The Survival of Country Attitudes in the Eighteenth-Century House of Commons

Abstract

THE purpose of this paper is very simple. It is to examine the extent to which those ‘Country’ attitudes which were so manifest throughout most of the seventeenth century managed to survive during the years between the accession of George I and the outbreak of the French Revolution. At the outset I should explain precisely what I mean by ‘Country’, since historians habitually use the word in different contexts. Country members of parliament in the 1620s have been described merely as those ‘representing the country against a selfish, corrupt, unpatriotic Court clique dominated by Charles I’s favourite, Buckingham’.1 Those — and I am not one of them — who see the Great Rebellion as predominantly a struggle between Court and Country tend to equate this with a conflict between ‘ins’ and ‘outs’ — between those who shared in the largesse of the Crown and those who constituted the mere gentry, the backwoods country gentlemen who were provoked into revolution by economic decline and by exclusion from the fruits of office. The latest historian of the activities of the so-called ‘Country party’ in the 1670s takes a similar view, seeing it as comprising ‘some who were temperamentally “agin the government” and others who had either been disappointed of office in the past or hoped to force themselves into it in the future’.2 I do not propose in this manner merely to equate ‘Country’ and `opposition’. The essence of the true Country outlook seems to me to be a deep-seated distrust of the central government, regardless of the identity of monarch or the political complexion of his ministers — a distrust increased by the extension of the powers of that central government since the fifteenth century, by the growing exclusiveness of the Court under the early Stuarts, by the ever-increasing political, social and economic influence of the metropolis, and by the development (especially during the late seventeenth century) of an extensive Court party in the House of Commons. Genuine Country members were impervious to the attractions of place and pension, no matter from which side they were offered. They believed that they should above all preserve their capacity to act as ‘a permanent, purifying, criticising force in politics’.3 Yet even in this more limited sense the Country tradition had a long and respectable past.