← Back to Parliament Matters episode page

This transcript is automatically generated. There are consequently minor errors and the text is not formatted according to our style guide. If you wish to reference or cite the transcript please first check against the audio version. Timestamps are provided for ease of reference.

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?

And in the end, the Tories acquiesced with the revolution. They weren't very happy about it, but they decided that the rights of the church and the Church of England were ultimately more important to them. So they sort of, most of them sat on their hands and basically let it happen. Often they had rather a lot of moral qualms after as to whether they could accept William III, who is the person who becomes King, the Dutch stat [00:04:00] holder, whether they could accept him as the king, but mostly they did accept him as king, although often more de facto than de jure really.

Whereas the Whigs were much more straightforwardly pro the revolution and were more the instigators of it. But the revolution probably wouldn't have succeeded, or it certainly wouldn't have succeeded anywhere near as easily as it did, without the Tories basically reluctantly accepting it. And actually, you know, you'd think this creates a huge problem for the Tories. Like they were the party of divine right and non-resistance, a sort of idea derived from the church that you should never resist the Monarch, particularly one who's been ordained by God. But they go around this by various slight of hands and pretenses. And the idea that James sort of abdicated, which is not really true because he fled the country in fear of his life.

But so it does create a big problem for the Tories, and it heralds a big change in the nature of the party divide. So as the Tories no longer have a sort of very deferential view towards the monarchy, because the new king clearly doesn't have divine right to rule. They become much more skeptical about the monarchy, [00:05:00] and this is particularly important in the context of the European politics of the situation, which is essentially that William, who is the leader of the Dutch Republic, has been fighting a war for a long time against the French, who are essentially sort of the Roman Catholic superpower of Europe under Louis the 14th.

Mark D'Arcy: What's striking about the politics of the day was just the sheer power of the religious issue. I mean, it looks very strange to us in a year when King Charles has just been celebrating an ecumenical service in the Sistine Chapel with the Pope. But that era, anti-Catholic bigotry kept emerging in great sort of spasms every now and then, and was a major tool of politics, particularly for the Whig party.

George Owers: Yes. So by this point, England has become a pretty comprehensively Protestant country, and there's a great fear and hatred and loathing of what they would've called papists because it was basically inherently believed that Roman Catholics were absolutist and authoritarian by nature, and that there was always some sort of plot by the Jesuits and the Pope to steal the liberties of Englishmen and murder their wives and rubbish them in their beds and stuff. So [00:06:00] it's very heated, and the Whigs particularly exploited this, particularly on the context of James II being a Roman Catholic. And so they would do things like have massive pope burning ceremonies.

They would burn effigies of cardinals and popes on the 5th of November, for obvious reasons. Or sometimes on the succession day of Elizabeth I. So, yes, whereas the Tories are not Roman Catholics, the Tories are also Protestant churchmen. But they have a slightly more difficult time dealing with it because obviously they're defending the right of a Roman Catholic king to become king at first. So it's a bit harder for them. This is their great dilemma basically.

Mark D'Arcy: And the other side of the religious division coin was the treatment of non-Church of England Protestant dissenters. And there was this long running legislative saga that pops up again and again throughout your narrative around the occasional conformity bill.

Now this was a measure to stop dissenters, members of those non-Church of England Protestant churches, from being able to serve in public office if they only took communion from the Church of England a few token times and [00:07:00] then basically worshiped in some chapel somewhere else.

George Owers: Yes. So this is one of the central political issues of the era.

And what it goes back to is after Glorious Revolution, there is some limited toleration for dissenters. They're allowed to worship in private and exist because they've technically been illegal before that. However, particularly the Tories are determined to ensure that the state remains an Anglican monopoly so that only churchmen are allowed to serve in government and in public positions.

Mark D'Arcy: And that would include local government, for example.

George Owers: Yeah, so corporations, which are essentially what we now would call councils. And so the Tories wanted to maintain the church's monopoly. Also there's something called the Test Act that had been passed earlier, which ensured that there was a sacramental test, which means you had to have taken the sacrament, i.e. communion, in a Church of England church three times a year. But a lot of dissenters who were the backbone of the Whig party in many places, obviously wanted to get round this, because it had a political element. You know, the corporation will often vote for who became the MP [00:08:00] and so if dissenters had political rights, then this was a huge help for the Whig party.

