Ultra-Tories

A faction that was never formally organised, the Ultra-Tories were united in their antipathy towards the Duke of Wellington and Sir Robert Peel for what they saw as a betrayal of Tory political and religious principle on the issue of Catholic emancipation. They took their opposition to Peel to the extent of running a candidate against Peel when he had to resign his Oxford University seat when taking up political office, a requirement for all MPs when taking a ministerial office then. Although Peel was able to get back to Parliament via another parliamentary seat, this battle between Tory factions further embittered internal relations in the party.

The Ultra-Tory faction was informally led in the House of Commons by Member of Parliament Sir Edward Knatchbull and Sir Richard Vyvyan. In the House of Lords, they enjoyed the support of many ex-cabinet ministers and leading peers like the Duke of Cumberland, the Earl of Winchilsea and the Duke of Newcastle. Their general viewpoint could be described as extreme on the matter of defending the established Anglican ascendancy and barring Catholics from political office or influence. However, they were split on the issue of electoral reform and a large group came to a view that it could strengthen the appeal of pro-Protestantism.

The inability of the Tories to reunite led to losses in the 1830 general election following the death of King George IV. Combined also with the news of the July Revolution in France and a series of bad harvests in England which saw a great increase in political agitation, some Ultras returned to the party. However, there were sufficient Ultra-Tories left who were able to combine with the Whigs and the Canningite grouping, who had previously split from the main Tory party back in 1827–1828 over the issue of Catholic emancipation which they had supported, to defeat Wellington who finally resigned in November 1830.

This led to the creation of a government with Lord Grey as Prime Minister and the leading Canningites such as Lord Palmerston and Lord Melbourne. One leading Ultra-Tory, the Duke of Richmond, joined the Grey Cabinet and a few others appointed in more junior ministerial positions. However, the scope of the subsequent reforms proved too much for many of the pro-government Ultras who then moved back into opposition. Eventually, Richmond left the Whig led coalition and returned to the Tory party, or the Conservative Party as it was generally now known, after 1834.

Except for a few irreconcilables the vast bulk of the Ultra-Tories would eventually move over to the Conservatives, with some such as Knatchbull enjoying political office in Peel's first government in 1834. However, when the party split again in 1846 over the issue of abolishing the Corn Laws, the remaining Ultra-Tories quickly rallied to the protectionist banner and helped to vote Peel out from office once again, this time for good.[4]

The Ultra-Tories were civilian politicians. In practice, they had the overwhelming support of the Anglican clergy and bishops, many of whom came under severe verbal attack in their home parishes and dioceses for opposition to the Reform Act of 1832.[5]

J. C. D. Clark depicts England before 1828 as a nation in which the vast majority of the people believed in the divine right of kings, the legitimacy of a hereditary nobility and in the rights and privileges of the Anglican Church. In Clark's interpretation, the system remained virtually intact until it suddenly collapsed in 1828 because Catholic emancipation undermined Anglican supremacy which was its central symbolic prop. Clark argues that the consequences were enormous: "The shattering of a whole social order [...]. What was lost at that point [...] was not merely a constitutional arrangement, but the intellectual ascendancy of a worldview, the cultural hegemony of the old elite".[6] Clark's interpretation has been widely debated in the scholarly literature[7] and almost every single historian who has examined the issue has highlighted the substantial amount of continuity between the periods before and after 1828–1832.[8]

Eric J. Evans emphasizes that the political importance of Catholic emancipation in 1829 was that it split the anti-reformers beyond repair and diminished their ability to block future reform laws, especially the great Reform Act of 1832. Paradoxically, Wellington's success in forcing through emancipation converted many Ultra-Tories to demand reform of Parliament. They saw that the votes of the rotten boroughs had given the government its majority. Therefore, it was the Ultra-Tory the Marquess of Blandford who in February 1830 introduced the first major reform bill, calling for the transfer of rotten borough seats to the counties and large towns, the disfranchisement of non-resident voters, preventing Crown office-holders from sitting in Parliament, the payment of a salary to MPs and the general franchise for men who owned property. Such ultras believed that somewhat more open elections would be relied upon to oppose Catholic equality.[9]

• Gaunt, R. A. (2003). "The Fourth Duke of Newcastle, The Ultra-Tories and the Opposition to Canning's Administration". History. 88 (4): 568–586. JSTOR 24426952.
• Jaggard, Edwin (2014). "Lord Falmouth and the Parallel Political Worlds of Ultra-Toryism, 1826–1832". Parliamentary History. 33 (2): 300–320. doi:10.1111/1750-0206.12099.