Whig Party

12 Key excerpts on "Whig Party"

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  The Whig Revival, 1808-1830

  • W. Hay(Author)
  • 2004(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  A political party in Britain is an organized group possessing or aspiring to political power, and thus political office, which cultivates popular support for its beliefs and focuses its attention on Parliament. Parties also act at different times as vehicles of ideology, dispensers of patronage, and instruments of government. 22 Whigs and, to a lesser extent in this period, Tories met the criteria of party even though the absence of a mass electorate focused attention on the Commons itself. Since few members owed election to a party label or machine, unity relied on personal loyalty, shared ideological commitments, and, above all, the desire for office and its perquisites. Parties can be understood best as coalitions reflecting a spectrum of political opinion within agreed bounds rather than a more disciplined and homogeneous body. If differences at times weakened party cohesion, breadth of opinion also became a strength in drawing support from outsiders who might gradually merge into the group. 23 Debates over ideologically charged issues that emphasized identity strengthened the role of parties, while party sentiment receded when such matters of principle became muted and the unity they brought faded. Centrifugal forces often blurred dis- tinctions and made parties appear as two centres of gravity rather than 14 The Whig Revival, 1808–1830 the organized and disciplined bodies acting in sharp opposition usually associated with the concept. 24 The system’s flexibility encouraged small, cohesive groups, acting both within parties and as separate forces. Factions depended upon their leader’s fortunes and differed from parties in the scope of their ambitions, their size and popular support, and in having a distinctive ideology. 25 Contemporaries often used the terms party and faction interchangeably, a practice that may derive as much from the ill- repute associated with factions as from confusion over the standing of particular groups.

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  Political Parties in Britain 1783-1867

  • Eric J. Evans(Author)
  • 2006(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The 1784 election offers a neat paradox. It showed clearly enough that the rights of the monarch in the political system could both be asserted and sustained. Pitt, the king’s choice, had been triumphantly endorsed by the electorate. Yet the king’s battles with his political opponents had caused those opponents to refine and develop the notion of party against which George III had ranged himself. Fox’s supporters now began to challenge the royal prerogative with organization, propaganda and a clear platform. Their tactics anticipated later party developments. It may even be, as Professor Cannon has suggested, that the king needed to fight fire with fire by marshalling his own anti-Foxite forces on party lines. Court politicians organized supporters, made arrangements for like-minded MPs to vote together and used propaganda to influence the electorate. An anti-party monarch had to organize a party to defeat his opponents. In the long term, as we shall see, party would expand to fill the vacuum in political life left as royal influence began to decline from the end of the eighteenth century. The king’s victory in 1783–4 had many pyrrhic elements.

  Party in 1783 was already over a century old. The terms Whig and Tory came into use in the later 1670s to describe the views of those respectively for and against the exclusion of Charles II’s Catholic brother, James, Duke of York (later James II), from legitimate succession to the throne. On the Whig side, party stressed the institution of parliament as a necessary brake on royal power; on the Tory side, it implied a defence of established institutions and, in particular, those of the monarchy. A pro-Whig writer concluded in the 1770s that the ‘most material doctrine’ of the early Tories was ‘to exalt the Crown to the possession of all those prerogatives at which Charles the First aimed’, while the Whigs sought ‘to limit the power of the Crown as much as possible, until prerogative was so much reduced, that the nation should be in fact tho not in form a Republick. The Tories were above all other things fast friends to the House of Stewart: the Whigs fast friends to Liberty alone.’ Such a view cannot be accepted without qualification, of course, but it is a reasonable statement of differing attitudes to royal power.

