Whatever Happened to the Whigs?

In a recent post I explained why British Conservatives are known colloquially as "Tories." The name goes back to 17th century British politics, as does the name "Whig." The Whigs represented the rival party or outlook to that of the Tories. "Tory" remains in common use politically in the UK, but "Whig" has disappeared. Why is that?

The names Whig and Tory emerged at the end of the 1670s during what became known as the Exclusion Crisis. The crisis arose from the efforts of some leading politicians to exclude James Stuart, Duke of York, from following his brother Charles II to the throne. 

Charles had fathered no legitimate heir. According to the normal rules of succession, James was next in line to be monarch. Supporters of James called his opponents Whigs, then a term denoting a sect of extreme Scots Protestants.

The Tories were firm supporters of strict hereditary succession. They defended James's right to succeed Charles, despite the fact he had converted to the Roman Catholic faith. 

The Tories were also firm supporters of the Protestant Church of England, so the choice was not easy. The great majority of the British people then were not only Protestant but fervently "anti-papist." Many of them belonged to recently emerged and politically radical sects like Baptists and Congregationalists. Whig efforts to prevent James from becoming king thus rested on broad public support.

But the Tories and the King prevented the Whig Exclusion Bill from being enacted in Parliament. In the aftermath, the Whigs were greatly weakened. Their leader Lord Shaftesbury fled to the Netherlands, where he died shortly after. [Image: Anthony Ashley Cooper, First Earl of Shaftesbury]. 

James became king upon Charles' death in 1685, but his reign was short. He appointed Catholic allies to key positions in the government, the army and navy, and the courts. Some leading Tories, fearing that he intended to restore Catholicism as the established religion, turned against him. 

They joined with leading Whigs who feared James intended to rule as an absolute Catholic monarch in the style of Louis XIV of France. At the time, large numbers French Protestants (Huguenots) were migrating into England, bringing tales of their persecution in France. 

The timing could not have been worse for James. The same was true of the recent birth of a son to James and his second, Catholic wife. James had two Protestant daughters from his first marriage, Mary and Anne, but the male baby would take precedence in the line of succession.  

With the prospect of a Catholic dynasty before them, a group of Whig and Tory leaders secretly appealed to William of Orange, the Protestant Stadtholder of the Netherlands, to intervene. William was married to James' eldest daughter Mary, and was himself descended from Charles I. 

William concocted a bold and risky plan. He assembled an army and fleet and landed them in the West of England on November 5, 1688.  He began a march toward London. James prepared for battle but lost his nerve and fled to France. Thus began the "Glorious Revolution."

After a great deal of negotiation, Parliament installed William and Mary as joint monarchs. The arrangement was a clear violation of the law of hereditary succession and laid the ground for future conflicts. Parliament, not God, had decided who should rule.

William at first employed both Tories and Whigs in his government. But he gradually leaned more heavily on the Whigs, who were more comfortable with the results of the "Revolution." 

Whig dominance in British politics increased in the early 18th century after the death of Queen Anne (1702-1714). Anne was the last of the Protestant Stuart line. She had many children, but all died at birth or not long after. [Image: Queen Anne]

Parliament addressed this issue at the beginning of her reign with an Act of Succession. It declared that on her death the Crown should pass to her closest Protestant relative. At the time that was a German princess, Sophia of Hanover. 

Sophia died before Anne, however. Her son George became King of England and Scotland in 1714. George suspected that the Tories were behind efforts to restore the Catholic Stuarts to the throne. Some were. He and his son George II generally chose their ministers from the Whigs. 

The period 1714-1760 is often known as the Whig Supremacy, so dominant were Whig politicians. The Tories were virtually eliminated as a political force. It was not until the early 19th century that a new Tory Party emerged and held power. It changed its name officially to Conservative in the 1830s, but the old name stuck.

The use of Whig as a political term, however, gradually disappeared. In part this was due to the emergence of a lose group of Radicals who favored extension of democracy and modernization. It was also due to a split in the Conservative Party. The key issue was free trade, which some Tories supported, and others opposed. The division came to a head in 1846, during the Irish Famine. 

The Tory Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, decided that it was necessary to abolish the Corn Laws (tariffs on imported grain) to ensure supplies of food for the masses. The majority of Tories opposed him. His free trade bill passed only with the support of Whigs and Radicals. 

