Welsh Journals

JACOBITES AND FREEMASONS IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WALES SEVERAL recent studies have made apparent the full complexity of British Toryism during the eighteenth century. In particular, it is clear that it was not merely a movement based on sentiment for the exiled Stuarts, nor on a wish for a monarchy founded on religious concepts of divine right, although it contained both these elements.! It also inherited a large measure of the traditional 'country' ideology, which feared and mistrusted virtually any government; and it even drew to itself some of the heirs of urban radicalism, a strand which fitted surprisingly well with Stuart nostalgia.2 Another paradox was in religious matters, where one mainstay of the Tory tradition was loyalty to the established church. However, some Tories were working for the restoration of a catholic dynasty, while certain of their radical allies were strongly anti-clerical, and the bishops of the established church were often erastian Whigs. Traditional con- figurations were breaking up by the 1760s, and to some extent Toryism was resolving itself into its component elements. Some Tory M.P.s chose to support the government against the Wilkites; they found themselves defending church, state and Crown, and no longer facing the difficult decision as to which of these three most deserved their affection. They had been restored to their natural ideological home, and the renewed alliance with established order may be symbolised by the events of 1774, when Oxford University (a heartland of the Ultras) elected as chancellor the prime minister of a Hanoverian king. The radicals, likewise, returned to more congenial company, and those who would earlier have supported the crypto-Jacobite 'Independent electors of Westminster' now opposed the government on traditional libertarian issues, such as the Wilkes affair and America. However, the older alignments left curious traces, and Drs. Brewer and Colley have shown how much the Wilkites inherited from Toryism, including a party colour (blue), and some songs and slogans. This is only a small part of the story. Toryism under the first two Georges had always commanded substantial support. Dr. Linda ] L. Colley, 'The Tory party, 1727-1760' (unpublished University of Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1976); John Brewer, Party ideology and popular politics at the accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976); G. Holmes, British politics in the age of Anne (London, 1967). N. Rogers, 'Aristocratic clientage, trade and independency: popular politics in pre- radical Westminster', Past and Present, No. 61 (1973), pp. 70-106.