THE RUTHLESS REVEREREND

See Also: DOWNING STREET; WHITEHALL DEPARTMENTS The Treasury

While George Downing was an adolescent, he and his family emigrated from London to Salem, Massachusetts. His uncle John Winthrop was the colony's inaugural governor. In 1642 the youth was ranked second in Harvard College's initial graduating class. Three years later he left New England to serve as a ship's chaplain in the West Indies. The following year he returned to England which was then in a state of civil war. He was appointed to minister to the religious needs of one of the regiments in Oliver Cromwell's recently raised New Model Army.¹

Downing was both highly intelligent and very capable. His abilities drew him to the notice of some of the commander s associates. They took it upon themselves to promote the young man's interests in the advancement of their own. As a result, he was employed to perform a variety of secular tasks. In 1649 he was appointed to serve as the Scoutmaster-General of the English Army in Scotland. This position involved his heading the force's intelligence operations. He fought at the Battles of Dunbar (1650) and Worcester (1651). That he was trusted by Cromwell enabled him to acquire wealth. He married Lady Frances Howard, who was a noted aristocratic beauty.

In 1657 the Protectorate appointed him to serve as its envoy to The Netherlands. There, his two principal tasks were to try to foster good Anglo-Dutch relations and to set up a spy network that could feed back information to John Thurloe, the Secretary of the Council of State, about the activities of the Royalist exiles. He was successful in the latter undertaking.

The Dutch had not only established their independence from Spain they were also flourishing culturally. These achievements were possible because their commercial activities had enabled them to generate vast wealth. Downing took it upon himself to investigate the economic phenomenon.

Cromwell died the following year. He was succeeded as Lord Protector by his son Richard. The youth was not a man of the same calibre as his father had been. Politically, the Protectorate government began to collapse in upon itself. There was an appreciation that Britain might easily slip into a state of bloody anarchy. In 1660 George Monck, the head of the Army in Scotland, declared his support for the exiled King Charles II and marched southwards. Thereby, he cleared the way for the monarchy to be restored. Downing was an associate of the soldier. He offered to put his considerable skills at the disposal of the prospective regime.² The proposal was accepted and a knighthood was conferred upon him. He was continued in his diplomatic position, and received a remunerative sinecure as well as the grant of a plot of land that abutted the newer, western portion of Whitehall Palace.³

The Convention Parliament enacted a financial and political settlement. Downing sat in its Commons as an M.P.. The sovereign and his advisers appreciated that some of the developments that had occurred during the English Republic had been beneficial both for the nation and for the government. The knight drew upon his studies in The Netherlands to play a central role in ensuring both that the Navigation Acts⁴ were re-enacted and that revenue was generated by the Excise rather than by the Customs.⁵

The 59 officials who had presided over the state trial of King Charles I in 1649 had become known collectively as the regicides. The proceedings had ended with the monarch being sentenced to be executed. Downing had worked with some of the number on other matters. In 1662 he oversaw the arrest of three of them at Delft in South Holland. They were extradited back to England, where, in their turn, they were tried and sentenced to death. Of the trio, one had been the colonel of the New Model Army regiment of which Sir George had been the chaplain. The orchestration of these judicial murders led to Downing's name carrying an overtone for ruthless self-interest that was to outlive him. He had not been trusted by the returned exiles, however, it was now clear to Charles II that the man had separated himself decisively from his old associates. He was now an independent agent who was not part of any faction. This political isolation and his ability made him a valuable resource for the monarch.

Downing s admiration of the United Provinces politico-fiscal achievements did not prevent him from adopting a hawkish attitude towards the country. It is possible to attribute the start of the Second Anglo-Dutch War of 1665-7 to his actions although the substantive underlying cause was the two states colonial and commercial rivalries with one another.

While there was a general acceptance across the political nation that the restoration of the monarchy had been the best option for the country in 1660, and there was broad goodwill towards the person of Charles, there had been no resolution of the essential tension that existed between the wishes of the legislature and those of the executive. It had been this dissonance that had caused the First English Civil War to break out in 1642. Parliament did not trust the king and he, in his turn, was wary of it. He needed money in order to run the government but the assembly was suspicious about what he might actually do with any funds that it might grant him.

In 1665 Downing made an important contribution to the development of modern democracy. To assuage the suspicions of backbench M.P.s, he developed the practice of appropriation. This involved assigning a particular Parliamentary granted source of revenue solely to a single, designated area of expenditure. Funds that were sanctioned in this way did not disappear into the Treasury, where their actual usage would have been known only to the king and some of his ministers. Instead, the moneys became traceable. If surpluses were generated by the tax then the overage remained apart from other government revenues, their fates being determined by the terms of the original grants. Since the restoration, Charles's Lord Treasurer and principal minister had been the Earl of Clarendon. The peer's loyalty to the king was unquestionable. However, he was self-important and had a tendency to be overbearing towards the monarch. The official had opposed the proposed innovation as an impairment of the royal prerogative. The sovereign, who was a more pragmatic person than the peer, had overruled him.

By 1667 Clarendon and Parliament's relationship had become mutually antagonistic. Charles removed the earl from office. The Lord Treasurership was placed in a commission. Downing was appointed to serve as the body's Secretary. In this role, he was able to introduce a range of technical practices that had already proven their worth in the United Provinces. Collectively, they made another large contribution towards the growing robustness of the government's finances.

In 1671 Charles appointed Downing to be England's diplomatic representative in The Netherlands. There is an argument that the king did this with the express purpose of having Sir George - whom the Dutch disliked profoundly - trigger another war between the two countries. If this was the case then the ruse worked. As the conflict commenced the knight was forced to flee back across the North Sea.

Downing was placed in the Tower of London for having left his post without having had formal permission to do so. However, this may well have been a political expedient that covered the reality of what he had probably been instructed to do. The man was released after six weeks of incarceration and his talents continued to be well-regarded by the monarch. The previous Anglo-Dutch conflict had had an indecisive outcome. This one, when it finished in 1674, left England permanently as the principal party in the two powers relationship with one another.

In 1742 Sir Robert Walpole established the precedent of walking away from No. 10 after losing power.

Location: Downing Street, SW1A 2AA (orange, turquoise)

¹. The New Model Army had been raised and trained in East Anglia. Downing's father had been a native of Ipswich, one of the region's principal towns.

². Downing's success in making this political transition seems to have been facilitated by his being in a position to blackmail his intermediary to the Stuart court. The man's reputation as a loyal Royalist could have been erased by a number of documents that the diplomat had in his possession.

³. Downing Street now stands upon it.

⁴. The Navigation Acts set out the terms upon which England dealt with other country's merchant vessels and thus the terms of trade. Under Cromwell, the nation had become more assertive in the promotion of its own interests. Downing sought both to continue this attitude and to extend it.

⁵. Downing's experience of The Netherlands had left him with the belief that the revenue yield would be greater overall if the Customs (a tax on goods passing in and out of the country) were kept low. This would mean that there would be more trade, which would stimulate the overall economy, which would lead to the Excise (a tax on processed goods within the country) returning more.

David Backhouse 2024