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. 

 

        

   

  

  

Mission Impossible: Reverend Francis LeJau in South Carolina

"There is one thing wherein I find the people here generally like those in the West Indies, they are so well persuaded that what they do is well, as to be very angry when their mistakes are shown to them and they will find cunning arguments to oppose truth itself." Francis Le Jau, 1709

Francis Le Jau was a French Huguenot who fled to England c. 1685 to escape religious persecution under Louis XIV. After his arrival, he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, earning a doctorate. He then became an Anglican minister. 

The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel (SPG), founded in 1701, sent him to St. Christopher in the West Indies and then to South Carolina as a missionary. (Image: portrait of Le Jau, by Henrietta Johnston)

Le Jau arrived in Charleston (then Charles Town) in 1706. He was 41 years old and in good health. The colony, slightly younger, was not. The colonists had just driven off a combined French and Spanish attack, and were expecting another soon. Anglicans and Protestant Dissenters were feuding with one another over an act making the Church of England the established religion in the Carolina colony, which then included what is now North Carolina. [Image: A View of Charleston in 1773]. 

In addition, Charleston was suffering from a deadly epidemic of yellow fever. Samuel Thomas, the first and thus far only SPG missionary to have come to the colony, was among the hundreds of dead. Local officials whisked Le Jau away to his rural parish, St. James, Goose Creek, to escape the pestilence. 

Despite this grim beginning, Le Jau was optimistic. People had told them new arrivals commonly experienced a bout of sickness during the warm season of their first year of residence. They called it the "seasoning," as if one was being preserved like a piece of meat. 

"When I am seasoned to the country, I hope I'll do well," he wrote his SPG superiors in London. In the winter months, he proclaimed, the climate was the finest he had ever experienced, pleasant and productive. The people were prosperous and generous.

With the advance of summer, the tone of his reports to London began to alter. He suffered his first bout of fever, probably malaria. His family arrived that summer and all became sick. 

At first, he blamed the seasoning, and anticipated a speedy recovery of health. Instead, he remained seriously ill for more than a year with fevers and fluxes (dysentery or severe diarrhea). For months he was unable to perform his clerical duties.

Notes of disillusionment crept into his letters. His disappointment extended to his neighbors. They were not the good Christian folk he had at first thought, but consumed by greed. They would "do any thing for money." They treated their  enslaved Africans and "Indians" (many of whom they had also enslaved) barbarously. The colonists fomented conflicts among the various tribes and then bought war captives as slaves. 

The mistreatment of the Native Americans led to the Yamasee War in 1715, during which an alliance of several tribes nearly destroyed the young colony. They attacked Le Jau's Goose Creek parish, and he and many of his neighbors fled to safety in Charleston.

Le Jau's animosity towards his neighbors deepened when his white neighbors failed to help him in his time of need. Few had honored pledges to supplement his meager income, or to finish building him a house and a church. After six years it was still unfinished. [Image: St. James, Goose Creek]

"They deceived me more than I can dare say," he wrote to the SPG, and he urged them to inform other missionaries coming to Carolina to be warned that they "must be prepared to suffer great hardships and crosses."

For ten years, Le Jau was plagued by fevers, fluxes, and other diseases. In August 1716, he was attacked with a fever and digestive disorder that confined him to bed for months. In March 1717, he reported that he expected to die soon. His body was "worn out with labour in this sickly and desolate country." He died a few months later in the Carolina Lowcountry's cruelest month, September. 

Le Jau did not understand all of the connections between South Carolina's economic system and its deadly disease environment, particularly that between disease, enslavement of Africans, and rice production. 

Yet he sensed the root of the problem: "This would be a pleasant place if men were but willing to make themselves easy and improve the fruitful soil where anything grows without much trouble ... but they all aim at riches which are hard to be got and they neglect the peace of their conscience and life."

Sources: 

Frank J. Klingberg, ed., The Carolina Chronicle of Francis Le Jau (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1956)

Papers of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, London (Microfilm copies available in many academic libraries; a treasure for historians of colonial America)

Peter McCandless, Slavery, Disease, and Suffering in the Southern Lowcountry (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011, pbk, 2014)

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