Ultra-Tories
Ultra-Tories | |
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Leader | |
Founded | 1820s |
Dissolved | 1830s |
Succeeded by | Conservative Party |
Ideology |
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Political parties |
Part of the Politics series on |
Toryism |
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The Ultra-Tories were an Anglican faction of British and Irish politics that appeared in the 1820s in opposition to Catholic emancipation. The faction was later called the "extreme right-wing" of British and Irish politics.[1]
The Ultra-Tories faction broke away from the governing party in 1829 after the passing of the
The Ultra-Tories were defending "a doctrine essentially similar to that which ministerial Whigs had held since the days of Burnet, Wake, Gibson and Potter".[3]
History
A faction that was never formally organised, the Ultra-Tories were united in their antipathy towards
The Ultra-Tory faction was informally led in the
The inability of the Tories to reunite led to losses in the 1830 general election following the death of King
This led to the creation of a government with
Except for a few irreconcilables the vast bulk of the Ultra-Tories would eventually move over to the Conservatives, with some such as Knatchbull enjoying political office in Peel's first government in 1834. However, when the party split again in 1846 over the issue of abolishing the Corn Laws, the remaining Ultra-Tories quickly rallied to the protectionist banner and helped to vote Peel out from office once again, this time for good.[4]
The Ultra-Tories were civilian politicians. In practice, they had the overwhelming support of the Anglican clergy and bishops, many of whom came under severe verbal attack in their home parishes and dioceses for opposition to the Reform Act of 1832.[5]
Legacy
J. C. D. Clark depicts England before 1828 as a nation in which the vast majority of the people believed in the divine right of kings, the legitimacy of a hereditary nobility and in the rights and privileges of the Anglican Church. In Clark's interpretation, the system remained virtually intact until it suddenly collapsed in 1828 because Catholic emancipation undermined Anglican supremacy which was its central symbolic prop. Clark argues that the consequences were enormous: "The shattering of a whole social order [...]. What was lost at that point [...] was not merely a constitutional arrangement, but the intellectual ascendancy of a worldview, the cultural hegemony of the old elite".[6] Clark's interpretation has been widely debated in the scholarly literature[7] and almost every single historian who has examined the issue has highlighted the substantial amount of continuity between the periods before and after 1828–1832.[8]
Eric J. Evans emphasizes that the political importance of Catholic emancipation in 1829 was that it split the anti-reformers beyond repair and diminished their ability to block future reform laws, especially the great
See also
Notes
- ^ a b James J. Sack, "Ultra tories (act. 1827–1834)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, accessed 19 September 2011.
- ^ J. J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative. Reaction and orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 69.
- ^ J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832. Ideology, social structure and political practice during the ancien régime (Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 408.
- ^ Pearce and Stern, Government and Reform: Britain 1815–1918 (2nd ed.), p. 35. Hodder Murray, 2000
- ^ Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church (1966) vol. 1, pp 24–47.
- ^ J. C. D. Clark (1985). pp. 90, 409.
- ^ Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Clarendon Press, 2006) pp. 668–671
- ^ Professor Frank O'Gorman, review of English Society 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice During the Ancien Regime (review no. 41b), accessed 25 July 2012.
- ^ Eric J. Evans (1996), The Forging of the Modern State: Early Industrial Britain, 1783–1870 (2nd ed.), 1990, p. 216.
Further reading
- Gaunt, R. A. (2003). "The Fourth Duke of Newcastle, The Ultra-Tories and the Opposition to Canning's Administration". History. 88 (4): 568–586. JSTOR 24426952.
- Jaggard, Edwin (2014). "Lord Falmouth and the Parallel Political Worlds of Ultra-Toryism, 1826–1832". Parliamentary History. 33 (2): 300–320. .