The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  It was the Whig Party which dominated both the executive and Parliament during this period, a rare example of political supremacy exercised by one party for such a length of time. Not surprisingly, it was unable to maintain the cohesion which it had enjoyed during the reign of Anne. As the vital constitutional and religious issues which had done so much to nurture parties between 1689 and 1714 lapsed in intensity, so the texture of the Whig Party weakened. The first schism appeared within a few years of the Hanoverian Succession, but it was soon repaired and the number of Whigs opposed to the government remained small. Even as late as 1727 there were only 15 of them confronting no fewer than 424 ministerial Whigs. After the election of 1734, however, there were 83 opposition Whigs facing 326 ministerial Whigs. After the general election of 1741 there were no fewer than 131 of the former and only 286 of the latter. Thereafter the numerical importance of the opposition Whigs began to decline. After the election of 1747 there were still 97 Whigs in opposition compared to 338 in ministerial ranks. After the election of 1754, however, only 42 opposition Whigs were left to confront 368 ministerialists. The ‘old corps’ was reabsorbing other Whig groups, hitherto inclined to oppose successive governments.

  What did Whiggism stand for after 1714? Can it be argued that Whiggism became meaningless because everyone who mattered politically was a Whig? Certainly contemporaries found it necessary to insert one or more adjectives before the all-embracing term to render it intelligible. Thus they referred to ‘old corps’ Whigs, or the Bedford Whigs or the opposition Whigs. But if the term ‘Whig’ lacked precision it did not lack meaning. Although historians have tended to be cynical about the pragmatism of Whig politicians, it is difficult to believe that the great Whig principles of the defence of the constitution, the protection of Protestantism, the repudiation of Jacobitism and support for religious toleration were little more than fig leaves concealing naked human greed. Whigs felt, and cared, deeply about such matters, and their beliefs concerning them were distinct from those of the Tories. Walpole’s religious policy in the session of 1736 seriously divided his party but, when contrasted with the high church Anglicanism of many Tories, the anti-clerical stance of Whig MPs falls into sharp relief. On questions of foreign policy, in particular, Whig differences were often debated self-consciously within a common Whig tradition. In the 1740s, for example, the ‘new Whigs’ justified their inclusion in the post-Walpolean settlement on the grounds that they had revived the interventionist traditions of Marlborough and William III.

  This common sense of a historic yet continuing tradition of Whiggism was most strongly manifested by the ‘old corps’ Whigs. As we saw earlier, this group, emerging from the debris of Walpole’s ministry, consisted of the great Whig aristocracy, the court and Treasury group and a number of Whig Country gentlemen. They were a loose amalgamation of men and groups at the heart of the Whig governments of Walpole and his successors. Many of these men were from traditionally Whig families. Some of their ancestors had even been active in the great events of 1688–9. The ‘old corps’ were essentially men of aristocratic connection who looked back with pride to the Glorious Revolution and who believed that it was the function of the Whig Party to protect the constitutional legacy of the late seventeenth century. The old corps were not a party but an inner core of politicians at the very heart of the confederation of Whig families. Indeed, by the 1740s it is difficult to depict the Whigs as a party, except in the most general terms. Although the conflict between Whigs and Tories remained the most important cleavage in mid-eighteenth-century politics, the Whigs had become less a party than a broad-based political establishment with the old corps at its heart. Their presence lent continuity and stability to successive administrations, just as the presence of the solid body of the Tories lent continuity and stability to successive oppositions.

  After the fall of Walpole the old corps felt sufficiently insecure in power to reinforce themselves with a number of individuals on the basis of the principles of ‘Broad-bottom’. By 1746, however, thanks to the diligence of Henry Pelham and his brother, the Duke of Newcastle, they were able to govern on the principle of a reunion of the Whigs. For the next eleven years the ‘old corps’ dominated politics. Employing at times a somewhat disdainful attitude towards the monarch, they sometimes behaved as though they, and not he, exercised ultimate power. They developed a lofty sense of their own dignity as the king’s ministers. They sternly protested that the king should take advice only from his ministers and not from favourites who were not responsible to Parliament. On many of the routine political squabbles between the king and his ministers the king was forced to give way: Pitt did become Secretary of State and Fox was never made chief minister. And, as we have seen, George II bent the knee to the Pelhams in 1746. On the other hand, the ‘old corps’ had no wish to tilt the balance of the constitution away from the monarchy. They leaned more towards the royal prerogative than towards the rights of Parliament. They saw no contradiction between their basic beliefs in a natural aristocracy and a legitimate, functioning, competent monarchy. It was their business as the former to support the latter. Thus they accepted the king’s right to be consulted and to enjoy a general oversight of affairs. They recognized that on most matters the ultimate, formal decision on matters of state rested with him. For his part, the king recognized their philosophy of service. Although he could be irritated by their clannishness he was prepared to accept them as his servants. ‘My Lord,’ he once told Newcastle, ‘I know your faults, but I know also your integrity and zeal for me.’ After the death of Henry Pelham the king remained aloof from the reconstructed ministry until he could be sure that it was the only ministry that could both manage the general election of 1754 and command the Commons. Only then did he give it his unreserved support. The king may have lost several important political battles with the ‘old corps’, but there can be no question that in the end the monarchy remained the essential hub around which ministerial politics revolved. Indeed, the unity of the old Walpole-Pelham system almost at once began to weaken. When Henry Pelham died in 1754, his brother, the Duke of Newcastle, replaced him at the Treasury. Although the general election of 1754 delivered a massive Whig majority, after initial setbacks in what came to be known as the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) Newcastle was forced to share power with William Pitt.

