“A sound Conservative government,” said Taper, musingly. “I understand: Tory men and Whig measures.”
—Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby
The end of the American Revolution and the foundation of the United States left both countries firmly in Whig hands—and, in the U.S., the victorious Whigs split into Federalists and Democrats. Although a great many would have been Whigs in English terms, the 100,000 Loyalists who had to flee from the newly independent nation to Canada had been called Tories by their opponents. In their number, however, were a great many Jacobites, who fought for the Stuarts in their homeland, and fought for the King in their new country. With the deeply Catholic French Canadians who were already in the country, the Loyalists and Scots Jacobites gave Canadian Conservatism a unique flavour of its own (of which more, presently).
In Britain, George III reconciled himself to the new state of affairs, and never attempted to unseat the oligarchy again. Across the Channel, however, things were going very badly. French intervention in the American Revolution had been essential to rebel success. But France got nothing out of its victory, save bankruptcy and the importation of Lockean ideas to the nobility, via such as Lafayette. When the eruption of an Icelandic volcano ruined the crops in 1788, France was faced with famine. Louis XVI—despite his financial, military, and governmental reforms that had allowed France to emerge victorious from the recent war—had neither money nor credit to buy grain to relieve the starving. The following year he called the Estates General together for the first time since 1614. The would-be French oligarchs, such as Lafayette and the Duke of Orleans, sought to overthrow what they considered Royal absolutism. They unleashed forces over which they soon lost all control, and the results were the horrors of the Revolution, the rise of Napoleon, and the titanic effort of all Europe—not least, Great Britain—to defeat him. This in turn, beginning in 1810, would enkindle the bloody wars of independence in Latin America.
The resistance to the revolution in Continental Europe and Latin America engendered the Conservatism of those countries, with de Maistre as its foremost exponent alongside many more from each country that had been affected. This was the era of the Restoration, the Holy Alliance, and the Congress System, all designed to keep the horror from emerging again. But British “Conservatism” was something quite different, and it ultimately played a great part in the unravelling of that whole structure.
As long as the horrors were fresh, the interests of the five major powers were nearly identical. Moreover, just as Chateaubriand, Novalis, and many other Romantics were doing on the Continent, so Sir Walter Scott was doing in the British Isles—making the Middle Ages, and so in a sense the heart (if not always the head) of post-Napoleonic Conservatism respectable and even admirable to a public once taught to despise it by the paladins of the Enlightenment. Sir Walter’s influence extended to the Prince-Regent (George IV, after 1821); not so popular among the English, he had become an admirer of the Jacobites by reading Scott. In return, the fourth George became well-liked by the Welsh, Scots, and Irish.
But Sir Walter’s influence had a much wider range than royal circles. Directly or indirectly, he had a part in the revival of “Roman” Catholicism in Great Britain, thanks to, among others, his disciple Kenelm Digby; the Young England Group of such as Lord John Manners and a young Benjamin Disraeli; the Neo-Gothic Movement in architecture and other arts, spearheaded by Pugin, Ruskin, and Morris; the Pre-Raphaelite Movement; the Catholicising Oxford Movement in Anglicanism; the Arts and Crafts Movement; the Celtic Revival; and much else besides. Moreover, thanks to Sir Walter’s friend and disciple Washington Irving, Conservative Romanticism leapt the ocean to America. But note that, while all of these currents taken together would be hugely influential in 19th century Britain, it was primarily—save for Young England, and some of the results of the Arts and Crafts and the Celtic Revival—cultural rather than political. Indeed, the argument might be made that in both Britain and America, ‘real Conservatism’ (as Continental Europeans saw it) was in the Anglosphere primarily a cultural rather than a political force. The political sphere was primarily left to the Liberals (in the classical sense).