So they got round the Test and Corporation Acts by insincerely taking the sacrament and then spending the rest of their time in their dissenting chapel, going to Presbyterian meetings or whatever it would be. And this particularly came to a head in the mid 1690s when the Lord Mayor of London, very ostentatiously, went to take the sacrament in the Church of England Church and then literally in his full regalia rides to a dissenting chapel, sort of mocking the whole thing and sort of drawing attention to it.

And a lot of the high church Tories who are not a group of people who were naturally calm or considered a lot of the time, shall we say, went absolutely ballistic about this. And then when Queen Anne becomes Queen, Queen Anne is a massive, is really a high church Anglican herself, huge attempt to pass legislation, which would make this illegal.

Basically to enforce the Test and Corporation Act properly. This becomes a huge political football. From about 1702 to 1705, there were [00:09:00] three attempts to pass it through Parliament.

Mark D'Arcy: And of course looming over Queen Anne as it had loomed over William and Mary was the prospect of an alternative dynasty taking power. The direct descendants of King James II were in exile in France in an alternative royal court in Sangerman, and there was always the possibility that they might come back. There were a whole, whole faction of Tories who were Jacobites, supporters of James II to some degree, and you can't help wondering what might have happened if some of James I direct male descendants had decided that London was worth a Eucharist, that they'd been able to convert to the Church of England in order to become king.

George Owers: Yes, I mean, they obviously loom over this whole thing because it's all linked to the war in France because obviously the Jacobites have the support of the French largely for religious reasons, and partly because it would mean that England wouldn't be at war with France if the Jacobites returned and the Stuarts' line continued.

The thing is, of course, that the massive problem and the reason why, [00:10:00] although some Tories did support the Jacobites, particularly at certain times. Even the bulk of most Tories didn't really want to bring in the pretender, i.e. the Jacobite heir to the throne, because of the religious issue, because the Stuart family, that's the successors to James II, so his son also called James, remained a very, very convinced Roman Catholic. There were many attempts to persuade him to say, look, come on, he just pretends to be an Anglican and your chances of getting restored, and obviously they thought they had a good chance of getting restored 'cause the Stewarts have been restored before, from what looked like very unpromising circumstances in the 1650s.

And the Jacobites were very convinced that they would do it. But this was the thing upon which it foundered, like even most Tories were very reluctant to go down the Jacobite route unless they were really desperate because they didn't want our own Catholic King. And the Whigs relentlessly play on the fear of the Jacobites, the fear of the Pope and the pretender. That's one of their most consistent and important lines of argument. Basically trying to smear the Tory party as all being [00:11:00] Jacobites and crypto papists, who are gonna bring back a Roman Catholic tyranny and which is often not really that fair, but there's always enough of a suspicion and there are enough Tory Jacobites on the fringes to make it an accusation, which has enough power, you know, to help the Whigs out basically.

So prize of the Pope and the pretender are always underlying the Whig argument basically.

Ruth Fox: And George, another big difference to our era is that as depicted in your book, the government is led directly by the monarchs, it's the kings and the queens, Queen Anne sitting in cabinet meetings presiding over them, and the leading men in an administration occupying a much more ambiguous position than we'd recognize today in the role of a modern Prime Minister.

George Owers: Yeah, so the Glorious Revolution, which is the sort of key to understanding a lot of this, haven't really formally changed the English Constitution that much in formal terms, at least. The key change that it really did introduce was the fact that Parliament [00:12:00] before this was more of an event rather than an institution.

You know, Kings could call a Parliament or not call a Parliament as various Stuart Monarchs had tried with varying degrees of success, but after the Glorious Revolution, various factors mean that that's no longer really an option. Parliament is a permanent annual institution, and this is largely because, first of all, King William's wars mean that he has to raise a lot more money, right? This is on a scale of warfare that it just has not been seen for a long time in English history. So in order to raise the funds he needs for the war, there's no option but to call Parliament. And Parliament has become a lot more canny. It won't give long-term grants because it made a big mistake with James II. It had made a lifetime grant of money to him. Which proved to be a big mistake and made it become much more cautious and less willing to give long-term financial grants to the Monarch. So this means that from the 1690s onwards, there is no question that a Parliament is gonna be called every year, which for the first time. However, still the government, as you say, is led by the [00:13:00] Monarch and the Monarch points the ministers, and retains an awful lot of prerogative power.

