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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 March 2014
PARTY HAS LOST NONE OF ITS ATTRACTIONS. THE DEVELOPMENT of party is regarded by recent historians, as it was by Namier, as the key to the development of the modern British political system. Indeed, the Whig historians of the pre-Namierite age had made the same assumption. But to what extent is it justified? And to what extent has the continued absorption of historians with the question of party development in British history elicited explanations of that development which are both consistent and adequate?
1 Such analytical discussions seem to embarass British historians but not their American colleagues. It is difficult to understand why this should be so. Perhaps British historians are reluctant to formulate analytical hypotheses from a prejudice against the procedures of political scientists. The consequence has been, however, a marked inferiority in the study of British compared to American party development. See, for example, Chambers, William N., Political Parties in a New Nation, New York, Oxford University Press, 1963 Google Scholar, and the review by Richard Hofstadter in Government and Opposition, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1965. It is probably significant that the American, Donald E. Ginter, is the only historian of British party who has attempted to deal at all thoroughly with its analytical and definitional aspects. See his Introduction to Whig Organization in the General Election of 1790, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1967 and his paper ‘The Origins of British Political Parties: a Reinterpretation’, read to the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies Conference at Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, May 1977.
2 Gash, N., Politics in the Age of Peel, London, Longman, 1953, pp. xviii–xix Google Scholar; Blake, R., The Consetvative Party from Peel to Churchill, London, Eyre & Spottiswood, 1970, pp. 1–91;Google Scholar M. Brock, The Great Reform Act, London, Hutchinson, 1973, ch. 1.
3 For the early nineteenth century see Mitchell, A., The Whigs in Opposition, 1815–30, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1967 Google Scholar. For the later eighteenth century see D. E. Ginter op. cit.; ‘The Financing of the Whig Party Organization, 1783–1793’, American Historical Review LXXI, 1966; F. O’Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution, 1789–94, London, Macmillan, 1967; Cannon, J., The Fox‐North Coalition 1782–84, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1969 Google Scholar; Mitchell, L. G., Charles James Fox and the Disintegration of the Whig Party, 1782–94, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1971 Google Scholar. For the importance of the party dimension in the first two decades of the reign of George III see my own The Rise of Party in England, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1975.
4 See Brooke, J., The Chatham Administration, London, Macmillan, 1956, pp. 218–19Google Scholar for the most powerful and persuasive statement of the case against continuity.
5 Sir Namier, L. B., England in the Age of the American Revolution, London, Macmillan, 2nd edition, 1961, pp. 3–29 Google Scholar; J. Brooke, The Chatham Administration 1766–68, pp. 218–24.
6 B. W. Hill, The Growth of Parliamentary Parties, 1689–1742, 1976; Langford, Paul, The Excise Crisis, London, Oxford University Press, 1975 Google Scholar; Linda J. Colley, The Tory Party, 1727–60, Unpublished Ph. D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1976; ‘The Loyal Brotherhood and the Cocoa Tree: The London Organization of the Tory Party, 1727–60’, The Historical Journal, 20, i, 1977, pp. 77–95.
7 See the works cited in n. 3 above. To be fair, Namier was much less confident than some of his followers that his conclusions would be relevant for a later period. John Brooke has written that Namier ‘always maintained that the conclusions he had reached about the middle years of the century might not necessarily be true for an earlier or later period’. Furthermore, Brooke himself conceded the political as opposed to personal parties were once more in existence in the 1770s. Sir L. B. Namier and J. Brooke, The House of Commons, 1754–1790, London, H. M. S. O., 3 vols, 1964, I, pp. ix, 198–99.
8 B. Hill, Op. cit., p. 10.
9 J. Gunn, Factions No More, London, Cass, 1971; C. Robbins, ‘Discordant Parties: a Study of the Acceptance of Party by Englishmen’, Political Science Quarterly, LXXIII, 1955; P. Campbell, ‘An Early Defence of Party’, Political Studies, III, 1954.
10 The Fox‐North Coalition, p. 243.
11 Harvey Mansfield Jnr, Statesmanship and Party Government, University of Chicago Press, 1965, pp. 1–4, 164–200.
12 J. Plumb, The Growth of Political Stability in England, 1675–1725, London, Macmillan, 1967.
13 As Namier always recognized: ‘There was a Whig and a Tory mentality; each was expressed in certain conceptions of State and Church, had its own ideology and idealism, and responded to certain sentimental appeals and traditional watchwords’, England in the Age of the American Revolution, p. 179.
