; and it is of the Essence of the Protestant Religion, both to assert it for ourselves, and to allow it to others.”Footnote 17 Steele rejected compulsory theories of obligation in both secular and spiritual matters as counter to the values of Protestantism. Like Benjamin Hoadly, Steele seems to have believed that “public religion was a matter of political sovereignty and decent order, while conviction, faith, and salvation were private issues between God and the individual.”Footnote 18 He did not share Hobbes's anxiety about the destabilizing effect of post-Reformation Protestant heterodoxy. In any case, his definition of just governance—which has implications for the church as well as the state—is decidedly pious: “A Prince” operating according to the tenets of Christianity should serve “his Fellow-Creatures” and have “a noble contempt of Pleasures, and Patience of Labours,” acting as “the Guardian and Asserter of the Native Rights and Liberties of Mankind.”Footnote 19
A theme that would become dominant in Steele's later writings is embryonic in The Christian Hero: the sanctity of the community, which takes precedence over the monarch.Footnote 20 “The Eternal God … presses us by Natural Society to a close Union with each other; which is, methinks, a sort of Enlargement of our very selves when we run into the Ideas, Sensations and Concerns of our Brethren.”Footnote 21 We are, Steele concluded, “fram'd for mutual Kindness, good Will and Service, and therefore our Blessed Saviour has been pleased to give us … the Command of Loving one another.”Footnote 22 This is no mere sanctimonious abstraction for Steele: he returned to this subject again and again, and it informed his attitudes toward aristocratic snobbery and the need for charity, toward political power and its abuse, and toward toleration of dissent.
In the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian, Steele addressed the duties of leaders worthy of the name. His Tatler essays, like his contributions to the Spectator, convey his disapprobation of Queen Anne's last (Tory) ministry. At the outset of the Tatler, Steele's Whig heroes—Marlborough and Godolphin et al.—held the reins of government; in the fall of 1710, Godolphin was dismissed as lord treasurer, and in October, the Tories routed the Whigs in the general election. Aware of the vulnerability of the Whig junto, including Marlborough, Steele warned readers of the consequences of removing their successful general and leaders. In Tatler no. 187, for instance, he printed a letter from “Pasquin,” cautioning that Hanno “will Smile to have purchased the Ruin of Hannibal, tho’ attended with the Fall of Carthage.”Footnote 23 Hannibal stands in for Marlborough; England's fate will depend upon the general's. The Tatler is often more ideological than topical, indirect in its political message, but Steele's values are crystal clear—and his Tory critics wasted no time in objecting to the paper's partisanship.Footnote 24
Steele's contributions to the Spectator are likewise more politically sour than has been appreciated, the work of a disaffected man. He repeatedly highlighted the “Dissimulation” of the political world, and the disparity between appearance and reality, rhetoric and conduct: “Good Courtier's Habit and Behaviour” are “hieroglyphical.”Footnote 25 Recalling some of the tenets established in The Christian Hero, he reflected gloomily upon what happens when leaders are motivated by pride and love of power: “The Ambition of Princes is many times as hurtful to themselves as their People.”Footnote 26 Steele targeted the hirelings who support debauched regimes—a precursor to his attacks on the Examiner and other outlets of Tory propaganda in 1713–14. The Guardian of 1713 focused largely upon the ethical obligations of citizens and leaders, and it contained Steele's first explicit denunciation of the Examiner, which was written by Swift in 1710–11 and then by Delarivier Manley and William Oldisworth. The dichotomy established in the Guardian was damning: on the one side, aggressive polemic (e.g., Mr. Examiner) and ministerial flattery; on the other, patriotism and benevolence. Steele's Spectator essays indirectly exposed the unprincipled sycophancy of the ministerial hacks like Mr. Examiner, and the Guardian complemented that critique by claiming the moral high ground over the ego-driven Tory writers and the corrupt government they defended.
“The British Nation Expect”: The Royal Prerogative versus the Popular Basis of Power
From 1712 through ca. 1720, Steele was conspicuously and explicitly concerned with the basis of political power, with the conflict between prerogative-championing Tories and subjects’ rights. Even during the early years of George I's rule, when the Tories were the opposition party and the Whigs found themselves compelled to preach obedience, Steele underwent no significant reversal in his commitment to the preeminence of the popular will.
In the last two years or so of Anne's reign, he became more fearless and forthright, questioning not only the Harley ministry but the queen herself. The Englishman's Thanks to the Duke of Marlborough (1712) hails the illustrious general as “the Ministring Angel in the Cause of LIBERTY.”Footnote 27 Steele penned this pamphlet in anger the day after Anne dismissed Marlborough; the tract represents a judgment of that decision and a clear affront to Her Majesty. His Letter to Sir M[iles] W[harton] Concerning Occasional Peers (1713) functions similarly. In December 1711, Anne had created a dozen new peers to produce the desired result in the vote to conclude the War of the Spanish Succession. This controversial maneuver understandably riled the Whigs, and Steele took the opportunity to praise Wharton for having “refus[ed] … to be made a Peer of this Realm in a hasty and surreptitious Manner.”Footnote 28 Though Steele ostensibly defended the prerogative—“the numerous Creation of Peers is the greatest Wound that can be given to the Prerogative”—his pamphlet in fact highlighted the limits of royal jurisdiction. It denied that “Sovereigns upon Earth” represent “Fountains of Honour” and recommended “that a Bill be brought in to disable any Peer to Vote in any Case, till three Years after the Date of his Patent”—essentially hamstringing the monarch's power.Footnote 29 Steele acknowledged the provocativeness of his pamphlet, characteristically waxing defiant: “My Comfort is, that the Laws of England are still in Force, and tho’ what I have said may be Unacceptable, I am sure it is not illegal.”Footnote 30 Whereas many late Stuart Whigs took care to criticize only the ministry and not the queen, the Letter to Sir M[iles] W[harton] left no doubt about Her Majesty's ultimate culpability.
Steele never offered meaningful praise of his queen, refusing even to parrot obligatory clichés; what virtues he allowed her were entirely passive. In The Englishman's Thanks, he concluded, “The Brightest Circumstance that can be related of the QUEEN Her Self, will be, It was SHE for whom MARLBOROUGH conquer'd.”Footnote 31 In his pamphlet The Crisis (January 1714), he suggested only that Anne's reign was “attended with so many Victories obtained by her Arms Abroad” and that she “gave the Royal Assent to an Act” of which he approved.Footnote 32 Before the ministerial change of 1710, Steele had nothing much to say of Anne, and after that he made his antipathy clear.