However, because Parliament is now a permanent institution, and the financial needs of the government mean that it's not practical anymore, I mean, various Stuart monarchs had tried to not call Parliaments and not raise taxes, and you could just about get away with that when you are Charles II largely because he was taking money from the French.

But in this new era, this means that the Queen still retains a lot of power, but she has to find a way of managing Parliament, and a Parliament that's increasingly stuck with partisan party politicians, in order to get her business through. And she doesn't want to get into a situation where one party becomes so powerful that it does what's usually referred to as forcing the chamber. So this means one party became so powerful in Parliament, they could force ministers or policies upon the monarch that the monarch didn't necessarily want, so the Queen needed to make sure that Parliament was managed such that that wouldn't happen. [00:14:00]

Mark D'Arcy: And so what you had was a monarch desperate to avoid being dominated by any one political faction and parliamentary management was becoming increasingly important, and that kind almost required one political faction.

So you had a contradiction here that eventually forces the emergence of the office of Prime Minister.

George Owers: Yes, that's true. Although there is quite a long transitional period, a long entangled saga. One of the things you've gotta bear in mind about this era is there's a prejudice even by the people who are the most partisan and party politicians. Most people don't like the idea of party. Most of the leading politicians see parties as illegitimate, essentially. Even though they are themselves party politicians. They still think that politics should be a sort of an elite consensus, basically. So they tend to see their political opponents, whether it's Whigs or Tories, as being in illegitimate faction, and they're embodying the real consensus.

Of course, this is largely a fantasy and increasingly the parties get into a position where they're able to force measures on the queen and [00:15:00] form what was essentially a single party government, because for a lot of this transitional period, most governments are what we call mixed ministries, where various court managers on behalf of the Queen will try to appoint a mixture of Whigs and Tories, and then through various ways, divide and rule them to get the Queen's business through.

And this sometimes works, but sometimes they have to work more through one party or the other, just for practical reasons. Usually because one party is much more united than the other, and therefore if you have a united party, it's much easier to work with them 'cause they can get stuff through Parliament.

Whereas a divided party that's always fighting amongst itself creates as many problems as they would have otherwise. And as this period goes on, you get for a period, the Whigs are leaned on more and more because the Whigs tend to be in a more united party. The Tories are always fighting like cats and dogs, which may sound somewhat familiar to more people feeling with more modern politics.

Ruth Fox: If your book has a hero in all of this, and I think, let's be blunt, none of the big political figures cut a particularly heroic figure, but if there is one, it's [00:16:00] Robert Harley, who's now pretty much forgotten. But in that era, he's the master manipulator who's again and again, mobilizing these sort of different combinations of factions across both parties to deliver this majority for a governing program and the taxes to pay for it.

George Owers: Yeah. So Harley is the key figure, and you could argue is the key sort of transitional figure towards a Prime Minister becoming a constitutional, meaningful position. So Harley is originally a Whig, but he drifts away from the Whigs and ends up because he's suspicious of what he sees as an increasing Whig tendency, particularly among the leading Whigs who are a group of Lords known as the Junto. He thinks that they're rather self-interested and always attempting to bully the monarch into promoting them or furthering their agenda. So he drifts into being a very ambiguous sort of a Tory who works more with the Tories, but what he's really doing and he doesn't really like party politics, what he increasingly sees his role as is attempting to [00:17:00] manage Parliament for the Queen to stave off the chamber being forced, and the Queen, Queen Anne having to accept one party or the other.

And so he works more with the Tories, largely because he sees that the Tories are easier to manipulate because they're so divided usually, and they're always doing incredibly stupid things, which alienate the Queen. The way of seeing this era, in a way, in the bulk of my book, is a brave last gasp rear guard action by Robert Harley to attempt to basically prevent the dominance of one party who can force the monarch to do things that they don't really wanna do.