  Party battles were very fierce during the reign of Queen Anne (1702–14). Then other aspects of party, which would resurface as important distinguishing features as modern parties developed a century later, came to the fore. Tories were staunch, even fierce, defenders of the Church of England; they opposed the granting of religious toleration to nonconformist dissenters. Whigs supported toleration and, not surprisingly, attracted many dissenters from the expanding middle ranks of society. Throughout the reign, war with France raged. This war, the most costly Britain had yet fought, had to be paid for by taxation and by raising loans for the government. These loans paid useful rates of interest and merchants, traders and contractors benefited substantially from lending money. Those with most money to lend tended to be Whigs and Whigs supported the war. By contrast, smaller landowners increasingly opposed it. English country gentlemen were burdened by a land tax of 20 per cent (four shillings in the pound) levied to help pay for the war. The English counties became increasingly Tory in political sympathy. The land tax hit smaller landowners more heavily than it did commercial men.

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  Constitutional Government in the United States

  • Woodrow Wilson(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  VIII Party Government in the United States

  IN order to understand the organization and operation of parties in the United States, it is necessary to turn once more to the theory upon which our federal and, for that matter, our state governments, also, were constructed. They were, in their make-up, Whig inventions. At the time our national government was erected, the Whig Party in England was engaged in a very notable struggle to curb and regulate the power of the Crown. The struggle had begun long before the revolution which cut our politics asunder from the politics of England, and that revolution itself was only an acute manifestation of the great forces which wore at work among thoughtful Englishmen everywhere. The revolution which separated America from England was part of a great Whig contest with the Crown for constitutional liberties. The leaders of that revolution held Whig doctrine; the greater Whig statesmen on the other side of the water recognized them as their allies and gave them their outspoken sympathy, perceiving that they were but fighting a battle which must sooner or later be fought in England, whether with arms or with votes and the more pacific strategy of politics. Every historian now sees that the radical changes made in the government of England during the nineteenth century were quickened and given assurance of success by the changes which had preceded them in America; that the leaders of the American Revolution had but taken precedence of the Whigs at home in bringing government into a new and responsible relationship to the people who were its subjects.

  The theory of the Whigs in England did not go the length of seeking to destroy the power of the throne. It probably would not have gone that length in America if the throne had been on this side of the water, a domestic instead of a separate and distant power. The men in the old country to whom the American revolutionists showed the way sought only to offset the Grown with other influences, — influences of opinion acting through a reformed and purified representative chamber, whose consent not only should be necessary to the enactment of law, but the advice of whose leaders the king should find it necessary to heed; and the influences of judicial opinion acting through stable and independent courts. It was, as I have already pointed out, this theory of checks and balances:, which I have called the Newtonian theory of government, that prevailed in the convention which framed the Constitution of the United States, — which prevailed over the very different theory of Hamilton, that government was not a thing which you could afford to tie up in a nice poise, as if it were to be held at an inactive equilibrium, but a thing which must every day act with straightforward and unquestionable power, with definite purpose and consistent force, choosing its policies and making good its authority, like a single organism, — the theory which would have seemed to Darwin the theory of nature itself, the nature of men as well as the nature of animal organisms. Dominated by the immediate forces and aspirations of their own day, ruled in thought and action by the great contest in which they had found themselves engaged, to hold the royal power off from arbitrary interference with their interests and their liberties, they allowed themselves to become more interested in providing checks to government than in supplying it with energy and securing to it the necessary certainty and consistency of action. They set legislature off against executive, and the courts against both, separated the three in sphere and power, and yet made the agreement of all three necessary to the operation of the government. The boast of the writers in the Federalist

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  Constitutional Government in the United States

  • Woodrow Wilson(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wilson Press

    (Publisher)

