‘The Rage of Party: How Whig versus Tory made modern Britain’ by George Owers

This is a vast, extraordinarily well-researched history of British parliamentary politics during the reign of Queen Anne. The sub-title is, I fear a touch misleading. This is not a book to read if you are looking for analysis of the ways in which developments in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries seriously resonate with today’s politics. Some allusions are made towards the end, but thus is essentially a really impressive and very engaging work of narrative history. It is also huge, being just under six hundred pages long.

I studied British history both at school and university, and have throughout my adult life continued to read it for pleasure. I have to confess though that I have always tended to switch off a bit – in respect of political history - once we get past 1688 and the Glorious Revolution is done and dusted. My attention always then tends to focus much more on economic and social history, the industrial revolution, the enlightenment and the building of the British Empire. I have always found it hard to sustain the same interest in high politics, not least because there were, it used to seem to me, fewer big characters knocking about and knocking one another about.

As a result I have always had only rather a hazy idea about the careers and achievements of men such as Goldolphin, Harley, Wharton and Bolingbroke etc. I knew quite a bit about the Duke of Marlborough’s run of victories on European battlefields, but much much less about his domestic political role. Sarah Churchill’s relationship with Queen Anne and her replacement as favourite by Abigail Masham was something I was vaguely aware of, but not its serious, lasting political consequences. So this book, aside from being just a really interesting read, has also filled a gaping gap in my basic historical understanding.

George Owers brings all the shenanigans of the age to life brilliantly; in particular the way that a two-party system evolved in Parliament, Whig and Tory groups both also being made up of different factions who were forced to work together to avoid being overwhelmed by the opposing party. On the Tory side there was a group of Jacobites in Parliament who would have preferred to see Queen Anne succeeded by her half brother James, son of the deposed King James II (James VII of Scotland) rather than by the Elector of Hanover. On the extreme side of the Whig party were people who were deists rather than Christians and who had republican sympathies. But both of these factions were small. The mainstream Tories were passionate Anglicans, happy with the prospect of a Hanoverian succession, but unhappy with endless British involvement in overseas wars that were, in the main, paid for by taxes levied on the landed gentry. Whigs, by contrast, tended to be champions of commercial and merchant interests (not so heavily taxed to finance war), and were sympathetic to dissenting Protestant churches. For them the prospect of a Jacobite restoration after Queen Anne’s death was unthinkable, raising as it did the prospect of a return to the more authoritarian forms of government associated with the early seventeenth century, and as practiced in France.

Queen Anne herself, though broadly Tory in her sympathies, was like her predecessor William III, keen to achieve some consensus and to govern through a ministry made up of the best men from both parties. That was much easier said than done because of intense mutual suspicion on the part of the two party groupings, but by and large it was managed in practice albeit with huge challenges. Meanwhile the Act of Union was successfully passed (creating Great Britain), economic development proceeded at pace, the British Empire grew and the country gained much more political clout on the international stage. The Bank of England also dates from this period, making it easier for governments to raise money quickly.

What George Owers does so skilfully in this book is to tell this story in great detail from the perspective of each of the main players on the political scene, many of whom were colourful, had interesting private lives and had to navigate difficult relationships both with the Queen and one another.

This was also a time in which official censorship was in decline. You still had to be careful about what you said politically and religiously. You could be accused of sedition, and politicians were impeached from time to time, but this was an era in which political journalism flourished and figures like Addison and Steele (on the Whig side) and Swift and Defoe (for the Tories) penned strident articles and pamphlets that were widely circulated and shaped political debate across the country. Newspaper circulation grew and London coffee houses thrived as places where people discussed what was going on and spread information as well as misinformation.

An interesting set of points made by George Owers concerns the frequency of elections and the breadth of the franchise in the 1690s and first decades of the eighteenth century. At this time general elections were held every three years, an additional poll taking place whenever a new monarch acceded to the throne. Later the frequency was reduced to once every seven years giving the country much more stability, but also rather less interesting political history. Rules about who got to vote in these elections were complex and varied from place to place, but the franchise extended more widely than it did later. In the counties the franchises incorporated all men over the age of twenty-one who owned land worth at least forty shillings a year – meaning that only 10-15% of adult men could vote. In the towns it tended to be wider but very variable. There were ‘pocket boroughs’ with just a handful of voters, but other constituencies where thousands had the right to vote. Turnout – probably due to ‘the rage of party’ and wide differences of opinion – was also high.

The result was a situation in which neither party was able to attain supremacy over the other for a long period. Politics were heavily contested and competitive. When the influence of the Queen is added to the mix, the story becomes endlessly fascinating, particularly at times when her favourites exercised influence over her or at which she was sick and vulnerable. The story is really very complex because party advantage waxed and waned year by year.

The only disappointment for me was the failure to analyse at any length exactly how contemporary politics in the UK can be said to have been influenced in any significant way by the early Tory v Whig spats that evolved after the Glorious Revolution in 1688. I have seen interviews in which George Owers says more about this than he does in the book and I would like to have seen those arguments developed in more detail with examples to illustrate key points.

It seems to me that the direct relevance is really pretty thin because the political issues that fuelled ‘the rage of party’ in Queen Anne’s time are so wholly different from those which characterise today’s political debates as to give them only very limited resonance today. We are not fighting an expensive, ongoing continental war rooted in religious differences. We are not nowadays concerned about what faith those who govern us profess, nor are we seriously concerned at all in who will succeed to the Crown on then death of the King. Consensus is present in these areas and new debates rooted in identity and economics have taken their place in our political discourse. It seems to me that the Whig and Tory traditions can both now be found represented, largely, within the modern Conservative Party where a certain tension remains between them, but where more unites than divides in practice.

This book is nonetheless a terrific achievement. It is splendidly written and has the great virtue of making complex developments both fascinating and readily understood, without any simplification. It is also fair to everyone. I am so glad to have read it.