Politically, the apex of cooperation between Britain and her erstwhile allies was at the Congress of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1818, when it was agreed that France could rejoin the family of nations, and the occupation forces would be removed. Apparently amicable, the rifts between Britain and her allies showed first when Lord Castlereagh, the British Foreign Secretary, rejected the idea of a Pan-European army, and then suggested and subsequently withdrew the idea of a an-European naval force for suppressing the Barbary Pirates. This latter was due to his fear of a Russian presence in the Mediterranean. Moreover, he managed to derail any official response by the Alliance to the Spanish-American revolutions, a development which was welcomed by British merchants, ever attentive to new markets.
By 1822, when the Congress of Verona authorised France to suppress the Spanish revolution which had broken out the previous year, Britain broke with her erstwhile allies. Eight years later, the British government welcomed the liberal monarchy of Louis Philippe in France. The British government supported the liberal side in the ensuing Spanish and Portuguese civil wars, and in decades to come were quietly in favour of Sardinia and Prussia in their creation of new liberal monarchies in Germany and Italy—and the concomitant reduction of Habsburg influence. Obviously, the new regimes in all five countries were anathema to traditionalists among them—not only the adherents of the defeated German and Italian States, but even conservative Prussians and Sardinians, such as Constantin Frantz and Solaro della Margherita. Thus, the tone of much continental European conservative writing in the 19th century is very anti-British.
Another element entered the ideological mix in the 19th century: the Industrial Revolution. On the continent, traditional conservatives viewed with horror the miseries it inflicted on the working class, and sought to apply the spirit of noblesse oblige to them. On this foundation, the Catholic Church built her social teachings, and from this mix emerged figures like de la Tour du Pin and von Vogelsang, and Rerum Novarum. The liberals felt that such miseries—be they from famine or sweatshops—were the price of progress, and they tried to let the “hand of the market” settle everything. Marx and Engels came up with their own solution.
One issue that grew with the Victorian era was the British Empire. Although conservatives were supposed to be for it and liberals against it, it continued to expand regardless of which party was in power. Moreover the settler countries were developing political lives of their own. Canada’s conservative coalition of French Ultramontanes and American Loyalist and Scots Jacobite descendants was forged in fire in the War of 1812, and would uneasily survive for over a century and a half. Australia’s early conservatives were exemplified by the Irish Catholic Sir John O’Shanassy. But, as in America, both Australia and New Zealand developed party systems based upon local issues: in Australia, the “Liberals” are considered conservative, as are the National Party in New Zealand. South Africa’s issues were defined by the Anglo-Boer split and the rise of the Apartheid State after the 1948 elections: Monarchists tended to oppose Apartheid, while its supporters were devout republicans—at last getting their wish in 1961.
In the meantime, the United States, having had factions in both the Democratic and the Federalist, then Whig, then Republican parties (which considered themselves conservative or liberal) staggered into the Civil War over states rights, slavery, and other issues. Without a large-scale “Tory” element, ‘conservative’ might mean almost anything: Jeffersonians, Agrarians, Industrialists, Hamiltonians, Unionists, and Confederates have all claimed or rejected the term for themselves at different times. From Washington Irving and Fitz-Greene Halleck to Ralph Adams Cram and H.P. Lovecraft, there have certainly been Americans who have held Tory principles in the British or Canadian sense, but they have hardly amounted to a great political movement.
The latter half of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th rarely saw traditional Tory principles in the British Conservative party. From the Celtic Revival emerged various Celtic nationalisms, of which the Irish was by far the most successful, and so the most threatening to the status quo. From the Arts and Crafts Movement emerged the non-Marxist elements of the Labour Party (epitomised by such as R.H. Tawney, dubbed “the new Tories” by their opponents), Guild Socialism, and ultimately the Distributism of Belloc and Chesterton. Within the official Conservative Party, there were similar ideas on the part of such as Lord Randolph Church and his cohorts in the “Fourth Party” and the Primrose League. This atmosphere, together with the influence of Anglo-Catholicism, the revival of devotion to King Charles the Martyr, and support in such circles for such continental movements as Carlism, led to the Neo-Jacobite Revival, starting in 1888 with the founding of the Order of the White Rose. This might be easily dismissed, were it not for the eminence of so many of its members, both in the United States and Britain. George Wyndham was one of the few mainstream British Conservative politicians who believed that the proper place for these currents was within the party to which their Tory predecessors had given birth.