The Tory majority kicked Peel and his supporters out of the party. For a time, they sat together as "Peelites." In the 1850s, they gradually merged with the Whigs and Radicals to form what became known as the Liberal Party. 

The Liberals enjoyed great political success during the next few decades, especially under the leadership of William Gladstone. But "Whig" soon disappeared from political usage in the UK. [Image: W. E. Gladstone]

PS. In other posts I have referred to the use of "Whig" and "Tory" in the context of the American Revolution. I should add that in the 19th century, a Whig Party thrived in the USA between the 1830s and 1850s. The Whigs were the rivals of the Jacksonian Democrats. Their party fell apart in the early 1850s.Its place was taken by the new Republican Party that elected Abraham Lincoln in 1860. In Liberia, the "True Whig Party" was the dominant party for about a century after being founded in 1869. In recent decades, post-modern historians have used the term "Whig" to describe a progressive, linear, triumphal concept of history. 

 

        

   

  

  

Why Are UK Conservatives Called Tories?

The Conservative Party in the UK is known colloquially as the Tory Party. Its supporters are generally called Tories. Why? 

Many Americans may assume that it derives from the American Revolution. In the USA, the term "Tory" is generally associated with the War for Independence. People who supported the British government during the war were generally called Tories by their "Patriot" enemies.

American "Tories" did not embrace that term. Instead, they called themselves "Loyalists." The Patriots often called themselves "Whigs." Both Tory and Whig derived from British politics of the previous century, from a succession crisis during the reign of Charles II (1660-1685). 

Charles had no legitimate heir. According to the rules of hereditary succession, the Crown would pass on his death to his brother, James, Duke of York. [Images: Charles II and James II, by Sir Peter Lely]

 

Normally, James's succession would not have been a problem. What made it a problem was that James had converted to Catholicism. The great majority of people in England and Scotland were by this time Protestants of one kind or another. (Ireland was a different matter).

The Protestants generally feared and detested the "Papists." In their view, the Roman Catholic faith was not only religiously wrong, but politically dangerous. They associated it with the royal absolutism of Louis XIV of France. Many of them wanted James to be excluded from the thrones of England and Scotland. 

In the late 1670s a group within Parliament mounted a campaign to exclude James. Opponents of their "Exclusion Bill" called them Whigs, then a word used to describe fanatical Scots Presbyterians. 

The Whigs opposed what they saw as a trend toward absolute monarchy in Britain. They supported religious toleration for all Protestant sects, but not Catholics. The Whigs called their opponents in Parliament Tories. Tory was then a term used for Irish bandits. As political labels, both Whig and Tory originated as terms of insult. 

The Tories in Parliament were Protestant. But they were staunch defenders of the established Church of England who opposed any form of religious toleration. They were also firm royalists who did not want the monarch's power to be too restricted.  

The Tories foiled the Whig attempt to exclude James from the throne. Some radical Whigs plotted against the government, which struck back with arrests and executions. The Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury fled to the Netherlands where he died soon after. [Image: Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, by John Greenhill]

James became king when Charles died in 1685. But three years later Whig and Tory leaders cooperated to force James from power in what became known as the Glorious Revolution. Some leading Tories had also become alarmed by James's arbitrary and pro-Catholic actions.   

In the aftermath of the Revolution, Whigs and Tories continued to compete for ascendancy in Parliament. Between 1714 and 1760 the Whigs all but eliminated the Tory opposition, a period known as the Whig Supremacy. 

The Supremacy collapsed after George III came to the throne in 1760. He believed the Whigs had gained too much power and had corrupted the political system. He sought the support of "new men" outside the Whig oligarchy. Many of them were disaffected Whigs. 

The Old Whig establishment blamed George III for their decline. They claimed he was bent on tyranny, which was not the case. He considered his role to be that of a constitutional monarch, although he sometimes acted in a clumsy and ill-advised manner. (George wasn't "mad" either until almost 30 years later).

British Whig attacks on King George influenced events in North America. The colonists' real problem was not with the king, but with the British Parliament, which claimed the right to tax them. But the American Whigs adopted the rhetoric of their British namesakes and attacked the king. They called his supporters Tories, although none of them used or accepted that term. 

By the 1780s, what some historians call the Second Tory Party was emerging. Its supporters did not call themselves Tories but "Independent Whigs" or "Pittites," after their leader, William Pitt the Younger. It was only around 1812 that Pitt's successors began to use the term "Tory" to describe themselves. 

