Tory or Conservative? The Anglo-American Dilemma, Part I

Mr Coulombe analyses the Inglorious Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776 and shows how their aims were very similar.

From The European Conservative

By Charles Coulombe, BA, KSS

The victorious ideals of 1688 and 1776 are bound together.

“A sound Conservative government,” said Taper, musingly. “I understand: Tory men and Whig measures.”

—Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby 

Problems of definition plague those who seek a coherent body of conservative thought. Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn famously disliked the term “conservative,” and preferred to call himself a “Man of the Right.” Thomas Molnar preferred “Counter-Revolutionary.” But it is a term that we all use, and it is not likely to be replaced. Joseph de Maistre resembles Edmund Burke—but the differences between them define that between Continental (as in European, Latin American, and French Canadian) and Anglo-American conservatism. The former is traditionally bound up with adherence to Altar and Throne, Subsidiarity and Solidarity. The latter is far harder to nail down. This is because Continental conservatism in a real sense begins in 1789 with a definable moment. The Anglo-American variety might be said to begin with Henry VIII, or even with Richard III.

Of course, this last is a bit far-fetched, but we mention it simply because, as is common in most civil conflicts, the last chapter of internal struggle—military or political—inevitably bleeds into the next. So, while there were exceptions both ways as it were, when Henry broke with Rome a large number of his supporters came from families that had backed the Lancastrians during the Wars of the Roses. Similarly, many of his opponents came from Yorkist backgrounds. Recusants were particularly strong (and rose up in arms) against the new religion in the West and North, areas that would, until industrialisation, be associated with reaction. The same would be true with Wales, the Scottish Highlands, and the West and South of Ireland.

But if Henry’s opponents were laying the foundations of later resistance to successive revolutions, he himself was unwittingly beginning the genesis of their opponents. After suppressing the monasteries, he gave many of them to various supporters and hangers on; his helper in this “great work” was Thomas Cromwell. The landed class thus created would be the centre of opposition to subsequent Kings. Ironically, despite Thomas’ loss of favour and execution at Henry’s order, his nephew Oliver would be the chief agent of the judicial murder of Charles I.

Rising tension between Charles I and the landed oligarchy and its Parliament would break out in open war in 1642. The Wars of the Three Kingdoms as they have come to be poetically called in recent years saw the countries divided between the King’s Cavaliers and Cromwell’s Roundheads. In this division, we see the beginning of the Tories (who descend from the Royalists) and the Whigs (who came from Cromwell’s men), although it would be some time before the actual phrases came into use.

The King’s supporters were quite a varied and heroic lot. The Catholic Recusants and Catholicising High Anglicans were there, as well as Gaelic Irish and “Old” English from the Emerald Isle. There were Scots Highlanders, and Wales and Cornwall remained loyal. In England, the West and North were hotbeds of Royalism, as over the sea were Maryland and Virginia. The Cavalier Poets, Caroline Divines, and Cambridge Platonists naturally supported these extremely diverse groups, largely on the following grounds: they believed in 1) an Apostolic and Sacramental Christianity, by law established and not merely private; 2) Loyalty to a King who ruled as well as reigned, and was willing to die for his people; 3) Local liberties, functioning in tandem not through compulsion by an oppressive central government but a shared loyalty to that King; and 4) popular rights—such as grazing on common land—protected by the King against the wealthy. These themes would rise again and again in Tory history.

After the King’s defeat and his murder in 1649, and the Restoration of his son Charles II in 1660, his younger son, the Duke of York, converted to Catholicism. From 1678 to 1681, there was an agitation among the oligarchs dedicated to preventing the Duke from succeeding his sonless brother. In the “Exclusion Crisis” as it was called, the Duke’s supporters were called “Tories,” a phrase heretofore used to describe Irish bandits; their opponents were dubbed “Whigs,” after Whiggamores, bands of Lowland Scots sheep stealers. From insults, these two words came to be worn with pride.

The Duke in turn succeeded his brother in 1685, but was overthrown in the so-called Glorious Revolution three years later. His supporters and those of his descendants would be called “Jacobites,” after the Latin for James. As with the Cavaliers who rallied to his father, they were a gallant band, from Killiecrankie to the Boyne and Limerick, who sought to defend the old order throughout the Risings in 1715, 1719, and 1745-46. But it is here that in a real sense the Anglo-American “conservative” dilemma begins.

James and the Jacobites had—allowing for local conditions—the same vision of religion, governance, culture, and society that the Cavaliers before them and the Continental conservatives after them would have. Their Whig opponents, being men of education and property—a true oligarchy in the best and worst senses of that term—were believers in stability and order, so long as they were managing it. Parliament being their creature, they shackled the King to it; this was William of Orange’s price of admission to his father-in-law’s usurped throne. Their major propagandist was John Locke, who was nothing if not persuasive, and they cast their rebellion as being in the same league as the Barons’ and Bishops’ demand of Magna Carta from King John. Henceforth, the Monarch was to be the subject of the oligarchy via Parliament. William and Mary were pleased with this arrangement; Queen Anne, James II’s youngest daughter kicked up her heels against the restraints from time to time. But her death in 1714 brought her German cousin, George I to the throne.