From his opponents’ point of view, Steele's most egregious assault on the royal prerogative took the form of four words in the Guardian of 7 August 1713 (no. 128). In detailing the urgent necessity of the demolition of Dunkirk, he issued his simple but famously incendiary statement that “the British Nation expect” the government to make good on the promise of demolition.Footnote 33 His Importance of Dunkirk Consider'd: In Defence of the Guardian of August the 7th (September 1713) repeated the demand verbatim.Footnote 34 In both places, he added another significant claim: “The very Common People know, that within three Months after the signing of the Peace, the Works towards the Sea were to be demolished.”Footnote 35 Underlying this seemingly bland statement is a position informing all of Steele's journalism: the knowledge and implied vigilance of “the very Common People.” Whereas Swift, Charles Leslie, and other Tory writers expressed anxiety about the politicization of the people, Steele took for granted that his journalistic role was largely about educating, enfranchising, and galvanizing citizens.Footnote 36 While modern readers might scarcely notice the ideological assumption behind “the very Common people know,” Steele was in fact saying something important: the people are paying attention, and they have the right to hold the government, even its royal figurehead, accountable.
Steele was a loud critic of the authorities’ inaction on the subject of Dunkirk, and he was at the center of a paper war that had everything to do with prerogative. In The Importance of Dunkirk Consider'd, he defended his verb (“expect”) at considerable length. Responding to the Tory detractors who denounced his presumption, he refused to back down: “These great Authors lay the weight of the Accusation, upon saying, the British Nation expects; you see the difference of a Man's Condition who acts under the Laws of his Country in general, from his who acts only under the Prerogative. Here is a Treaty concluded; I am reckoned disrespectful, because I say, the Nation EXPECTS the Conditions to be complied with; he is a very loyal Man, who says, the Nation does not EXPECT it.”Footnote 37
Steele challenged Tory notions of loyalty/disloyalty and criticized their blind submission to the royal will. He was joined in this fight by the commonwealthman John Toland, whose Dunkirk or Dover (1713) invoked “the Author of the Guardian” and, echoing Steele, asserted that “the Demolition of Dunkirk … so solemnly stipulated by her Majesty” is also “unanimously desir'd by her Subjects.”Footnote 38 Toland quoted and affirmed Steele's controversial phrase: “The best men in Britain have the face to expect [demolition], and will set their faces against all those that seek to delay or obstruct it.”Footnote 39
In The Importance of Dunkirk, Steele redefined the term “prerogative”: “The true Meaning … is to be interpreted and understood by the Rules of the joint Welfare and Happiness of the Prince and People, and all great Genius's in Business in all Nations and in all Ages, have apply'd it in this manner.”Footnote 40 He complained that the word had come to be employed by Tories “to frighten Men from speaking what they lawfully may upon publick Occurrences.” When that happens, the language of royal sovereignty functions, perniciously, as “a Refuge to indiscreet Ministers, and they may in time to come protect their Miscarriages under that aweful Word.”Footnote 41 He discouraged his audience from reacting too deferentially to the invocation of the royal will, like Toland warning against “blind obedience to the Prerogative.”Footnote 42 His insistence that the prerogative, rightly understood, is about “the joint Welfare and Happiness of Prince and People” served as an act of leveling.Footnote 43 He not only demystified the language of sovereignty but reminded readers that the queen herself was a mere mortal: when he and Anne perished, “the Remains of Her Sacred Person [would be] as common Dust as mine.”Footnote 44
While fighting for the demolition of Dunkirk, Steele was also producing the first series of the Englishman (October 1713–February 1714), an aggressively partisan paper denouncing Tory ideals of nonresistance. The Englishman reflects Steele's increasing outspokenness about political power and his escalating commitment to politicizing the public. Based on analyses of the Tatler and the Spectator, Brian Cowan concludes that Addison and Steele sought “to close off and restrain, rather than to open up, venues for public debate … on matters of political concern.”Footnote 45 This conclusion is decidedly not applicable to the Englishman.
The Englishman reminded readers of their constitutional rights and of their patriotic duty to be a check on governmental excesses. The inaugural number emphasizes, crucially, that the time of civic passivity had passed: “It is not … now a Time to improve the Taste of Men by the Reflections and Railleries of Poets and Philosophers, but to awaken their Understanding.”Footnote 46 This is Steele manifestly abandoning the kind of manners-and-morals journalism with which his name is now universally associated. The third issue opens with a message for Anne's subjects: “It is the Happiness of an Englishman, that his Property is fenced about with Laws and Privileges, into which no Power can make any Incursion, except it is encouraged by his own Stupidity or Cowardice.”Footnote 47 Though the monarch may choose her ministers, “it is the Privilege of the People by their Representatives, to judge of, and even to arraign the Conduct of [the] Ministers.”Footnote 48 Subjects and their leaders are “equally punishable by Law.”Footnote 49 This issue of the Englishman, like many, takes the form of a letter from a contributor, in this case an anonymous patriot adamant about the right of ordinary subjects to monitor and comment upon state affairs: “An Englishman may speak his Opinion without Doors as well as within Doors: He may, nay he ought to have a jealous Eye upon the Officers and Servants of his Prince: He may, and he ought to alarm his Fellow-Subjects.” The letter-writer urges Steele to inculcate such “Notions … frequently to [his] Readers.” By “making them publick” in his journal, Steele can “put every Englishman a little upon this Train of thinking, for the Security of his Religion and Property to himself and his Posterity.”Footnote 50 Throughout the Englishman, Steele beseeches readers to remember that in this “Capital of Liberty … the Property of the meanest Subject is … strongly guarded by our Laws.”Footnote 51 Toland had used similar language in The Art of Governing by Parties: in England, “the meanest Countryman has his action and remedy at Law against the King no less than against any of his fellow Subjects,” and “in these and the like priviledges [sic] consists a great part of our Happiness.”Footnote 52 Steele's Englishman speaks the language of inclusion and enfranchisement (except for Roman Catholics, always beyond the pale).
