Powdered-wig partisanship

The so-called “Glorious” Revolution of 1688 in England has long occupied a pride of place within traditional narratives of liberalism’s inevitable rise within the modern West. Its resultant Bill of Rights, Act of Toleration, and establishment of a satisfactorily constitutional monarchy under a greatly empowered Parliament are typically depicted as essential stepping stones toward the flowering of Anglo-American democracy in the late 18th century.

What is often left out of such triumphalistic narratives, however, is the rancorous partisan strife that took place. In The Rage of Party: How Whig Versus Tory Made Modern Britain (Constable, 576 pp.), George Owers restores such factionalism to its rightful place for understanding post-1688 Britain. Brilliantly written with an eye for journalistic flair, Owers, himself a holder of a Ph.D. from Cambridge in the history of political thought, breathes a great deal of life into the somewhat forgotten years from the start of the co-regency of William and Mary to the death of Queen Anne in 1714.

Whereas Whigs aimed to present themselves as the true, duly Protestant representatives of the revolution, Tories were more inclined to maintain a traditional relationship between the crown and the government that managed to avoid the “Catholic absolutism” modeled by Louis XIV of France. Owers demonstrates how Whigs and Tories tussled with each other to win the affections of the given monarch to advance their interests. The Whigs and Tories witnessed changing allegiances between “Court” and “Country” variants within both parties, leading to some deals brokered across formal partisan lines for the sake of ulterior interests in matters such as the church and taxation. Peppered throughout an otherwise political chronicle are vibrant personal portraits and scintillating anecdotes concerning a large cast of historical actors.

Religion is given its proper due in Owers’ retelling of these years. Whigs were willing to secure nonconformists’ place within the ecclesiastical and political establishment, but the Tories had an overriding commitment to defend a decidedly “Anglican” vision of the Church of England that sought to exclude nonconformists entirely from any proper place within public life. These tensions came to a fever pitch in the 1710 impeachment trial of the clergyman Henry Sacheverell. Sacheverell used a sermon on Nov. 5, 1709 at St. Paul’s Cathedral as an opportunity to lambast dissenters and thus their Whig sympathizers as enemies to the security of the nation and virtually traitors-in-waiting. Despite a successful presentation of himself as a high-church “martyr” and subsequently light sentencing that resulted in a major electoral victory for the Tories, the affair indicated that the memory of the ideological struggles from the Civil War period of the 1640s had hardly faded away.

Owers’ framing of the book’s overall purpose, however, has its problems. He is spot-on in saying that studying these pivotal years “reminds us that we are not, perhaps, as modern as we like to think” since centuries in themselves are unable “to excise some of the temperamental and cultural instincts—often not terribly rational ones—that lie behind contemporary political partisanship.” Indeed, history is, if nothing else, notable for its insistent reminders of the constancy of human nature. Nevertheless, Owers begins and ends with an accent on presentism, emphasizing the eventual triumph of the Whigs due to their firmer grasp of modernity as champions of “the rising forces of a more mobile, more commercial, and more ‘polite society.’” Such conclusions are easily drawn in retrospect. Nevertheless, the story Owers manages to tell stands on its own merits and is worth the time of any interested parties of the present.