So Queen Anne clings as much as she can, is always trying to find a way to allow Harley to protect her from the Whigs and the Tories. However, towards the end of my book, as political circumstances change, Harley himself basically becomes the head of a more or less one party government, and the one party is the Tories.

And then this period, which is 1710 to 1714, there's an argument that he becomes close to being a Prime Minister. And some people [00:18:00] actually do use the phrase of him occasionally and informally, like people describe Harley as a Prime Minister.

Mark D'Arcy: But he's in the Lords as the Lord Treasurer.

George Owers: Yes, the Lord Treasurer is the more important position at this point.

So his predecessor, Godolphin, who had tried to do something similar, although he'd leaned more towards the Whigs, Godolphin is also described as Prime Minister occasionally as well. They can never really gain control in the same way as the first Prime Minister who comes a bit later, i.e. Robert Walpole. They can never quite gain enough a unanimous support in Parliament because they're trying to stave off party. They're trying to patch together coalitions, sort of buy people off, divide and rule, and Harley's particularly famous for this. I mean, his nickname is Robin the Trickster, because he's always cutting a deal with some faction of Tories and then going behind their back to talk through some Whigs and then trying to get through the middle by divide and rule and stuff. And actually he's surprisingly successful at this.

Mark D'Arcy: I mean it goes on for an awfully long time, doesn't it? 'cause he rides the

various different horses for an awful long time. The other thing that really [00:19:00] struck me about the book is just some of the utterly extraordinary characters in it.

I mean, this was an age when parties are, you know, employing propaganda like Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe. You have these extraordinary figures who are simultaneously rakes carousing their way through the brothels of London fighting duels all over the place. And they're turning up in the House of Lords to make sarcastic speeches about the other side.

Who's your favorite character in all this?

George Owers: In a way, my favorite is Thomas Wharton, Lord Wharton, who is essentially the closest that the Whigs come to have, you know, there aren't leaders in quite the same sense of a modern political party, the Whigs are led by a combination of five Lords called the Junto, but Wharton has a good claim to being for a long period, probably the most politically important member of that.

Now, Lord Wharton is a brilliant character, I mean, he's a complete rake. He's infamous for it at the time, and he's also in an age where religion is very important. Wharton is seen as basically the devil by the Tories. And this goes back,

Mark D'Arcy: [00:20:00] There isn't really a delicate way to describe the incident you are working towards.

George Owers: No, I'll try to be, but basically when he is,

Ruth Fox: It's a family podcast, George?

George Owers: Yes, don't worry. I'll put this delicately. So when he was a young man in his cups. He broke into a church with some of his friends and did his dispervenings of nature as Swift put it, on the pulpit and the altar.

So yes, there was certain degree of urination and the other type all over the church. And this gave him a reputation and not an undeserved reputation for being basically someone called him, he's a dissenter, grafted onto an atheist. He was not a very religious man. I think it's fair to say he was also famous for having quite a lot of mistresses, one of whom he put up in a house on the edge of his estate, which overlooked a race course. Because his other passion in life was horse racing. The joke at the time was that he could combine his two favorite passions at the same time in this house. And actually the interesting thing about this in a way is although he's hugely popular [00:21:00] amongst the Whigs as a sort of boistering duel fighting rake, who had a great discrete sort of parliamentary empire where he had an influence in many constituencies and he'd ride all over the country, canvasing for Whigs, bribing local officials, doing whatever he had to do to try to help the Whigs win, the fact that he had this reputation for being a dissolute atheistic hell hound basically meant that he had a big problems with Queen Anne. Queen Anne was a very devout Anglican. Going to church services was probably after state business the thing she did more than anything else, she despised him. She thought he was the devil incarnate and did everything she could to stop him being appointed to high office.

Sometimes she couldn't help it because the forces against her were too strong and the Whigs were too united, but when she became Queen, she struck him off the Privy Council in a sort of dramatic gesture, you know, to say well I'm not gonna have a dodgy rake like you anywhere near my government. So it did create problems for him.

But yeah, I think whatever you think about Wharton, [00:22:00] my book is a lot richer for his existence because he's an endless source of anecdote.

Mark D'Arcy: Another great moment is where the Duke of Hamilton is about to be sent off to be ambassador to France, but he gets involved in a duel with a Whig nobleman, and the two basically hack each other to death, and there's a fitting combination to, what's his name now, Mohan, the Whig nobleman in question's career.

