The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III facts for kids

The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III was a book written by Lewis Namier. At the time of its first publication in 1929 it caused a historiographical revolution in understanding the 18th century by challenging the Whig view that English politics had always been dominated by two parties.

Subject

The book covers the composition of the Parliament of Great Britain in the 1760s particularly covering English politics, an area Namier was considered to be particularly authoritative. His principal conclusion of that decade was that British politics in the mid-1860s was very loosely partisan and governed more by a set of personal alliances within the wider power structure, which was a direct repudiation of the Whig view that English politics had always been dominated by two parties. By way of its very detailed study of individuals, this course of study caused substantial revision to accounts based on a party system.

Thesis

Namier argued against the prevailing if declining Whig interpretation of the struggle against George III as a stage in the long term conflict between liberty and tyranny where although the king by now lacked the power to openly challenge the House of Commons' authority, it instead tried to drain power from parliament through corruption which led to the loss of the American colonies. The book argues that eighteenth century British politics was run by a network of powerful families, with the help of dependent clients with the Court as only the most important of the great families using fundamentally the same methods, albeit with greater means. However, George III could justifiably claim that he more closely embodied the national interest than the other territorial magnates and noble families who controlled Parliament. This was part of a centuries long tradition of political independence through an active share in local and national government meaning that English liberty did not result from a revolt against an aristocratic power but its gradual extension.

Structure

The book consisted of nine chapters, the first two were surveys of the backgrounds of people who became MPs looking at particular types of MPs while studiously avoiding parties. There is then a chapter detailing the differing electoral structures within English constituencies in 1760. There are then two essays on more specific nation topics, a consciously revisionist essay on the 1761 General Election and another essay on the management of the secret service funds by The Duke of Newcastle aiming to show that the fund was used more as a charitable resource for the distressed but well connected rather than a means to influence parliament, and the secret service accounts are reproduced in an appendix.

A second volume looks at specific boroughs looking first at politics in the relatively independent and uncorrupted county of Shropshire which sent a Whig delegation from the relatively Tory north west of England due to the influence of Henry Herbert, the Earl of Powis and Robert Clive - but in the end claimed to show that despite the appearances of a party organisation there the personal rivalry within parties and connections across parties were more important. There was then a survey of the widely perceived rotten Cornish borough seats as these were more dependent on the government and outside influence and showing that these were far less aristocratic than many other counties. There was then an analysis of two borough seats that were politically managed by the Treasury – Harwich and Orford and finally a set of biographical of MPs who drew secret service pensions aiming to underscore that these payments were unimportant in terms of influence.

Method

Namier used prosopography or collective biography of every Member of Parliament (MP) and peer who sat in the British Parliament in the latter 18th century to reveal that local interests, not national ones, often determined how parliamentarians voted. Namier argued very strongly that far from being tightly organised groups, both the Tories and Whigs were collections of ever-shifting and fluid small groups whose stances altered on an issue-by-issue basis. Namier felt that prosopographical methods were the best for analysing small groups like the House of Commons, but he was opposed to the application of prosopography to larger groups.

"What Namier's minutely detailed studies revealed was the fact that politics in 1760 consisted mainly in the jockeying for position and influence by individuals within the political elite" rather than ideas such as liberty or democracy, or rivalry with foreign kings, or social effects of industrial and technological change. Richard J. Evans wrote that "spending many years himself, off and on, in psychoanalysis, [Namier] believed that the "deep-seated drives and emotions" of the individual were what explained politics."

Similar Works

In 1930, a year after first publishing The Structure of Politics at the Accession of George III Namier published England in the Age of the American Revolution which developed his structural analysis and in the 1930s they were often treated together. The second book aimed to refute the idea that George III was set on undermining American liberties. A number of Namier's students published similar works using structural analysis to analyse eighteenth century English politics, such as John Brooke's biography of Charles Townshend.

In 1931, shortly after first publishing Structure of Politics and England in the Age of the American Revolution he became a professor at Manchester University and focused more on diplomatic history. But in 1953 he retired from Manchester and in 1957 a second version of Structure of Politics was published. Also after Namier retired he intensified work on the History of Parliament series, concentrating on the same mid eighteenth century period, although that volume had to be completed after his death by his student and co-editor John Brooke. His writing for the History of Parliament series concentrated on the social makeup of MPs and their ties to one another, in the same vein as the first chapters of Structure of Politics, reflecting his idea that "the social history of England could be written in terms of the membership of the House of Commons.