I

INTRODUCTORY

THE first germs of Whig and Tory in England may be dated (like Florentine Guelfs and Ghibellines) from a wedding—the sacrament which united Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn and signalized our definite disunion from Catholic Europe. Having then the same nativity with Queen Elizabeth, the embryo parties grew in accord with the actions and reactions of the Elizabethan age, at the close of which two twin schools of thought may be discerned, decisively opposed to each other on the causes which most divide mankind-on religious truth and political power. Here we are concerned only with the growth, the flowering, and the decay of that Royalist party which championed the cause of authority-the party which boasted Falkland and George Herbert among its prophets, Strafford and Laud in its roll of martyrs; the party which in robust youth figured as the Cavaliers and walked after death with the Jacobites; which counts Hooker, Bacon, and Swift in its spiritual lineage, and was led successively by Clarendon, Danby, Harley, and Bolingbroke; that party, finally, which after living for three-quarters of a century crowded with heroism, passion, and suffering, disappeared with the last Stuart and vanished as though it had never been.

This party, like its Whig rival, was the inheritor of older ideals, beliefs, and traditions, the origin of which must be explored before the more organized party history of 1660-1714 can be realized. But though a clash of conflicting ideas makes the interest of seventeenth-century party development, and though the politicians of that age were possibly more swayed by ideals than were any of their successors till 1780, still neither ideals nor atmosphere were those of our modern parties, and their distinctions and divisions were in part dictated by conditions so peculiar to that generation as to require a preliminary word. This is the more necessary in that the genius

of Disraeli, in his Young England stage, tried to equate the politics of Falkland and Strafford to those of his own day, to catch from Bolingbroke the essential and permanent character' of Toryism, and to identify the Whigs of 1832 with that cause 'for which Hampden died on the field and Sidney on the scaffold'. The old England, however, from which Disraeli drew this new history, was in fact a very different country to that of the fourth William, and the great events of two revolutions rise like barriers of rock between us and the Cavaliers. Those events swept away the provincial, rural, and aristocratic cadre of the seventeenth century for ever. All the conditions which give to a party its social background, its prejudices, and its mould of tradition, as distinct from its intellectual ideas, were wholly transformed in the interval between the death of Anne and the birth of Queen Victoria's minister.

Of such governing conditions the foremost in the seventeenth century was provincialism. The great currents of public opinion, now implicit in an educated democracy, a cheap Press, and swift transport, then ran sluggishly and in separate tributaries, with only now and then a fierce tide. London, it is true, was fast growing, but Lord Clarendon's mother for one had never entered it, and conservative families disliked the great wen', which threatened to engulf the fortunes of their sons and the characters of their daughters. In spite of a large pamphlet literature, clubs, coffee-houses, and a widely diffused university education, free political opinion, though the ultimate factor, still breathed with difficulty amid ancient barriers. The localism of the Middle Ages had not yet disappeared, the impress of the Reformation had borne very differently upon different areas, and the levelling force of world-markets and uniform economic conditions had not yet sapped the distinctive character of individual English shires. In the political struggles opening before us, and particularly of course in the Civil War, it is possible to discern several bands of territory, each with its marked political genius. Ideas common to the whole country took on a different hue as they crossed the Trent, the Tamar, or the Humber, and the predominant royalism of Kent differed as much from that of the Scottish

border as the Whiggism of East Anglia from that of the Welsh March.

In an age still fundamentally static, when the first concern of Members of Parliament was their own harvest and when the county town was the hub alike of amusement, of justice, and of defence, a man's countrymen' were those of his own county, and society ran in genial channels of local allegiance. When the clothier of Wiltshire or Gloucestershire brought his wagons to London, his friends knew they could find him at the Saracen's Head in Friday Street: members from the northern counties dined together each session : 1 Herefordshire and Worcester would, irrespective of party, push their countryman' Paul Foley for the Speaker's Chair. The same rules governed other passions than friendship. Half the political battles of the century at Westminster drew their sting from a dispute over provincial precedence, from a local election fight, or from some vendetta of the North touching a franchise or a freehold. Strafford lost his head to the rancour of the Vanes nothing could long keep in one party those jealous neighbours, the Lowthers and the Musgraves: Herefordshire quarrels of Harley and Coningsby echoed to the very centre of power.

Each great zone of England had, therefore, its own political identity. London, Essex, and East Anglia were bound by a dozen historic causes to the Whig and Puritan side. This was the land of Mary's martyrs and Cromwell's Ironsides, and of the exiles who were planting the wilderness of New England with the village names of Lincolnshire and Suffolk. Here were the dioceses which tormented Laud and harried Wren,' that damned Bishop Ely', for whose blood the militiamen howled in 1640. Here, under the aegis of Marshall, Calamy, and a dozen other luminaries, Presbyterianism built one of its rare fortresses in England: here, under the protection of the Riches, the Mildmays, and the Grimstons, dissenting teachers preached the Word with impunity in the hottest days after the Restoration. The solid Presbyterian squires, the clothiers who looked to Rotterdam and Amsterdam for market and Gospel, the Yarmouth fishermen-these were types of that Eastern English

1 Burton, Diary, 16 March 1659; Fleming papers, 174 (1680) H. MSS. Comm. Report XII. 7.

phalanx, whose Diana', wrote one of Laud's correspondents, is their liberty'. Here and there other districts maintained an almost equally continuous Whig tradition. Buckinghamshire, the home of the regicides Fleetwood and Mayne, of the Hampdens, the Whartons, the Wallers, and the Verneys, kept to the death of Queen Anne that intense Protestant note sounded in many generations stretching from the Lollards to Bunyan. Northamptonshire had a like radical leaning. Nowhere had the 'prophesyings' struck deeper root, nowhere was ship-money more firmly resisted. Banbury and Northampton were the gibe of every playwright for nasal hypocrisy. The clothing' areas of the middle West formed another such Puritan zone, swarming with small industrial towns from which proceeded in the second generation a steady race of Whig squires. The Methuens, the Longs, and the Trenchards may stand for a hundred famous Opposition families, and each stage in the Whig Revolution is marked by a Western milestone-Sedgemoor, Torbay, and Littlecote.

On the other side, a Royalist army or a Tory vote was assured in rival areas almost as well defined. In Kent, the garden of England, where Evelyn noted every field was ' even as a bowling green', and which as the corridor between London and the Continent had skipped half the Middle Ages, there lived a Royalism peculiarly metropolitan, 'trimmer', and enlightened, and when the public opinion of Kent was firmly voiced (whether fighting for the Prayer Book or against shipmoney), it coincided remarkably nearly with the verdict of posterity. Its ruling families-Finches, Wottons, Culpeppers, and Derings-represented a royalist but staunchly Protestant outlook. Its innumerable homes of the legal, professional, and Crown-service families stood for a conservative moderation, differing entirely from the Royalism of Cornwall or the North.

The last-named great province was itself made up of many variants, each showing in high degree some governing motive which elsewhere might be unimportant. Lancashire and Cheshire Royalism depended on two chief supports-the feudal power of the Protestant Stanleys, and the unbroken Catholicism of many old families-Molyneux, Tyldesley, or Townley. In the country districts of Yorkshire or Durham,