If you’re as old as I am (and live in the UK), you’ve likely read Our Island Story and its affectionate parody, 1066 and All That. You’ll know that Cavaliers were Wrong but Wromantic while Roundheads were Right but Repulsive. Oliver Cromwell had Charles I’s head chopped off, you see, and regicide is bad. Cromwell was, however, a great parliamentarian, and for that reason, memorable.
Historian George Owers—without naming either earlier work—takes the substance of these amusing observations and runs with them in The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain, an account of the emergence of modern party politics during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. His personal sympathies are with the Tories (wrong but wromantic), but he is a fair and scrupulous scholar. He conveys to contemporary readers con brio the extent to which both modern Britain and the modern developed world are built on historic Whig (right but repulsive) policies and beliefs. In one significant area, however—immigration—events proved the Tories right, first in their own time and once again in our own. Owers makes quite a bit of this, but given its relevance to contemporary electoral polarisation, he is right to do so.
Jaw-Jaw is better than War-War
The process by which England and Scotland stopped fighting wars over both religion and questions of governance and decided to hold regular parliamentary elections about them instead is both a remarkable story and hard to write well. The period 1689-1725 is often considered too complex for narrative history: Rage of Party is its first treatment for a general audience.
Films and plays—let alone histories—that depend on ensemble casts and episodic plots can spin out of a writer’s control, so Owers does two things to keep his story straight. First, he focuses—much as a novelist would—on rounded portraits of major historical figures. You will never forget his Duke of Marlborough, his depictions of the Whig “junto” lords, or the financial wizard that was Sidney Godolphin. Secondly, he builds the book outwards from two extraordinary people who dominated the period: Robert Harley, Earl of Oxford—arguably our first prime minister—and the country’s monarch, Queen Anne. They provide a point around which every other figure pivots.
“All the antipathies of the Civil War, between Cavalier and Roundhead, the Church of England and the Puritans, were revived and transformed into a new era of partisan strife,” Owers notes. “The battle, although rambunctious, polarising, and sporadically violent, allowed the nation to negotiate its way through a tumultuous period without another civil war or major bloodshed.” The English, soon joined by the Scots, turned their faces against both monarchical absolutism and violent internal conflicts. They developed the modern system of party politics, complete with enduring institutions like parliamentary sovereignty and cabinet government.
Both the Civil War and the “rage of party” were disputes within English Protestantism. Tories and Whigs agreed that England—and, after 1707, Scotland also—must be a Protestant country. Toryism, however, wished to keep the religious ritual and powerful court of the Tudors and early Stuarts. Tories believed—with some justification—that Anglicanism, with its language, liturgy, ecclesiastical organisation, and music, was both a distinctive cultural phenomenon and an adornment to English civilisation.
If duels in Hyde Park in full view of schoolchildren are somewhat outside modernity’s ken, then disputes over immigration policy are not.
Whigs, meanwhile, looked to push the Reformation to what they believed was a logical conclusion, with a more puritanical church and a more democratic settlement. It was Whigs who sought to expand the franchise. To Whigs, the greatest threat came from a Catholic revival, aided and abetted by Louis XIV’s France. “The Whigs,” Owers writes, “saw the Tories as backward insular chauvinists who would give absolute power to a motley crew of designing, quasi-papist priests … and mad bigoted squires. The Tories saw the Whigs as fanatical seditious hypocrites who would happily destroy the monarchy.”
Over time, Whigs came to stand for finance, commerce, and cities. They were comfortable with running up debts and taxes to pay for foreign wars; their continuing desire to do so led to the founding of the Bank of England and the development of concepts like “national debt.” Tories, however, represented the landed gentry, and to them, high taxes were the Devil’s handiwork. Although the idea of income tax has existed since antiquity (jurists and imperial officials in both Ancient Rome and Han China speculated about the possibility), no premodern polity had the state capacity and administrative competence to make such a revenue-raising system function. The world’s first income tax had to wait for the Napoleonic wars.
During Anne’s reign, by contrast, land was the easiest thing to tax (“as far as I know, God isn’t making any more of it,” as my dad used to say) and the landed gentry—both Tory and Whig—bore the brunt. “Country Whigs” often finished up making common cause with Tory squires, which led to a finessing of the religious and political ruptures that had animated the Civil War. Owers describes this emerging conflict between town and country as a “realignment.” It provides shape and context for a political division that exists to this day.
This meant “the country interest” wanted what Owers simply calls “the war” to be brought to a swift, cost-saving peace, viewing it as a drain on the fisc. “The war” provides background radiation to everything else in Rage of Party, grinding on, young men in England’s shires and harbour towns press-ganged into service and fed into its ravening maw. The war, of course, was the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–14), which has some claim to being the first global conflict, presaging both Napoleon and the Great War.
Factionalism and ideology were ugly, but they also channelled terrifying and violent forces into the calmer waters of the two-party system. This calm was, of course, relative. Like freedom of speech—which I discussed in these pages in October—stable politics did not spring fully-formed from beneath Queen Anne’s skirts. General elections—held, thanks to the Triennial Act, every three years, as they are in modern Australia—often became violent. Voting was public: Britain did not use the ancient Roman secret ballot, while the Australian ballot, now employed worldwide, was yet to be invented. Bribery and drunkenness came standard. Outside elections, duels were common. One of the book’s most arresting passages concerns a swordfight between Charles, Lord Mohun (a Whig), and Scots Tory James, Duke of Hamilton.
Hamilton was twenty years older than Mohun, but decades of carousing and feasting had made Mohun fat and cumbersome. Hamilton got the upper hand as the two men desperately grappled, stabbing Mohun through his belly, thigh, and left side before delivering a mortal blow through his groin. As Mohun tried to parry the final blow, Hamilton cut three of his fingers to “bloody ribbons.” Mohun died in a matter of minutes. His shredded corpse was taken back to his London house, where his long-suffering wife had little comment to make other than to complain that the blood was ruining her “magnificent counterpane.”
