THE BIRTH OF THE MODERN CONSERVATIVE PARTY
Across Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, right-wing parties emerged with an uncompromisingly hostile response to the onslaught of liberalism and secularism. By contrast, the forces of Conservatism in Britain adopted a more measured stance, generally seeking to moderate and adapt social change in the hope of reducing destabilizing tendencies rather than to oppose all change outright.
There were many reasons why British Conservatism moved away from the more extreme manifestations of continental ‘throne and altar’ assertiveness. The first, most obviously, was the relative moderation of British radicalism, which was less determinedly republican or atheist than many European left-wing movements. After the seventeenth century, the British monarchy was rarely threatened by bloody revolution, precisely because it generally kept within its constitutional limits. If British Tories were less extreme than continental ‘Ultras’, then it was because the institutions they sought to defend drew back from the sort of provocations that caused uprisings and revolutions across Europe in 1848. Security bred moderation. The same was true in religion. For all its defence of its own rights and presumptions, nineteenth-century Anglicanism did not turn its back on the modern world. Unlike the papacy, it did not wholeheartedly denounce the ideals of democracy.
Yet there was no predestined path towards moderation. The Tory Party was born in the 1670s around a group of politicians bent on preserving the constitutional right of the future James II to inherit the throne regardless of his Catholicism. It was their Whig opponents who first taunted them as ‘Tories’ (an abusive term connotative of Irish Catholic rebels). This taint of Jacobitism was mostly an exaggeration, although Tories did tend to be ‘High Church’ Anglicans, determined to defend the political supremacy of the Established Church. In the succeeding one hundred years, they fought several general elections on the slogan ‘The Church in Danger’.
To the Electors of the Borough of Tamworth, 1834
. . . With respect to the Reform Bill itself, I will repeat now the declaration I made when I entered the House of Commons as a member of the Reformed Parliament – that I consider the Reform Bill a final and irrevocable settlement of a great constitutional question – a settlement which no friend to the peace and welfare of this country would attempt to disturb, either by direct or by insidious means.
Then, as to the spirit of the Reform Bill, and the willingness to adopt and enforce it as a rule of government: if, by adopting the spirit of the Reform Bill, it be meant that we are to live in a perpetual vortex of agitation; that public men can only support themselves in public estimation by adopting every popular impression of the day – by promising the instant redress of anything which anybody may call an abuse, by abandoning altogether that great aid of government, more powerful than either law or reason, the respect for ancient rights, and the deference to prescriptive authority – if this be the spirit of the Reform Bill, I will not undertake to adopt it. But if the spirit of the Reform Bill implies merely a careful review of institutions, civil and ecclesiastical, undertaken in a friendly temper combining, with the firm maintenance of established rights, the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances, – in that case, I can for myself and colleagues undertake to act in such a spirit and with such intentions.
The social and political discontent that followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 brought out the authoritarian side of Tory administrations and it was necessity rather than enthusiasm that prompted the conversion of the prime minister, the duke of Wellington, to the cause of Catholic emancipation. Industrialization and urbanization were transforming the country in ways that traditional Toryism had difficulty comprehending. The party’s opposition to the franchise extension of the Great Reform Act placed it decisively on the losing side of the argument. The immediate political price was obvious. In the 1832 general election, only 185 Tory MPs were returned to Parliament. Their opponents numbered 473.
It fell to the new Tory leader, Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850), to decide how Conservatism should respond to its marginalization. A decision to reject the legitimacy of the increasingly democratic temper of the times could either have gifted the future to Whig and Radical administrations or, indeed, begun a process in which normal party politics disintegrated, bringing down the edifice of constitutional parliamentary government. As home secretary, Peel had shown himself a capable administrator who created the Metropolitan Police in 1829. His early political philosophy, however, suggested that he was still, in sentiment, a traditionalist.
More accurately, Peel was a man of contradictions. He inherited a baronetcy, was educated at Eton and Oxford, and became an MP at the age of twenty-one. Far from coming from the landed elite, his father had been one of the pioneering generation of northern industrialists. Peel’s background was thus entrepreneurial. He was not only ‘new money’ but was perceptive enough to recognize when an old nostrum had had its day.