  VIII

  PARTY GOVERNMENT IN THE UNITED STATES

  IN order to understand the organization and operation of parties in the United States, it is necessary to turn once more to the theory upon which our federal and, for that matter, our state governments, also, were constructed. They were, in their make-up, Whig inventions. At the time our national government was erected, the Whig Party in England was engaged in a very notable struggle to curb and regulate the power of the Crown. The struggle had begun long before the revolution which cut our politics asunder from the politics of England, and that revolution itself was only an acute manifestation of the great forces which were at work among thoughtful Englishmen everywhere. The revolution which separated America from England was part of a great Whig contest with the Crown for constitutional liberties. The leaders of that revolution held Whig doctrine; the greater Whig statesmen on the other side of the water recognized them as their allies and gave them their outspoken sympathy, perceiving that they were but fighting a battle which must sooner or later be fought in England, whether with arms or with votes and the more pacific strategy of politics. Every historian now sees that the radical changes made in the government of England during the nineteenth century were quickened and given assurance of success by the changes which had preceded them in America; that the leaders of the American Revolution had but taken precedence of the Whigs at home in bringing government into a new and responsible relationship to the people who were its subjects.

  The theory of the Whigs in England did not go the length of seeking to destroy the power of the throne. It probably would not have gone that length in America if the throne had been on this side of the water, a domestic instead of a separate and distant power. The men in the old country to whom the American revolutionists showed the way sought only to offset the Crown with other influences,—influences of opinion acting through a reformed and purified representative chamber, whose consent not only should be necessary to the enactment of law, but the advice of whose leaders the king should find it necessary to heed; and the influences of judicial opinion acting through stable and independent courts. It was, as I have already pointed out, this theory of checks and balances, which I have called the Newtonian theory of government, that prevailed in the convention which framed the Constitution of the United States,—which prevailed over the very different theory of Hamilton, that government was not a thing which you could afford to tie up in a nice poise, as if it were to be held at an inactive equilibrium, but a thing which must every day act with straightforward and unquestionable power, with definite purpose and consistent force, choosing its policies and making good its authority, like a single organism,—the theory which would have seemed to Darwin the theory of nature itself, the nature of men as well as the nature of animal organisms. Dominated by the immediate forces and aspirations of their own day, ruled in thought and action by the great contest in which they had found themselves engaged, to hold the royal power off from arbitrary interference with their interests and their liberties, they allowed themselves to become more interested in providing checks to government than in supplying it with energy and securing to it the necessary certainty and consistency of action. They set legislature off against executive, and the courts against both, separated the three in sphere and power, and yet made the agreement of all three necessary to the operation of the government. The boast of the writers in the Federalist

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  A History of the British Isles

  Prehistory to the Present

  • Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  In fact, the contemporary debate about whether women should remain entirely in the domestic realm itself can be seen as a reflection of the fact that many women were starting to do just the opposite. Another threat to the Whig oligarchy came from a parliamentary reform movement that targeted corruption, patronage, and financial malfeasance within the government. MPs actually exercised their own judgement and did not, as it turns out, sell their votes to the highest bidder, 3 but public perceptions are often more important than reality. Curiously, demands for reform during this period did not generally emanate from the manufacturing towns with little political clout that had begun to emerge in northern England because the government remained sympathetic to commercial interests. Instead, demands for reform came from within the Whig Party itself, leading to a division between moderate and radical Whigs. A HISTORY OF THE BRITISH ISLES 206 Much political debate in the second half of the eighteenth century centred on the position of the monarchy, causing yet another rift within the ruling class and precipitating a revival of the meaningful distinction between Whigs and Tories as opposed to the more meretricious party division of, say, the modern United States. The Whigs looked back to the Revolution of 1688 and became determined to remain in power in order to defend the principle of parliamentary supremacy. Some Whig representatives, such as Edmund Burke, sought to avoid a return to factionalism; others, however, saw in the increasing power of the monarchy under George III a threat to the very principles over which the Revolution of 1688 had been fought. George did not see himself as a tyrant; his most recent biographer, Janice Hadlow, describes him as ‘essentially a good-hearted man, who tried to observe the decencies of gentlemanly behavior even in the darkest and most trying times of his reign’.

