Country Party (Britain)

rdf:langString Country Party (Britain)

rdf:langString Country Party

rdf:langString Country Party

rdf:langString The Craftsman

rdf:langString cyan

rdf:langString the United Kingdom

rdf:langString In Britain in 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 Court Party, that is 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 (instead of the seven-year term in effect), 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 (such as Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson, and Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun) 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. Historically, the name "Country Party" was used by what became the Whig Party itself in its initial stages, when headed by the Earl of Shaftesbury during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-1681. Then, 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.