Court vs. Country
18th Century British Politics and 21st Century Massachusetts -- Part I in a Series
[Dear Readers: below is another historically-focused article. Apologies for a relatively slow pace this week — I’m working on some bigger, more news-focused articles for the near future, and am a bit behind schedule. Meanwhile, I want to continue to take a few steps back and look at the current situation in Southeastern Massachusetts in a larger, historical context.
Also, for whatever reason the Substack formatting isn’t letting me properly indent paragraphs, which is frustrating to no end, but for right now I will have to live with it.]
Local-lad-made-good and 18th century scholarship kid John Adams remarks somewhere that, prior to and up to the outbreak of the American Revolution, all thirteen colonies were divided into two political groupings, the Court Party and the Country Party. This was true from New England, through the Middle Colonies, to the Chesapeake and the Deep South.
What did Adams mean, and why and how is it relevant today?
The 18th century background
Adams, like most other inhabitants of what was still the British Empire in the 18th century, used the terms “Court Party” and “Country Party” as part of a commonplace, well-understood political vocabulary that united the otherwise extremely diverse and fractious inhabitants of the 18th century British Atlantic world.
Though that world is a distant one, it is one that I believe is relevant to our situation – a commercial oligarchy with the trappings of parliamentary government, engaged in imperial wars abroad, and contests over inequality, corruption, and economic hardship at home. Indeed, the similarity of our situations is remarkable.
Thus, what people in this 18th century world meant when they talked about “Court vs. Country” was a contest between two political groupings: one, a collection of aristocratic landowners, large merchants, and financiers in London, near the Royal Court; and the other, a broad coalition of fed-up provincial gentry, disaffected intellectuals, and plebeian crowds that sought to represent the interests of the whole country, and thus came to be called the Country Party.
These were not parties in the modern sense; rather, they were something more like what James Madison describes as “factions,” in The Federalist No. 10.
Let’s look at this in depth.
Tories, Whigs, Court, and Country
There were two political parties in the British Parliament starting in the late 17th century, the Tories and the Whigs.
The Tories tended to support the power of the Monarchy, the Whigs tended to oppose it. Whigs tended to support religious toleration for Protestant Dissenters — Congregationalists like most New Englanders, Presbyterians in Scotland and Northern Ireland, Methodists in Wales and northern England, Baptists scattered widely.
Tories generally looked at Protestant Dissenters (Catholics had limited civil rights in the United Kingdom, including Ireland, until the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829) with suspicion, and supported the Established Church of England. It is ahistorical, but you could broadly call Whigs left-of-center, and Tories right-of-center.1
18th century Britain was not a place with universal suffrage; the vote was restricted in all kinds of ways, not limited to owning a fair amount of property, being a white male, being in the right borough (an archaic electoral system meant that burgeoning industrial cities like Manchester famously had no Members of Parliament, whereas “rotten boroughs” like Old Sarum, literally an uninhabited hill in Wiltshire, did – chosen by local aristocrats).
(“William Pitt the Younger Addressing the House of Commons,” Karl Anton Hinkel, 1793. Via Wikimedia Commons)
The two parties had different social bases: the Tories tended to be divided between a wing of great, aristocratic landowners, often titled nobility, on the one hand, and a wing dominated by the provincial squirearchy and small-holding gentry in the shires and counties of the realm — think Eliza Bennett’s Father in Pride and Prejudice.
The Whigs, for their part, tended to be divided between a group of Old Whigs– intellectuals, defenders of civil liberties, critics of consolidated political and economic power, often allied with plebeian or religious radicals, on the one hand; and on the other, sometimes called the New Whigs, a group dominated by the great merchants and financiers of the City of London, centered in Parliament around the first Prime Minister of Great Britain, Robert Walpole.
Walpole was the most effective politician of his age, and more or less invented the office of Prime Minister. Through the adroit use of patronage, he was able to control Parliament, in coalition or directly, for 20 years, from the General Election of 1722 through his Government’s fall in 1742. Despite this and occasional periods of Tory rule, the Whigs would be in power for most of the 18th century, a period referred to by historians as the Whig Oligarchy.
Walpole’s tenure as Prime Minister, however, was ultimately undone by the same force that cemented his rule – patronage, construed by his critics as open and flagrant corruption. Walpole and his friends would distribute offices, emoluments, sinecures, etc., to control votes, especially in the House of Commons. A disaffected faction of Whigs split off, the Patriot Whigs, and refused to continue to support Walpole, viewing his politics as hopelessly corrupt.
The Patriot Whigs weren’t the only ones unhappy with the situation. The squires-and-gentry wing of the Tories were also fed up with Walpole’s corruption and their own party’s collusion therewith — great aristocratic landowners were just fine with Walpole, typically — and joined forces with their erstwhile political rivals across the aisle, the Patriotic Whigs, to form the Country Party — a loose affiliation rather than an organized modern political party.
