Party rivalry may be seen to most dramatic effect in the personality cults which sprang up after the deaths of Fox and Pitt. Within a few years at least 20 Fox clubs appeared in the major provincial towns, bodies extravagantly dedicated to the greatness of a man who in his lifetime had been a political failure but who could nevertheless be seen to have professed great principles. The speeches and toasts at Fox club dinners were widely reported in the press. Together with other Whig Party propaganda, they served to identify Fox and his party with the cause of the Glorious Revolution and to fuse the sacred flame of the Whiggery of the past with the urgent claims of civic reform and religious freedom in the present. As for Pitt, a grateful nation raised monuments to ‘the pilot who weathered the storm’, not least in the shape of the dozens of Pitt clubs, which far outnumbered those dedicated to his great rival. In this way, those who wished to commemorate the two men were perpetuating their struggles whilst alive into an indefinite future beyond their graves.
Involvement in party competition was not restricted to the wining and dining classes. Party was a vital element in parliamentary elections. During the first three decades of the nineteenth century the rate of elections suddenly accelerated, nine in twenty-nine years, a rate that was continued after – it was not initiated by – the 1832 Reform Act, with four elections in nine years.10 This return to the electoral rhythms of Queen Anne’s reign kept the political temperature on the boil. It allowed the competition of parties at Westminster to be filtered down into the constituencies. It is not too much to say that party competition in the constituencies structured political participation. There was already a local Toryism and a local Whiggism in many parts of the country, vestigial remnants of the first age of party. The party conflict at Westminster was now transmitted into the constituencies through a number of agencies, particularly the political activities of MPs and candidates and, where relevant, of local patrons and the more frequent discussion of national issues in the press. Furthermore, the proliferation of Fox and Pitt clubs and the growth of Loyalist, Protestant and Constitutional societies all served the same function. In some of the larger boroughs, indeed, especially those with considerable numbers of Protestant Dissenting electors, the identification of local activists with the parties and traditions of Fox and Pitt was quite marked. Especially in those places with strong Anglican corporations and powerful opposing parties of Dissenters, such as Exeter, Lincoln, Worcester and Norwich, such identifications were strong and underpinned local politics. In about forty places in all, Protestant Dissenters were in the vanguard of local party rivalry.
Party divisions were also reflected in the organizational expedients upon which both government and opposition depended. Both sides had fairly well-developed whipping procedures in both Houses. On the government side, the position of leader of the House was rapidly developing. In the 1780s he had been responsible for organizing ministerial supporters. By the early nineteenth century he had become the representative and spokesman of the ministry, especially when the first minister (Liverpool) sat in the Lords. Indeed, Lord Liverpool was forced to adopt party methods. He employed Tory whips, Charles Arbuthnot and William Holmes, and demanded ‘a generally favourably disposition’ from his followers. By the 1820s the government whips had become salaried officials. Charles Arbuthnot was Joint Secretary to the Treasury; his work as patronage secretary did much to weld the government’s majorities together. Without its growing organizational apparatus the government could not have survived. As for the opposition, the bureaucratic structures pioneered by William Adam in the 1780s survived the Portland schism of 1794 and Adam continued to organize the Foxite party after 1794. There was, however, little further development. Although the work of William Adam was not repeated after his retirement from the House in 1812, the opposition could not blame organizational deficiencies for its weaknesses. They held, for example, far more party meetings than the governing side thought fit, at least two in each session during Liverpool’s administration. At the general elections of 1818 and 1820 the Whigs came close to returning 200 members of Parliament. Outside Parliament, at least, the old Whig club, with a membership of about 1,000, had spawned about twenty provincial equivalents as early as 1800. These coexisted with the metropolitan and provincial Fox clubs which sprang up after 1806. Together, these societies constituted a real and substantial, if untidy and informal, infrastructure. The organizational advances of the post-1832 period were both impressive and widespread. That they were founded upon well-developed precedents is equally clear.
Those who wish to argue the case for party in this period like to emphasize three further points. First, parties influenced proceedings in Parliament, defining the allegiance of members, determining the arguments marshalled for and against particular measures and mobilizing support for and against government within Parliament. Second, parties powerfully influenced elections at a number of points: in the selection of candidates, the character of election campaigns, the quality of the ideas and arguments held out to the public and, not least, the result and outcome of those campaigns. Third, parties contributed to the politicization not only of the electorate but also of a much wider audience, bringing to the awareness of the public their respective principles and ideologies, programmes and policies and, indeed, their contrasting party histories and mythologies.
