Country Party (Britain)
Country Party was the name employed in the Kingdom of England by an early to middle 18th century political movement that campaigned in opposition to the Whig Walpole ministry.
It was a term taken up by opponents of Walpole's Ministers of the Crown and the Court Party who supported them, which they claimed was acting tyrannically and against the interest of the British nation and its people. It took its name from a late 17th century grouping what would later become known as the Whig Party, characterised by its opposition to absolute monarchy.
History
Original Country Party
The original Country Party was a faction which opposed absolute monarchism and favoured exclusionism.In the late 1670s, the term "whiggamor", shortened to "Whig", started being applied to the party – first as a pejorative term, then adopted and taken up by the party itself. The name "Country Party" was thus discarded – to be taken up later by opponents of the Whig Party itself, once it had come to dominate British politics following the Glorious Revolution.
Country Party (1726—1752)
During the period from the 1680s to the 1740s, and especially under the Walpole ministry from 1730 to 1743, the Country Party was a coalition of Tories and disaffected Whigs.It was a movement rather than an organised party and had no formal structure or leaders. It claimed to be a nonpartisan force fighting for the nation's interest—the whole "country"—against the self-interested actions of the politicians in power in London. Country men believed the Court Party was corrupting Britain by using patronage to buy support and was threatening English and Scottish liberties and the proper balance of authority by shifting power from Parliament to the prime minister. It sought to constrain the court by opposing standing armies, calling for annual elections to Parliament, and wanted to fix power in the hands of the landed gentry rather than the royal officials, urban merchants or bankers. It opposed any practices it saw as corruption.
The Country Party attracted a number of influential writers and political theorists. The ideology of the party faded away in England but became a powerful force in the American colonies, where its tracts strongly motivated the Patriots to oppose what the Country Party had cast as British monarchical tyranny and to develop a powerful political philosophy of republicanism in the United States.
Contemporary opposition journalism fed into paired Country-Whig general histories in the 1740s: William Guthrie’s A General History of England carried the narrative to 1688, while James Ralph’s The History of England, During the Reigns of King William, Queen Anne, and King George I treated the post-Revolution decades, testing ministries against principles of liberty and economy and appending fiscal and military data.
Bolingbroke
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke was especially influential in stating the need and outlining the machinery of a systematic parliamentary opposition. Such an opposition he called a "country party" which he opposed to the court party. Country parties had been formed before, for instance after the king's speech to Parliament in November 1685, but Bolingbroke was the first to state the need for a continual opposition to the government. To his mind the spirit of liberty was threatened by the court party's lust for power.Liberty could only be safeguarded by an opposition party that used "constitutional methods and a legal course of opposition to the excesses of legal and ministerial power…". He instructed the opposition party to "Wrest the power of government, if you can, out of the hands that employed it weakly and wickedly" This work could be done only by a homogeneous party "…because such a party alone will submit to a drudgery of this kind". It did not suffice to be eager to speak, keen to act. "They who affect to head an opposition, …, must be equal, at least, to those whom they oppose…". The opposition had to be of a permanent nature to make sure that it would be looked at as a part of daily politics. It had to contrast, on every occasion, the government. He considered a party that systematically opposed the government to be more appealing than a party that occasionally opposed the government. This opposition had to prepare itself to control government.