It was this quality that shone through his address to the 586 electors in his Tamworth constituency, in December 1834, at the outset of the 1835 general election campaign. In the narrow sense, his proclamation was scarcely necessary. With no opponent being put up to run against him at Tamworth, Peel’s re-election was a foregone conclusion. In reality, his argument was addressed to the wider, national electorate. His manifesto laid out not a specific set of legislative proposals but a new philosophical path for the Tories, realigning the party as one of moderation and open-mindedness to reform, rather than as a force of instinctive reaction. Reported and published nationwide, the Tamworth Manifesto became, in effect, the founding charter of the modern Conservative Party.
1678–81 The Tories are identified as a parliamentary group loyal to the hereditary right of the Catholic James, duke of York, to succeed to the throne. The term is derived from Tóraidhe, the Irish word for ‘outlaw’. Their opponents are labelled ‘Whigs’ from the Scots’ word Whiggamor or ‘cattle drover’.
1715 The flight of the Tory leader, Lord Bolingbroke, to the Old Pretender’s court allows the Whigs to taint the Tories with Jacobite treason.
1714–60 During the so-called ‘Whig Oligarchy’, the Tories are continuously out of government.
1762–3 Lord Bute serves as the first Tory prime minister. The Tories are viewed as the defenders of King George III’s royal prerogatives.
1794 The Whig unity fractures over its response to the French Revolution and domestic radicalism. Whig conservatives support the administration of William Pitt the Younger, which is retrospectively categorized as Tory. The realignment ensures that Toryism comes to be associated with patriotism and the philosophy of Edmund Burke.
1783–1806 and 1807–30 The Pittites/Tories are continuously in power.
1812–27 The Tory leader, Lord Liverpool, becomes Britain’s longest-serving prime minister.
1829 The Tory Party splits over the decision of its leader, the duke of Wellington, to support Catholic emancipation.
1834 Sir Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto realigns Conservatism with moderate reform.
1841 The Conservatives win the general election.
1846 The Conservative Party splits over Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws.
1852 Benjamin Disraeli, the Conservative leader in the Commons, abandons protectionist economics and endorses free trade.
1859 Peel’s adherents, including William Ewart Gladstone, join with Whig and Radical factions to found the Liberal Party.
The manifesto accepted the widened democracy created in 1832 as a settled reality. Instead of opposing change on principle, it pledged the party to a more pragmatic and empirical response, still committed to ‘the firm maintenance of established rights’ but also wedded to ‘the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances’. Even the entitlements of the Church of England were not sacrosanct where there was a case to answer. To some, this looked like an opportunistic sell-out of time-honoured Tory principles.
For Peel, the Tamworth Manifesto was not just about finding a new direction for his party; it was also about asserting his own role as its policy-maker. In aiming to marginalize dissent within its fractious ranks, he helped restore the party to power. One hundred seats were gained in the ensuing general election, enough to demonstrate recovering Tory fortunes.
Peel proceeded to win a working majority in the 1841 election, serving as a reforming prime minister until 1846. It was at that point that he tried to take his supporters further than their adherence to landed interests would allow. Having been converted to the cause of free trade, and conscious of the urgent need to tackle the Irish potato famine, he repealed the agriculture protection measures of the Corn Laws, ushering in an age of cheaper food but also ensuring a division in his own party that forced him from office.
During the succeeding twenty years, the Conservatives were mostly out of power. Some of Peel’s followers – including William Ewart Gladstone – drifted towards the Liberal Party. However, the central tenets laid out in the Tamworth Manifesto were eventually revived as the guiding principles of Conservatism. In 1867, a Conservative government passed a second Reform Act that began the enfranchisement of urban working men. Social reform followed in the 1870s. In its attitude to domestic politics, the party spent the twentieth century as a centre-right group, far removed from the sort of right-wing factions that did so much to destabilize liberal Europe between the two world wars.
