An Introduction to the Whig Hegemony

Between 1714 and 1760, the Whig Supremacy saw the opposition Tories excluded from government and made a permanent minority in the House of Commons. However, conventional timelines of British political history would have us believe the supremacy had no lasting effects upon the accession of George III in 1760, and that politics resumed with the same two-party wrangling we know today. Considering the nature of the supremacy, these notions are nonsensical and amount to a retroactive obfuscation of a period of continuing Whig cultural hegemony. This period can serve to inform our understanding of Britain’s contemporary politics of consensus.

Having all but squeezed the Tories out of existence by the early 1760s, the Whigs, as a cohesive political party, had unintentionally rendered themselves obsolete. The party splintered into a number of factions, all of whom claimed the Whig mantle while a non-party ideal of government was asserted. These factions were typically centred around an aristocrat in the Lords or a relative thereof in the Commons, populated by members of his family and other supporters; they rarely survived the death of their namesake leader intact. Meanwhile, ‘Tory’ was reduced to an occasional insult levied by opposition factions against the government, perhaps merely out of resentment for not being included in the governing coalition. Being a genuine Tory during the eighteenth century increasingly meant being an outcast in Parliament and polite society, tainted by accusations of Jacobite sympathies tantamount to sedition. These insults, among other claims used to advance factional interests, stuck through the inventions of misleading genealogies during and after the Whigs’ hegemony. For instance, the Conservative Party of 1840 shared virtually no continuity with the Tories of 1740, despite attempts to argue the contrary. The same disconnect is observable between the Victorian Conservatives and the modern iterations of recent years. Linking oneself with history and tradition is far from a negative impulse, but narratives of spontaneously resurgent Toryism ought to be refuted if readers are to better understand cultural hegemony in our national context. Furthermore, it should be stressed that the period of the Whigs’ hegemony in British political culture predates the political ‘left’ and ‘right’ in any contemporary sense.

After George III expelled the Pelhamite Whigs from government in 1770, the short-lived premiership of Lord Bute was the first to be accused of Toryism, despite the fact that his ministry was largely staffed by Bedfordite and Grenvillite Whigs. The factions’ names are used here for the sake of accuracy and to emphasise the overwhelming parliamentary affinity to the Whigs; however, the specificities of each are less useful for the purposes of this overview. Lord North ran the next supposedly Tory government in the 1770s and early 1780s, yet also considered himself a Whig. His strength lay in building coalitions without respect to party identities, insofar as they existed within these factions. As such, his government contained groups of Pelhamites, Bedfordites, Grenvillites, and other former supporters of Bute. William Pitt the Younger’s subsequent domination of politics, from 1783 until his death in 1806, stemmed from a similar ability to fuse a stable combination of factions in government without recourse to party discipline. Although the Pittite faction was initially a minor grouping, Pitt considered himself an independent Whig. He amassed a formidable coalition through versatile patronage in elections and upon the split of the Whig opposition in the early 1790s over Foxite sympathies towards the French Revolution. However, it was during Pitt’s tenure that Whiggism in government took on a more defensive character amidst the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, exemplified by the philosophical contributions of Edmund Burke.

After the death of Pitt in 1806, the Pittites continued as a significant force in politics, though they never referred to themselves as Tories. Lord Liverpool, the last long-lasting Prime Minister of the Whigs’ dominance over politics, continued to assert that his government could be nothing but a Whig one, as had been the case for over a century before. Like Pitt, Liverpool was adept at attracting opposition factions to his ministry, but his government was also ossifying in the face of impending political crises. When Liverpool resigned in 1827, the issues of parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation quickly destroyed the Pittites. An inauthentic spectre of the Tories re-emerged in the late 1820s in the narrower governments of George Canning and the Duke of Wellington, but their actions only created more splits amidst the wider convulsions of the political system. At this point, an incipient conservatism broke free in the political maelstrom from defending the Whig order, and space emerged for a new party to slowly coalesce. To the end, almost all actors saw themselves as legitimate successors to the Whig party, which had maintained such a chokehold on British politics. There was no coordinated infiltration by Tories during these decades to be identified by historians afterwards for our convenience, only gradations of ideas which culminated in broad coalitions defending the established order.

Although no governing ideology in the last two centuries has been culturally embedded to such an overt extent as the Whigs, it would be remiss not to consider their hegemony’s similarities to the seemingly immovable ascendancy of modern liberalism. Beneath the constitutional vandalism of Tony Blair and the welfare state of Clement Attlee lie the totemic reforms of the Liberal governments before the First World War, which prefigured both. Some of the positive and accusatory adjectives have changed, as have the political parties, but we too languish under an ossified and increasingly obvious hegemony. Of course, party machines do exist, rather too strongly to provoke change preceding a paradigm shift; yet, the three parties in government since 1900 have spent less time noticeably distinct from one another than not. High politics unsettled the Whigs, but our equivalent event in Brexit shows that this is not a guaranteed outcome. Yet there is much we can learn from this somewhat forgotten hegemony, most crucially the knowledge that even in our political system all parties must come to an end.