English Conservatism Since the Restoration: An Introduction and Anthology

263 Pages·1990·0.89 MB·English

by  R. Eccleshall

ENGLISH
CONSERVATISM SINCE
THE RESTORATION

ENGLISH
CONSERVATISM SINCE
THE RESTORATION
An introduction and anthology
Robert Eccleshall
London
UNWIN HYMAN
Boston Sydney Wellington
© Robert Eccleshall, 1990
This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No
reproduction without permission. All rights reserved.

Published by the Academic Division of
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First published in 1990

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Eccleshall, Robert
English conservatism since the Restoration: an
introduction and anthology.
1. Great Britain. Political ideologies: Conservatism,
Theories, history
I. Title
320.520941

ISBN 0-203-20518-9 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-20521-9 (Adobe eReader Format)
ISBN 0-04-445773-1 (Print Edition)
ISBN 0-04-445346-9 pbk
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Applied for
Contents
Preface page ix
1 Principles galore 1
Notes 19
2 From the Restoration to the French Revolution 21
Notes 44
Readings 49
1 Robert Sanderson (1587–1663) 49
2 Sir Robert Filmer (1588–1653) 53
3 Offspring Blackall (1654–1716) 57
4 Henry St John, Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751) 60
5 John Reeves (1752?–1829) 65
6 Edmund Burke (1729–97) 71
7 Edmund Burke 74
3 Peel, paternalism and political economy, 1827–46 79
Notes 94
Readings 97
1 Sir Robert Peel (1788–1850) 97
2 Sir Robert Peel 100
3 Michael Thomas Sadler (1780–1835) 103
4 Michael Thomas Sadler 106
5 Anthony Ashley Cooper, seventh Earl of Shaftesbury
(1801–85) 108
6 Benjamin Disraeli, first Earl of Beaconsfield (1804–81) 112
4 Tory Democracy 1867–1918 118
Notes 132
Readings 135
1 Benjamin Disraeli, first Earl of Beaconsfield 135
2 Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) 139
viii English Conservatism since the Restoration
3 Frederick Edwin Smith, first Earl of Birkenhead
(1872–1930) 146
4 Lord Henry Cavendish-Bentinck (1863–1931) 149
5 Survival of the fittest 1880–1953 153
Notes 164
Readings 166
1 Alexander Hugh Bruce, sixth Baron Balfour
of Burleigh (1849–1921) 166
2 William Hurrell Mallock (1849–1923) 169
3 Sir Ernest John Pickstone Benn, second Baronet
(1875–1954) 174
6 A middle way 1924–64 179
Notes 188
Readings 190
1 Harold Macmillan, first Earl of Stockton (1894–1986) 190
2 Quintin Mcgarel Hogg, Baron Hailsham
of St Marylebone (1907–) 194
3 Richard Austen Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron
Walden (1902–82) 198
7 Turning the collectivist tide 1963– 202
Notes 222
Readings 224
1 John Enoch Powell (1912–) 224
2 Sir Rhodes Boyson (1925–) 229
3 Keith Sinjohn Joseph, Baron Joseph of Portsoken (1918–) 233
4 Margaret Hilda Thatcher (1925–) 240
5 Norman Beresford Tebbit (1931–) 244
Index 249
Preface
This book is an introduction to a style of political thinking rather
than a history of a political party. It begins therefore with the
emergence of a recognisable Tory creed during the seventeenth-
century Restoration, and not at around 1832 when the modern
Conservative Party came into existence. There is little mention,
either in the chapters or in the extracts which conclude them, of
party leaders (Winston Churchill, for instance) unless their
speeches and writings happen to convey, in a cogent and
illuminating manner, aspects of conservative thinking (as is the
case with Peel, Disraeli, Macmillan and Thatcher). Too many
historians, I argue in the introductory chapter, have written a
retrospective account of the doctrine from the standpoint of how
people of a sensible conservative disposition ought to think. The
effect has been to produce a laundered version of the doctrine
that includes writers who cannot properly be regarded as
conservatives (David Hume, for instance), while excluding others
who do not fit the argument—even though they were associated
with the party and typified a pattern of thinking. But the task of
the historian of political ideas, in my view, is to tell a coherent
story by re-creating the beliefs, intentions and methods of
argument of writers, minor as well as major, who represented a
tradition of political discourse. The story should not include
thinkers merely because they are judged to be sound from the
ideological perspective of the historian, or ignore a host of figures
simply because they made little impact on the practice of politics.
In this particular story the number of obscure but interesting
characters—Offspring Blackall, John Reeves, Michael Sadler, Lord
Henry Bentinck, Sir Ernest Benn, to mention a few—is larger
than the great names of the Tory party who usually capture the
historian’s attention. When reading the writings of some of these
neglected characters, I must confess, I found myself in less
uncongenial company than anticipated.
I should like to express my gratitude to Dr Vincent Geoghegan,
Professor Cornelius O’Leary and Dr Christopher Shorley for
x English Conservatism since the Restoration
reading an initial draft of the text and suggesting various stylistic
and other improvements; and to Dr Rick Wilford for commenting
on the introductory chapter. My thanks are also due to Ms Betty
Donnelly and Ms Judith Graham for deciphering my scrawl and
typing much of the final manuscript.
Robert Eccleshall
Belfast, January 1990
1
Principles galore
Conservatives are by temperament cautious and prudent. Aware of
the frailties of human nature, they are suspicious of grand schemes
for improving society: indeed, they regard any such fanciful design
as not only pernicious in its aim of sweeping away constraints
upon potentially unruly behaviour, but also as a manifestation of
human vanity and imperfection. Instead of speculating about an
unattainable earthly paradise, conservatives cherish existing social
arrangements as a repository of the accumulated wisdom of the
past. Politics for them is a practical activity in which the task is to
maintain a settled way of life not by the pursuit of theoretical
certainty, but through experiential adjustment to changing
circumstances. Sceptical by nature, reluctant to embrace intellectual
abstractions, mistrustful of missionary zealots who would transform
society according to some visionary blueprint, and anxious to
preserve the organic unity of a nation in which people may
conduct their affairs in a customary manner, conservatives favour
the kind of gradual, piecemeal reforms that are periodically
required to keep the ship of state afloat on an even keel.
This is how the doctrine is usually characterized. As a
description of how conservatives think, it is not entirely inaccurate:
no more so than the depiction of socialists, for example, as
Utopian dreamers intent on leaping into a propertyless community
regulated by a mutual instinct for co-operation instead of the
coercive apparatus of the state. Both are abstractions in so far as
relatively few conservatives or socialists conform to their respective
stereotype. British labourism hardly passes the test of boundless
optimism and theoretical sophistication. Most of its adherents, far
from seeking to smash the state by the application of speculative
reason, are pragmatists concerned to use the benevolent power of
government to tame rather than annihilate capitalism. The rarefied
description of socialism is easily recognized as a caricature, and
only the most partisan observer is likely to confuse the perspective
of the British left with the unsullied essence of the ideology. The