14 D. Beales, The Political Parties of Nineteenth Century England, Historical Association, Appreciations in History, No. 2, 1971, p. 1.
15 G. M. Sanderson, ‘The Swing of the Pendulum in British General Elections, 1832–1966’, Political Studies, XIV, 1966.
16 D. Beales, Op. cit., p. 2.
17 In any case, the cohesion and effectiveness of the parties of the later nineteenth century have been enormously exaggerated. Their most significant achievement lay in their successful mobilization of consent to and participation in the political system of the new industrial population of Victorian England. But they were much less successful in eliminating informal agencies of political power and were frequently obliged to work through them.
18 Unwittingly, of course, the men of 1688–89, while not wishing to establish party government had established the context and conditions for party conflict. See Harvey C. Mansfield Jnr, ‘Whether Party Government is Inevitable’, Political Science Quarterly, LXXX (4), pp. 522–3, and the same author's Statesmanship and Party Government, Chicago, Chicago University Press, pp. 13–16.
19 J. A. C. Gunn, Factions No More, pp. 11–25.
20 John Brewer has claimed that Burke intended party to be permanent but he adduces no evidence at all to suggest that it ought to have a life longer than that of the next Rockingham administration (Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accesion of George III, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1976, pp. 72–4). Party domination of government is not at all the same thing as the permanence of party. Had Burke intended party to be permanent no doubt he would have said so. His neglect of party institutions and, indeed, the whole drift of his career, suggests that he did not take a bureaucratic view of party. Nor did contemporaries evince any awareness that Burke regarded party as permanent. He wished to cure ‘Present Discontents’ not future ones.
21 Party remained a faintly discreditable phenomenon even for the Victorians. It is astonishing the extent to which they neglected either the appreciation or even the serious analysis of party and party organization. They may have enjoyed political journalism but they had no taste at all for psephology before the 1850s ‐ and not much thereafter. Serious political analysis of party organization scarcely exists before the work of the Russian Jew, Ostrogorski, published in 1902.
22 An almost amusing inconsistency may be discerned in such writings. For example, it is common for the Rockingham Whigs to be attacked either because they lacked principles or failed to live up to the principles they professed. On the other hand, the Tories of the first half of the century are dismissed with contempt because they demonstrated remarkable fidelity to their principles, presumably because their cause had failed. L. B. Namier, op. cit., pp. 183–90; John B. Owen, The Eighteenth Century, 1714–1815, 1974, pp. 112–14.
23 It is necessary to liberate ideology from the straitjacket imposed upon it by some eighteenth century historians but I would not go so far as Quentin Skinner does in allowing that even principles exploited rhetorically help us to understand the political behaviour of those concerned. There are considerable difficulties, in my view, in eliciting the precise meaning of such a rhetorical flourish, to say nothing of the problems to be faced in ascertaining the writer's intention. Further, to assume that almost any principle must of necessity be an assertion of socially permissible—and hence politically legitimate—ideology seems to me to be dangerously unhistorical. See Q. Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, VII (1969), pp. 3–53; ‘Social Meaning and the Explanation of Social Action’, in P. Laslett, W. G. Runcimon and Q. Skinner, Philosophy, Politics and Society, Oxford, Blackwell, 1972.
24 John Owen is extremely cynical about their significance. ‘In the constituencies the old Whig‐Tory rivalry survived… even if it often did no more than confer a specious aura of principle upon traditional struggles between prominent local families’, The Eighteenth Century, 1714–1815, p. 112. See also W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife: England 1714–1760, 1977, pp. 161–64.
25 Thus John Brooke in The Chatham Administration, pp. 337–38, argues that party was irrelevant in election results and gives examples of men of the same party opposing each other in the constituencies or men of opposing parties co‐operating at the local level.
26 A. Newman, Elections in Kent and its Parliamentary Representation, 1715–54, Unpublished D. Phil., Oxford, 1957, p. v.
27 The picture of the electorate sketched by W. A. Speck in Tory and Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies, London, Macmillan, 1970, pp. 22–24, for the years 1701–1715 does not appear to change significantly for the succeeding period so far as party voting is concerned. At Carlield in 1768 only 5 electors out of 694 split their votes, at Lichfield in 1761 only 14 out of nearly 700, at Newcastle‐upon‐Tyne in 1774 only 128 out of 2,500, at Exeter in 1761 only 3 out of 1,254, at York in 1820 only 130 out of 2,500, at Gloucester in 1818 only 90 out of 1,703, at Nottingham in 1826 only 109 out of 4,051. It is also significant that voters remain loyal to their party. It was unusual for more than 10% of the electorate to desert the party it had supported at the immediately preceding election. I hope shortly to publish the results of my researches into electoral behaviour.