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  The Forging of the Modern State

  Early Industrial Britain, 1783-c.1870

  • Eric J. Evans(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7 The decline of the Whigs and the emergence of a new Conservatism, 1788–1812 I This period is rarely considered as a unity, yet it witnesses one of the most significant realignments in British political history. During it, the old Whig Party, the dominant force under the first two Georges but in almost perpetual conflict with the third, splinters. From the ideological ferment engendered by the French Revolution comes a coalition of Pittites and old Whigs concerned above all to defend property and the old order against rash and speculative political notions like reform and religious toleration. Planted in soil already broken and tilled by expressions of popular anti-reformist ‘Conservatism’ from the 1770s onwards, the seeds of the modem Tory party germinate in the 1790s, though the naming of its true-blue flowers had to wait until the nineteenth century. The name ‘Tory’, redolent of a discredited opposition two generations earlier, stuck in the throats of the new coalition and was adopted diffidently only by second-generation Pittites during the government of Lord Liverpool after 1812. The coalition also further weakened the vitality of political independence in Parliament. The independents were a declining force there before 1780, but as the great issues of the 1790s, war, reform and religious toleration, polarised opin- ion, many expressed a consistent preference for the party of order, thus preparing the way for the virtual disappearance of the MP without party allegiance by about 1830. The Foxite Whigs, advocates of moderate reform and opponents of the war with revolutionary France, became an isolated group barely fifty strong in the Commons. Though the confusions of 1801–12 resulted in an accession of strength – the opposition could count on about 150 supporters by 1812 – the Whig split of 1794 effectively consigned the followers of Fox to a generation in the wilderness. In this period, too, the nature of opposition begins to change.

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  British Politics in the Age of Anne

  • Geoffrey Holmes(Author)
  • 1987(Publication Date)
  • Hambledon Continuum

    (Publisher)

  In the first election Robert Harley triumphed over Sir Richard Onslow by a large majority, with the help of a great party of Whigs who still regarded him as a symbol of country independence; 1 but much of that support had significantly evapo-rated by the end of 1701 when he scraped home against Sir Thomas Littleton by a mere four votes. 2 During 1701 three developments — two parliamentary and one external — had fused together the main elements in the Whig Party more effectively than at any time since the Revolution, convincing even the Country Whigs that Tory ministers were no longer fit Bennett, 'King William III and the Episcopate', Essays in Modern English Church History in Memory of Norman Sykes (1966), pp. 122-3. 408 British Politics in the Age of Anne to be entrusted with the government of the country. The first was the impeachment of three of the Junto lords on charges blatantly trumped up out of party malice. The second was the crisis over the Spanish succession, and the evident unwillingness of the Tories to recognise the reality of the threat from France and the inevitability of a new war. The third was the passage of the Act of Settlement, which produced relatively little tension on the surface but enough below the surface to suggest that many Tories had not really cut themselves free from the bonds of divine hereditary right (an impression reinforced by the wrangling which marked the debates on the Abjuration bill in February 1702). Outside Parliament in 1701 the deliberate attempt of the Highflying Tories, prompted by Rochester, to use the Lower House of Convocation as a political weapon against the Whigs forced moderate as well as Low Church divines into the welcoming arms of the Junto and finally shattered William Ill's already-crumbling policy of religious pacification.

