Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The Political Sow-Gelder, or the Castration of Whig and, Tory (1715), a tract attributed to Daniel Defoe, lamented ‘what a woful Condition is Poor England reduced to, that … we are brought to this unhappy Dilemma, that we must be either Whig or Tory’. These party labels were, the author lamented, ‘names invented in hell and spread about this kingdom to brand honest Men with odious characters and turn the whole nation into confusion’. Defoe reminded readers that a Tory meant a bog-trotter or Irish robber and Whig was a word that had originated in Scotland, meaning either a Presbyterian Covenanter or ‘a sort of Butter-Milk or Whey’ which was sour, ‘not unlike the present temper of the English, for when a Whig and a Tory meet together, they look as sower upon one another as so many Crab-Trees’. Such party bitterness, Defoe noted, ran deep and had become an ingrained feature of everyday life, with disastrous consequences for the nation's honesty and manners: ‘the design of Party-Men is not truth but to abuse each other, and like Billingsgate Orators, they that make the greatest noise and call the foulest names, get the better of it’. Moreover, the ‘Party-Men condemn the contrary Side, purely for opposition-sake’. Lamentably, Defoe suggested, such attitudes had spread right down the social scale and the mob made themselves ‘judge’ of every case. Written at the time of widespread Jacobite ... log in or subscribe to read full text