28 This phrase is that of Professor G. Holmes, The Electorate and the National Will in the First Age of Party, Lancaster, 1976. The ‘First Age’ occupies the period 1679–1722.
29 This was always Namier's view and has been reasserted by the school of late seventeenth‐early eighteenth century historians, notably Prof. Holmes and Dr Speck. For its most recent formulation, see W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife, 1714–60, London, Arnold, 1977, ch. 6. The most authoritative recent expression may be found in John Owen's The Eighteenth Century, 1714–1815, ch. 5.
30 See Linda Colley, The Tory Party, 1727–60. Miss Colley demonstrates quite convincingly that, whatever the opinions of historians, contemporaries had no difficulty in identifying a Tory party. Furthermore, of 388 MPs who sat in Parliament betwen 1727 and 1760 only 17 deserted the party.
31 R. R. Sedgwick (ed.), The House of Commons, 1715–54, 2 vols, 1970, I. p. x.
32 L. Colley, ‘The Loyal Brotherhood and the Cocoa Tree: The London Organization of the Tory Party, 1727–60’, op. cit..
33 The most persuasive statements of this ‘Court‐Country’ view of early eighteenth century politics may be found in the works of J. Owen, The Eighteenth Century, pp. 105–09 and W. A. Speck, Stability and Strife, pp. 156–66. For criticism of this position see M. Goldie and L. Colley, ‘The Principles and Practice of Eightcenth Century Party’, The Historical Journal, 21, 1, 1979, pp. 241–43.
34 I have dealt with the continuity of personnel from the old corps to the Rockingham Whigs in The Rise of Party, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1975, pp. 46–61, 219–24.
35 Characteristically, Newcastle reported to Hardwicke (24 October 1754, B. L. Add. MSS. 32737 f. 191, Newcastle Papers) ‘I believe that the plan of the Closet is to stand by, look on and if we can support ourselves to be pleased with it. But to avoid as much as possible, to make our cause their own.’.
36 It is worth remarking that the malaise of social and political dissension had in the British public mind traditionally been associated with party conflict. Burke, however, ascribes the social and political instability of the time to the court and to the blind and indiscriminate support for the ministry and Crown which weakens rather than strengthens government. For Burke, then, party is the cure not the cause of the ‘Present Discontents’. ‘Thoughts on the Causes of the Present Discontents’, The Works of Edmund Burke, 16 vols, 1815–27, II, pp. 220–21.
37 F. O'Gorman, The Whig Party and the French Revolution, pp. 12–31. John Brewer, However, argues, though without citing any evidence, that ‘the election of 1784 marked the almost complete destruction of the Rockinghamite edifice’, but only proceeds to register the well‐known fact that the Fox‐North coalition was unpopular and that it lost the election of 1784. It may be the case that in 1784 ‘aristocratic Whiggery took a terrible beating’ but it yet had a long life ahead of it. ‘Rockingham, Burke and Whig Political Argument’, Historical Journal, XVIII, 1975. Mr Brooke (The Chatham Administration, p. 292) argues that the Foxite party after 1784 was a different party with little connection with the Rockingham party. ‘It was Fox not the colourless Rockingham who attracted men to the party. He built up his own following independent of Rockingham but enlisted under his banner. The survival of Rockingham after 1775, like the survival of Newcastle after 1766, was incidental to the development of the party, Fox was the driving force, Rockingham the symbol of unity and aspiration.’ For a different assessment which argues the case for continuity between the parties of Rockingham on the one hand and Portland and Fox on the other see my The Rise of Party, pp. 431–34.
38 D. E. Ginter, ‘The Financing of the Whig Party Organization, 1783–93’, loc. cit.; Whig Organization in the General Election of 1790.
39 As they had in the early eighteenth century. In parliamentary lists for 1715 ‘ninety per cent of the members are designated simply as Whig or Tory in identical fashion’. H. Snyder, ‘Party Configurations in the early eighteenth century House of Commons’, BIHR, XLV, 1972.
