Making
Oligarchy:
Whigs,
Tories, and
Cultural
Responses
Robert Walpole as “The English Colossus”
18C Parliament: some numbers
• House of Commons
• England: 489
members
– 80 from the 40
counties
– 4 from Oxford &
Cambridge
– 405 from boroughs
• Wales: 24 members;
Scotland: 45
The House of Lords
• Usually c.220 total
• 26 Anglican bishops also sit
• Could reject bills passed by
Commons
– Except money bills (finance
and taxation)
Newcastle was an exemplar of the
“pocket borough” system, alleged to have
at least seven boroughs under his control.
Structure of 18C Parliament
• Who do peers represent?
• Commons MPs?
– County MPs: 40-shilling
freehold qualification
– Boroughs = uneven levels
of representation
– “rotten” and “pocket”
boroughs
– Parties or “factions”?
The ruins of All Saints Church,
Dunwich, in a 1904 postcard. The
East Anglia cliffs crumble away…
Special tensions, 1689-1715
• Disputed succession
(1715 & 1745!)
• The “rage of party”
– Whigs: “country”
interest
– Tories: crown and church
– Popular participation in a
time of war
Daniel Burgess's Presbyterian meetinghouse in Carey Street, London, is
wrecked by the mob during the antiDissenter Sacheverell riots of 1710
The Whig Junto
• William and the Whigs, 1694
– Triennial Act
– Patronage as a system
– War and the Bank of England,
1694
– A shift in court/country
allegiances
The Bank of England, as it appeared
while occupying Grocer’s Hall,
London. from 1694-1732.
The Hanoverian Succession
• Queen Anne, last of the Stuarts,
d1714
• The Electors of Hanover
(George!)
• Tory weaknesses
–
–
–
–
Bolingbroke and “treason”
The ‘15 invasion
Death of Louis XIV
Scottish support?
• Septennial Act (1715)
• “Whig Oligarchy”: 1715-1760
Ruthven Barracks, set on an old castle
mound near Ruthven, Highland in Scotland,
are the smallest but best preserved of the
four English barracks built in 1719 after the
1715 Jacobite rising.
Inventing the Prime Minister
• Robert Walpole (1676-1745)
• Walpole and the South Sea
Bubble, 1720
• Parliamentary “placemen”
• The Augustan Age in
literature
– Tory satirists
– The Beggar’s Opera, by John
Gay (1728)
– Licensing Act, 1737
Excise in Triumph (1733)
The election agitation of 1733-34 was dominated
by images such as this one, of Walpole and the
military, with an army of taxmen, riding roughshod
over the nation's rights. Beneath the wheels of the
minister's excise carriage lies Magna Charta
(Magna Farta, in the print, to show how little
Walpole cared for it), and the carriage is pulled by
a despondent British lion, wearing the clogs that
were the symbol of a French-style slavery under an
absolute monarch.
Cultural responses to Oligarchy
• The Augustan Age in
literature
– Tory satirists
– The Beggar’s Opera, by
John Gay (1728)
– Licensing Act, 1737
John Gay (1685-1732)
For Thursday
• How did religion influenced the Enlightenment
in Britain? How did the Enlightenment
influenced religion?
• What role did Dissenters play in the
Enlightenment?
• How did “popular religion” differ from the
standard religions?
• Explain the rise of Methodism.