Lecture | Brown Bag Seminar
English Party Politics 1690-1715
- Date
- Monday 23 November 2026
- Time
- Location
-
Herta Mohr
Witte Singel 27A
2311 BG Leiden - Room
- 0.14
Abstract
Students of later Stuart politics currently face three issues: a paucity of evidence (few voting lists), controversy over foundational questions (who were the Whigs and Tories?), and emphasis on confounders (hard-to-explain voting behaviour and campaigning). Overall, the stories scholars now tell contain so many nuances and doubts that we miss the larger and obvious truths.
This paper presents a simplifying model of English politics. It advances two claims. The first is that the parties existed as coherent extra-parliamentary political forces, with co-equal patronage, print, clerical, and court components. The second claim is that English parties were sites of political ideologies, and these can be cast onto a compass of advocacy of executive power on the Y axis, and latitudinarianism on the X axis. A diagonal split tightened as the period progressed, principally due to the coalescing of, on the one hand, latitudinarianism and executive power (to support Protestantism in Europe), and suspicion of Crown and High Church Anglicanism (to defend the Church from secular and Dissenting interests).
After introducing the models, the paper introduces two case-studies that show the parties functioning and coalescing. It demonstrates that, notwithstanding the variables and nuances, the parties should be understood as the major drivers of political action in these decades.