In recent weeks the factional nature of political parties has become apparent, with previous members speaking out against their leaders and news of MPs defecting to other parties. But in the 18th century the line between the main political groups was even more murky, and many politicians (as well as the nation!) found themselves going back and forth between them. In the next blog for the Georgian Elections Project, Dr Robin Eagles looks at the status of political parties in this period…
For much of the 18th century, many of those engaged with politics in one way or another identified with one of two broad political ‘parties’: the Tories and the Whigs. Both names derived from somewhat obscure insults each side threw at the other, but the Tories emerged from an earlier grouping in the 1670s that had come together in support of the court and church, while the Whigs had advocated greater toleration for non-Anglican protestants and intervening to prevent Charles II’s Catholic brother, James of York, from inheriting the throne. After James’s succession, Whigs had been the core of the group that supported William of Orange’s invasion in 1688.
Through the early years of the 18th century, both parties vied for authority and at the end of Queen Anne’s reign the Tories appeared triumphant following a major victory in the 1710 general election. However, Anne’s death in 1714 handed the initiative back to the Whigs who had long made their loyalty to George I extremely obvious, and on George’s accession the Tories were drummed out.
For the best part of half a century, all administrations were Whig of one kind or another. Some Tories gradually made their way over and joined their former rivals; others settled for a pro-Hanoverian opposition, while another significant minority identified themselves with the ‘Jacobites’, supporting whether actively or tacitly the return to the throne of the exiled Stuarts. While by no means all Tories were Jacobites, this made it easy for the Whigs to accuse the entire party of potential disloyalty. As the radical MP John Wilkes declared in his anti-government paper, the North Briton:
Show me a Tory and I will show you a Jacobite [North Briton, xxx]
However, if the Tories found themselves out of power, not everything went the Whigs’ way either. The utter dominance of Sir Robert Walpole prompted some Whigs to quit the administration and embrace opposition. There was also the tendency for many of the Whigs to be identified with one or more of the great aristocrats that helped create differences in outlook depending on which patron they were associated with.
By the middle of the century, some realignment of those in opposition began, driven in part by the unifying figure of the Prince of Wales, who had fallen out with his father and established an alternative court based at Leicester House, in modern day Leicester Square. Associated with his new ‘patriot’ grouping of opposition Whigs and Tories were some of the future heavyweights of the period including Pitt the Elder. Their philosophy was inspired greatly by the writings of the former Tory minister, Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke. Frederick’s death in 1751 stalled the group’s progress, but when his son, George, became King George III many of the most prominent figures from Leicester House were welcomed into government and much of George’s early rhetoric reflected the sentiments of Bolingbroke’s writings, in particular that set out in his Idea of a Patriot King. At the heart of this was the relationship between an enlightened monarch and his people:
The prince and the people take, in effect, a sort of engagement with one another; the prince to govern well, and the people to obey him…
Inspired by such thoughts, George III hoped that he would be able to transcend party and put an end once and for all to the divisions between Whig and Tory.
© National Portrait Gallery, London
One thing that one could always be sure of in the period, though, was the tendency of factions to split. One of the most rumbustious figures to emerge from some of those associated with the patriots was John Wilkes. Having started out as a fairly typical minor member of a Whig faction led by Earl Temple, he rapidly went his own way, and in the later 1760s a new organization was established known as The Society of Gentlemen Supporters of the Bill of Rights (SSBR), whose objectives were to settle Wilkes’s debts and drive forward a programme of political reform. Very soon, though, it was found that the leaders of the SSBR could not work together either and there was an angry falling out between Wilkes and his former protégé John Horne Tooke leading to the rival groupings standing candidates against each other.
Something similar happened with one of the most successful of the aristocratic groupings, the Rockingham Whigs. After the death of the marquess of Rockingham in office in 1782, leadership was assumed by Charles James Fox, but first the rise of Pitt the Younger and then the advent of the French Revolution helped pull the party apart. Their greatest thinker, Edmund Burke, who had worked closely with both Rockingham and Fox, took a completely different view to Fox and other prominent members of the party like Richard Sheridan of what was happening in France. Speaking in the Commons he objected that one could see there:
No other system than a determination to destroy all order, subvert all arrangement, and reduce every rank and description of men to one common level
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Burke and Fox went through a very emotional and very public falling out on the floor of the House of Commons and never reconciled. Fox continued to lead what was left of his Whig party, while Burke steadily made his way over to the government headed by Pitt. Just how far things had strayed was shown by Burke ultimately becoming one of the most important political philosophers for the Tories having started out in life as a loyal workhorse of one of the greatest of the Whig factions.
RDEE
Find out more about elections in the 18th century over on our Georgian Elections Project page.
And you can find more information about the main political parties at this time in these videos on our TikTok channel!
The History of Parliament 