Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- For my parents and Toby
- Preface
- Part I The Problem of Tory Survival
- Part II The Ingredients of Tory Survival
- 3 The Tory Party in Parliament
- 4 The Content of Toryism
- 5 The Tory Party in the Constituencies
- 6 The Fabric of the Tory Appeal
- Part III Single-Party Government Assailed
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Manuscript Sources
- Notes
- Index
3 - The Tory Party in Parliament
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 February 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- For my parents and Toby
- Preface
- Part I The Problem of Tory Survival
- Part II The Ingredients of Tory Survival
- 3 The Tory Party in Parliament
- 4 The Content of Toryism
- 5 The Tory Party in the Constituencies
- 6 The Fabric of the Tory Appeal
- Part III Single-Party Government Assailed
- Conclusion
- Appendix
- Manuscript Sources
- Notes
- Index
Summary
Since the tories after 1714 have so frequently been described as Jacobite fifth-columnists or as political independents, it is scarcely surprising that their leadership and parliamentary organisation should have been ignored or more commonly denied. Neglect has also been encouraged by the lack of easily available evidence. Only two tory Commoners in this period, Thomas Carew and Sir Roger Newdigate, and only one of the party's noble families, the earls of Oxford and Mortimer, are represented by a substantial cache of political papers. Reliance instead on the ill-informed and often contemptuous assessments of the tory performance supplied by some whig observers, or an assumption that the apparent paucity of tory papers presupposes a concomitant lack of tory parliamentary endeavour, have been both convenient and consonant with preconceptions about the party's role in the mid eighteenth century.
The disorganised quality of Augustan toryism as compared with the efficiency of the Junto Lords and their whig adherents is of course part and parcel of the political instability so often and, as I have already suggested, too immoderately ascribed to the period. Geoffrey Holmes' excellent account of the frequently partisan but invariably independent tory country gentlemen and of ‘the seemingly limitless tory capacity for fragmentation’ has tended to obscure the same author's salutary reminder that the Oxford administration of 1710-14 suffered only one major defeat in four parliamentary sessions. Tory M.P.s were often difficult to manage; they were not unmanageable.
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- Information
- In Defiance of OligarchyThe Tory Party 1714-60, pp. 53 - 84Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982
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