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The Idea of Party in the Writing of Later Stuart History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

Robert Walcott
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Extract

The most familiar view of party, and one held almost universally for a century and a half, sees a continuity in party history from the Whigs and Tories of Charles II's reign to the Liberals and Conservatives of Victoria's. This view received its classic expression at the hands of Macaulay, and with him it was a verdict arrived at before he even began The History of England and more than thirty years before he finished with it. In an election speech at Edinburgh in 1839 he proudly traced his Whig ancestry back to the Roundheads of the time of Charles I. In the opening section of the History he was more specific and selected a certain day in October of 1641 for the birth of the modern party system. “From that day,” he wrote, “dates the corporate existence of the two parties which have ever since alternately governed the country.”

Macaulay was not the first historian to reach such a conclusion. Writing some twenty years earlier the Catholic John Lingard, in dealing with the 1678-1681 crisis over Exclusion of the Duke of York, wrote that “it was during this period that the appellations of Whig and Tory became permanently affixed to the two great political parties which for a century and a half [1680-1830] have divided the nation.” Even before the turn of the nineteenth century the same idea had been suggested by Thomas Somerville in his History of England which appeared in 1792.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 1 , Issue 2 , May 1962 , pp. 54 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1962

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References

1. The speech is quoted in SirFirth, Charles, Macaulay's History: a Commentary, ed. Davies, Godfrey (London, 1938), pp. 259–60Google Scholar.

2. Macaulay, T. B., History of England, ed. SirFirth, Charles (London, 1913–1915), I, 87Google Scholar.

3. Lingard, John, History of England (London, 1845), XII, 227Google Scholar.

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5. Lord, W. F., “Development of Political Parties during the Reign of Queen Anne,” Trans, Roy. Hist. Soc., New Series, XIV (1900)Google Scholar; Abbott, W. C., “Origin of English Political Parties,” A. H. R., XXIV (1919)Google Scholar; Kent, C. B. R., Early History of the Tories, 1660-1702 (London, 1908)Google Scholar; Feiling, Keith, History of the Tory Party, 1640-1714 (Oxford, 1924)Google Scholar; Trevelyan, G. M., “The Two-Party System in English Political History”, An Autobiography and Other Essays (London, 1949)Google Scholar and England under Queen Anne (London, 1930–1934)Google Scholar.

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10. Ibid., I, 53-54.

11. Macaulay, , Hisory, I, 89-90, 313–14Google Scholar; Trevelyan, , England under Queen Anne, I, 189–94Google Scholar.

12. The phrase is Feiling's in his Tory Party, p. 483.

13. Hume, , Essays, I, 58, 62-63, 65.Google Scholar

14. Bolingbroke, , “Dissertation upon Parties,” Letters VIII and XIX, Works (London, 1754), III, 134-35, 290Google Scholar.

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17. See Walcott, Robert, “English Political Parties, 1688-1714,” in Essays in Modern English History (Cambridge, Mass., 1941), pp. 83–85Google Scholar; and English Politics in the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1956), pp. 91-93, 156–60Google Scholar.

18. Feiling, , Tory Party, p. 154Google Scholar.

19. Ibid., pp. 179, 189, and passim.