40 D. Close, ‘The Formation of a Two‐Party alignment in the House of Commons between 1832 and 1841’, EHR, 1969. Dr Close is, perhaps consciously, reinforcing the view of Professor Gash that there appeared soon after the 1832 Reform Act ‘a solid and comprehensive two‐party alignment’. In the sense that the new and fluid situation after 1832 consequent upon the widening of the franchise, the reduction of nomination boroughs and the increase in the number of contests quite quickly stabilized, then the political alignment which emerges after 1835 is of the greatest importance. However, it was neither novel nor permanent. Dr Close's case is that from an examination of division lists on five issues only 81%‘proved themselves firm party supporters by voting consistently (on all five issues) while 95.5% aligned themselves unmistakeably with one party by their votes on at least three’ (op. cit., pp. 272–3, 273–4). Dr Close recognizes that after 1847 this alignment was ‘admittedly disrupted’ but he asserts that ‘even in the subsequent thirteen years of party confusion, the labels Conservative and Liberal continued to stand for distinguishable sets of ideas, and to be accepted by most MPs’ (ibid., p. 257). This is not, perhaps, a particularly impressive legacy.
41 Fraser, P., The Conduct of Public Business in the House of Commons, 1812–27, Unpublished Ph. D. Dissertation, University of London, 1957, pp. 11–12.Google Scholar
42 A. Mitchell, The Whigs in Opposition, p. 66.
43 A. Aspinall and E. A. Smith, English Historical Documents, 1783–1832, 1959, p. 254.
44 A. Mitchell, Op. cit., p. 3 (n).
45 A. S. Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition, 1714–1832, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1964.
46 ‘The truth is that Opposition had staked everything upon Napoleon's success, and are grieved at his failure’. Dudley to Llandaff, 22 June 1816. Even so, it was regarded as healthy that the ministry (in this case of Liverpool) should be given the occasional defeat. ‘I think that the ministry wanted beating upon something, no great matter what’ wrote Dudley shortly after Liverpool had been defeated on the Income Tax in 1816. ‘A blow of that sort was necessary to remind the servants of the country that they are not its masters, and to give back to the constitution that spirit and activity which it was perhaps beginning to lose’, Dudley to Llandaff, 2 April 1816, Llandaff MSS.
47 The Whigs confessed that they were driven to organize themselves as a party because the ministry already did so. See The Edinburgh Review, vol. LIX, article vii, pp. 188 et seq..
48 A. Mitchell, The Whigs in Opposition, ch. 1. ‘The independence claimed by so many amounted to real neutrality only in a few cases. For the most part the members in the central zone of the House were ultimately subject to the attracting or repelling power of one of the two political poles. The range of opinion always resolved itself in discussion, and divisions into two sides and the differences within parties were variations on the same theme, not disharmonies. The existence of nonparty divisions does not eclipse the fact that political ones in which ministry and opposition, or sections of them, clashed were in a majority most of the time. They certainly received much the greater share of public and press attention’. ibid., p. 4.
49 A. S. Foord, op. cit., pp. 420–39; M. Hinton, The General Elections of 1806 and 1807, unpublished Ph. D. Thesis, University of Reading, 1959, pp. 10–12, 36, 52–61. See also P. C. Lipscombe, ‘George Canning and the Trinidad Question’, Historical Journal, XII, 1969, p. 445, ‘In seeking to drive Addington from office Canning hoped to transform Pitt's connexion into a large party’.
50 McQuiston, J. R., ‘Rose and Canning in Opposition, 1806–07’, Historical Journal, XIV, 1971, p. 527 Google Scholar. There was in the early nineteenth century a tradition that the Talents, in apparently trying to buy off the opposition of Perceval and Canning, welded the opposition into a party. See, e.g., the Duke of Buckingham to Fremantle, 22 August 1814, Box 55, Fremantle MSS.
51 By 1800 there were probably only about 100 Independents left in the House of Commons. Derek Jarrett has challenged the traditional view of the Independents and has found them far from Independent, in ‘The Myth of Patriotism in Eighteenth Century British Politics’, Britain and the Netherlands, vol. V, 1975, J. Bromley and E. H. Kossmann (eds). The Court and Administration group was also declining in numbers and was only slightly bigger than the Independents. The ‘Third Party Circular’ of 1788 describes only 263 MPs as either ‘Independent’ or ‘Court and Administration’. Historians should certainly be fully conscious of the abiding significance of traditional ‘non‐party’ elements in politics (see the elegant reiteration of these elements in J. Brooke’s ‘Introduction’ to The House of Commons, I, pp. 203–4) but they should not allow them to obscure their view of party.