The reader must reach an independent decision on the precise status to be allocated to party influences in the early nineteenth century. While there were important structural and ideological differences between government and opposition, it has to be remembered that they shared many common features. Both were tentatively organized political forces with large and sometimes vague fringe memberships. Both were difficult to lead and to coordinate. As the Tory Party began to distance itself from the monarch, so the Whig opposition began to distance itself from the heir apparent. Both were adept at appealing to the nation through the use of press and propaganda. Both were intervening regularly in the constituencies at election time, beginning to break down the isolation of local patronage structures. Furthermore, their mutual perceptions forced both parties to define themselves. Whigs disliked the policies of Tory governments; Tory governments feared what the Whigs might do in government, how much ground they might concede to public opinion, how much damage they might do to the royal prerogative. It was these interactions between the parties which created the tension that underpinned the rivalry of Whigs and Tories.11
Furthermore, it surely cannot be denied that government and opposition represented contrasting ideological positions in the age of George IV. Liverpool was running his own, a Tory ministry committed to Tory measures in response to Tory opinion, a Tory ministry one of whose principal objectives was to keep the Whigs out. Indeed, the epithet ‘Tory’ was regularly applied to Liverpool’s ministry, in order to distinguish its supporters from those of the indubitably named ‘Whig’ opposition of Fox and his successors. If the ‘Toryism’ of the early nineteenth century was less clearly delineated than that of its ‘Whig’ counterpart, it does not follow that it did not exist. Indeed, the policies pursued by Pitt in the 1790s had occasionally had the epithet ‘Tory’ attached to them: the government’s repression of radical reformers, its patriotic defence of the country during the recent war and the maintenance of order at home. In the 1790s, moreover, some of its defenders were beginning to adopt distinctly un-Whiggish sentiments. The Anti-Jacobin Magazine contrasted ‘our High Church and Tory principles’ with ‘the modern Whigs, and their associates, who see nothing praiseworthy in our present constitution’. In the 1790s some Pittite writers were even arguing that the British constitution was not in essence a balanced constitution but a monarchical constitution since the monarchy was the most ancient element within it, more ancient even than Parliament, the stock from which the other branches of the constitution had sprung. By the early nineteenth century the ministerial press was regularly defending its actions in terms that can only be described as Tory. It maintained a running justification of
the actions of successive ‘Tory’ governments in the pages of the Courier between 1807 and 1830 and, more cerebrally, in the Quarterly Review after 1809 and the high-Tory Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine after 1824. By the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century the term ‘Tory’ was back in regular usage to denote the supporters of the government, and was used by those supporters themselves. By the end of the 1820s the Tories had provided themselves with a (quite illegitimate) pedigree which quietly dropped the old Tory infatuation with divine right and passive obedience in favour of the loyalism of the 1790s, the ideology of Burke, the wartime sacrifice of the revolutionary and Napoleonic period, the defence of Protestantism and, not least, nostalgia for the towering figure of William Pitt. The continuity of personnel, the long survival of Pitt’s government and the continuation of Pittite policies under his successors meant that it was not necessary to mark the point where loyalty to the king’s government could be distinguished from loyalty to a Tory government. Only when the Tories entered the unfamiliar world of opposition in 1830 was it necessary to redefine themselves more openly and more avowedly as a political party, in circumstances in which they could no longer rely on the almost automatic support of the crown.
On the other side of the House of Commons, the Whig Party had carved out for itself a position of semi-permanent opposition to successive Tory ministries. The failure of the ‘Talents’ administration and the death of Fox left the Whig Party in the hands of men who were prepared only to mark time. Fox was succeeded by Grey, who for many years had to be watchful of the reactions of the Grenvilles to any initiative which he might make. The party, moreover, was deprived of his considerable oratorical talent when the death of his father in November 1807 consigned him to the upper house. With Grey and Grenville in the Lords, who would lead the party in the Commons? Grenville vetoed the obvious candidate, Whitbread, and the affable but incompetent George Ponsonby led the Whig troops in the Commons until 1817. The only realistic alternative, Lord Henry Petty, was removed, like Grey, to the Lords on the death of his father in November 1809. On Ponsonby’s death in 1817 George Tierney became leader of the opposition in the lower house and, at once, a more positive note was struck. Indeed, for three years the opposition was at its liveliest and most threatening. However, his failure to topple the government weakened both Tierney’s authority and his health. The momentum which he had generated could not be sustained in the calmer political climate after 1821. Grey fell into depression, attended the House of Lords only occasionally between 1823 and 1825 and in February 1826 actually resigned the leadership to the Marquis of Lansdowne, as Lord Henry Petty had become.
