The Rage of Party: How Whig versus Tory made modern Britain, George Owers, Hachette UK, £30

At the turn of the 18th century, England was ruled by landed gentlemen who were all Protestants (most of them Anglican), and united in their attachment to their country’s mixed and balanced constitution, common law, and system of individual rights that had been confirmed by milestones such as Magna Carta in 1215 and the Petition of Right in 1628. Despite such agreement, England’s ruling elite was hopelessly divided on fundamental questions: the direction of the Church of England and that of non-conformity, England’s relationship with the Continent, the role of finance in politics, and, at times, even over the royal succession. This was the time when England (and Britain after the Act of Union in 1707) had to learn to live with political parties, a story delightfully told by George Owers in The Rage of Party.

The Whigs and Tories – the precursors of the Liberal and Conservative parties, respectively – emerged in the final decades of the 17th century. The party names appeared during the Exclusion Crisis of 1678–81, with the MPs called Whigs wanting to exclude the Catholic Duke of York from the succession to the throne, and those called Tories wanting to preserve the succession intact. The names were initially terms of abuse, and borrowed from earlier usages in Scotland and Ireland, but they stuck. The party division stemmed from the longstanding division between ‘Court’ and ‘Country’, referring to the division between the central government and the counties, as well as the parliamentary division between the king’s government and the opposition. The party division also had a strong religious element, originating from the Reformation and the division within Protestantism in the British Isles, between the Church of England and other variants, including Puritans. In the Restoration period, Puritans and other non-Anglican Protestants became collectively known as Protestant Dissenters.

Charles II and his successor James II, though supported by the church party in the form of the Tories, clashed with the Anglican church and the universities. Though the Tories were initially successful and several Whigs were forced into exile (including the philosopher John Locke), James II’s Catholicism and promotion of fellow Catholics alienated the Tories and precipitated the Glorious Revolution of 1688-89, which placed William of Orange of the Dutch Republic and his wife Mary on the English, Scottish and Irish thrones.

In the 1690s, an alliance between Country Whigs and Tory backbenchers created a new oppositional Country party. As William III, Louis XIV’s European rival, ascended the throne, the new Country party sought to control the ambitions of the new king to harness and expand the power of the English state in wars against the French. This Country party alliance became differentiated from both William’s Tory ministers and Court managers at the beginning of his reign, including the rising Whig Junto group, who were determined to gain office, and did so in 1694. The Country alliance was not a united party in the sense of Whig and Tory, but rather an opposition stance, which could be adopted for both principled and opportunistic reasons. Its chief grievances were the standing army, corruption of Parliament, and the financial revolution of the 1690s, which saw the creation of the Bank of England and the national debt.

The reigns of William III (1689-1702) and Queen Anne (1702-14) are known as the ‘Rage of Party’ – hence the title of Owers’s book. The Triennial Act of 1694 meant that 10 general elections were held between 1695 and 1715, all of which were highly partisan affairs between Whigs and Tories. Though most ministries remained coalitions of centrists of both parties, one-party administration became acceptable, especially in the final period of Queen Anne’s reign. After she died without heirs, the Hanoverian Succession in 1714 ended the alteration of parties in government and led to the Whig Supremacy. Prior to his accession, the future George I of Hanover, a German state, had sought to keep both parties at an equal distance, but he came to regard the Peace of Utrecht of 1713 as a Tory-led betrayal of Britain’s continental allies. The Whigs grasped this opportunity and portrayed themselves as the true friends of Hanover and European Protestantism. Just like the Tories had cried ‘the Church is in danger’ during Anne’s reign, the Whigs now claimed that the Protestant succession was in danger. This was not simply rhetoric, as many Tories were indeed Jacobites (after Jacobus, James’ Latin name), meaning that they supported the exiled Stuart court.

This highly readable book tells the story of England’s first party framework in fascinating and entertaining detail, based on a rich body of parliamentary historiography pioneered by the great Geoffrey Holmes. Owers is a gifted writer with a knack for narrative history. Throughout, he points, explicitly and implicitly, to his subject’s continued relevance for modern politics. As he writes in the conclusion: ‘We still live… in the world shaped by the battle between Whigs and Tories that this book has outlined.’ The union between England and Scotland in 1707, undertaken as a Whig project to protect the settlement of the Glorious Revolution, created Great Britain as we know it. This was also the time when Britain began to check the French and became a truly great world power, destined to become even greater. The financial revolution of the 1690s laid the foundation for capitalist modernity and London as a financial hub. And, as Owers puts it, this was the time when modern party politics ‘started to form out of the outright violence, sectarian savagery and chaos that characterised much of early modern England.’ But electioneering and parliamentary politics were combined with sectarian and dynastic strife, which often took violent expressions, and this mixture makes the rage of party both recognisable and peculiar to modern readers.

Owers concludes the book by suggesting that ‘we are still, in our hearts, either Whig or Tory’. ‘Which are you?’, he asks. But, as he shows, many of the crucial political figures of the period were less than straightforward in their convictions. The Earl of Godolphin was ‘a Tory turned nominal Tory turned de facto Whig’, whereas Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford was a ‘Whig turned Country Whig turned reluctant and highly ambiguous “Tory”’. Indeed, this has been a persistent theme in British political history. Bolingbroke came from a Whiggish family and became a leading Tory parliamentarian before he sought to create a coalition of parties under the Country party banner in opposition to Robert Walpole. Burke was a Whig who opposed the French Revolution and, eventually, became idolised by Tories. Disraeli was a Radical turned Tory, whereas his rival Gladstone was a Tory turned Liberal. Churchill left the Conservative party for the Liberals and, though he returned to the Tories, he was very comfortable in coalition governments. Thatcher and Blair, the most successful Conservative and Labour leaders in recent times, both fit rather uneasily within their parties, at least as the parties were composed when they became leaders.

Many of Britain’s great statesmen have been partisans who have worked within the party system, used it to their advantage, and yet managed to combine the best from the Whig and Tory traditions. To understand the origins of these traditions and why they still matter, we must read The Rage of Party.