The Tories of the early 19th century are the true ancestors of the present-day Conservatives. In 1834, they changed their name officially to the Conservative Party. In the 1880s, they officially became the Conservative and Unionist Party, after a merger with Liberals opposed to Irish Home Rule. That bulky term is little used nowadays. But everyone still calls them Tories, a term they use themselves. 

"Whig" is no longer used to describe a political party. Why not? That is a subject for another post.

   

   

The Brexiteer's Guide to English Ancestry

Hey, Brexiteers! Mes amis! You don't have to have a DNA test to prove what a True Born Englishman you are! All you need to do is read a poem by Daniel Defoe, an Englishman of oops, Flemish descent.

"A Brexit victory's a contradiction, In speech an irony, in fact a fiction." (Apologies and thanks to Daniel Defoe,1660-1731)

Brexit is real now, sort of. Devout Brexiteers proclaim, in near holy terms, that the UK has finally achieved "independence." By the "UK", however, they really mean England. 

Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland must reconcile themselves to being dragged about by the whims of English nationalists. British companies are in the same boat. The immense costs of Brexit for those trading to Europe are becoming distressingly clear. 

Narrow English nationalists are the big winners for now. It remains to be seen what they have actually won. In fact, Brexit is a triumph of extreme nationalism, aided by ignorance and lies, over economic rationality. 

Much of the pro-Brexit vote in 2016 stemmed from xenophobia, a hatred of foreigners. In this case, "tyrannical" foreigners in Brussels. Of course, not all who voted for Brexit were motivated by by xenophobia. Yet the rhetoric of hard Brexiteers is often based on the assumption that people who are "Not English" are somehow "lesser breeds," not to be trusted and certainly not listened to.

England found itself in a similar situation more than 300 years ago. The thrones of Britain were occupied by a foreigner, the Dutch prince William of Orange. He and his wife Mary had become joint sovereigns in 1689 following the Glorious Revolution, in which he and the Dutch military had played the pivotal role. (Image: William III, of Orange)

 

Despite being hailed as the savior of English Protestantism, William III (II in Scotland) was never much liked in England or in Scotland. In Northern Ireland, of course, he is still idolized by people who remain imprisoned in a time warp, the eponymous "Orangemen." 

William became thoroughly unpopular in England after Mary died of smallpox in 1694. People not only disliked him but the Dutch soldiers, politicians, and merchants who followed him to London in particular. They were the target of numerous vitriolic pamphlets and poems. 

In 1701, Daniel Defoe took up his pen to defend the Dutch king and his countrymen. He did so in a long satirical poem that was highly successful in its time. "The True-Born Englishman" is not read much today. Perhaps it should be, at least some of it. 

Defoe was a prolific writer, mostly of political pamphlets at this time. Later he made his name as the author of Robinson Crusoe (1719) and other novels. (Image: Defoe)

The target of Defoe's satire was not Englishness per se, but anti-Dutch xenophobia. To clear up any misunderstanding about that he added an explanatory preface two years later. In it he declared "that an Englishman, of all men, ought not to despise Foreigners as such ... since what they are today, we were yesterday, and tomorrow they will be like us." 

The English were themselves foreigners, invaders who eventually assimilated into one nation. The Dutch newcomers would assimilate as well, given the chance, Defoe implied. 

The English, far from being racially pure, were in reality a mongrel race. The "English" were a people forged from the union of Celtic Britons, Romans, Scots, Picts, "Anglo-Saxons," and Danes. Somewhat oddly, Defoe left out the Normans, here wearing the latest in 12th century fashion.

Defoe pulled no punches. The "union" he meant was sexual. Englishness originated "in eager rapes, and furious lust." The "rank daughters" of the land "Receiv'd all nations with promiscuous lust." The "nauseous brood" that resulted contained the "well extracted blood of Englishmen." 

In reality, the "True-Born Englishman" did not exist: "A true-born Englishman's a contradiction, In speech an irony, in fact a fiction."

Defoe understood the biological and cultural reality of Englishness 300 years ago. Why do so many people today continue to champion a view so much at variance with history and biology? They should check the ancestry of their leader, True-Born Boris.

Further Reading: Daniel Defoe, The True-Born Englishman (London, 1701 and later editions)