  While Whigs governed, Tories opposed, impotent, hesitant but, in the end, united in their lingering demise. Their political failure is easy to explain. They had through their misjudgments surrendered office to the Whigs in 1714. They were not able to impress either George I or George II that they had the interests of the dynasty at heart, and they were incapable of keeping their distance from the Jacobites. Victims of the Septennial Act, they had been sacrificed upon the altars of successive purges of office-holders in both local as well as central government. Finally, they had to suffer constant Whig propaganda that they were little better than enemies to the throne.

  Nevertheless, they continued to exist as a party. Their persistent survival is remarkable, and requires explanation. In one sense, there was nowhere else for them to go but to opposition. Most of them were proud of their (often hereditary) political attachments. There might have occasionally been room in the house of the Whig supremacy for a few of them, but there was never any prospect of the Tories coming in as a party. Furthermore, many of the Tories were staunch Anglicans, and the central ideological pillar of Toryism was the defence of the established church. Although their Anglicanism must have sustained the Tories during their long years of hopeless opposition, it served to underline their differences with the Whigs on religious matters. Tories agreed with Whigs that religious persecution was wrong, but they drew the line at legislative measures which gave aid and encouragement to non-Anglican sects. It was for this reason that they so strongly opposed both the Quaker Tithes Bill of 1736 and the Jewish Naturalization Bill of 1753. On such occasions they demonstrated that slumbering Anglicanism could be roused into a formidable weapon of popular protest.
Yet this, their greatest strength, seriously damaged them at court. Both of the first two Hanoverian monarchs were Lutherans and found the staunch Anglicanism of the Tories distasteful. George I, in particular, was keen to promote unity between Protestant sects and disliked the rigidity of the Tories on such matters.

  The durability and cohesion of the Tories also owed much to their ideological consistency. They continued to advocate hereditary succession and divine right monarchy, principles of continuing relevance during the dynastic uncertainties of this period. They consistently supported a ‘blue water’ foreign policy, free of continental entanglements; they advocated place and pension bills and demanded the repeal of the Septennial Act; they opposed the standing army, preferring national defence to be based on a militia in peacetime. This was a distinctive programme and, if ever enacted, would have dismantled many of the foundations of the Whig supremacy. It was, moreover, a Tory not a Country programme, despite the common features which they shared. In 1739, 1740 and 1742 the Tories found it impossible to cooperate with Country Whigs on proposals to repeal the Septennial Act. And in 1758 the Tories opposed to a man the old Country demand for annual Parliaments.

  Tory cohesion also owed much to the proprietorial nature of the electoral system. Their ownership of property, especially in the counties, lent them a durability that was almost timeless. Just as important as this, however, as Professor Colley has persuasively argued, was the popularity of the Tory Party in the country.20 To a very considerable extent the Tories were the party of the open boroughs; they were strong in Bristol, Coventry, Nottingham and Westminster. In other sizeable boroughs, such as Exeter, Leicester and Worcester, local Toryism was based on popular Anglicanism. In some cathedral cities and county towns, such as Hereford and Gloucester, it arose from civic and corporate tradition. In rather fewer cases (such as Chester, Monmouth and Newcastle upon Tyne) Toryism rested principally upon the presence and property of powerful local families. The Tories claimed, and with some justification, that they, not the Whigs, were the party of the people. At the general election of 1715, for example, the Tories polled approximately as many votes as the Whigs, although they lost the election. Furthermore, Professor Colley claims that at three of the next four general elections, those of 1722, 1734 and 1741, they actually polled more.21 Obviously, they were well organized at the electoral level. Although they had not yet developed a central, party election fund, there are examples of regional funds and of measures of regional cooperation. Finally, we should not imagine that the absence of contested elections in a constituency meant an absence of active Toryism. Norwich, for example, did not experience a parliamentary election between 1715 and 1727, but during that period there were over twenty contests for councillors and sheriff, all of them contested on party lines and in all of which the Tories more than matched the efforts of their Whig opponents.

  The continuing cohesion of the Tory Party also owed much to its effective parliamentary organization. By the 1730s the Tories had developed routines of consultation and whipping-in which bear comparison with those of the Junto Whigs. Their attendance rate, between 75 per cent and 80 per cent, was actually above the rate for the House as a whole. Furthermore, it was rare for a Tory to vote against his party. Only a handful of such instances occurred in this period. Such remarkable party loyalty may to some extent be explained by the effectiveness of the great Tory clubs, the Loyal Brotherhood and the Cocoa Tree. The clubs facilitated regular meetings, political planning and the dissemination of information. No less significant was the ability of the Tories to launch political campaigns of a popular character, such as those in 1733 against the Excise, in 1739–42 at the end of Walpole’s ministry and in 1753 against Jewish naturalization. By the 1750s, indeed, some Tory pamphleteers were trembling on the verge of what later generations were to term ‘radicalism’, with their demands for the repeal of the Riot Act and the widening of the electoral franchise.

