The Language of Impartiality and Party-Political Discourse in England, 1680–1745

THE LANGUAGE OF IMPARTIALITY AND PARTY-POLITICAL DISCOURSE IN ENGLAND, 1680–1745

Christine Gerrard

The terms ‘impartiality’ and, more particularly, ‘impartial’, play an important, if curiously under-researched role in party-political discourse during the period 1680–1745. This is the period that witnessed the birth of political parties in England, following the bitter ideological divisions of the English Civil War and the restored monarchy of Charles II in 1660. Charles’ royalist supporters in Parliament became known as ‘Tories’ and their opponents, who attacked absolutist rule and the succession of Charles’s Catholic brother James, were dubbed ‘Whigs’. Both labels orig- inally derived from insults hurled at one party by the other. The term ‘party’ itself had negative connotations during this period, and both Whigs and Tories made strenuous efforts to demonstrate that they were not a ‘political party’ but represented the interests of the nation at large. Recent studies of the language which the Whigs and Tories used to try to prove their non-partisanship have focused on their rival efforts to appropriate key terms such as ‘patriot’, ‘patriotism’, ‘country party’, ‘national interest’ and ‘public spirit’.1 These contested terms, however, overlap in important ways with an evolving political discourse of impartiality. The emergence of impartiality, as other essays in this volume will attest, is more often associated with developments in science, historiography, moral philoso- phy, and ethics, than with the cut-and-thrust world of party-politics. Yet the two terms ‘impartial’ and ‘party’ are of course semantically linked. To be ‘impartial’ means to be of no party, to be ‘non-partisan’. In 1717 the French Huguenot historian Paul Rapin de Thoyras traced the history of the origins of the Whig and Tory parties in his Dissertation sur les Whigs et

1 See, for example, Pocock J.G.A., The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cam- bridge: 1957); Cunningham H., “The Language of Patriotism”, in Samuel R. (ed.), Patrio- tism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, 3 vols. (London: 1989) I, 57–89; Gerrard C., The Patriot Opposition to Walpole (Oxford: 1994); Viroli M., For Love of Coun- try: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: 1995); Knowles R., “The ‘All-Attoning Name’: The Word ‘Patriot’ in Seventeenth-Century England”, Modern Humanities Research Association 96/3 (2001) 624–643. 212 christine gerrard les Torys. The second edition (1718), translated by Thomas Ozell, plays on the tension between ‘party’ and ‘impartiality’. It was entitled An Impartial History of Whig and Tory. Shewing the Rise, Progress, Views, Strength, Inter- ests, and Characters of those Two Contending Parties. Rapin’s preface exposes the tension between partisanship and impartiality. He claims that only a foreign historian such as himself can write impartially about the rise of party in Britain: But it is not from them [British historians] that we must expect to learn the true State of the affairs of the two Parties. Those Pieces were published either by Whigs or by Tories, and consequently by Authors that we may justly suspect of Partiality: Neither is there one of them that does not shew its Author to have a Tincture of it. A Foreigner therefore is the most likely man to give an impartial Account of this Matter.2 As Rapin observes, party writers often sought to conceal their ‘Partiality’ or partisanship through the cultivation of historical impartiality. It is important to recall that there was no formal recognition of the legiti- macy of opposition in British government until the parliamentary debate of 1826 in which John Hobhouse coined the term ‘His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition’.3 In the early years of political party, opposition was still often dismissed as faction, and much of the political ideology generated by both the government and the opposition from the 1670s onward centred on an imagined ideal of political wholeness or non-partisanship – a government ‘above’ party. Lord Bolingbroke’s A Dissertation on Parties (1735) famously depicted the rise of party as an evil that had to be overcome by an end to all parties, a government drawn from the best and most disinterested citi- zens, irrespective of previous party-political allegiances. Association with a political party was by necessity a declaration of partisanship. From the 1670s onwards, political writers defending Whig and Tory, ministry and opposition, competed over the centre ground, declaring that they were acting selflessly by representing the interests of the country at large. One of the ways in which they did this was by claiming to be ‘patriots’ who placed the good of their country above private self-interest; and another way they did this was by claiming to be impartial.

2 Rapin de Thoyras Paul, An impartial history of Whig and Tory. Shewing the rise, progress, views, strength, interests, and characters of those two contending parties, 2nd ed. (London, S. Baker: 1718) vi. 3 Foord A., His Majesty’s Opposition 1714–1830 (Oxford: 1964).