In the aftermath of Steele's battle over Dunkirk and the prerogative, he was obsessed with obedience and disobedience. Throughout the first Englishman, he targeted the high-flying commitment to nonresistance, a subject he treated briefly in the Tatler no. 44, where he comically likened those practicing passive obedience to the dolls controlled by a puppeteer named Martin Powell. In 1713, Steele explicitly defined the Tories as sycophants—an implicit theme of the Spectator—and gave moral primacy to patriotic resistance over passive obedience. His “Constant Churchman” (in the first Englishman) expounded upon the reasons for rethinking the Tory commitment to such slavish, backward-looking dogma.Footnote 53 Steele's Romish Ecclesiastical History of Late Years (May 1714) functioned similarly, and in the dedication to his inflammatory Crisis of 1714, Steele accused the Tories of adhering to “pompous Ideas of Imperial Greatness, and Submission to absolute Emperors,” which leads them to disseminate political ideas “abhorrent from the Laws of this their native Country.”Footnote 54
Steele's strategy in the Englishman was twofold, and it had everything to do with subverting Tory notions of power and Tory condemnation of popular politics. He contended that a passive loyalty is not only misguided but unpatriotic: “It may be Submission, but it cannot be Obedience, that is passive.”Footnote 55 And, second, he called on citizens to defend their rights—implicitly, through the power of public opinion. In no. 8, Steele printed a letter from “Anglo-Britannus” urging him to continue in his galvanization of the people: “I hope, Sir, you will … let [your countrymen] know it is their Duty to study Politicks as well as Ethicks or Morals.”Footnote 56 As in his role as “Tatler” and “Spectator,” here Steele stressed surveillance, in this case civic surveillance. He taunted authorities with the knowledge of a watchful and righteously disappointed public, and he invited that public to feel and express outrage. The epistolary nature of the Guardian and the 1713–14 Englishman is an effective formal complement to Steele's ideological agenda. His printing of letters (whether authentic or fabricated) allowed him to model a certain kind of public inquiry.Footnote 57 The inclusion of missives from “Ralph English” and other commoners validated those ordinary citizens who wished to engage in public political debate. Steele's anonymous Englishman was undoubtedly meant to serve as kind of Everyman; that he published his opinions meant that others should be free to do so as well. This sense of purpose is succinctly but evocatively affirmed by one of Steele's correspondents: “When you set up for ENGLISHMAN in the aggregate Sense of the Word, you take us with you.”Footnote 58
The pamphlet that finally got Steele in serious trouble was The Crisis, an extensive meditation on political power and the limits of obedience—one tellingly dedicated “To the Clergy of the Church of England.” Even the scholars who most admire Steele have little affection for it, but it is a bold piece of work. Like many late Stuart Whigs, Steele was in favor of those “Restrictions on Power made by Laws and Participation of Sovereignty among several Persons.”Footnote 59 He voiced approval of resistance in extreme circumstances, defining liberty as “the Happiness of Mens living under Laws of their own making by their personal Consent, or that of their Representatives.”Footnote 60 He enumerated the stipulations established by the Act of Succession, as, for example, “That it is the Right of the Subjects to petition the King, and all Commitments and Prosecutions for such Petitioning are illegal.”Footnote 61 He detailed James II's “Miscarriages” in a manner clearly meant to give the lie to the old adage that the king can do no wrong.Footnote 62 He emphasized Anne's “Parliamentary Title.”Footnote 63 Steele was hardly alone in espousing these principles—but he did, significantly, sign his pamphlet. In doing so, he not only asserted his right to weigh in on matters of state but also inspired his readers, fans of the popular Bickerstaff, to associate this Whig outlook with ethical, moderate standards and values.Footnote 64
Steele's 1713–14 writings established his reputation, in late Stuart England, as rabble-rouser—and justly so. Neither Blanchard nor Knight appreciates the prominence of this theme among his contemporary critics.Footnote 65 Swift responded to Steele's Dunkirk writings with The Importance of the Guardian Considered (1713), an ad hominem attack challenging, among other things, Steele's “Habit of treating Princes familiarly.” Swift wondered about this political novice's presumption:
What shadow of a Pretence has he to offer his crude Thoughts in Matters of State? to Print and Publish them? to lay them before the Queen and Ministry? and to reprove Both for Male-Administration? How did he acquire these Abilities of directing in the Councils of Princes? Was it from Publishing Tatlers and Spectators, and Writing now and then a Guardian? Was it from his being a Soldier, Alchymist, Gazetteer, Commissioner of Stampt Papers, or Gentleman-Usher? No; but he insists it is every Man's Right to find fault with the Administration in Print, whenever they please.Footnote 66
The author of Remarks on Mr. Steele's Crisis (1714) also queried Steele's chutzpah, in this instance vis-à-vis the church rather than the state: “What Authority has Mr. Steele, or rather what Presumption has he not, to talk of the Nature of Oaths, and prescribe the Observance of them to the Clergy? Is this a Token of his Deference and Respect? This, an Indication of his Submission to his Spiritual Pastors?”Footnote 67
No other contemporary was as routinely disparaged for his political pluck as Steele. In The First Ode of the Second Book of Horace Paraphras'd (1714), Swift jeered at Steele's public disapprobation of Anne's appointment of a dozen peers: “The Q[uee]n (forsooth, Despotick) gave / Twelve Coronets, without thy Leave!”Footnote 68 A 1715 critic offered a broader rebuke: “We have an Englishman who dares write to any Man upon the Face of the Earth.” That author mocked Steele's self-importance, imploring him to “Descend … from [his] dignified Seat” and to “Divest [himself] of that Dictatorial Authority [he has] assumed, and … to be like One of Us.”Footnote 69 The anonymous The Life of Cato the Censor (1714) bitingly addressed Steele as “the greatest Subject England ever saw”: “your Power to call the Greatest to Account, without being accountable yourself, (a Power, I am afraid, you will hardly allow our Kings and Queens).”Footnote 70 In the same year, a more solemn caviler, preaching obedience, groused that a “Subject falls infinitely short of his Duty” who questions any of the queen's decisions.Footnote 71
Steele's detractors abused him for his presumption, alarmed by his ability to embolden the people. A 1715 commentator grumbled that “every Scribler now has learnt of St[ee]l to speak High, and say the Nation expects it.”Footnote 72 In the previous year, the author of John Dennis, The Sheltering Poet's Invitation to Richard Steele had reminded his subject of his place:
The upshot is simple: citizens should defer to the queen, her ministers, and the clergy; Steele should leave off attempting to educate and inform the rabble and tend his own garden. The author of A Letter to Richard Steele, Esq; (1715) straightforwardly rejected Steele's “false Notions of Liberty,” accusing him of choosing “Hobbs, Lock, Hoadly” over “the Laws of God and our Country.”Footnote 74 These comments are typical of Steele's reputation among his contemporaries: his Tory critics repeatedly decried his impertinence in encouraging subjects to voice or even have “expectations” of their leaders. As Defoe grumbled in a letter to Harley, “The New Champion of The Party, Mr Steel,” is taking pains to see that “The Ministry be Bullyed in as Publick a Manner as possible.”Footnote 75
These complaints were well earned: we have evidence that Steele did in fact manage to change how his readers thought about their role in the political process. In A Letter to Mr. Steele, Concerning the Removal of the Pretender from Lorrain (1714), a fellow traveler praised Steele for “awaken[ing] in [his] Countrymen a Sense of Liberty.”Footnote 76 Echoing Steele's language from The Guardian, he encouraged the heroic author of The Crisis to tell the authorities too “that the British Nation expects the Removal of the Pretender from Lorrain.”Footnote 77 This author's response testified to a new sense of empowerment: “Why should not I, who am a free Subject of our Glorious Queen ANNE, offer a Memorial to his Majesty of France, in an Affair which concerns no less than our Sovereign's Life and Safety, our Country's Welfare and Liberty, and my own Property.”Footnote 78 Steele's willingness to speak the truth to power inspired this anonymous commoner to offer his own memorial to the French king, one with a cheeky bottom line: “A Freeholder of Great Britain is one who is not in the least afraid of approaching the greatest Sovereigns, and the most puissant Monarchs.”Footnote 79
