T O R Y H I S T O R Y 117 6 Tory history: Thomas Salmon’s Modern History The popularity of Rapin’s Histoire ensured that it generated a large number of responses from other historians. Indeed, both Thomas Salmon’s Modern History (1724–38), the subject of this chapter, and Thomas Carte’s General History (1747–55), the subject of the next, provided direct attacks on Rapin’s account. However, whereas Rapin had shown little interest in contemporary debates about public credit, Salmon’s and Carte’s analyses were structured around criticisms of the system of
The eighteenth century was long deemed ‘the classical age of the constitution’ in Britain, with cabinet government based on a two-party system of Whigs and Tories in Parliament, and a monarchy whose powers had been emasculated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. This study furthers the work of Sir Lewis Namier, who, in 1929, argued that no such party system existed, George III was not a cypher, and that Parliament was an administration composed of factions and opposition. George III is a high-profile and well-known character in British history, whose policies have often been blamed for the loss of Britain's American colonies, around whom rages a perennial dispute over his aims: was he seeking to restore royal power or merely exercising his constitutional rights? This is a chronological survey of the first ten years of his reign through power politics and policy making.
Chap 2 19/8/02 11:41 am Page 24 2 The political scenario in 1760 Party terminology in eighteenth-century Britain is a minefield of myth, prejudice, and contradiction. Not since the 1720s had the line between administration and opposition been one between Whig and Tory parties. Outside the main Whig government party, headed since 1754 by the Duke of Newcastle, there existed smaller Whig factions, varyingly in and out of office. In the 1750s only two were of real significance. One was a small talented family group in which the leading figures were the
3 Mark Garnett The leadership gamble of William Hague Win or bust: the leadership gamble of William Hague Mark Garnett Writing in 1977, Conservative MP Nigel Fisher identified ‘two qualifying conditions’ for Tory leaders: ‘a lengthy spell in Parliament and considerable Cabinet experience’. In combination, he thought these factors ‘make it unlikely that in future anyone will become leader of the party at an early age. There will be no more William Pitts’. Fisher’s timing could hardly have been more ironic. The 1977 Conservative Party conference saw the
9 Peter Lynch The Scottish Conservatives, 1997–2001 The Scottish Conservatives, 1997–2001: from disaster to devolution and beyond Peter Lynch William Hague’s four years of leadership of the Conservative Party coincided with a revolution in the political opportunity structure of Scottish Conservatism. First, the Scotish Tories were wiped out at the 1997 general election, their worst electoral performance of all time and their lowest share of the vote since 1865. Second, the party’s constitutional position was heavily defeated at the devolution referendum of
7 Nation making and fiction making: Sarah Orne Jewett, The Tory Lover, and Walter Scott, Waverley Alison Easton ‘Writing something entirely different’ Beside Sarah Orne Jewett’s desk where she would have seen it every time she looked up was a small copy of the well-known Raeburn portrait of Sir Walter Scott. No critic has commented on this, yet Scott was important to her. As she remarks in a 1905 letter to her dearest friend and companion, Annie Fields,‘How one admires that great man more and more’.1 So, what was New England’s most notable, late
Chap 11 19/8/02 11:50 am Page 237 11 Conclusion: factions or parties? The old concept of a two-party system of Whigs and Tories does not survive detailed knowledge of mid-eighteenth-century politics.1 By 1760 less than one hundred MPs could be deemed Tories even by a generous definition, and in the ensuing decade they split asunder, being variously attached to the Court or to factions, or remaining independent of all connections. The ministry at George III’s accession was a coalition of all the Whig groups, but soon fell apart. The next five ministries were
argued that, although stereotypes’ emotiveness was vital to their political appeal, they did not blinker thought and reason. Thinking beyond anti-popery and seeing through a given polemicist’s deployment of it for political gain was a necessary part of being a political citizen when each side of the religio-political divide (Whig/nonconformist and Tory/episcopal royalist) used anti-popish rhetoric for decidedly contradictory ends. Thus, second, it is argued that the presence of anti-popish stereotypes in English
, Thinking with Demons, p. 558. 21 Bostridge, p. 91. 22 Arthur H. Scouten and Robert D. Hume, ‘“Restoration Comedy” and Its Audiences, 1660–1776’, The Yearbook of English Studies 10 (1980), 45–69 (p. 53). 23 Susan J. Owen, Restoration Theatre and Crisis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 185. In fact, even the preface is far from conciliatory in places, referring, for example, to ‘Impudent Hot-headed Tantivy Fool[s]’. The word ‘tantivy’ was frequently applied to the emerging Tory grouping, who were said by their opponents to be ‘riding tantivy [i.e. at a gallop] to
with roots in post-Reformation polemic was hardly limited to the languages of priestcraft and imposture. It was equally constituted by the languages of enthusiasm and fanaticism. Third, this perspective illuminates the fact that conformist and Tory elements were just as instrumental in the emergence of the notions of priestcraft and imposture as their religious and ideological opponents were. After all, as Noel Malcolm has recently made clear, the discourse of imposture, both originally and in its early incarnations