Anti-Corruption Politics and the Birth of American Republicanism
Indeed, in their philippics against corruption — understood as the use of public things (“res publicae”) for private gain – the Old Whigs tapped into an ancient politics that is oft-neglected today, but was critical in the 18th century: civic republicanism.
Civic republicanism, which has a lineage stretching back to Greece and Rome, and through the Renaissance, Reformation, and Enlightenment comes down to the 18th century, became the ideology of the American Revolution. Republicanism viewed the public good as essential, and public virtue as necessary to guard it; attempts to engross power and wealth were viewed as inimical to human freedom and well-being. The essential enemy of Virtue, Liberty, and Equality was Corruption, with a capital “C,” understood as the use of public things for private gain.
Republicanism was especially influential in America. Trenchard and Gordon’s Cato’s Letters, a key republican text, was found in roughly half of British America’s personal libraries in the mid-1700s, according to one estimate. Essentially, when the Revolution broke out, all Americans became members of the Country Party. Whether you are a member of the Democratic Party2, Republican Party, a Green or a Libertarian, Unenrolled, have never voted, won’t vote, whatever it may be, the assumptions that guide your politics for the vast majority of Americans are likely to be civic republican at a certain basic level.3
So what does any of this have to do with southeastern Massachusetts in the Year 2022?
A great deal.
The Country Party Reborn? A look at contemporary Southeastern Mass.
Let’s examine several of the issues before us that this newspaper has covered. A quick glance shows the presence of Country Party-style civic republicanism in action; perhaps it should be called The Commonwealth Party, considering where we are.
This is very apparent in the battle to halt Holtec’s proposed dumping of a million gallons of irradiated waste-water in our bays. The coalition opposing this is a classic Country Party political grouping — instead of Old Whigs and Tory Squires, we have Native people and environmentalists, small businesses and realtors, fishermen and everyday citizens. All have united to defend the interests of the entire Country,4 as opposed to the Court, i.e., those with privileged access to economic and political power.
(Save Our Bay Poster, April, 2022, by Heidi Mayo. Credit — Heidi Mayo).
Likewise in the struggle against deforestation and strip-mining in southern Plymouth County, the politically-connected, socially and economically powerful extractive interests in Towns like Carver have been able to quite literally dominate Town Government — a classic iteration of the Court Party, lining their own pockets at the expense of the public weal.
Whereas the opponents in places like Carver, Plymouth, Wareham, and beyond, again, are again a Country Party coalition of everyday citizens, Native nations, environmentalists, and small-holders, arrayed against some of the largest landowners in the region.
( Members of Carver Concerned Citizens; photo credit — Carver Concerned Citizens).
Finally, the burgeoning movement to stop a Casino from being snuck into our ancient Commons, i.e., the Plymouth County Woodlot, again displays the classic signs of a Country Party political coalition: everyday citizens, concerned young families, environmentalists, Native groups, elected officials, and seemingly the great majority of the People of Plymouth. These are concerned with the general welfare, rather than private gain (a very civic republican concern).
( County Woodlot Sign. Photo credits —No Horsing Around Save the Woodlot Save Plymouth)
Whereas the number of proponents who will not benefit in some way, whether directly or indirectly, are vanishing small. Indeed, the fact that development interests that were defeated by a Country Party coalition at Town Meeting last Spring in Wareham, and are back for another bite at the apple, underlines the extent to which this is a conflict of private profit vs. the public good — of Court vs. Country.
Taken as a whole, I believe the resonance of these 18th century political groupings for our own time and place becomes clear.
And I certainly will admit to hoping for the continuing success, and thrilling in the growing strength of, the Country Party in southeastern Massachusetts, and beyond.
Indeed, the modern political usage of “Left” and “Right” dates from the French Revolution, when supporters of the King sat to the right of the presiding officer in the National Assembly, the supporters of the revolution to the left.
The Democratic Party was originally the Democratic Republicans, sometimes, confusingly enough, just called “the Republicans,” when they arose in opposition to Hamilton in the 1790s. Not to be confused with the the 1850s Republican Party of Fremont, Seward, Lincoln, etc.
Toryism also essentially died out in America as a political ideology. Associated with a sense of ordered hierarchy and noblesse oblige paternalism, Tories were not the same, traditionally, as US conservatives. This where Thatcherism was actually a departure from the norm. Indeed, there were many so-called Red Tories in the UK and especially Canada, people with social welfare policies allied with conservative politics, like Canadian Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald, or, arguably, Harold MacMillan in Britain.
The 18th century usage of “Country” in English and other Western European languages did not really mean the nation-state as now understood. It was closer to something like “where I’m from, where I am comfortable; where I grew up; my locality and region, and then my larger nation.”