In his Political Biography of Steele, Knight highlights Sir Richard's belief in “the authority of writers … to speak of political matters.”Footnote 80 This is true, and we can go further: this conviction of Steele's turns out to be an enormously important part of his contribution as a polemicist. He was, like Toland and Hoadly, inter alia, committed to vox populi, vox dei—the battle cry of radical Whigs defending the legitimacy of the 1688 Revolution. As Champion observes, “A tradition of radical theorizing that [drew] from Lockean sources, as well as republican and other radical Whig writings of the Exclusion period, was circulated in the populist form of a series of pamphlets with the names Vox Populi, Vox Dei … throughout the 1690s and 1700s.”Footnote 81 Steele belonged to this tradition—in a way that Addison did not. Steele's position on loyalty and royal authority suggests his agreement with Toland, for whom “there is no Title equal to [popular] Approbation, which is the only divine Right of all Magistracy, for the Voice of the People is the Voice of God.”Footnote 82 Or, as Trenchard and Gordon later asserted in The Independent Whig (1720–21), George I's title “is the best of Titles, viz. the voluntary Establishment of a free People by an Act of their Legislature.”Footnote 83
One of the many ways in which Steele revealed his commitment to “the voice of the people” was by signing his name to a startlingly high percentage of his works. Though his journals were mostly pseudonymous, they included outspoken contributions from “Richard Steele.” He put his name on The Importance of Dunkirk Consider'd, owning his rejoinder to critics—an unapologetic assertion of his right to speak that reaffirms the argument of his Dunkirk writings: the people are free to comment on government action (or inaction). The Crisis bore his name on the title page, and the dedication was signed. The lengthy, aggressive final number of the first Englishman (15 February 1714) is signed by Steele, as is the last issue of the Theatre, a journal its twentieth-century editor reckons was too controversial to be reprinted in Steele's lifetime.Footnote 84 His Romish Ecclesiastical History (1714) carries his name on the title page, as do A Letter to a Member of Parliament Concerning the Bill for Preventing the Growth of Schism (June 1714) and The British Subject's Answer, to the Pretender's Declaration (1716). Steele did more than promulgate Whiggish notions; he openly declared his authority to speak by eschewing the anonymity typical of late Stuart polemicists, especially those writing in opposition. His canon of partisan writing reflects the conviction he expressed vividly in the Englishman of 6 October 1713 (also signed): “In the House, and as a Member of Parliament, I am accountable to no Man, but the greatest Man in England is accountable to me.”Footnote 85
Though Steele's commitment to vox populi is reflected in his writings more than in any out-of-doors political activism, his contribution to popular politics has clear non-rhetorical implications. He seems to have been very aware of the potency of public opinion to shape policy: his emphasis on civic surveillance would be futile without some confidence that surveillance can matter to administrative behavior. One of Steele's major polemical aims is to challenge the rhetorical relationships between Tory writers and their readers, as I have argued elsewhere, and this is a particularly important move given the novelty of a culture of daily news and thus daily politicization of the people.Footnote 86 Steele apparently recognized that he and his contemporary party writers had a role to play in influencing how English citizens conceived of politics and of their ever-evolving role in the political drama of the age.
Steele's Anticlericalism
Steele's political notions were, of course, inseparable from his religious convictions: his politics were driven by his Protestantism, by his almost rabid hostility to the spiritual and secular consequences of Roman Catholic hegemony. I discuss Steele's position on the Church of England elsewhere, along with his personal and polemical connections with that Low Church firebrand Hoadly—but something needs to be said here, briefly, about his contributions to the anticlerical campaign prominently carried out from the 1690s until the 1720s.Footnote 87
Anticlericalism, as Richard Rorty and others have observed, is a political position, not a theological or metaphysical one.Footnote 88 Goldie has reminded us that the “militant anticlericalism” of these years “was grounded in an unfolding tradition of Christian reformism.” Anticlericalism was not the language of atheists but of reformist Whigs, those “hostile not to scripture but to theocracy.”Footnote 89 Champion has done as much as anyone to explore and illuminate “the political consequences of … theological heterodoxy,” the ways in which religious orthodoxy structured early modern attitudes toward political power.Footnote 90 The critique of clerical authority—a critique of both the premise and the abuse of secular power—had become, by Queen Anne's reign, a foundational part of radical Whig and republican political thought. Writers like Toland, Matthew Tindal, Trenchard, and Gordon challenged the church's position as sole arbiter and explainer of the Scripture, insisting that one feature of a reformed Protestant Church is that it celebrates the reasoning capacity, even in matters of biblical hermeneutics, of all individuals. Another is that it defends the sanctity of conscience in matters of faith: “Unless there be a Toleration of Religion, Religion, which is a Matter of Choice and Conscience, is almost excluded the World.” Trenchard and Gordon incisively argued for a correlation between the degree of “Power and Influence of High-Church Priests” in a society and that of “Violence upon Mens Consciences.”Footnote 91 In the early eighteenth century, anticlericalism was the language that Whigs spoke to challenge the legitimacy of high Tory notions of nonresistance and to defend toleration of Protestant dissent.
“English Whiggism,” Goldie succinctly concludes, “was born as much in anticlericalism as in constitutionalism.”Footnote 92 Champion and Goldie are part of a group of scholars responsible for helping us appreciate the anticlerical dimension of early Whiggery. John Marshall's important study of John Locke offers a lucid analysis of Locke's “formidable anticlericalism,” his concern about the “political power involved in interpreting Scripture,” and his anxious acknowledgment of the problem of superstition. Locke's Whig political theory was inseparable from his rejection of the “case for jure divino episcopacy from Scripture,” and his religio-political writings were “animated as much by disbelief that any clergy could be given power” as they were “by support for toleration.”Footnote 93 Brent S. Sirota's study of the Christian Monitors traces Anglican High-Church discontent in the face of fear over “the loss of the ecclesial,” the collective existential crisis created by the seemingly “relentless assault” upon “the integrity and independence of the Church” as a distinct and sovereign society.Footnote 94 Where does Steele fit in this context? What is the nature of his contribution to the anticlericalism of this period?
The importance of sociability and community to Steele's outlook is well known, and his ideal national community was by definition Protestant. He routinely denounced anti-tolerationist Anglicans for persecuting their fellow (dissenting) Protestants: “The Protestant and Christian World have been bent down to the Ground, by Antichristian Projects and Plans against Schism. Dissenters from us in little Points, which are in themselves indifferent, have been treated like Enemies of God and Man.”Footnote 95 The true national community was threatened by dogmatic ecclesiastical policy, by a church trying to assert itself in secular realms. In A Letter to a Member of Parliament Concerning the Bill for Preventing the Growth of Schism, Steele attacked the proposed Schism Bill, which prohibited dissenting teachers from teaching. The Letter insisted upon the human right to education: it is “unlawful to restrain Men from the Means of Instruction in the different Forms of Religion.” Such a policy is, moreover, “against the Interest of the Church of England, as it is a Protestant Church in general; for it is the Characteristick of Protestant Churches to admit with all Candour the Liberty of studying the Scriptures, and consequently of teaching and being taught them.”Footnote 96 Steele's position here not only reflects his commitment to toleration of dissent and the sanctity of conscience but also shows his concern for who has access to, and the right to judge, the scripture.
