TORY HISTORY
The Second Tory Party, 1714-1832. By Keith Grahame Felling. (Macmillan. iss.)
WHEN Mr. Felling some twenty years ago first began upon the history of party he opened up a most promising and profitable vein of 'research. There are few things more significant in English history than the proper analysis of parties, the under- standing
of their function in our political system and of their roots in divergent group-interests and social classes. Mr. Felling addresses his book to " alI interested in the place of party in English civilisation, its function in politics and the lives of its greatest exponents." The history of the Tory Party has the further attraction that it fails very conveniently —almost aesthetically—into three distinct arid well-defined periods. There is that of its origin in the conflicts of the Civil War, the party which triumphantly made the Peace of Utrecht and came such. a resounding crash with the death of Queen Anne. Of this Mr. Felling has already written the history. There is the second period, the long years in the wilderness under the Whig ascendancy ending up with the formation of a recognisably modern Toryism under the younger Pitt in reaction against the French and Industrial Revolutions. This is the subject of Mr. Feiling's present volume. This period also ends with a satisfactory crash ; though there is a case for thinking the crash of 1846 over the Repeal of the Corn Laws, with the splitting of the party in two and its exile from power for thirty years, a more significant date in Tory history than even 1832. But no doubt Mr. Felling has his reasons. Then there is the third period, which has not yet reached its close. It is a great subject and it has happily found a dis- tinguished historian in Mr. Felling to write it up. It is much to be hoped that he will continue his work to give us some day the history of the party in its third period, the party we know today.
This book is a great advance on the earlier volume ; it has more unity and is altogether more strongly and vividly written. Mr. Feiling's forte is a gift for felicitous and sometimes
nostalgic phrases, an apt and widely-drawn command of quotation, a sense of the picturesque for which one is grateful, if it is not always relevant to the narrative. The strength of the book lies in its admirable pen-sketches of political Per- sonalities. Mr. Felling quotes by way of motto.- a . sentence from an eighteenth-century Under-secretary of State : " It would be as well if we had not quite so many - But these things are a pox which we pay for liberty." Mr. - Feiling_can hardly regret that, since it gives such an. opportunity for his talent of political portraiture. The younger Pitt, it is not too much to say, is the hero. of the book, and it is a very sympathetic percnnality .that- Mr. Felling portrays : a man of real principle in an unprincipled age, of a lofty devotion to the State, guided by a great ambition and his sense of duty where so many others were by a mean and pecuniary self- interest, high-minded, cold, proud, standing apart from others and by that fact their master ; in a word, a great mar— Fox. emerges an altogether less attractive figure. There is a. detailed: portrait of Canning to whom Mr. Felling is clearly sympathetic ; it is evident that his sympathies are with the Liberal Tories and against the Ultras, whom he regards as responsible for breaking the party. Aud there are innumerable little sketches of lesser men, of Spencer Perceval, Huskisson, Lord North, of such men as Archibald Hutchison of whom we would gladly hear more.
Yet in spite of the obvious attraction of the subject, .the history of a great party, there are difficulties which make it disappointing from a literary point of view. There is the discontinuity of Tory history after the disaster of 1714, .the fragmentariness and quasi-submergence of the party which have weighed too heavily upon its historian. In fact, as he tells us, there was a solid core of about a hundred Tories in the House of Commons throughout the worst period of the Whig ascendancy ; . in the very middle of it they had a majority in the representation of the F.ngliqh shires. They were the party of the country gentlemen par _excellence : ".I bate all lords," said Squire Western, " they are a parcel of courtiers and Hanoverians—my daughter omit have an honest country gentleman." The fact that this was the social basis of the party may be seen again and again in its afrirucIP towards legislation and policy ; 'they hated the National Debt which was such a pillar of the moneyed interest behind. the Whigs —Hutchison went so far as to propose a capital levy for paying it off. As landowners they naturally disliked the land-tax and thought that the burden of taxation should fall upon direct rather than indirect taxation. When. Pitt introduced his legacy duties they helped cynically to restrict them to personal property. (Yet why should one say " cynically " ?—It was all a question of economic interest and self-preservation.) There were certain other elements of continuity too : they remained the Church party as against Dissent, even if they could not raise the traditional cry of " Church and King " under the first two Georges, but had to wait for a " British " King in George III ; they had their areas of strength—the four south-western counties returned Tories throughout the century ; there was the University of Oxford with its attitude " the rulers of Great Britain are always wrong and the rulers of Oxford always right."
In view of all this, the book, in spite of its distinguished qualities, the research that has gone into it and its vivid writing., is 'not an entire success as a history of the Tory Party. Mr. Felling tells 12S that he has concentrated on "the genealogy of the party, and the inter relations between its leaders." This means a purely political history; but the history of party cannot be dealt with in solely political terms : the economic, social and intellectual factors are no less important. The criticism has been made that the book deals inadequately with the thought of the period ; and we could well have spared a great deal of the details of ministerial changes, often in themselves of no great importance, for some treatment of such Tory writers as Swift, Bolingbroke, Johnson, Southey, Coleridge. Even more important is the consideration that to write a real history of the Tories during their long period of exclusion from power would need research of a much more local character, among the archives of the towns and lesser country magnates, rather than among the already well-known great collections whose owners form a regular aristocratic muster-roll in Mr. Felling's Preface. But perhaps the time has not yet arrived for that ; and such a book, though it would be more specifically a historY of the party, might well be less good reading than this.
A. L. Rowsia:
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