John Barnes, Historian

Conservative

The first use of the term Conservative as a description of the party is usually attributed to John Wilson Croker: he is cited as the author of a passage in the Quarterly Review ['Internal Policy' in Vol.42. p.276] of January 1830, which reads

"we now are as we have always been, decidedly and conscientiously attached to what is called the Tory, and which might with more propriety be called the Conservative, party..."[1]

However, if his biographer is correct, Croker was not writing for the Quarterly at the time. After a lapse of five years, he began writing for it again in July 1831.[2] In his Ford lectures, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics 1832-1852, Norman Gash suggests that the author is one of the two men regularly writing political articles in the Review, Fullerton or Miller, and there can be no more authoritative opinion.[3]

Halevy also quotes a reference to Conservative principles from another article in the Quarterly on Parliamentary Reform in January 1831 [Vol.44. p.595] including a sentence which claims a continental derivation for the term: "It would ill become those who desire to cherish the Conservative Principle to withhold, in circumstances like the present, on any mere party considerations, their cordial support from any Government which should evince a fixed determination to uphold that principle. The alternative use of the words 'conservative' and 'conservator' reveals the Continental and French derivation of the new term."[4] Wellington indeed wrote to Londonderry in April 1827: "Rely on it, dear Charles, the object of the great aristocracy and of the parti conservateur of this country is to secure the crown from the mischief with which it is threatened, by moderation, by consistency, by firmness and good temper."[5] He was later to write of his party that they were "the conservators of the Constitution."[6] Similarly Londonderry wrote to Buckingham of the "puissance conservative" in 1831.[7] The word 'conservative' had been used earlier by Canning in 1824 and Greville reports Herries as using it in 1829; Halevy has found an apt reference in Hansard where Lord John Russell refers to the Emperor of Russia's manifesto on Spanish affairs, quoting his assertion that "institutions emanating from thrones were conservative".[8] However, it was not widely used until the Quarterly popularised the term. Mrs Arbuthnot used the word for the first time in her journal in March 1831 and by the end of the year it was clearly in common use. The Standard, closely aligned to the high Tories, employed the term in its issue of 24 December 1831 as if it were familiar and by the following December, after the 1832 election, was employing it throughout its pages as a surrogate for Tory. The ultra-Tory Blackwoods Magazine made use of it in January 1832 and the Annual Register for 1832, enumerating the parties on the eve of the dissolution, wrote of "the tories, now called conservatives". Similarly the Edinburgh Review in an article on 'The Reformed Parliament' used the phrase, "what of late has been called Conservatives".[9] The Radical Colonel Perronet Thompson in the same month referred scornfully to the Tories being "all vaccinated into 'Conservatives'."[10]

Lord Mahon in his report to Peel on the results of the 1832 election used the term 'Conservative' throughout and Peel in his letter to Goulburn of 3 January 1833 wrote of "that Party which is called 'Conservative'".[11]