In the dedication to The Crisis, he acknowledged the power of the church to influence the political notions of English subjects, and instead of deprecating that power, he called upon the clergy to adhere to the constitution in their preaching. “My Purpose in addressing these Matters to you,” he explained, “is to conjure you, as Heaven has blessed you with proper Talents and Opportunities, to recommend them, in your Writings and Discourses, to your Fellow-Subjects.”Footnote 97 Here and elsewhere, Steele modeled what he considered to be the appropriate political role and outlook of a reformed clergyman. In the Englishman, no. 55, he included a letter from “Constant Churchman,” a pious, god-fearing Anglican who criticized his brethren of the cloth for disseminating unlawful political dogma: Sacheverell and other high-flyers, the churchman suggests, “pervert … the Notions of Right betwixt Kings and their Subjects. It would be of great use to shew, that Preachers should either forbear to touch such a tender Point, or speak Truth.” Constant Churchman complains, unequivocally, about the pulpit rhetoric of “Obedience without Reserve,” which does “not allow … a Nation to defend it self against Tyranny and Oppression.”Footnote 98
Early modern advocates of nonresistance cite St. Paul's injunctions in Romans 13 to legitimize their commitment to civil obedience: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God,” and “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God” (13:1–2). Like Hoadly and other critics of this position, Steele's “Constant Churchman” insists that “the Quotations of St. Paul must receive reasonable Limitations, as all other Precepts do; and that straining them without those, are as gross Abuses of Scripture, as the Pretence of Papists when they plead This is my Body for Transubstantiation.” In no. 56 of the Englishman, Constant Churchman returns with the same message: “I BELIEVE our Church never did either receive, determine, or teach Passive-Obedience dogmatically, as a positive Doctrine.” He denounces nonresistance as a “high Flight” of “Unlawfulness.”Footnote 99
The Crisis represents Steele's most extensive defense of political resistance, and significantly, in it he connected his political theorizing to the church. Champion has suggested that “the need to address the practical consequences of heterodox systems of belief drove the development of resistance theories and ensured that political thought would struggle with the relationship between sovereignty and conscience.”Footnote 100 Steele's dedicatory address to Anglican clergymen is his worried acknowledgment of the fact that, in Champion's phrasing, “Priests … not only sanctified religion, but politics too.”Footnote 101
Steele's criticism of a compulsory theory of obligation had a clear religious dimension, and again it had to do with his Protestant national identity. In his telling, one of the fundamental differences between Protestantism and popery was the latter's dependence upon tyranny and superstition: “The Horror which a Reasonable Man has to Popery it self, is chiefly raised from the Usurpation of Power in Secular Matters, and a pretended Superiority to all Ordinances and Establishments among Men, from his Authority who declared his Empire not to be of this World.”Footnote 102
In other words, in Catholic regimes the church has secular authority—but this is not and should not be the case in a liberty-loving Protestant nation. Steele would no doubt agree with Trenchard and Gordon, who sharply observe that “the Church of Rome owes its Figure and Preservation to the Court of Rome, where all the nicest Secrets of Power are understood, and all the most curious Arts in Politicks are practis'd; where every Absurdity is finely disguis'd, and every Cruelty is artfully conceal'd; where, in fine, they have the Knack of making People pleas'd with being abus'd, and to forget that they are Slaves, or never to know it.”Footnote 103 Steele linked reformed Protestantism with enlightenment thinking, reason, and some degree of skepticism about authority—all of which help preserve the boundaries between spiritual and secular power.
Though Steele was never as aggressively anticlerical as Trenchard and Gordon, he did routinely object to the church's specious presumption of secular power and in particular its attempt to dictate conscience. In the second series of the Englishman, he praised Hoadly for articulating this view, quoting his friend and fellow traveler on “that which is the Meanest Vice, and Disgrace of Human Nature, a Blind Submission of the Conscience to Man's Authority, where Man can have no Authority.”Footnote 104 In his rejection of the Schism Bill, he had also observed that such legislation would demonstrate to enemies of the church that “she is conscious of her Inability to defend her self by Reason and Truth,” instead having to rely upon an illegitimate “Secular Power.” The passage of the Schism Bill, he concluded, would “carry in it all the Guilt which we object against the Roman Catholicks, in founding her Power in the blind Obedience of the People, and not in the Conviction of their Minds.”Footnote 105 In religion as in politics, Steele contrasted liberty with compulsion, emphasizing the rationality and intellectual/spiritual autonomy of English citizens over the tyranny of oppressive institutions.
Steele versus Addison
Steele's reputation has suffered by comparison with other major writers of his time. Even his more sympathetic biographers tend to conclude that he was a less polished essayist than Addison and a less skilled a polemicist than Swift. I have discussed his partisan battle with Swift elsewhere, and here want only to note the damage that battle has done to Steele's modern critical reception: Swift and Steele scholars alike too often assume that Steele was the loser of the paper war.Footnote 106 In partisan terms, the contrasts between Swift and Steele were many and fundamental; between Addison and Steele there is considerable ideological common ground but enormous disparity in their preoccupations as public writers. They seem to have understood their roles very differently, and their rhetorical relationships with their audiences reflect divergent attitudes toward popular political engagement. Steele shared an intellectual milieu with the likes of Hoadly and Toland, with Lockean thinkers and radical champions of resistance—and Addison, quite simply, did not.
No one would deny that Steele was the more assertive and uncompromising polemicist of the Addison-Steele duo. The pre-Addison Tatler is heavy on news, and Steele's contributions to the Spectator—unlike Addison's—conveyed a distinctly negative view of those in power. Addison's participation in the Whig opposition to the Harley ministry took the form of five collaborative numbers of the Whig-Examiner (Fall 1710), which consisted of literary criticism sans the rabid partisanship of Steele's anti-Examiner essays in the Guardian and beyond. If we focus on 1709 to 1712 in the polite essays of the Tatler and the Spectator, we can appreciate the common ground between the early eighteenth-century's most eloquent proponents of Whig culture. But the more comprehensive polemical canons of Addison and Steele reveal a significant degree of ideological difference. Both are Whigs, committed to some degree of socio-political inclusivity; both are supporters of Revolution principles, the Hanoverian accession, and European Protestantism. Their notions about public politics, however, sharply distinguish them from one another, as does Steele's obsession with vox populi. Under Anne, the distance can be measured simply in terms of all that Steele says that Addison does not: the promotion of engaged citizenship and the emphasis on limits to royal power. Addison wrote war propaganda—The Present State of the War (1708)—but he did little to galvanize the people. This is the extent of his attempt to dictate popular political engagement: “Let it not therefore enter into the Heart of any one that hath the least Zeal for his Religion, or Love of Liberty, that hath any regard either to the Honour or Safety of his Country, or a well-Wish for his Friends or Posterity, to think of a Peace with France, till the Spanish Monarchy be entirely torn from it.”Footnote 107 Addison's interest here is not street-level politics, not the “we” of Steele's “meaner” subjects; his “we” comprised policy makers. He had little to say about the contingency of power, the problem of political obligation, or—à la Toland—the value of popular “Approbation.”