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  The Persistence of Party

  Ideas of Harmonious Discord in Eighteenth-Century Britain

  • Max Skjönsberg(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Parliamentary parties were, in historical and political writing, related to civil war ‘parties’, which is why a discussion of Whig and Tory was usually incomplete without reference to Cavalier, Roundhead, and the civil war.  For similar reasons, men- tions of the factions that brought down the Roman Republic were also common in discussions of British party politics.  We now turn to the second half of the seventeenth century, and Hume’s second Stuart volume, and see how the survival of religious parties once again produced a Court and Country polarity, which in turn would give way to Tory and Whig. Restoration After eleven years of republican rule, many under the essentially military government of Cromwell,  monarchy was restored with the aid of General Monck, lavishly praised by Hume.  Reconciliation between  Ibid., –.  Ibid., VI, .  Ibid., –.  Ibid., V, .  Ibid., .  Spectator, No. ,  July .  Gordon’s ‘First Discourse: On Party and Faction’, in Political Discourses on Tacitus and Sallust (Indianapolis,  [–]).  Hume, History, VI, , , , –, .  In an extensive footnote, Hume attacked the ‘factious spirit’ of Bishop Burnet for treating Monck with ‘malignity’. The Whig Burnet’s treatment was ‘a singular proof of the strange power of faction’, according to Hume; see History, VI,  (note g). Restoration  erstwhile rival parties paved the way for the Restoration.  Upon his restoration, Charles II ‘admitted the most eminent men of the nation, without regard to former distinctions’.  Hume was clear that Cavalier and Roundhead expired at the Restoration, as a result of the ‘lenity and equality of Charles’s administration’. Meanwhile, ‘[t]heological contro- versy alone still subsisted, and kept alive some sparks of that flame, which had thrown the nation into convulsion’.  Presbyterianism and Episcopacy (or Prelacy), which was restored with the king, competed for superiority.

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  British Prime Ministers from Walpole to Salisbury: The 18th and 19th Centuries

  Volume 1

  • Dick Leonard(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Parliament to which Pitt was elected was divided as much by faction as by party. The historical division between Whigs and Tories had become somewhat blurred during the 20 years that George III had occupied the throne. The long domination of the Whigs throughout the reigns of the first two Georges, which had seen the Tories steadily decline in both numbers and influence, was a thing of the past. The Whigs still saw themselves as the guarantors of the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, believing in a limited monarchy, the supremacy of Parliament, a vigorous and basically anti-French foreign policy, free trade and relative religious tolerance. Led by an oligarchy of enlightened aristocrats, they tended to be arrogant, self-satisfied and to behave as though they were born to rule. The main Whig factions were led by three peers – the Marquess of Rockingham, the Earl of Shelburne and the Duke of Portland – with Charles James Fox the dominant figure in the House of Commons.

  The Tories, representing primarily the gentry, were strong supporters of the royal prerogative and the Church of England, tending to believe in the divine right of monarchs, and were long tainted by suspicions of Jacobitism, though this was less of a factor after the failure of the 1745 uprising of Bonnie Prince Charlie. They were also protectionist, and more isolationist in international affairs, putting their trust in the British navy to keep the nation out of danger. Their long eviction from power was ended by the accession of George III, who distrusted the Whig oligarchs and was determined to assert his own personal role. In 1762, he installed a Tory, the Earl of Bute, a personal favourite, as Prime Minister, but his ministry lasted for less than a year. There followed four short-lived Whig governments, one of them led by the Elder Pitt as Earl of Chatham, but in 1770, George succeeded in imposing a second Tory administration. This was led by Lord North MP, a much more substantial politician than Bute, who was to continue in office for 12 years. When Pitt was elected, his long rule was nearing its end, and he was largely discredited by the disasters of the American War of Independence.

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  Applied History and Contemporary Policymaking