It is perhaps fitting that Wyndham’s last major struggle was in defence of the House of Lords against the so-called “Reform Act” of 1911. With the same peculiar Tory insight that he had brought to Ireland, he foresaw the damage to Britain that this attack on the Constitution would bring. But as would be the case down to our own time with any number of issues, the mainstream Conservative Party, after a bit of squawking, accepted it.
The First World War saw the end of Europe’s two remaining conservative (in the 1815 sense) powers: Russia and Austria-Hungary. The first fell with the connivance of Imperial Germany, who sent Lenin into the country despite Austro-Hungarian Emperor-King Karl’s vocal protest; the second fell at the insistence of the victorious allies, particularly Woodrow Wilson, with results that, as Churchill observed, gave us World War II. Although the interwar period produced conservative figures such as Douglas Jerrold, H.W.T. Edwards, and T.S. Eliot, they had little influence on practical politics. Ireland had two splits: pro- and anti-British, and Catholic versus secular. In the United States, Roosevelt’s New Deal created an opposition: this was the seedbed of modern American conservatism, although it would not coalesce as such until after World War II. Meanwhile, the rise of the dictators gave continental conservatives the choice of collaborating with the Axis (in order to be destroyed in 1945) or resisting heroically—only to see the Soviet-American dyarchy dominate Europe and render their goals impractical, save in the reduced “Christian Democratic” form.
Britain in the postwar era, was thrust into the triple explosions of growing Socialism, decolonisation, and societal decay in the face of a growing Soviet menace. The Suez defeat in many ways put an end to Britain as an independent power. There would be very few authentic Tory voices in Britain in the four decades following the war, but there were Sir John Biggs-Davison and the Monday Club. In many ways, Sir John was a latter-day George Wyndham. Such figures as C.S. Lewis, Roger Scruton, Michael Oakeshott, and Canada’s George Grant have much still to tell us after their deaths; but they—as with most of us Anglo-Americans—had varying amounts of Whiggery in their mental makeup. To-day, of course, there are many groups in and outside the Conservative Party that hold something approaching the old Cavalier principles, but they are no more influential than their predecessors were under Cromwell.
In America, Russell Kirk was the great intellectual organiser of conservative intellectuality in the postwar era, though there were many others. He was a great admirer of Edmund Burke (as we saw in the first section, a Whig). For all of his many virtues, circumstances required that he try to see in “Conservative Revolutions” in 1688 and 1776. The group around Triumph Magazine (1968-1978) was an unrepentant exponent of continental conservatism. Because the journal had been set up with the advice of Archduke Otto von Habsburg, its completely American editors were respectively pro-Franco, Carlist, Action Française, and Neapolitan Legitimist. There were other mansions in that house, all of which have been dubbed “Paleo-Conservative.”
After the apparent triumph of the Reagan Revolution, the fall of the Soviet Union seemed to have sealed the victory of some variety of conservatism. But it was, as we now know, illusory. The past few decades—and the last in particular—have revealed a coterie of Western ruling classes as semi-omnipotent as their technology can make them. But the “reforms” they are imposing are producing a society which is ultimately unsustainable, quite apart from these measures being evil and immoral in themselves. This simply cannot end well.
To adequately fight such a foe, it is not enough simply to oppose them. We must know what we are fighting for. The current situation did not arise overnight; we were a long time getting here. Dealing with the problems that we now face can only be strengthened by carefully studying that long road—and more particularly, those of our forerunners who resisted—often against what seem to be overwhelming odds. In my youth, in conservative circles in America, it was fashionable to dismiss both de Maistre and the tradition he represented on the one hand and Johnson and his tradition on the other. The past several years, however, show that they yet have much to teach.