The Whig opposition, then, existed as a government-in-waiting, acting as a semi-permanent opposition, convinced that on Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform their time would come and public opinion would swing in their direction. Weakened by years of failure, demoralized by internal divisions and crippled with indecisive leadership, the Whig Party limped on from year to year. Their depiction of themselves as embodiments of heroic virtue and their rewriting of British history as a testament to Whig progress were as inaccurate as they were unconvincing. They consoled themselves for their political misfortunes by reiterating all the old Rockingham/Foxite Whig prejudices concerning the secret influence of the crown and the evils of the ministerial system of government. To the Whigs, Pitt and Liverpool were the allies of royal tyranny, just as Lord Bute had been. It was irksome, therefore, for the leading Whigs, splendidly assembled at Holland House, the home of Fox’s heir and nephew, to be kicking their heels and awaiting the summons of the public. Their very aloofness concealed from them how outdated was their view of public affairs, how inaccurate their picture of the well-meaning and totally unautocratic Lord Liverpool, how ridiculously conspiratorial their general reading of politics. Everyone was to blame but themselves. Their political horizons were frozen in the 1760s. Even their supposedly ‘popular’ opinions were the product of Whig prejudice rather than social observation and political principle. Their case for parliamentary reform, for example, arose not from the need to represent the literate, talented and propertied middle class but from the need to strengthen the House of Commons against the Hanoverian monarchy. Their inability to move on the issue without upsetting the Grenvilles cut them off from middle-class opinion. It was left to Whitbread and the more radical Whigs in the party, collectively known as ‘the Mountain’, to keep the flag of reform flying, but they did so without the support of the leadership.
No wonder these narrow and sullen aristocrats failed to capture the imagination and sympathy of the public. They might enjoy harassing ministers and occasionally disrupting their parliamentary business, but to the public this seemed factious and irresponsible conduct. The justification for their soporific behaviour would have been that it was not for Whig aristocrats to go around stirring up a dangerously unpredictable public opinion. The art of responsible government was to wait for public opinion to turn, as one day it surely would, and then to go to meet it half way. In this manner, the Whig Party never abandoned its historic belief in aristocratic and party government, pledging itself to defend the propertied public from ministerial despotism and popular anarchy alike. Consequently, there can be no doubting the party credentials of the Whig Party of the age of Grey; but if their convictions were the ultimate source of their consistency in unhappy and unpromising times, it has to be conceded that these party convictions were at the same time a source of weakness, complacency and self-congratulation.
THE STATE AND THE LAW
The Hanoverian stated rested upon two apparently contradictory features: a powerful fiscal-military apparatus which, as we saw in Chapter 8, at certain times was capable of titanic exertions and a decentralized political apparatus which ensured that civilian government remained in local hands. The principal features of the fiscal-military state continued with little structural change down to the end of this period. The size of military establishments grew to extraordinary proportions during periods of warfare, while the revenue-raising departments of state had a staff of over 20,000 officials by the end of it. By comparison, the civilian bureaucracy remained very small. In the early nineteenth century the Foreign Office had a staff of just over 30, the Board of Trade 20, the Home Office 17 and the Colonial Office 14. The central bureaucracies simply lacked the means to develop coordinated national policies. Consequently, they lacked the will to do so.
Britain remained a politically decentralized state in which the sources of political and legal action remained parochial. As we saw in Chapter 4, the regulation of political and social action remained in local hands, supplemented powerfully by a large and varied number of bodies, some statutory, some voluntary. It was not the state but the churches and bodies like the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge which founded schools, including hundreds of charity schools. Moreover, local government was left to powerful local families who enjoyed discretionary authority over remarkably wide areas of life, not least over the raising of military and naval personnel, the administration of the laws and, in many places, over the conduct of election campaigns both to local offices and to Parliament. For much of this period there were few innovations in local political life, even though many contemporaries conceived of their society as one of improvement and progress. By the later eighteenth century the demands made on local government were intensifying as social and economic change accelerated. The period of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars was something of a golden age for the independence of the local magistrates. It was the local mobilization of forces which repelled the radicals and manned the militia and the Volunteer regiments. It was the magistrates of Berkshire who evolved the Speenhamland system (which supplemented wages from poor rates), not Parliament and not the central government. As the burden of work falling upon quarter sessions increased, so the informal arrangements of earlier decades gave way to more formal procedures. By the end of the century most counties had developed separate committees for distinct
areas of their work: for the management of prisons, for the supervision of workhouses, for the maintenance of roads and bridges, for the work of the police, for the approval and collection of parish rates. Unelected and unaccountable, quarter sessions remained, however, a valuable and flexible instrument but responsive to central direction when needed.
In the corporate towns a similar pattern may be discerned. Although conditions varied enormously, ranging from corrupt corporations, in which self-perpetuating groups practised corruption and even peculation, to others, where a decent, accountable and economical administration prevailed, the corporations were not particularly successful in meeting the complex challenges of rapidly changing social and economic conditions. When new demands arose they frequently could not be answered by the corporations because they lacked both money and specialized experience. The needs of the new urban communities were often met by new agencies established either by voluntary action or by parliamentary statute. These included watch committees, street commissioners, water boards and harbour boards. Sometimes several such activities might be collectively entrusted to improvement commissioners, over 200 of which existed in 1830.
The Long Eighteenth Century Page 56