  School of Statecraft

  • Robert Crowcroft(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  47 The Whig Way of War Elizabethan precedent. William’s reign also saw the maturation of the British fiscal- military state; as Steve Pincus aptly put it, the British monarchy and its London financiers were ‘going Dutch’. 12 And the king also, in his final years and after seeking a kind of ‘bipartisanship’ in Parliament, turned decisively towards the Whig Party and its ‘Junto’ leadership in the face of suspicions of Tory dalliance with the exiled Stuart men. When the last of James’s daughters, Anne, succeeded to the throne and the wars against France resumed, the duumvirate of Sidney Godolphin in London and the duke of Marlborough on European battlefields and capitals realized the kind of great-power leadership that Elizabeth’s advisers might have dreamt of. Not until almost 1710 – and after great effusions of blood – did the mercurial and weakening queen turn to Tories, including the youthful Henry St John, the future Viscount Bolingbroke, scheming to return to power and end the seemingly endless war. But this Tory revival was extremely brief and their signature achievement, the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, became a byword for pusillanimity and a staple of Whig propaganda for decades after. Ironically for the Tories, the treaty also secured France’s acquiescence to the ‘Protestant succession’, a previous act of Parliament that bestowed the British thrones on the niece of Charles I, the Electress Sophia of Hanover (a Dutchwoman by birth) and thence to her son, Georg Ludwig, one of the electors of the Holy Roman Empire. The British Empire was now yoked firmly to a continental European connection – and the new king promptly proscribed the Tories for their betrayal of Britain’s European allies at Utrecht. Through nearly fifty years of unbroken Whig ascendancy in government, the Whig way of war outlined at the beginning of this essay became not merely British strategic orthodoxy but a rigid doctrine.

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  French Revolution Debate in Britain

  The Origins of Modern Politics

  • Gregory Claeys(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Amongst the reformers, some sought to argue that their applause for French developments was commensurate with a tradition of British liberty stretching far into the past. Others, however, insisted that their ideals innovated upon and/or broke from such a tradition. This Chapter aims to explore the evidence for seeing the split amongst the Whigs as a matter of principle, or as a function of party and, beyond this, personality. Characteristically, of course, any such party fissure is a function of all three: the devil lies in the details. That the French Revolution revealed a substantial underlying disagreement about the nature of Whiggism is evident; the break among the Whigs was clearly a matter of principle, and had been forecast by some very early in the debate. 4 This principle, stated most simply, was whether any stable monarchical government was legitimate as such, including that of Louis XVI; or whether even a republic, if freely chosen by the French nation, was preferable to monarchical absolutism. What rendered these principles far more complex was that support of the first – legitimacy – could be construed as support for despotism, if the ancien régime was ‘despotic’, while applause for the second – popular choice of government – could be viewed as republicanism, even verging on, indeed to the doorstep of, particularly in humbler abodes, treason. It is these issues, firstly, of hidden motives, and secondly, of unintended consequences, we will see, which most bedevilled the debate during the years 1790–3. Whigs and Newer Whigs: Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan Charles James Fox Central to any such examination are the views of Charles James Fox (1749–1806), third son of the first Lord Holland, a leading Whig MP, and an ally of Burke’s respecting both the American colonies and East Indian corruption.

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  Revolution by Degrees

  James Tyrrell and Whig Political Thought in the Late Seventeenth Century

  • J. Rudolph(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Whig Theories and Theorists after 1688 97 preserved, and irregularities were tolerated in the interest of moving towards a solution of the crisis in government. The relative calm of elections to the Convention offer an impression of overall political consensus, but it was the long preparations of previous months that helped these elections to run smoothly and created an illusion of consensus. 13 Only a few of the elections were contested, and few of these were divided along party lines. 14 Once the Convention met, however, contests and maneuvering over the election of speakers, and for control of debate, reveal that even if there were fewer elect- oral party contests there was strong competition between Whigs and Tories from the very outset of the meeting. Within this split between Whig and Tory three main groups – loyalists, adherents of William, and supporters of Mary’s sole right to the throne – can be identified. Further complicating these alliances were the myriad past experi- ences and connections, both personal and political, that tied many of these men together. For all that the Convention shared with a regular Parliament, important differences remained. The absence of a king meant not only that there could be no legal summons, but also that there would be no lord chancellor, no opening of the session with the king’s speech, and no members’ sworn oaths of allegiance and supremacy. 15 Such irregularities were significant. For example, a Speaker pro tempore had to be elected in the Lords, and instructions to the Commons to elect a Speaker came from the Lords rather than from a King. Such expedient measures provided occasions for party influence and contest, and played a significant part in the outcome of debate. In the Convention House of Lords George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, was chosen Speaker.

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