It was during Queen Anne’s lifetime that the Tory and Whig parties developed as parties. The more radical wing of the former remained Jacobite, but many of them were able to restrain their zeal for James III so long as his older sister Anne occupied the throne. Indeed, under her, something approaching a real two-party system developed. But the ascension of the non-English-speaking George I, and his disinterest in British affairs made the oligarchical—and indeed, Whig—control of the Two Kingdoms (England and Scotland had been brought into Union in 1707; Ireland would join in 1802) and the emergence and dominance of the Prime Minister complete. The successive failures of the Jacobite risings sealed this victory. Tories at this point were far too few in Parliament to matter, being the “party of the Squires,” and tainted with Jacobitism. But as always, what they lacked in political power, they surely had in artistic and cultural might. At this low point in Tory fortunes, they had in their number one of the most brilliant minds in Britain at that time, Dr. Samuel Johnson. In his dictionary, the good doctor defined “Tory: One who adheres to the ancient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a Whig.” Their opponents were described thusly: “Whig: The name of a faction.” Despite this solid victory in the culture wars, however, in terms of politics, the Whigs had the solid upper hand.

But said dominance would face one more internal challenge—that presented by George III, when, as “the first of my house to glory in the name of Briton,” he ascended the throne in 1760. While committed to Parliamentary Sovereignty and the settlement of 1689 on the one hand, the new King wished to regain the remaining powers exercised by “Good Queen Anne” for the common weal, and above faction.

Having presided over victory in the Seven Years War, George III at first found himself a mere spectator as one Whig ministry after another sought unsuccessfully to pay the debts incurred by that conflict. Alongside it were various measures intended to coax the American colonies for whom in great measure the war had been fought to contribute some symbolic amount toward its repayment. All the while, the King attempted to assemble a majority of his own in Parliament. Finally, in 1770, sufficient Tories and dissident Whigs came together as “The King’s Friends” to bring in a Prime Minister amenable to the King’s views: Lord North, 2nd Earl of Guilford. It seemed as though the King would triumph over the oligarchs and reform the British Constitution.

Alas, he reckoned without the colonies, each of which had a little oligarchy of its own—the four richest men in British America being George Washington, John Hancock, Philip Schuyler, and Charles Carroll of Carrollton. Although dominating their own colonial assemblies—and so levying taxes on their fellow colonial subjects, most of whom could not vote for those assemblies—they wished to be complete masters in what was already quite literally their own house. In this, they won the friendship and assistance of Britain’s own Whig oligarchy, which was down but far from out—and most particularly of their great spokesman, Edmund Burke, described by his frenemy, Dr. Johnson, as a “bottomless Whig.”

At first—given that 12 of the colonies had been founded under the Stuarts without reference to Parliament, many of the rebel controversialists appealed to the King to deal directly with each assembly as though it were Parliament, without reference to the government in London. Although this idea prefigured the current relationship between the King and his non-British Commonwealth Realms, it was unthinkable at that time. George III was too committed to maintaining the 1689 settlement to do such a thing of his own accord. In turn—especially after the King (who had shown himself in favour of Catholic Emancipation, and so was popular in Ireland) approved the Quebec Act, liberating the French Canadians from the Penal Laws—the ire of the American Whigs was transferred to the King himself. Thus it was that Thomas Jefferson used Locke’s arguments against James II in his famous 1776 declaration of independence. 

A good piece of the justification for breaking with the Mother Country that Jefferson adduces is that of various charges against the King (including a truly Orwellian attack on the Quebec Act). These are addressed by Tory writer William Cobbett, in his 1829 History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland: 

Now, justice to the memory of the late king [George III] demands that we expressly assert that here are some most monstrous exaggerations, and especially at the close; but does not that same justice demand of us, then, to be cautious how we give full credit to the charges made against James II? However, the question with us at the present moment is, not whether the grounds of one of these revolutions were better than those of the other, but whether the last revolution grew directly out of the former; and of the affirmative of this question no man who has read this chapter can, I think, entertain a doubt. 

Cobbett then adds ominously, “I should now proceed to show that the French Revolution, or ‘Reformation’ the fifth, grew immediately out of the American Revolution, and then to sum up the consequences; but I am at the end of my paper.” Certainly, the combination of Whig pressure in Parliament, the mishandling of the war by the Whig General Howe culminating in Burgoyne’s 1778, and finally, based on that latter defeat, the entry of France and later Spain and the Netherlands into the War doomed the British war effort. And that whole debacle ended Lord North’s tenure, and George III’s attempts at reform. The Whig oligarchy were back in control in Britain, as they and their successors have been ever since. As the historian Eric Nelson puts it in The Royalist Revolution, when the Revolution and the American Constitution were finished, on one side of the ocean would be a Monarchy without a King, and on the other, a King without a Monarchy. The victorious ideals of 1688 and 1776 were ever after bound together.

As we shall see in part II, the French and subsequent revolutions posed a tremendous challenge for Britain, her developing settler countries, and the United States themselves. In response, Whiggery would be forced to share and then take for itself the title of “Conservative.” The reduction of authentic Toryism to no more than a series of small coteries in the British Empire and eccentric individuals in the United States would have disastrous results in Europe and Latin America—and even worse consequences for today’s Anglosphere.