Under George, the contrast between them manifested itself in their responses to the regime change and later to the Peerage Bill in 1719. Addison's Freeholder (December 1715–June 1716) represents his one major periodical contribution in George's reign, and its overarching concern is with loyalty to the present regime. The Freeholder was meant partly “to mobilize patriotic emotions in support of” Hanover.Footnote 108 This emphasis on obedience has decidedly un-Whiggish implications for public politics, and that is what patently differentiates Addison's enterprise from anything Steele would ever produce. Unlike Steele, Addison had little to say at any point about the rights of citizens, beyond the occasional quasi-obligatory Whig platitudes: “A Free-holder of Great Britain, is bred with an Aversion to every Thing that tends to bring him under a Subjection to the arbitrary Will of another.”Footnote 109 The bottom line of the Freeholder is that, while the people should never abide tyranny, George is so just a king, so active a guardian of his subjects’ liberties, that all good citizens should devote themselves to bolstering his regime.
Addison regarded loyalty and patriotism as compelling deference to the new king. In his telling, the fact that English liberties were so well protected under George had everything to do with the monarch's righteousness and nothing to do with subjects’ vigilance: “How can we sufficiently extol the Goodness of His present Majesty, who is not willing to have a single Slave in His Dominions!” Loyalty does not lead to “Servitude” in these conditions but instead “entitles [man] to the highest Privileges of Freedom and Property!”Footnote 110 Although Addison acknowledged the limits of royal sovereignty, he did so in the context of highlighting George's unmitigated integrity and subject-mindedness.Footnote 111 In other words, the effect of the Freeholder is a deliberately anesthetizing one: a bad king can be resisted, but this king is a paragon of constitutionality, and subjects should therefore obey and help crush (or shame?) those of their countrymen who do not.
Much of what Addison contended in the Freeholder must have appalled Steele—even granting Steele's abhorrence of the Jacobite rebels against whom Addison was writing. In no. 5, Addison maintained that a man of honor should look for “Opportunities … of doing Good to his Native Country” rather than “throw[ing] away his Time in deciding the Rights of Princes, or the like Speculations, which are so far beyond his Reach. Let us leave these great Points to the Wisdom of our Legislature, and to the Determination of those, who are the proper Judges of our Constitution.”Footnote 112 This attitude—leave the governing to the governors—sounds remarkably close to the position taken by Steele's Tory critics at the end of Anne's reign. To put the point more bluntly: from Steele's perspective, this would be not the advice of a fellow traveler but of an adversary. Addison's attitude toward the politicization of the people by the press was likewise remote from Steele's. In Freeholder no. 53, he lamented the “constant Application of the Press to the publishing of State-Matters,” stuffily opining that “the making of the Politician is the breaking of the Tradesman.”Footnote 113 Citizens should focus on their own occupations instead of imagining themselves political players. This is essentially the premise that Steele devoted his journalistic career to undermining. That “the Duty of every Briton [is] to contribute his utmost Assistance to the Government” is not a stance Steele would ever adopt.Footnote 114 The Freeholder endorsed “Allegiance” and lingered on the unfortunate consequences of rebellion (nos. 28–31).Footnote 115 Addison, in fact, took a much sterner position on the rebels than Steele did in the Englishman; though Steele was relentless in his vilification of Jacobites, he surprisingly called for leniency, characterizing “the prisoners not as criminals but as unfortunate men misled by misplaced and outdated loyalties.”Footnote 116
The Freeholder’s occasional staunchly Whig affirmations were always qualified. In no. 10, for example, Addison noted that the people “are imposed upon by Terms which they do not comprehend,” convinced “that Passive-Obedience and Non-Resistance, Unlimited Power and Indefeasible Right, have something of a venerable and religious Meaning in them; whereas in Reality they only imply, that a King of Great Britain has a Right to be a Tyrant, and that his Subjects are obliged in Conscience to be Slaves.”Footnote 117 Steele excerpted this statement in Town-Talk no. 7 (27 January 1716), but he and Addison did quite different things with it. Addison followed this warning with yet another reminder that since George was so far from a despot, the people need not worry: he represented a check on his own power, so they could relax and attend to their own affairs. After quoting this passage, Steele explained that the author “goes on to shew the ill Effects of Absolute Power.”Footnote 118 Addison did in fact describe an absolute leader, but the point was to contrast the situations in other times and places with England's present happiness in its monarch. Steele selected and highlighted the most Whiggish morsel from the Freeholder; he likely found little else in the periodical that suited his outlook.
The conservatism and loyalty-preaching of Addison's paper is, of course, a reflection of the circumstances in which he was writing. The first years of Hanoverian rule were not comfortable or triumphal ones for the Whigs. As Nicholas Rogers has observed, “One of the most remarkable features of early Hanoverian politics was the persistent and deep-rooted hostility of Londoners to the new regime.”Footnote 119 The strength of popular Toryism was considerable, revealing itself in extensive riots and public protest. The authorities responded by implementing the Riot Act, which defined most demonstrations not as misdemeanors but as acts of treason; they criminalized dissent, encouraged Whig vigilantism, and changed the rules of accountability, leaving magistrates legally impervious when dissidents were hurt or killed while being incapacitated.Footnote 120 What we find in this period is a significant reversal in political rhetoric: the Whigs become the loyalists encouraging submission and calm, and the Tories become the rabble-rousers newly committed to resistance. Addison's response to the culture of dissent was loyalist. The point is not that this is surprising—his reaction was not unlike that of most contemporary Whigs. The point is that Steele did not respond in the same way.
The 1715–16 period must have been uncomfortable for Steele, despite his satisfaction at the Whig reclamation of power. Writing at the end of Anne's reign, he had been an indomitable, noisy supporter of civic vigilance and the right to protest. How did he respond when the opposition was no longer Whig but Tory? The most extensive record of his reaction to the events around the regime change is the second Englishman series (July–November 1715)—which sounds nothing like Addison's Freeholder.
