Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 1.djvu/550

 500 COMPLETE PEERAGE apparently inconsistent votes of individuals, on various questions and at various stages of their public careers, increases the difficulty of classification. " Throughout the 230 years which have elapsed since party nomen- clature became a permanent feature of our parliamentary system, there has been a more or less continuous supply of those sturdily ' independent ' members — men of the type of the first Lord Lilford, William Wilberforce, John Arthur Roebuck, and Harold Cox — who were the despair alike of contemporary "Whips and of future historians. By whatever party name, if any, they may have elected to be called at any given date, the label of a single epithet would be delusive without some annotation. We are on surer ground when we have to deal with those whose political opinions, whether in the normal course of some evolutionary process or through the operation of more expeditious inducements, underwent complete transform- ation — those for whom party malignit)' or the attractiveness of monosyl- labic emphasis has provided the ineuphonious but expressive designation 'rats,' and for not a few of whom, especially in these later days, a change of political connexion has been found to be the precursor of a coronet or of the Ulster hand. "Politicians like Godolphin and Peterborough and Haversham in the Lords, or ' Jack ' Howe in the Commons, who boxed the party compass in the days of William III and Anne, were early practitioners of that fine art of political tergiversation, which in the master hands of Charles Fox and the first Lord Auckland and Peel and Graham and Gladstone was reduced almost to an exact science, and is still illustrated by no unskilled exponent in the ranks of the leading statesmen of the year 19 10. "From 1679 to the death of George I the distinction of Whig and Tory was sufficiently marked to ensure a fairly accurate discrimination, except in the case of those members of either House who rarely took part in important debates or divisions. " For the later years of Walpole's government (1730-42) I have used the simple term ' Whig ' to denote the Prime Minister's adherents, distinguishing those of his opponents who were not Tories pure and simple by the epithet ' Anti-Walpolean.' " From the fall of Walpole till the rise of the new Tory party under the younger Pitt, the Tories became less and less an organised political connexion, and in fact had almost ceased to exist under that name when George III ascended the throne : politicians like Egremont, Halifax, Barrington, Nugent, even Lord North himself, who were ranged on the side of the Court in its struggle with the old Whig families, regarding themselves as being no less genuine Whigs than the Bentincks and Caven- dishes and Lennoxes and Wentworths, who affi;cted to monopolise, by a kind of divine right of permanent tenure, the trusteeship of the Revolution settlement. " The difficulty of precise classification is complicated by the action of the Grenville and Bedford Whigs. Both these sections protested against the Repeal of the Stamp Act, and supported the measures taken against the American Colonists, while the former section, although the original