Page:The Complete Peerage Ed 2 Vol 1.djvu/551

 APPENDIX I 501 proceedings against Wilkes had been initiated by their leader in 1763, joined the Chatham and the Rockingham Whigs (the Bedford group, irreverently termed by their opponents ' the Bloomsbury gang,' standing aloof), in vehement opposition to the action of the Grafton ministry with regard to the Middlesex election of 1769 and the agitation to which it gave occasion. " In dealing with the period from 1780 to 1783 I have had regard to facts rather than to names, and have classified the adherents of Lord North's administration generally as Tories and its opponents as Whigs, though probably most of the former would have disclaimed the party name which I have assigned to them. " Many of North's colleagues and adherents, as Loughborough, Carlisle, Eden, Stormont, Sandwich, <yc., followed their leader into the disastrous Coalition of 1783, and continued afterwards to act, some for a time only and some permanently, with the Whig opposition to Pitt's ministry, whilst leading W'^higs, as Camden, Gower, Carmarthen, Thomas Townshend, Wilkes, &'c., gave their support to Pitt, most of them ultimately becoming indistinguishable from Tories, though they did not adopt the name. "From the Regency Bill of 1789 to the close of the i8th century the main body of Pitt's supporters may for historical purposes be classed as Tories, though Pitt himself and Grenville, his leader in the House of Lords, would hardly have accepted the designation: these were reinforced in 1794 by the Portland-Burke section of the W^higs, some of whom were with Portland himself finally incorporated in the Tory party, whilst others, as Windham, Spencer, Minto, i^c, reverted to their old Whig connexion after the Peace of Amiens. For some years after Pitt's resignation the Grenville and Addington sections were disturbing elements as political combinations, till they were merged (the latter in 18 12, and the former in 1822), in the main body of the Tory party. The Canningite group and (at a later date) the Peelites have also to be considered; with few exceptions, after the deaths of their respective leaders, they gravitated towards and were finally swallowed up by the Liberals. The Liberal Unionists of 1886 are of too recent date to cause any difficulty in identification, although in one or two cases such authorities as Dod and Who^s Who regard the same individual as ' Conservative ' and ' Liberal Unionist ' respectively in the same year, and some Liberal peers who avowed their opposition to Home Rule in 1886 are classed with their old party in Dod till 1892 or 1893. "As I have said, it is not in my judgment possible to indicate with precision, by the simple use of the terms ' Whig ' and ' Tory,' the avowed principles and the course of action (often tortuous and evasive) of politicians in the half century that followed the fall of Walpole, or even in the time of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. I am conscious that where I have used those terms without modification my fundamentum divisionis may not commend itself to every student of the subject, but I think the explanation 1 have given will render my classification intel- ligible. " I ought to add that for any errors whether of fact or judgment, 64