George Owers: Yeah. Mohan is even more vicious and is always the most extraordinary character of the period because he basically spends his whole life getting very drunk, fighting people, dueling people, and murdering people. So he's tried for murder in front of the House of Lords because if you're a peerage, you're allowed, you know, the privilege of having a criminal trial in front of the highest court in the land, which is the House of Lords.

And he's tried for murder twice when he is only a young man and he's let off, but he's probably, it's dubious as to whether he was innocent or not. But, he's a very convinced Whig. He's also famous for beating up journalists, though. There's a Tory journalist onto, [00:23:00] he traces a Tory journalist to a tavern, and this Tory journalist has said he's a bit of a rake and a reputable character, which I mean, fair enough. He was. And cudgelled him with a whip. So that was one way of dealing with political journalists, I suppose. But the culmination of this is he ends up, as you say, fighting this the most famous duel of the era with the Duke of Hamilton, who is a Tory, suspected of being a Jacobite, which he probably was more or less, and they have a duel that's so brutal that they're both killed in fighting the duel. I mean, my favorite detail of this is as Mohan is dying, he may already be dead, but he's taken back to his family house in London. And his wife, who I think is fair to say, regretted marrying him, the only comment she had as they laid the dead body out on their bed is, oh, he's got blood all over my new counter pain. Which sort of, sums up how close that marriage was. And the duel becomes itself a massive element of the party fight because there's a sort of suspicion [00:24:00] that the Tories argue that it's a deliberate political assassination.

It's not clear why the duel happens. It's a very tenuous reason. And so there's this theory. With truth, it's impossible to say that there'd been a plot by the Whigs led by the Duke of Marlborough to provoke a duel and extra judicially murder the the Duke of Hamilton to stop him becoming ambassador to France.

And this is at the height of tension towards the end of the book when basically the Whigs suspect that the Tories are about to bring the pretender in and end liberty in Britain. So it becomes heated and not million miles away from the edges of possibly a civil war.

Mark D'Arcy: But it never quite happens.

I suppose back to our particular fetish on this podcast, which is constitutional parliamentary matters. A key factor in this that we haven't talked about much yet is the House of Lords. The House of Lords was the place where the Whigs mostly seemed to control things for quite a lot of the time, until eventually Robert Harley we talked about, created a dozen extra peers to give the Tories a majority.

Talk about the [00:25:00] importance for us of the House of Lords in all this.

George Owers: Well, the House of Lords is very important because I think that people often assume that after the Glorious Revolution that establishes the primacy of the Commons. But that's not really true in any straightforward way. So the Commons has primacy in financial matters.

Yes. But it sort of did before the Glorious Revolution as well. So that didn't really sort of confirm that. They didn't really change that very much. The House of Lords because it is seen as being senior in status because of course, and this is an era where issues of aristocratic status and so on are taken very seriously because it represents the peers of the realm.

It is still seen as in some ways the senior house, particularly on non-financial questions, and the power of the Whigs is very much its control for a long time over the Lords where it tends to have an inbuilt majority, whereas the Tories more often than not, not always, but usually the Tories dominate the Commons.

And this is partly because the social backbone of the Tories are the gentry, the landed squires, particularly the [00:26:00] lower gentry. But most of the gentry are, not all, there are Whig squires, but broadly the land owning classes who are non noble anyway, are seen as the backbone of the Tories. Whereas the Whigs tends to have more support amongst the aristocrats and the nobility who are seen as jealous of the prerogatives of the Monarch, I suppose if you going to the Stuart Period. And so the Whigs generally manage to block the Tories from carrying out their agenda in the early part of the reign of Queen Anne by blocking them through the Lords, so they defeat the occasional conformity bill by their power in the Lords. And then from 1710 when Robert Harley becomes Lord Treasurer and the leader of a more or less Tory government, that government has a big problem in that the Lords is still dominated by the Whigs. And the big issue becomes the question of peace with France. So there's a huge controversy.

The Tories are the peace party, largely because the squires who make up the backbone of their support are a bit tired of being taxed to the hilt to pay for this war. And the Whigs are very much the war party. They see defeating France [00:27:00] completely and totally as being the key to stopping the Jacobites who are dependent on the power of the French monarchy.

