Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-rcrh6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-28T21:10:37.206Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Party Turns? Or, Whigs and Tories Get Off Scott Free*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Tim Harris
Get access

Extract

The Restoration period has attracted renewed scholarly interest in recent years, with the result that many of our commonly held assumptions about politics in the reign of Charles II have come under increased critical scrutiny. Nowhere is this more true than for the Exclusion Crisis and the subsequent Tory Reaction. For a long time we thought we had the dynamics of this period worked out: the Exclusion Crisis gave birth to two parties—the Whigs and Tories—with the Whigs being the anti-Catholic, exclusionist, and Parliamentarian party, who carried with them the support of the people out-of-doors, and the Tories being the party of divine-right, absolute monarchy, anti-populist in their outlook, putting their belief in the sanctity of the hereditary principle before the interests of the people. The Whig challenge was essentially defeated with the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681, and thereafter the 1680s saw a drift towards monarchical absolutism, until this trend was defeated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89.

Type
Order and Authority: Creating Party in Restoration England
Information
Albion , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , Winter 1993 , pp. 581 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1993

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

I should like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for the award of a Summer Stipend to help support some of the research undertaken for this article. A version of this article was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington in December 1992.

References

1 Harris, Tim, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II (Cambridge, 1987), chs. 5–7Google Scholar; Harris, Tim, “‘Lives, Liberties and Estates’: Rhetorics of Liberty in the Reign of Charles II,” in The Politics of Religion in Restoration England, ed. Harris, Tim, Seaward, Paul and Goldie, Mark (Oxford, 1990), pp. 217–41Google Scholar.

2 Knights, Mark, “Politics and Opinion during the Exclusion Crisis 1678–81” (D.Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1989), pp. 413, 416Google Scholar.

3 Scott, Jonathan, “England's Troubles: Exhuming the Popish Plot,” in Politics of Religion, p. 126Google Scholar.

4 Scott, Jonathan, Algernon Sidney and the Restoration Crisis, 1677–1683 (Cambridge, 1991), p. 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Stress in the original.

5 A Letter from a Gentleman in the City, To One in the Country (London, 1680), p. 8Google Scholar; A Most Serious Expostulation with Several of my Fellow-Citizens [London, 1679], p. 4Google Scholar.

6 Knights, Mark, “London's ‘Monster’ Petition of 1680,” Historical Journal 36 (1993): 39–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Idem, “Petitioning and the Political Theorists: John Locke, Algernon Sidney and London's ‘Monster’ Petition of 1680,” Past and Present 138 (1993): 94–111; Idem, “London Petitions and Parliamentary Politics in 1679,” Parliamentary History 12 (1993): 29–46; Furley, O. W., “The Pope-Burning Processions of the Late Seventeenth Century,” History 44 (1959): 16–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Williams, Sheila, “The Pope-Burning Processions of 1679–81,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958): 104–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harris, London Crowds, ch. 7; Harris, Tim, Politics under the Later Stuarts: Party Conflict in a Divided Society 1660–1715 (London, 1993), pp. 102–06Google Scholar; The House of Commons 1660–1690, 3 vols., ed. Henning, Basil Duke (London, 1983), 1: 63–64Google Scholar.

7 Goldie, Mark, “The Political Thought of the Anglican Revolution,” in The Revolutions of 1688, ed. Beddard, R. (Oxford, 1991), p. 106Google Scholar; Dickinson, H. T., Liberty and Property: Political Ideology in Eighteenth-Century Britain (London, 1977), pp. 14, 26Google Scholar.

8 Cooper, E. and Jahoda, M., “The Evasion of Propaganda: How Prejudiced People Respond to Anti-Prejudice Propaganda,” Journal of Psychology 23 (1947): 15–25CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

9 B[ritish] Lpbrary], Add. MSS 32,518, fols. 144–52.

10 The argument presented in the next few paragraphs is developed at greater length in my “Tories and the Rule of Law in the Reign of Charles II,” The Seventeenth Century 8 (1993): 9–27Google Scholar.

11 T. L., The True Notion of Government (London, 1681), pp. 26–27Google Scholar (misnumbered pp. 18–19).

12 W. P., The Divine Right of Kings [London, 1679], p. 2Google Scholar.

13 The Parliamentary History of England, 36 vols., ed. Cobbett, William (1806–1820), 4: cols. 1182, 1188, 1190Google Scholar.

