George Owers

• The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain (Constable, September 2025)

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Intro: You are listening to Parliament Matters, a Hansard Society production supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust. Learn more at hansardsociety.org.uk/pm.

Ruth Fox: Welcome to Parliament Matters, the podcast about the institution at the heart of our democracy, Parliament itself. I'm Ruth Fox.

Mark D'Arcy: And I'm Mark D'Arcy. And in this special edition, as the two party system which has shaped British politics for centuries, seems to be fragmenting, we journey back 300 years to the era of Queen Anne, when two party politics began to crystallize.

Ruth Fox: Our guest is George Owers, whose new book, the Rage of Party, chronicles the tumultuous politics of the early 18th century, and George, the two loose political arguments that were emerging were the Whigs and the Tories in your book. So can you start with what did a [00:01:00] Whig believe and what did a Tory believe.

George Owers: Well, so broadly speaking, particularly in the early stages of this party division, the Whigs were, I suppose the easiest way of putting it is that they are the extension or the continuation of the sort of Roundhead parliamentary course from the Civil War, and the Tories are heirs of the Cavaliers. So the Whigs, broadly speaking, would put much more stress on the rights of Parliament, whereas the Tories were much more supporters of the prerogative powers of the Monarch. However, there was also a very strong religious element to this because religion and politics were never far away from each other in this period. So broadly speaking, the Tories were the party of the Church of England, and particularly the high church element of the Church of England, which is to say the people who stressed the power, or their church as a structure, sacraments and had a more small c catholic view of the church as a dispenser of grace and so on. Whereas the Whigs were much more the party of the group who we call the dissenters.

So they [00:02:00] were the Protestants. They were all Protestants, but Protestantism was essentially divided in this period from the more radical Protestants, the ones who were more skeptical about the authorities and the structures of the church and bishops and so on. They were supporters of the Whigs and the Whigs were much more sympathetic to them.

And the religious side and the political side are intertwined because the high Churchmen tended to see the hierarchical structures of the state and the hierarchal structures of the churches mutually supporting and saw the king as having divine right, as did the bishops. Whereas the Whigs and the dissenters and the low churchmen were still part of the Church of England, but they were less supportive of the sort of high church position. They saw the state as being much more secular and were much more in favour of a, something of a distinction between the church and religion and the state, and therefore they had a much less rarefied view of the power of monarchy.

Mark D'Arcy: And all this came to a head in what became known as the Glorious Revolution when a Catholic King James II [00:03:00] was essentially booted out because he was thought to be scheming to make Britain a Catholic state again, bring back Papism as they put it at the time, and he was chased out and that caused a lot of problems for the Tories. If you believe in the divine right of kings, how do you boot out a king?

George Owers: Well, this is the problem. So basically, if they were the church and King party, the Glorious Revolution saw a fatal conflict between those two things. The church and King. Having a Roman Catholic King and a particularly Roman Catholic King who was quite happy to promote his religion and promote Catholics in the Army and in the state, meant that the Tories had to make a terrible choice from their point of view, which is do they plump for the church or the king? Full transcript →