So Harley has a big problem getting the peace through Parliament in 1711, and his peace preliminaries are defeated in the House of Lords by a narrow majority. And he thinks there's, you know, there's panic in the Tories. They think, well, what's gonna happen? We can't get the peace through. That's the main thing that's holding us together as a party, 'cause they're very divided on other issues. And so there's this period around Christmas and New Year where everyone holds their breath and thinks, well, what earth's gonna happen? You know, the only way of breaking this impasse is if the Queen will appoint a load of Tory Lords to break the impasse. Jonathan Swift is who's keeping a record of all of this in his letters to Stella, which is a great record of what's going on.

He's friends, personal friends with both Harley and the other leading Tory Viscount Bollingbrook. He's writing, oh, we're all ruins. Your Whigs are gonna get back in. And then the Queen is talked by Harley into appointing what is known as Harley's dozen, so 12 Lords who will break the impasse and pass the [00:28:00] peace through the House of Lords.

And then you can see Swift in his letters and diaries saying, joy the Queen is true to us. And you know, we will get the peace through. We're alive yet, and so on. So it's quite dramatic and course. It raises big questions because a lot of the Lords, and the Whigs particularly, are aghast at this because they see this as the monarch breaking the independence of one of the three parts of what they see as the tripartite constitution, so the Commons, Lords and monarchy.

And so it's quite controversial, but the reason is by this point, the queen has become very pro peace. She's tired of endless war, but not unreasonably because by this point, England has, and Britain has, been at war for the best part of 20 years on and off. So yeah, the House of Lords becomes the key constitutional political football between the parties.

Ruth Fox: And at the end of this period, George, the country begins this long period of single party domination under what emerges to be the first Prime Minister Robert Walpole. Obviously this sort of question of war and peace is a factor, but are there other sort of elements that [00:29:00] create these roots to the prime ministerial role?

George Owers: Well, the key issue is that a new monarchical dynasty comes to the throne, right? So Queen Anne dies in 1714, and she had been the only thing really propping the Tories up by this point, and the new king is George I, the German from Hannover. And he, for various reasons, hates the Tories, partly because he opposed the peace and he thinks and suspects that the Tories are at heart jacobites who don't want him to become king.

Mark D'Arcy: Just to interject for a second, the Hanoverians had had their succession guaranteed as the sort of Protestant alternative to the Jacobite line who were in exile in France. So for quite a while during Queen Anne's life, it had been nailed down that the Hanoverians were the successors.

George Owers: Yeah, well because they were the nearest Protestants in line to the throne, but they were still like 60 something in line to the throne because there were so many Catholics before them. But obviously because of the events of the Glorious Revolution, a Catholic monarch had become completely taboo. So yeah, this set of Germans, who are distantly related are by [00:30:00] an Act piloted actually with Tory support earlier in the reign made heirs, but this doesn't stop endless speculation because there's always this suspicion and fear on the part of the Whigs particularly, that although the Hanoverians technically by law are the Protestant heirs who will say you've written from the return to the bad old days of the Papist stuarts. There's still a suspicion that the Jacobites are just biding their time and waiting for Queen Anne to die.

I mean, the reality is that there are some Tories who support those Jacobites, and this becomes, as Queen Anne gets ill, and as it becomes clear that the Hanoverians are obviously pro Whig, as this becomes clearer and clearer through throughout the course of the issue, over the peace, some Tories start think, well, my God, we can't have Hanoverians. They hate us and they're gonna proscribe us forever, basically. So you do get towards the end more Tories lean over to the pretender and become Jacobites. But even so, still, there's a bulk of the Tories don't really want the pretender to come in, just can't stomach a Roman Catholic king. So in the end there's a lot of to do about this and the Whigs are convinced that the Jacobites are gonna come in [00:31:00] when Queen Anne dies and there's gonna be an invasion and possibly a civil war. And it all gets incredibly heated. But actually when Queen Anne dies, it's all a bit of an anti-climax because actually, partly because some of the leading, particularly Farley, who is actually not a Jacobite, he's spent a long time either in secret correspondence with the Jacobites saying, oh, don't worry, you don't need to worry because I will bring back the pretender, I have a secret plan to do it. He had no plan. It was all to sort of a distraction to get them to be very complacent. So when Queen Anne dies and the Hanoverians come in and it's all very straightforward. I mean, there are riots, and George I is not popular. He's seen as a fat German turnip farmer, fairly or unfairly who doesn't speak very good English.