14 Thorogood, B., Captain Thorogood His Opinion of the Point of Succession [1680], p. 9Google Scholar.

15 Fiat Justitia (London, 1679), p. 2Google ScholarPubMed.

16 Advice to the Men of Shaftesbury (London, 1681), p. 2Google Scholar.

17 [Womock, Lawrence], A Short Way to a Lasting Settlement (London, 1683), p. 3Google Scholar.

18 L. S., A Letter to a Noble Peer of the Realm (London, 1681), p. 2Google Scholar.

19 [Charles, II], His Majesties Declaration To All His Loving Subjects, Touching the Causes and Reasons that Moved Him to Dissolve the Two Last Parliaments (London, 1681), p. 9Google Scholar.

20 Harris, , London Crowds, pp. 140–44Google Scholar.

21 [Nalson, John], The Character of a Rebellion, And what England May expect from one (London, 1681), pp. 4–5Google Scholar.

22 [Nalson, John], The Complaint of Liberty and Property against Arbitrary Government (London, 1681), p. 3Google Scholar; [Womock, ], Short Way, p. 30Google Scholar; Johnston, Nathaniel, The Excellency of Monarchical Government, Especially of the English Monarchy (London, 1686), p. 51Google Scholar.

23 Parliamentary History, 4: col. 1186.

24 Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts, ch. 4.

25 Harris, London Crowds, ch. 7; Harris, , Politics under the Later Stuarts, pp. 106–07Google Scholar.

26 Loyal Protestant Intelligence, no. 19, May 10, 1681; Northleigh, John, The Triumph of our Monarchy (London, 1685), p. 393Google Scholar; The Misleading of the Common People by False Notions (London, 1685), pp. 7, 25Google Scholar.

27 Loyal Protestant Intelligence, no. 61, Oct. 4, 1681.

28 The Address of above 20,000 of the Loyal Protestant Apprentices (London, 1681)Google Scholar.

29 Loyal Protestant Intelligence, no. 12, Apr. 16, 1681.

30 Clifton, Robin, The Last Popular Rebellion: The Western Rising of 1685 (London, 1984), pp. 135–37Google Scholar.

31 Loyal Protestant Intelligence, no. 85, Dec. 3, 1681.

32 HMC, Ormond, NS VI, 91; Vox Juvenilis: Or, The Loyal Apprentices' Vindication (London, 1681)Google Scholar; The Address of above 20,000…; Just and Modest Vindication of the Many Thousand Loyal Apprentices that Presented an Humble Address to the Lord Mayor of London (London, 1681)Google Scholar; Harris, , London Crowds, pp. 174–80, 186–87Google Scholar.

33 Loyal Protestant Intelligence, no. 30, Jun. 18, 1681.

34 Ibid., no. 39, Jul. 19, 1681.

35 BL, Add MSS 41,804, fols. 296–307; S[omerset] R[ecord] O[ffice], Q/SR/169, nos. 1–12; SRO, Q/SP/315, recognizances 49–61; SRO, Q/SI/210, indictment 6.

36 Victoria County History, Chester, II (Oxford, 1979): 115Google Scholar; Child, Margaret Smillie, “Prelude to Revolution: The Structure of Politics in County Durham, 1678–88” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 1972), pp. 72–80Google Scholar.

37 Key, Newton, “Politics beyond Parliament: Unity and Party in the Herefordshire Region during the Restoration Period” (Ph.D. diss., Cornell University, 1989), ch. 8Google Scholar.

38 Barry, Jonathan, “The Politics of Religion in Restoration Bristol,” in Politics of Religion, pp. 163–89Google Scholar; Evans, John T., Seventeenth-Century Norwich: Politics, Religion and Government, 1620–1690 (Oxford, 1979), ch. 7Google Scholar.

39 Leeds Record Office, Mexborough MSS 18/85, Thomas Yarburgh to Sir John Reresby, Mar. 22, 1682.

40 Huntington Library, Stowe Collection, Temple Correspondence Box 24, William Chaplyn to Sir Richard Temple, Nov. 19, 1682.

41 See Harris, Politics under the Later Stuarts.

42 Loyal Impartial Mercury, no. 12, Jul. 14–18, 1682; Ibid., no. 40, Oct. 24–27, 1682.

43 An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye 1652–1699, ed. Hunter, Michael and Gregory, Annabel (Oxford, 1988), pp. 156–57Google Scholar; House of Commons 1660–1690, I: 500Google Scholar.

44 Loyal Protestant Intelligence, no. 95, Dec. 27, 1681.

45 Ibid., no. 211, Sep. 23, 1682.

46 Bodleian Library, MS Carte 232, fol. 99.