ABSTRACT
Modern Conservatives routinely claim that their party is the oldest political organisation in the Western world. Subsequent historians, including Boyd Hilton, Anna Gambles, and Jorg Neuheiser, have echoed Gash in locating the evolution of a distinctly Conservative policy, if not an actual Conservative Party, in the period following the Battle of Waterloo. The perilous position into which the Conservatives had fallen was reinforced by the first elections held under the new franchise in the newly re-drawn constituencies created by the Reform Act. Operative Conservative Associations played more than a purely political role in terms of co-ordinating and organising electoral activity. Extra-parliamentary Conservative organisation found its complement in innovations at Westminster. As Conservatives sought to recover their nerve and their fortunes, after the discomfiting experience of the 1841–1846 government, the Peelites occupied a position which seemed, to many observers, completely at variance with the ideals which they had previously worked to uphold.
