A History of the Four Georges, Volume I | Page 9

this time at least the Tory party still
accepted the theory of the Divine origin of the king's supremacy. The
Whigs were even then the advocates of a constitutional system, and
held that the people at large were the source of monarchical power. To
the one set of men the sovereign was a divinely appointed ruler; to the
other he was the hereditary chief of the realm, having the source of his
authority in popular election. The Tories, as the Church party, disliked
the Dissenters even more than they disliked the Roman Catholics. The
Whigs were then even inclined to regard the Church as a branch of the
Civil Service--to adopt a much more modern phrase--and they were in
favor of extending freedom of worship to Dissenters, and in a certain
sense to Roman Catholics. According to Bishop Burnet, it was in the
reign of Queen Anne that the distinction between High-Church and
Low-Church first marked itself out, and we find almost as a natural
necessity that the High-Churchmen were Tories, and the
Low-Churchmen were Whigs. Then as now the chief strength of the

Tories was found in the country, and not in the large towns. So far as
town populations were concerned, the Tories were proportionately
strongest where the borough was smallest. The great bulk of the
agricultural population, so far as it had definite political feelings, was
distinctly Tory. The strength of the Whigs lay in the manufacturing
towns and the great ports. London was at that time much stronger in its
Liberal political sentiments than it has been more recently. The
moneyed interest, the bankers, the merchants, were attached to the
Whig party. Many peers and bishops were Whigs, but they were chiefly
the peers and bishops who owed their appointments to William the
Third. The French envoy, D'Iberville, at this time describes the Whigs
as having at their command the best purses, the best swords, the ablest
heads, and the handsomest women. The Tory party was strong at the
University of Oxford; the Whig party was {19} in greater force at
Cambridge. Both Whigs and Tories, however, were in a somewhat
subdued condition of mind about the time that Anne's reign was closing.
Neither party as a whole was inclined to push its political principles to
anything like a logical extreme. Whigs and Tories alike were
practically satisfied with the form which the English governing system
had put on after the Revolution of 1688. Neither party was inclined for
another revolution. The civil war had carried the Whig principle a little
too far for the Whigs. The Restoration had brought a certain amount of
scandal on sovereign authority and the principle of Divine right. The
minds of men were settling down into willingness for a compromise.
There were, of course, among the Tories the extreme party, so pledged
to the restoration of the Stuarts that they would have moved heaven and
earth, at all events they would have convulsed England, for the sake of
bringing them back. These men constituted what would now be called
in the language of French politics the Extreme Right of the Tory party;
they would become of importance at any hour when some actual
movement was made from the outside to restore the Stuarts. Such a
movement would of course have carried with it and with them the great
bulk of the new quiescent Tory party; but in the mean time, and until
some such movement was made, the Jacobite section of the Tories was
not in a condition to be active or influential, and was not a serious
difficulty in the way of the Hanoverian succession.

The Whigs had great advantages on their side. They had a clear
principle to start with. The constitutional errors and excesses of the
Stuarts had forced on the mind of England a recognition of the two or
three main principles of civil and religious liberty. The Whigs knew
what they wanted better than the Tories did, and the ends which the
Whigs proposed to gain were attainable, while those which the Tories
set out for themselves were to a great extent lost in dream-land. The
uncertainty and vagueness of many of the Tory aims made some of the
{20} Tories themselves only half earnest in their purposes. Many a
Tory who talked as loudly as his brothers about the king having his
own again, and who toasted "the king over the water" as freely as they,
had in the bottom of his heart very little real anxiety to see a rebellion
end in a Stuart restoration. But, on the other hand, the Whigs could
strive with all their might and main to carry out their principles in
Church and in State without the responsibility of plunging the country
into rebellion, and without any dread of seeing