But nonetheless, most of the country is like, well, we don't really like him, but he's better than having a Roman Catholic. So George I is absolutely never gonna employ the Tories. He suspects them of being Jacobite traitors. And then the Whigs have a period where they're fighting like rats in a sack over who's gonna get the predominance?

Because the Whigs have been largely out of power for a long time, and [00:32:00] eventually by 1722, one man has by manipulation, by immense political legerdemain and great skill as well to be fair to him, Robert Walpole has come to climb to the top of the tree. He's Prime Minister of 20 years, and the Whigs become dominant, partly Walpole marshals the considerable resources of the treasury in a very coordinated way to basically bribe and use the power of patronage to get a lot of MPs to be sort of paying votes for the Whigs.

But he's also, but Walpole's also clever. He's not just corrupt. He also realizes that the reason why the Tories had support in the country, and they did have a lot of support in the country, probably the majority was because people hated war and taxes, which is fair enough. I mean, I don't think many people are that keen on either of those things. And so Walpole realized that to keep the Whigs in power permanently, he would have to basically keep England under peace, which he does right until the end of his reign. And he would have to keep taxes down, which he also does. I mean, particularly the land tax, which is the big [00:33:00] issue for the squires. So this instigates a period of what is usually referred to as the Whig oligarchy.

The Tories continue to exist. They're there. They always have at least a hundred odd MPs. They have a tradition in the country now. There are some seats that they continue to win, but they never have a chance from that point on of, you know, getting any considerable power within the government.

Mark D'Arcy: So this was domination by a combination of corruption and boredom really.

George Owers: And skill.

I mean, Walpole knew how to play the independent backbench MPs. He was a skillful political operator and he becomes so prominent that I think, you know, people usually say he's the first Prime Minister. And I think on the one hand, in some ways he's not a million miles away from Harley or Godolphin, but he's qualitatively different, I think, because he has such a command over the government and it's one party government, completely unambiguous. One party government is the Whigs are in control so he can dominate Parliament and has the favour of the monarch to an extent, which no one before had a chance. I mean, Harley didn't manage that 'cause Parliament was too divided and the Tories were always fighting [00:34:00] against each other and so on.

Although I think it's probably arguable that, that quite a few people that come after Walpole who are called Prime Minister, but I mean they're not really Prime Minister. It's a bit more complicated than that. It does fundamentally change the balance and the constitution and leads to the formation of a Prime Minister.

Ruth Fox: So we talked, George, you know, your book is about the dawn of the two party system in this era, but, maybe lessons for today. Perhaps we should be looking at the way politics works when governments are formed on the basis of multiple floating factions.

George Owers: Yeah, I think there's something in that, because obviously parties in this era I've written about are very loose.

So there are Whips and there are attempts to coordinate the parties in Parliament, but the power of the central leadership and Whips is just so much weaker. The Labour Party and the Tory party nowadays have far more power and discipline over their MPs. You know, a lot of these MPs are landed big whigs that have their own electoral interests in the constituencies.

And so they don't need to worry. They don't care. They're often, it's the tail wagging the dog. It's the MPs [00:35:00] bullying the leadership into what to do. And the particular result of this is, particularly the Tories in this era, are endlessly factional. There's all sorts of factions. So there's something called the October Club, which is from 1710.

The most virulently pro church anti Whig, extreme sort of Tories. And then there are other Tories who are much more moderate and so actually though you can see it in terms of two parties really, particularly by the end of this era, there's like probably at least three or four factions in Parliament.

Mark D'Arcy: I mean, you could imagine a situation where after the next election, you might need to have a political leader capable of balancing several separate parties and possibly factions within other parties in order to form a viable government. So maybe future prime ministers in this country for a while at least, may have to be more like Robert Harley and less like say, Margaret Thatcher in order to govern.