Hamilton, however, was not to last much longer than Mohun himself. … His right leg had been slashed, an artery in his arm had been severed and his left side had been run through. These wounds proved fatal. Both men were dead. Colonel Hamilton [the Duke’s second, a relative] grimly remarked to MacCartney [Mohun’s second]: “We’ve made a fine morning’s work on it.”
Held in Hyde Park—so ordinary Londoners got an eyeful as they walked past, something Virginia Woolf uses as a plot-point in Orlando—its sheer bloodiness led Anne to move against duelling. She didn’t ban duels, but she did ban swords. Pistols were to be substituted, while in time duels became less frequent: all part of Britain’s steady movement towards political peace.
People Are Not Widgets
If duels in Hyde Park in full view of schoolchildren are somewhat outside modernity’s ken, then disputes over immigration policy are not. Modern developed states—except Australia, which has learned the lesson Owers imparts—have been forced to accept that migrants and refugees from different countries or classes or of different religions can add to or detract from civic order and good governance. Among statisticians, this phenomenon goes by the anodyne phrase “average differences between groups,” which conceals more than it reveals (unless you’re a statistician).
The Whig-Tory divide over foreign Protestant refugees—especially Huguenots (1680s to 1690s) and the larger wave of Palatine Germans (1708–11)—was a battleground that fused religion, economics, and … average differences between groups. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, French Protestant Huguenots who fled to England proved an economic boon. High in human capital (the Spitalfields silk industry was their creation), their arrival helped other factors of production (land and labour) and made the country more prosperous.
The Whig-dominated ministry of 1708–10 (the “Junto”) was of the view that it was possible to repeat the dose with a similarly positive effect: in 1709, Britain welcomed an unprecedented 13,000–15,000 impoverished Lutherans as fellow Protestants and potential soldiers against France. “Poor Palatines,” they were called, after the German region from whence they hailed.
Contemporary legislatures are stuffed with media-obsessed nonentities sitting atop a bloated and unresponsive civil service.
Huguenots, they were not: unskilled, illiterate, and lazy, they cornered the limited poor relief available at the time, drove down local wages, lived in tent cities in Camberwell and other outlying parts of London, and were incapable of learning English. They became a flashpoint that contributed mightily to the 1710 Tory landslide—Tory canvassers used the episode as proof that Whig cosmopolitanism was both hypocritical and ruinously expensive. The election result allowed Harley to repeal the legislation naturalising them and boot them out of the country.
This process was sped along thanks to Jonathan Swift’s acid-tipped pen. He was now at the height of his powers as a Tory propagandist, read in coffee-houses up and down the country. “They understood no trade or handicraft, yet rather chose to beg than labour; who, beside infesting our streets, bred contagious diseases, by which we lost in natives thrice the number of what we gained in foreigners,” he wrote at one point.
What’s in a Name?
You’ve probably heard of Whigs and Tories, but may not know that both names began as insults. Whiggamores were Scottish Presbyterian rebels, while a Tory was an Irish Catholic outlaw. In a pattern familiar to us—think what people have done with gay and queer—the epithets were reclaimed and repurposed by those meant to be saddled with them.
Owers steps through the door opened by this name-calling, using it to draw out how personal morality complicated political attachments. This is particularly notable in his discussion of Thomas Wharton, one of the greatest Whig junto lords, and Henry St John, later Viscount Bolingbroke, a leading Tory and (later) reluctant Jacobite. Both men were freethinkers—even atheists—and thoroughly irreligious. Wharton, Owers writes, “was one of the greatest figures of the Turf of his age, owning the best stable of horses in England.” He won four duels against Tory opponents and was notorious for his infidelity. He also once broke into a Gloucestershire church after a night on the turps, shat on the altar, and pissed in the font.
We’ve come to associate Deism, moral laxity, and odd kinds of nonconformism with Whiggery, so Wharton’s libertinism seems of a piece. However, Bolingbroke reveals how such people can sometimes be instinctively conservative. He kept a string of mistresses and—as Owers puts it—“would have been invited to the London prostitutes’ Christmas parties had such events occurred.” One of many superbly selected colour illustrations in Rage of Party depicts Bolingbroke signing the Treaty of Utrecht using his mistress’s arse as a writing-desk.
Harley, meanwhile, came from a Dissenting background but was also from the country. He started as a “Country Whig” and evolved into a gentle Tory. He spent his career trying to bring moderates on both sides together, hoping to steer successive governments down a narrow path. For all that both Whig and Tory partisans despised his wheeling and dealing, calling him “Robin the Trickster” behind his back, unlike most of them, he was personally honest, uxorious, and devoted to his children. He never kept a mistress, took bribes, or sought personal preferment from the Queen. The last section of Rage of Party—where he finally loses Anne’s favour and goes to pieces mentally—is almost Shakespearean in its tragic effect.
Precisely because this period birthed a political system that, with local variations, exists across the developed world, Owers is alive to its contemporary resonances without pushing them too far or too hard. That said, on the book’s final page, he suggests we’re all “in our heart of hearts” either Whigs or Tories. “Which are you?” he asks.
What is certain is that a parliament of local notables embedded in their communities—these people would later build the largest empire ever seen, abolish slavery, and spark the Great Enrichment—proved to be responsive both to public opinion and facts on the ground. Meanwhile, contemporary legislatures are stuffed with media-obsessed nonentities sitting atop a bloated and unresponsive civil service. They produce little in the way of good government—just a ferociously expensive one.