Steele's primary aim was to justify the impeachment proceedings against Robert Harley, Henry St. John, and the Duke of Ormonde, which required convincing Englanders that “we have been Betrayed.”Footnote 121 What Steele did, and Addison mostly did not, was write with the awareness that not all of George's subjects were going to agree with him. The proceedings against the Tory peacemakers of Anne's reign were not popular: mobs rallied behind those ministers, defying the government to punish them. Steele did not judge (or indeed even mention) the protestors. He did not lecture them or accuse them of disloyalty. Instead, he built a case against the Tory leaders, reminding readers more than once that he would let them decide for themselves. In the preface, he explained that he would “lay … together Facts which must convince all the World of the Methods [the ministry] had taken to accomplish” their traitorous ends.Footnote 122 The key word in this declaration is “convince”: Steele wrote as one trying to persuade, not simply to preach to the choir or to punish those of a different mind. He resolved to “make good this Charge [his accusation against the Tories] to the Conviction of every Man living” but also to “leave it to them to call the Guilty in this Case what they please.”Footnote 123
Though Steele did not agitate for popular involvement the way he had in the earlier Englishman, the effect of his arguments was to promote civic engagement. In the inaugural number of the second Englishman, he explained that he intended “to Explain the false Arts which have been used against this injured Nation … by a plain State of Facts, in these little Half-Sheets, at a Time, when it is possible there may be found Readers who will be attentive, and give the Cause of their Country a Quarter of an Hour twice a Week.”Footnote 124 Steele wanted his audience to be invested enough to track current events, to be involved in the political life of the nation. And the very fact of his extensive attempt to persuade them is itself testimony to his conviction that the nation functioned more effectively if the people supported the actions of the authorities. The second series of the Englishman seems an attempt not to coerce but to convert. In no. 3, Steele clearly appealed to those protesting the new government's desire to punish Harley, St. John, and Ormonde; he implored would-be defenders of Anne's Tory leaders to recognize that “wicked Men under Punishment are not the proper Objects of Sorrow to the Innocent.”Footnote 125
Steele's paper defended not the virtue and benevolence of George I—a king who, in Addison's account, could do no wrong—but the legality of his title. He did not assure his readers of the new king's boundless affection for them; the furthest he went was to insist that they show their allegiance to Hanover until they had a reason not to. Steele's message was that “King GEORGE has … a better Title to the Throne … than any Prince in any Country, in any Age, ever had”—that, in other words, the parliamentary title is as secure as can be.Footnote 126 Steele targeted—as usual—the hereditary right men, the high Tories still plumping for the Pretender. Ideologically, he did not waver from his fundamental belief in the people's right to resist. He scorned the notion that “the Nature of Government requires an absolute Submission in the whole governed Society, even to a Degree of total Ruin,” arguing instead, “All the Measures of Submission and Ordinances of Government, are to be esteemed lawful, or unlawful, according to the Rule of the general Good, and utter Ruin of the People governed.”Footnote 127 Steele did not energetically promote civic activism in the second series of the Englishman—but neither did he abandon his commitment to a popular basis of authority.
Steele and Addison were moving in different directions by 1716, though their open break did not occur until three years later. In both 1716 and 1719, as John Loftis points out, “Addison followed the party leaders and Steele took a place among the opposition Whigs.”Footnote 128 The first critical moment occurred when they split on the subject of the proposed Septennial Bill, which Steele initially opposed. The Freeholder no. 25 enumerated Addison's reasons for support of the measure, which would extend the term for the House of Commons from three to seven years. Addison's case rested upon the virtues of stability: “The frequent Changes and Alterations in publick Proceedings” tended to create “unhappy Distinctions and Parties,” destabilizing the state and endangering “the Safety of [the] People.”Footnote 129 Steele left a manuscript response to this Freeholder, a five-and-a-half-page essay evidently intended to be the beginning of a new periodical. He branded Addison's journal “a subtle destructive Paper” and voiced his concern for what the “one change more” represented by the Septennial Bill might mean for the constitution.Footnote 130 Then, for whatever reason—biographers speculate that Addison persuaded his old friend—Steele changed his mind.Footnote 131 In April 1716, he published Sir Richard Steele's Speech for Repealing of the Triennial Act, arguing that the seven-year model would allow for more efficient and effective governance. Had Steele not flip-flopped, 1716 would mark the break between the erstwhile collaborators.
Instead, the two came into public conflict in 1719 during the Peerage Bill controversy. The bill, the major controversy of 1719, was an attempt by George I's supporters to prevent the future George II from creating additional peers who would change the composition of the House of Lords. The current king's supporters feared that the successor would remove them after a regime change, and even impeach them, as had happened to Anne's ministers early in George I's reign. The proposal, as Edward Turner has outlined it, “provided that the sixteen elective peerages, which had been allotted to Scotland by the Articles of Union, were to be abolished, and the king was instead to nominate twenty-five Scottish hereditary peers. It provided also for six new English peerages; but no future additions were to be made to the number, though the king might thereafter create new peers on the extinction of existing peerages through failure of issue.”Footnote 132 The bill involved “a considerable diminution of the royal power,”Footnote 133 an unprecedented voluntary surrender of prerogative on George I's part. His enthusiastic support of the measure was testimony to his intense distrust of his son; he was willing to curtail monarchical power to pare down the prince's future powers.
Given Steele's desire to limit the royal prerogative, one might expect him to support a bill that did precisely that—but he opposed it, in the four numbers of the Plebeian and elsewhere. In his Letter to the Earl of O[xfor]d, he maintained that such a measure would “change this free State into the worst of all Tyrannies, that of an Aristocracy.”Footnote 134 Though no fan of unchecked regal power, he was convinced that “we are safer under the Prerogative in the King than we can be under an Aristocracy.”Footnote 135 Like other critics of the proposal, including, most notably, Walpole, Steele worried generally that it would unbalance the constitution—and specifically that it would create an unshakable, formidable aristocracy.
Though Steele's contributions to the Peerage Bill paper war ostensibly defended the prerogative, he was primarily interested in safeguarding the House of Commons. In “The Joint and Humble Address of the Tories and Whigs Concerning the Bill of Peerage” (1719), he shrewdly depicted critics of the measure—a measure supported by the king—as guardians of His Majesty's sovereignty. “We look back with Pleasure and Amazement at your M[ajest]y's Goodness in resigning your Prerogative,” he explained, “but with Contempt and Hatred on those who Solicited you to it, and prevailed upon your Noble Nature to part with what is so Essential to our Safety and your Grandeur.”Footnote 136 Steele's support of the prerogative (“what is so Essential to our Safety”) was merely a cover, of course, meant to offset any suspicion of disloyalty. His concern was for the House of Commons, which, as Winton observes, Steele considered “the most important element” of mixed government, “the guarantor of independence for subject and sovereign alike.”Footnote 137 Supporters of the Peerage Bill tended to argue that they were trying to protect the independence of the House of Commons. In his account of “Commonwealth Politics in the Early Years of George I,” Champion notes that critics of the bill, including Walpole, maintained that “Removing the Crown's authority over the distribution of honors would compromise the process of political rewards for virtuous actions and introduce a dependence of the Commons directly on the Crown.”Footnote 138
Steele's skepticism emerged largely from his doubts about the English nobility. In the Englishman no. 25, he recounted how the Roman government was monarchical and aristocratic (“without allowing any Share of [power] to the Populace”) until the deposition of the tyrant Tarquin the Proud. During his reign, “the People … too late began to repent themselves, that instead of placing too much Confidence in the Nobility, they had not made Terms for themselves, and stood upon their own Feet, by demanding a Share in the Legislature.” This situation would have “occasioned infinite Troubles, Broils, Tumults, and Insurrections, and must have issued in the Destruction of that Commonwealth, had not [in Tarquin's wake] the Nobility consented at last to admit the People into a Part of the Legislature.”Footnote 139 In Hanoverian England, Steele was dubious about the possibility of so fair-minded an aristocracy and recognized the need for subjects to fight to preserve their representational rights.
