A history of England

by Charles Oman

The Whig party drew its main strength from three sources. The first was the strong Protestant feeling in England, which made most men resolve that the Pretender must be kept over-seas at any cost, even at that of submitting to the selfish and stolid George I. The second was the fact that the Whigs had enlisted the support of the mercantile classes all over the country by their care for trade and commerce. While in power in Anne's reign, they had done their best to make the war profitable by concluding commercial treaties with the allies, and by furthering the colonial expansion of England. This was never forgotten by the merchants. The third mainstay of the Whig party was their parliamentary influence. A majority of the House of Lords was on their side, and they contrived to manage the Commons by a judicious mixture of corruption and coercion.

Pocket boroughs and crown boroughs.

The great peers had many "pocket boroughs" in their power—that is, they possessed such local influence in their own shires that they could rely on returning their own dependents or relatives for the seats that lay in their neighbourhood. Many of these "pocket boroughs" were also "rotten boroughs"—places, that is, which had been important in the middle ages, but had now decayed into mere hamlets with a few score of inhabitants. Over such constituencies the influence of the local landlord was so complete, that he could even sell or barter away the right to represent them in Parliament. The most extraordinary of these rotten boroughs were Old Sarum and Gatton, each of which owned only two voters, men paid to live on the deserted sites by their landlords. Yet they had as many representatives in the House of Commons as Yorkshire or Devon! Besides these nomination boroughs, the Whigs had now control over a number of crown boroughs, places where of late the members had been wont to be chosen by the sovereign; there were many such in Cornwall, where the king, as duke of that county, was supreme landlord. The Tudors had made many Cornish villages into parliamentary constituencies in order to pack the House of Commons with obedient members.

Parliamentary influence of the Whigs.

Hitherto the crown and the great peers had seldom acted together, and no one had realized how large a portion of the House of Commons could be influenced by their combination. But when, in the days of the two first Georges, the Whig oligarchy wielded the power of the crown as well as their own, they obtained a complete control over the Lower House. Often the Tory opposition shrank to a minority of sixty or eighty votes, and the only semblance of party government that remained was caused by the quarrels and intrigues of the leaders of the Whigs, who fought each other on personal grounds as bitterly as if they had been divided by some important principle.

The Jacobites.—Death of Lewis XIV.

In the first year of King George, however, the Whigs were still kept together by their fear of the enemy. The Jacobites, who had seemed so near to triumph in Bolingbroke's short tenure of power, did not yield without an appeal to arms. The late prime minister and his chief military adviser, the Duke of Ormonde, both fled to France and joined the Pretender. When safe over-seas they began to organize an insurrection, counting on the active assistance of Lewis XIV., who was always ready to aid his old dependents the Stuarts. But the plot was not yet ready to burst, when the old king died, and his successor in power, the regent Philip of Orleans, refused to risk any step that might lead to a war with England.

Bolingbroke and the Tory party.

Nevertheless, Bolingbroke and his master persevered. They had so many friends both in England and in Scotland, that they thought that they could hardly fail. They had not realized that most of these friends were lukewarm, and unprepared to take arms in order to give the crown to a Romanist. Two-thirds of the Tory party hated the Pope even more than they hated the Whigs and the Hanoverian king, and would not move unless James Stuart showed some signs of wishing to conform to the Church of England. Their loyalty to the national Church was stronger than their loyalty to the divine right of kings.