Politics

County Members and Country Politicians

There was a high degree of overlap between the country gentlemen, the county Members and the ‘Country’ politicians, but these terms were not identical. In the mid-eighteenth century a good example was Sir George Savile (1726-84), who owned estates in Nottinghamshire and in Yorkshire. He sat in the Commons from 1759 to 1783 as Member for Yorkshire, which was considered England’s premier county. He was also highly respected for his independent politics, which were strongly in the tradition of ‘Country’ attitudes stretching back to the seventeenth century. Indeed, although he was a close associate of the Rockingham Whigs, who in some ways embodied ‘Country’ values, he refused to class himself among the opposition MPs.

The country gentlemen were the leading non-noble figures in their counties, men of birth, landed wealth and often title (usually baronetcies). They had a social standing which gave them sufficient status to seek to represent the counties in which they lived. In essence, they were defined by what they were not: they were not peers, they pursued no occupation or profession, and they rarely held national office, though most were justices of the peace and would sometimes have filled other local positions. They typically embodied a bundle of prejudices around notions of patriotism, instinctive Anglicanism and standards of personal honour. In a sense they were amateurs in politics; when maddened, they were the ‘John Bulls’ in the parliamentary china shop.

Not all of the 134 county Members in England, Wales and Scotland were country gentlemen. Many of these seats were held by the sons of local noblemen, while the occasional recent recruit to the gentry found a berth in one of them: for example, Sir Joseph Mawbey only relinquished his distillery business on coming in for Surrey in 1775. Nor did all country gentlemen sit for counties, a significant exception being Sir Roger Newdigate of Arbury, Warwickshire, most of his parliamentary career taking place as Member for Oxford University, which was also a prestigious constituency to represent. Some long-established gentry families returned themselves for boroughs – a county town was more suitable than a rotten borough. For instance, Thomas Grosvenor, whose family were traditionally Tories but were soon to be elevated to the nobility as Whigs, sat for Chester from 1755 to 1795. Not that all who aspired to the social status of the gentry were of old family. After nine years in the House, William Hussey, a Wiltshire clothier in his youth, became MP for his native Salisbury in 1774, and a decade later he described himself in the chamber as ‘one of those independent country gentlemen, who had never attached themselves to any party’.

The ‘Country’ politicians, though this expression is almost a contradiction in terms as they eschewed partisan politics, were the heirs of those who had opposed the Court in the seventeenth century. Theirs was not a political outlook that was confined exclusively to either Tories or Whigs, though it was usually associated with those, either Tories or Whigs, who were at different times mainly in opposition. Surviving sporadically into the eighteenth century, the main ‘Country’ attitudes were resistance to the encroachments of royal and executive powers; campaigning against the continuation of placemen in the Commons and of corruption at elections; a determination to scrutinize and reduce government expenditure; a profound hostility to the maintenance of a peace-time army and a general distrust of British involvement in European wars.

Although they looked upon themselves as inheritors of the Pelhamite Court Whig tradition, the Rockingham Whigs displayed several ‘Country’ attributes during their long spell in opposition between 1766 and 1782. They promoted a principle of virtuous resistance to what they saw as the growing influence of the crown. They sought to reduce government control in the Commons by, for example, disfranchising revenue officers. They also objected to the colossal expense and mismanagement of the war in North America. At the same time, the fact that they (and not least their leaders) often seemed temperamentally unsuited to the burdens of parliamentary politics and more concerned to place considerations of party above ambition for office, chimed with earlier examples of ‘Country’ oppositions.

In his classic analysis of the structure of politics at the accession of George III, Sir Lewis Namier defined the independent country gentlemen as a distinct grouping in the House of Commons, separated from the court and treasury party (the government) and the (mainly opposition) politicians on the other. For him, the country gentlemen provided the dynamic by which administrations survived, because it was through retaining their confidence that prime ministers kept a working Commons majority. Once the government lost the backing of the country gentlemen, the king was usually obliged sooner or later to replace it with another. Whether Namier’s analysis was accurate for the entire eighteenth century, or even for the 1760s, is a question which dominated the historiography of the period for several decades after Namier’s interpretation first appeared.

Author: Stephen Farrell