Those who supported the proposal, like Addison, maintained that “that there had been a great and undesirable enlargement of the house of lords,” contending that the “commons … should support the lords in destroying ‘the most exorbitant Prerogative of the Crown’, especially since the king was not being stripped of power, but was in this case willing to part with it.”Footnote 140 As Addison and others suggested, the balance of power was disturbed by the monarch's ability to create as many peers as he wished in order to control the composition of the Lords. In The Old Whig, Addison took on Steele's Plebeian, defending the Peerage Bill because it would restore more meaningful balance among the executive and legislative branches and because it would ultimately strengthen the Commons as well as the Lords. Addison's position was the safer one, in keeping with the current Whig leaders and George himself, but he was on the losing side. The bill failed, and Addison did not include the two numbers of his ineffectual paper in his collected works.Footnote 141
The controversy around this proposed legislation reflects a divide within the Whig party. In 1717, the Whigs had split between the Stanhope-Sunderland ministry and the opposition of Walpole and Townshend; the Peerage Bill was one of several issues on which Walpole fought Stanhope and Sunderland. The controversy also revealed deeper “fissures within Whig ideology.” As Champion has argued, “Although the defeat of the measure can be seen as evidence of the essentially conservative allegiance of the mainstream of the party to the established protocols of government, it also shows that there was a powerful minority of leading men who applied the principles of a republican tradition to the practical issues of political authority.”Footnote 142 In their Peerage Bill writings, neither Steele nor Addison aligned himself with a radical republican tradition. In his abortive response defending the government, Addison invoked Locke on the need for division of powers, highlighting the problem of having the monarch essentially control two of the three government branches. Steele charged Addison with abandoning his Whig principles, working to augment the power of the Lords at the expense of the Commons. He responded to Addison as to a government agent, insinuating bribery.Footnote 143 Addison was on the side of Sunderland and Stanhope; Steele allied with Walpole, for whom he served as a pen in the last years of his career.Footnote 144 His language sometimes echoed that of republican Whigs: he raised the issue of bribery, for example, warning that, “according to the degeneracy of human nature, the Lords may as well grow corrupt as other men.” All aristocratic “schemes of grandeur and oppression can be formed to invade the property, as well liberty of their fellow-subjects,” he argued, prophesying that “what is founded on usurpation, will be exerted in tyranny.”Footnote 145 Steele did not, in the last years of his life, go as far as the more radical republican Whigs like Trenchard and Gordon, but he did speak their language of “virtue, liberty, and regulation construed against tyranny, slavery, and passion.”Footnote 146 J. G. A. Pocock offers the usual characterization of Addison as champion of politeness, observing in his influential essay on the “varieties of Whiggism” that “Whiggism of the polite kind had no need of the Puritan, Tory, or republican virtues.”Footnote 147 Steele's canon and commitments cannot be so tidily divorced from those “republican virtues.”
Addison was essentially an establishment man in Hanoverian England, much closer to a court Whig than Steele. Steele, while reaping the benefits of his loyalty to the Protestant succession, seemed for various reasons much less at ease in the new regime than Addison and other loyalists. Much of his polemical canon, under George as under Anne, was contentious, highlighting his anxieties and targeting the objects of his disapproval. Addison, on the contrary, operated more naturally in panegyric mode. He was better at defense than attack; neither the Whig-Examiner nor the Old Whig suggests that he enjoyed the cut and thrust of party warfare. The scrappier Steele was vastly happier to spar with his enemies; he was much more willing to defy those in power; and he devoted himself to empowering his fellow subjects to insert themselves into an emerging public sphere. By contrast, Addison showed little interest in conditioning his audience to see themselves as political players. Except in the Freeholder, he did not actively discourage them from participating, but he certainly did nothing like what Steele did to exhort common subjects to be the guardians of their own liberties. In a 1713 letter to John Hughes, Addison expressed his disapprobation of Steele's partisan over-engagement: “I am in a thousand troubles for poor Dick, and wish that his zeal for the public may not be ruinous to himself; but he has sent me word that he is determined to go on, and that any advice I can give him in this particular, will have no weight with him.” Three weeks later, he would commend Pope for staying “out of the Fray.”Footnote 148 Addison manifestly did not see his role as a public writer as involving popular politicization; Steele did.
Addison alluded very occasionally to the problems of “arbitrary Government,”Footnote 149 and in 1706 he observed rather tepidly, “It looks very odd that there should be so great a majority in parliament against what seems to be the bent of the nation.”Footnote 150 Addison was a political player, but he did not exert himself to politicize his readers. In the Freeholder, he depicted freeholders as “but one Remove from a Legislator”;Footnote 151 while Steele would not have disagreed, he worked to remove the sense of distance that Addison's telling phrasing created. Steele went out of his way to emphasize the immediacy of the citizen's role, summarizing his outlook in these terms: “He considers himself, as a Member of the Community represented in Parliament, whether one of the Representative Body, or no: He knows Britons, by their Birth-right, are a Part of the Legislature.”Footnote 152
Conclusion
Steele's many polemical works exhibit a consistent ideological commitment to popular politics, a position for which he has received surprisingly little credit among modern scholars. There is considerable irony in the fact that modern critics still actively prefer the authoritarian, traditional, conservative Swift (and the relatively mild, moderate Whig Addison) over the writer who comes much the closest to the predominantly liberal sensibilities of present-day academic humanists. Addison and Swift were undoubtedly more polished and skillful authors, but one can acknowledge that while also recognizing Steele's significant contributions to the culture of politics in the early eighteenth century. His rivals used him roughly in many respects, but he did richly earn his contemporary reputation for being willing to address himself—by name—to those in power. Steele was fixated on the issue of journalistic authority: who had it, where did they get it, and what role did it play in the political process?Footnote 153 None of the Whig wits with whom he is so often associated were as unequivocally adamant about the legitimacy of popular involvement in state affairs. In many respects, his polemical career connected with radical republican Whigs like Toland and decidedly Low Church writers like Bishop Hoadly.
Steele was a major player in late Stuart and early Hanoverian partisan controversy, and contemporaries knew it—though this part of his career has been almost entirely eclipsed by the modern scholarly tendency to see him as an urbane, Addisonian cultural critic. Neither his party journalism nor his extensive pamphleteering has figured significantly in the formation of his present-day reputation; he continues to be seen in contexts that mostly do not include partisan political controversy. His role in the emergence of a new notion about daily politicization of the people—his role, that is, in the evolving public sphere of early eighteenth-century England—has never even been seriously addressed. The point is not that we have gotten the answer wrong about Steele's position on public politics: we have not even asked the question. When we do, and when we appeal to his substantial prose canon to answer it, we discover that Steele did as much as any other writer to give his readers a sense of themselves not as subjects but as citizens—and to remind leaders and establishment writers of the potency of a politics of inclusion and collective popular vigilance. The Englishman went so far as to articulate the startlingly progressive conviction that “the greatest Man in England is accountable” to the meanest. A reading of Steele's numerous and extensive political writings tells us that he was consistently committed to that popular political engagement to a degree that strongly sets him apart from Addison and the other Whig ideologues and journalists of his time.
