The Sir Roger de Coverley Papers

by Joseph Addison; Eustace Budgell; Sir Richard Steele

The other and more important subject of difference between the two parties was the relation of the Church to the State and to Dissent. The Tories were Churchmen, and held that the interests of the Church and of religion demanded more constant and detailed attention from the State, and more stringent measures to repress dissent. They always called themselves the Church party; Queen Anne never called them anything else. The Whigs, on the other hand, though many of them were good Churchmen, apprehended less danger from dissent and were more liberal toward it. The Dissenters themselves, of course, were all Whigs.

There was, however, another difference between the two parties quite as important as any speculative question, and daily growing more important. As was stated in the Introduction, the most significant social fact in the England of the first half of the eighteenth century is the growth of a great middle, commercial class, who were gaining wealth rapidly and filling up the towns. At the bottom of much political controversy between 1700 and 1715 was the undefined jealousy between this class and the landed class. It was trade against land, new wealth against old aristocracy, town against country. For this commercial class almost to a man were Whigs; the landed gentry and their dependants, country squires and country parsons, almost to a man, were Tories.

This jealousy became extremely bitter about 1710. During all the reign of Anne, England had been engaged in the great war of the Spanish succession, the real object of which was to prevent the virtual union of the crowns of France and Spain. The war was heartily supported from the first by the Whigs, but opposed, or only languidly supported, by the Tories. A successful war is always popular, and strengthens the party that favours it most; accordingly, through the earlier years of the reign, when the English general Marlborough was winning his famous victories, the Whigs had everything their own way, and by 1708 the government was entirely in their hands. But as the war, however successful, seemed no nearer ending, and its burdens began to press more heavily, Tory opposition strengthened, and party feeling grew more and more intense. The financial load fell mostly on the Tory or landed class; for, as the Tories said, so soon as ever a trading Whig could get a thousand pounds, he put it into government securities, which he had to pay no tax upon, while the land had to pay him a handsome rate of interest. This opposition to the Whigs, strengthened by a feeling that the cause of the church and of religion was endangered by Whig supremacy, grew to such volume that in the memorable elections of 1710 the Whigs were defeated, and a Tory majority brought into the Commons. The Whig ministers were dismissed; Marlborough, the great general, a little later was recalled from the army; and finally the queen took the unprecedented step of creating twelve new Tory peers, and so making a Tory majority in the House of Lords also.

It was in these stormy years that The Spectator appeared. In the tumult of partisan controversy Addison succeeded in keeping his paper out of the strife. He was a pronounced Whig himself, and his preferences are plainly enough to be seen even in these papers; but he sincerely deprecated the rancorous tone of party writing, and he wisely refused to allow The Spectator to become the organ of a party. Steele had more difficulty in restraining his pen, and finally retired from The Spectator rather than remain quiet on public questions.

155: 4. Roundheads and Cavaliers. The Puritans, during the term of the Civil War, were nicknamed Roundheads because they wore their hair short (as everybody does now), instead of allowing it to fall over their shoulders as was the fashion with the Royalists or Cavaliers.

155: 6. St. Anne's Lane. Probably the lane of that name in Westminster, near the Abbey.

155: 12. Prick-eared cur. A dog with pointed ears. The epithet was applied to the Puritans, because they wore their hair short, and their ears were not covered by long locks.

[156]: 4. Tend to the prejudice of the land-tax. Sir Roger naturally finds the mischiefs of parties to come mostly from the Whigs, who support the war, and so raise the land tax.

156: 25. Plutarch. The Greek historian and moralist, born about 46 A.D. His Lives are perhaps the most interesting work of biography in the world. The quotation in the text is from his other principal work, the Morals.