Whigs

This was not unnatural at Aldeburgh where he had been known under less prosperous circumstances but he met with a good deal of opposition when after his long residence in Suffolk he returned to Muston and at Trowbridge he was at first considered too worldly for his flock and only slowly won their sincere respect.

A strict moralist he had no dislike of social pleasure and as a staunch Whig he shrank from enthusiasm of every kind.

The serious and the profane alike distrusted him.

The worldly remonstrated at his description of the workhouse chaplain to which allusion has been made and in deference to the complaints of the religious world the vigorous lines of the library Calvin grows gentle in this silent coast nor finds a single heretic to roast make way for a weaker couplet with a half line plagiarized from Dryden Socinians here and Calvinists abide and thin partitions angry chiefs divide Let us consider the clergy and the religious teachers generally as he describes them.

Not that I have any desire to raise controversial questions, but one is bound to do so when speaking of English life during the great war with Napoleon, which bears so striking an analogy to the present.

There is a marked tendency to-day to say that the conduct of our statesmen and of society in general contrasts unfavourably with that of men of a century ago, and I think I shall be able to prove conclusively that under very different conditions the passions of men are much the same as formerly, and that if the advantage is on either side it is with the present rather than with the past.

I feel I have set myself a very difficult task in attempting to define a Whig in the later years of George III.

The strength of the party was the new aristocracy created by Henry VIII with the spoils of the monasteries, of which the Cavendishes, Russells, and other houses were the leaders.

Let's call that like a subset of the Treasury.

And he sat that entire time on the Whig interest under Whig patrons as a member of the Whig Party.

He was never a Tory, right? Never, not once and not nominally and not even briefly, not at the end.

The man we call the father of conservatism spent his entire career in the party of reform, and he died three years before anyone in Britain even used the word conservative in the modern political sense.

Exclusion crisis publishers dug it up and printed it because they thought it would be useful for them.

You can look all this up.

He wasn't answering Whigs because Whigs didn't exist when he wrote them, when he wrote this rather.

He was arguing with civil war parliamentarians, and his argument was that God gave Adam absolute authority over his descendants and that it descended through Noah to every king since.

The men who are, on the whole, content with the principles by which they have hitherto guided their lives, though they think that some changes ought to be made in matters of detail, and those who start upon an entirely new principle and who strive to realize an ideal society which commends itself to their own minds.

They answer, in short, to the Whigs and Radicals of modern political life, whilst the Conservatives are represented by a third class averse from all change whatever.

The first class, the Reformers, as we may call them, who, on the whole, controlled the movement, were content with gradual and slow change.

They were ready to examine every practice and doctrine by the test of Scripture and the custom of the early Church, but they were willing to retain all that could not be so shown to be worthy of rejection.

But such was, was s- sort of the trauma of, of the Popish Plot.

Charles had to replace all his Navy board and Navy officers, uh, w- with those of the opposition, uh, the Whigs.

Uh-

Yeah

But those who had succeeded him at the treasury had been less expert, or less solicitous to maintain public faith.

Since the victory won by the court over the Whigs, not a farthing had been paid, and no redress was granted to the sufferers, till a new dynasty had been many years on the throne.

There can be no greater error than to imagine that the device of meeting the exigencies of the state by loans was imported into our island by William III.

What really dates from his reign is not the system of borrowing, but the system of funding.

In the meantime, they were maintained without any charge to him and were kept under an excellent discipline to which he could not have ventured to subject them.

If the jealousy of the parliament and of the nation made it impossible for the king to maintain a formidable standing army, no similar impediment prevented him from making England the first of maritime powers.

Both Whigs and Tories were ready to applaud every step, tending to increase the efficiency of that force, which while it was the best protection of the island against foreign enemies, was powerless against civil liberty.

All the greatest exploits achieved within the memory of that generation by English soldiers had been achieved in war against English princes.

In this period, the estates generally weren't sold, though some of the most over-indebted ones had to be.

Still, their owners were in a much weaker position than they had been since Cromwell, and lacked, thanks to the demise of the Whigs, any real political power within the ascendant liberal coalition that had set its sights upon them for reasons of spite and envy, all the usual sorts of justifications for economic expropriation.

Describing this aspect of their political woes and how that fed into their economic woes, Cannadine writes, quote, the difficulty for the Whigs was that although they were the defenders of liberty, they were not the champions of equality.

They feared democracy as much as they hated despotism.

They would go with the people, but not to extremes.

And so, as politics in late 19th century Britain became increasingly democratic in its tone and reformist in its preoccupations, they gradually ceased to be the leaders of progress and instead became its opponents.

For the landowners' claim to be the governing class of Britain had ultimately depended on the fact that they led both of the major political parties.

Whether Whigs or Tories were in power, the aristocracy had always ruled.

The state of the political parties favored the plans of the king to restore some of the ancient luster of the crown.

The Whigs, who were composed mainly of the smaller freeholders, merchants, inhabitants of towns, and Protestant nonconformists, had grown haughty and overbearing, through long continuance in power, and had as a consequence raised up many enemies in their own ranks.

Their opponents, the Tories, had by this time given up all hope of restoring to the throne the direct Stuart line, but they still cherished their old notions about divine right.

With the accession of George III, the coveted opportunity came to them to rally around the throne again.

The merchants of the seaboard cities took the lead in making a dignified but unmistakable protest, agreeing not to import British goods while the hated law stood upon the books.

Lawyers, some of them incensed at the heavy taxes on their operations, and others intimidated by patriots who refused to permit them to use stamped papers, joined with the merchants.

Aristocratic colonial Whigs, who had long grumbled at the administration of royal governors, protested against taxation without their consent, as the Whigs had done in old England.

There were Tories, however, in the colonies, as in England, many of them of the official class, who denounced the merchants, lawyers, and Whig aristocrats as seditious, factious, and republican.