George Owers: I think I completely agree because if you know, clearly we're now entering a period where having a party, having a two parties that both have very strong control over their MPs, [00:36:00] and can therefore rule without having to manipulate factions or parties or third parties or whatever, it's clearly, I mean, it seems, unless something dramatically changes that's going. So after the next election, presumably you're gonna have a situation where there's a question whether Reform can form a government, maybe with the support of the Tories or whether Labour will be able to cobble together some combination of them and maybe the Greens or Lib Dems or whatever.

And that breakdown of the old post-war two party Labour Tory system is gonna mean that you need leaders who can't just order a three line whip for their backbenchers who are all loyal members of one party, they're gonna have to be dealing with all sorts of parties rather than factions within a party.

But that's a distinction, which if you're trying to manage a Parliament, is actually a bit of a distinction without a difference. Harley was having to manage, you know, various factions of Tories, although they were all called Tories and we didn't really help him very much because they were arguing like cats and dogs and he was often having to tell one faction this thing and another faction this thing, and then lying to both of them at the same time, about [00:37:00] patronage and so on.

Mark D'Arcy: But I suppose it's fair to say though, that even though it was an incredibly complicated political landscape, they did get big stuff done. I mean, we're talking about the era when the Bank of England was created. We're talking about the union with Scotland. So really major changes were possible even against that kind of background.

George Owers: Oh, yes. And also the conclusion of the war, which is a major. It resulted in the peace of Utrecht, which basically established the status quo in European politics for at least the next 20 or 30 years, and I would argue formed the basis for what became the pomp of the British Empire because we did pretty well out of the peace of Utrecht.

We gained various colonies and stuff, so absolutely. I mean, if you have really good parliamentary operators who can manipulate fact, well, often it's not very pretty to be honest, when you are dealing with lots of warring factions. I mean often deals are cut and they're not necessarily very morally edifying, shall we say, like the, it doesn't, the act of union, which was partly result of various very complicated wrangling between the [00:38:00] Whigs, the government, and the non-party managers and the Tories, that was not a pretty process.

It was a very complicated, and there was a lot of devious manipulation of various Scottish factions by the various ministers and the Whigs. But you know, I mean obviously it depends on whether you think the union, the union with England and Scotland is a good thing or not. But if you're a unionist, certainly it was certainly an incredible and important achievement.

But my impression is that some prime ministers now I'm not interested in Parliament. I don't think Starmer or Sunak or many prime ministers in recent years, they're not that interested in Parliament. They go there as little as they can to vote occasionally. They're not generally House of Commons men or women nowadays.

And I think that if the new era we're entering seems that it's gonna go like we think it is. I think that's gonna have to end. If you are a Prime Minister who's trying to manage three or four different parties or factions or whatever to keep a majority, you are gonna have to get stuck in, you're gonna have to go to the tea room in the House of Commons, you are gonna have to have meetings with unruly groups of back benchers like Harley did. Harley's always wheeling and [00:39:00] dealing. He knows everybody. That's one of the things. He knows what every MP wants. He knows the problems in the constituency. He knows how to manipulate them all. He knows what jobs they want.

He knows so and so, you know, they have the silk industry in this constituency, so he will be attentive to the trade policy on silk or whatever. And Harley's a genius. He knows all of these things and so he can bribe or offer them jobs or cut deals with them. He does end up in the Lords, but for a long time he's the master of the House of Commons, and so was Walpole.

Walpole never went to the Lords, except right at the end went after his political career. Walpole was even more probably skilled at this than Harley. Walpole was the consumate House of Commons man. He knew everybody. Where the skeletons were buried. He knew what people wanted. And I think that maybe, you know, whoever's Prime Minister after the next election will have to rediscover some of these arts of parliamentary skullduggery and management.

Mark D'Arcy: And you've possibly written the textbook on how to do it.

So for future Walpoles and Harleys managing a multi-party coalition perhaps after the next election, George Owers, thanks very much [00:40:00] indeed for joining us on the podcast today.

George Owers: Thank you.

Ruth Fox: Thanks, George.

Intro: Parliament Matters is produced by the Hansard Society and supported by the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.

For more information, visit hansardsociety.org.uk/pm or find us on social media @HansardSociety.

← Back to Parliament Matters episode page