  To what extent may the Tories be regarded as a potential and feasible party of government-in-waiting? After the ‘15 and their original proscription, the prospect of an exclusively Tory administration was poor. There was always a number of Hanoverian Tories who would have accepted office and there were sometimes rumours and, conceivably, some possibility of Tories being brought into a mixed administration, such as happened in 1717, 1721, 1725 and 1727, but nothing materialized. Even when the adhesion of a few individual Tories was negotiated in 1744 the arrangement collapsed. Indeed, so long as the monarch was firmly opposed to a Tory administration, or even a mixed administration in which the Tories played a substantial role, then the Tories were likely to remain a party of opposition.

  Whatever their own wishes about office may have been, the Tories had no alternative but to provide the numerical ballast for successive oppositions. Their numbers drifted steadily downwards. After the general election of 1715 there were 217 Tories; after that of 1722 there were 178; after that of 1727 there were 130. For about a decade and a half their numbers stabilized; 149 after the election of 1734; 136 after that of 1741. Thereafter their numbers drifted down once more: 117 after the election of 1747 and 106 after that of 1754.

  Ironically for a party wasting in opposition for so long, the great ideological and emotional centre piece of Toryism remained its reverence for the institution and person of the monarch. Many of them found the Hanoverian Succession a regrettable departure from the pattern of strict hereditary succession; this explains the recurrent Jacobite tendencies of a recalcitrant minority of Tories. Recent historians have made much of such tendencies. They led one eminent authority to conclude that ‘the Tories were a predominantly Jacobite party, engaged in attempts to restore the Stuarts by a rising with foreign assistance’.22 Given the nature of the evidence which the Jacobites generated – rumour, secretiveness, exaggeration and report – it is doubtful if the detailed evidence on this matter will ever be settled. Some leading Tories undoubtedly had Jacobite connections, some of them very dangerous ones, but this does not commit the whole party to the cause of the Pretender. Although Jacobite agents liked to talk up the Jacobite attachments of members of the Tory Party, especially when seeking foreign assistance, such exaggerations should not mislead historians. Judged by the acid test of how they behaved in the ‘15 and the ‘45 most Tories showed themselves to be Hanoverian and not Jacobite. The reluctance of Tories to lift a finger for the Young Pretender in the ‘45 is particularly suggestive.

  To judge by their behaviour in Parliament, and their readiness to play by the rules of the eighteenth-century political game, the Tories appear as a constitutional political party, willing to accept the Hanoverian dynasty. Most Tory MPs stoically accepted their political proscription, but sought to remove it less by rebellion than by patient parliamentary effort. Their prospects of office were slight but – by utilizing popular appeals in the open constituencies and, when opportunities presented themselves, by attaching themselves to successive heirs apparent – not entirely negligible. If we remember that the unifying sentiment of the parliamentary Tory Party was its attachment to Anglicanism, it is difficult to see how it could enthusiastically embrace the cause of a Catholic dynasty which steadfastly and publicly refused to renounce its Catholicism.

  At the same time, we cannot simply dismiss the issue of the Jacobitism of the Tory Party as though it were not a serious problem for contemporaries. Walpole certainly thought they were a Jacobite party and believed them to be implicated in plots for the restoration of the Stuarts. Detailed research on the 136 Tory MPs returned to Parliament at the general election of 1741 has revealed that twenty were actively involved in the plots which led to the ‘45, another twenty were strongly sympathetic to the cause, while at least a further twenty, probably more, would have passively accepted a Jacobite restoration.23 These figures suggest that even at this late date Jacobitism was alive and well among a large minority of Tory MPs. If these men had believed that the Young Pretender had stood a reasonable chance of success in the ‘45 then they may well have dec
lared for him. As it became clear that it was a hopeless cause, there seemed no purpose in their risking themselves, their families, their property and their fortunes.

  If many Tories, albeit a minority, were Jacobite, it was a nebulous sort of Jacobitism which would not seriously trouble the dynasty unless foreign invasion or defeat in war precipitated a major political and military crisis which removed the old corps from office. Even if such a catastrophe occurred, a Jacobite restoration, sponsored and supported by the Tories, was one of its least likely consequences. Much more feasible was a reconstructed ministry based upon an alliance between the old corps and the opposition Whigs which might or might not include the Tories. Another alternative was a coalition between the patriot Whigs and the Tories which did not include the old corps. Before 1751, at least, it is likely that such a reconstructed administration would have included Frederick, Prince of Wales, and in such an arrangement Tory participation would have been almost certain. In all these cases, the Jacobite option took a low priority. Much of this is speculation, but it does at least suggest that a Jacobite restoration sponsored by the Tories, albeit a possibility, was a somewhat remote one.