Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650-1730.
Bailey, Richard G.
Dismembering the Body Politic: Partisan Politics in England's Towns, 1650-1730, by Paul D. Halliday. New York, Cambridge University Press, 1998. xvi, 393 pp. $69.95.
From the Middle Ages, borough corporations were authorized by the king to act in his name as a single body with many members. Paul Halliday describes how partisan politics dismembered the body politic between the time of the civil wars and the Walpolean ascendancy.
For several decades interpretive studies have been moving away from the centre and into the counties, boroughs and parishes of England, but two aspects of Halliday's study offer something new: his view of partisan politics from the towns themselves, and his extensive case studies based on rarely used sources drawn from rolls and order books of the Court of King's Bench which adjudicated legal concerns issuing forth from corporations. One might imagine that partisan politics would only add to instability in a land tom by civil war and legal confusion left in the wake of the Interregnum years. On the contrary, Halliday's study of two hundred towns led him to conclude that partisan politics helped to create political stability, because the King's Bench provided legal recourse to resolve partisan conflict primarily through increased use of writs of mandamus and quo warranto. This book "uncouples" the connection between conflict and instability and takes direct aim at the "historiography of crisis" advocated by J.H. Plumb in The Growth of Political Stability in England (1967). A society marked by conflict is not necessarily unstable. Apart from 1688, society successfully accommodated conflict through the use of King's Bench.
Another pillar of the old historiography to fall here is the view that partisan conflict was a "top-down" phenomenon. Partisan politics emerged out of England's borough corporations and not in Parliament. Nor were partisan politics "party" politics in the modern sense. Halliday takes into account recent revisions of older theories to demonstrate that before the 1680s it is more accurate to speak of "polarities of belief" and we find these at the local level and not in Parliament.
After the Restoration, corporate actions of the Protectorate were reversed and corporations were re-established largely through the Corporation Act of 1661 which excluded religious dissidents from holding office. Exclusion led to purges in the corporations and kept the fires of partisan politics burning. King's Bench was increasingly sought out to adjudicate contested elections. Privy Council, which lacked judicial authority, faded from view as corporate litigants sought total victory through force of law. The shift in jurisdiction not only created a new body of law but "helped create and protect the legitimacy of partisan politics" (p. 145).
The process of granting new charters after 1660 arose in response to local and not crown initiative. Only in the 1680s was there a shift from corporate to royal initiative. The classic Whig view (J.H. Sacret) advocated a continuity of crown initiative to control borough government throughout Charles II's reign. Halliday contends that the Whig view failed to contrast royal policy in the early Restoration with the 1680s when continuity was broken and a new charter policy emerged as a crown reaction to pressures from the localities. Halliday does not deny the expansion of crown powers in the boroughs during the Restoration, most evident in the approbation clause in new charters; however, only after 1680 did the King take advantage of his power to force surrender of charters. Halliday's discussion of Charles's successful use of quo warranto to force surrender of Worcester and London's charters is among the most judicious to appear.
By the 1680s there were clearly two sides to partisan contests: "loyal" (Tories) and "factious" (Whigs). Statutory toleration in 1687 produced a new wave of purges and the dismissal of thousands of "loyals" creating "the one period of true crisis for local government in the three generations after the restoration of the monarchy" (p. 239). The traditionally positive view of toleration is recast by Halliday who effectively describes how toleration had the effect of overturning the political status quo in the corporations. The new crew of local politicians had "no natural place in local political life" (p. 239). It was a grave miscalculation by James and challenges the view that James's efforts in the boroughs proceeded "with a clear understanding of political realities" (p. 239).
Halliday uses King's Bench records to successfully challenge J.H. Plumb's conclusions that political peace in England only came with the victory of single party government. Political contests between Whigs and Tories continued in the boroughs well beyond 1715. Halliday is convincing in his demonstration of pre-1688 partisan politics as a "bottom-up" phenomenon. The argument is not so convincing for the period between 1689 and 1714 when Parliament became more of a force in the nation's affairs and courts. Partisan politics between 1715 and 1730 is only briefly discussed at the end of the book. This is an important book and should be studied by anyone interested in the impact of partisan politics on the body politic.
Richard G. Bailey
Tarbes, France
