ABSTRACT
If Whigs and Tories were to cooperate, wrote Lord Stawell on 3 May 1711, ‘I shall conclude the lamb will lye down with the leopard.’ Changing the metaphor, Lord Halifax believed it would be like ‘mixing Oyl and Vinegar (very truly)’.1 Unlike the
reign of William III, there is no doubt about the continuing predominance of party rivalries during the reign of Queen Anne. The evidence of division lists, tellers’ names in divisions recorded in the Commons Journals, and the Proxy Book of peers, which lists the names of those colleagues who were entrusted with the proxy votes of absent peers, indicates that the vast majority of MPs from 1702 to 1714 followed a consistent Whig or Tory voting pattern. Nor did most MPs follow Whig or Tory party lines only on major issues of principle, but also on minor tactical issues – on the choice of speaker and the amendment to a South Sea Company Bill, as well as on the future of the Church. Moreover, party rivalry extended beyond parliament. To a certain extent, smart London society polarized into separate Whig and Tory social circles. For the upper elite, the Whig Kit-Cat Club and the Tory Society of Brothers became mutually exclusive dining and drinking clubs. Less grand and more popular, many of the coffee and chocolate houses, which proliferated in London at the turn of the century, developed a reputation as either Whig or Tory establishments, the Whigs frequenting the Cocoa Tree in Pall Mall and the St James’s Coffee House, the Tories Ouzinda’s Chocolate House in St James’s Street and the Smyrna in Pall Mall. This political apartheid was sometimes carried to comically absurd limits: in 1713 the earl of Sunderland, arriving at the house of his Whig colleague, Lord Halifax, for a dinner party, went home when he realized that Robert Harley (now earl of Oxford), who was by this time more closely identifi ed with the Tory party than ever before, was also invited.2
