Country Party (Britain)

In Britain in the era 1680–1740, especially in the days of Robert Walpole (1720s to 1740s), the Country Party was a coalition of Tories and disaffected Whigs. It was a movement rather than an organized 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 exposed as British tyranny and to develop a powerful political philosophy of republicanism in the United States.

Hoppit (2000) argues that around 1700 instead of a Country "party" England had a Country persuasion. The main points of agreement were demands that the government should be frugal and efficient, opposition to high taxes, a concern for personal liberty, a quest for more frequent elections, a faith that the local militia would substitute for a dangerous standing army, and a desire for such moral reforms as temperance in an age of drunkenness, and less Sabbath breaking. The Country leaders stressed the civic duty of the upper class to engage in politics to strengthen the national interest.

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