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Changes in governing norms and the development of institutional capacity and routines that foster public presidential promotion generate incentives and expectations for the presidents to overestimate their personal power and underestimate durable institutional and political constraints. The result is a tendency — especially on major programmatic initiatives — to squander leadership opportunities and to leave presidents in weakened political positions. This chapter examines the rise of presidential promotions and its impact on White House calculations by tracing changes in the White House's institutional capacity for reaching the public, a content analysis of presidential appeals is given, and comparative case studies of institutionally strong presidents — those who enjoyed the rare and advantaged position of unified party government are studied. The chapter's conclusion weighs the implications of what may be an emerging form of institutional Toryism — one that recalibrates the constitutional balance of authority under certain conditions and legitimizes a politically astute future Democratic president to use the new norms of governance for liberal ends.

This chapter examines the process of the formation of Disraeli's initial understandings of the East and the Eastern Question. The social and political context within which the young Disraeli grew up is scrutinized, as well as the influence of his Jewish origins and the personality of his father, Isaac D'Israeli. The influence of the liberal Toryism of Canning and the romanticism of Lord Byron on the shaping of Disraeli's understanding of the Eastern Question are equally stressed. Finally, the influence of Gibbon's pessimistic view of the 'slavic races' of Eastern Europe as examples of ‘barbarism’ and ‘backwardness’ is also highlighted.

This chapter deals with Hannah More's last years, a period of bereavement, increasing frailty, and reactionary politics. In response to the post-1815 radical publications, she published Cheap Repository Tracts suited to the Present Times. Her Moral Sketches acquired mild notoriety because of its francophobic attack on British visitors to France. The Queen Caroline affair and Catholic emancipation reinforced her Toryism. She joined the Ultra Constitutional Association. She was suspicious of some of he new trends in Evangelicalism and came to distrust the millenarian preacher Edward Irving. Forced to leave Barley Wood because of the depredations of her servants, she died at Clifton in 1833.

Aside from Darwin, the writer most commonly associated with evolution in Victorian Britain, and the country’s most famous living philosopher, was the individualistic Herbert Spencer. Spencer certainly seems an unlikely altruist, but it was the influence of his writings, including his Data of Ethics (1879), that did most to guarantee the wider dissemination of the language of altruism from the 1870s onwards. This chapter explains what altruism meant to Spencer; how he used it in his attacks on the brutality and hypocrisy of British imperialism; how it led many readers, to his great frustration, to identify him as a disciple of Comte; and how he finally dropped the term as it came to be associated with socialism. Spencer’s combination of altruism abroad and egoism at home made sense as two sides of his resistance to political and ideological movements which he thought represented the ‘New Toryism’.

The chapter discusses how historical romance emerged. Eighteenth-century fiction was mostly focused on the relationship between the gentry and other social classes. This chapter provides an analysis of the works of Disraeli, Scott, and the other authors to explore the interplay of relationships among different characters that represent the social classes and their differences and similarities of ideas in terms of their belief in Romantic Toryism.

This chapter shows how Behn and her panegyrists construct an empowering authorial image in which feminine erotic potency and Stuart loyalism are intimately connected by drawing on the celebration of erotic freedom in Tory celebrations of the restored theatre — and especially on their politicisation of the public figure of the actress. The eroticisation of Tory femininity in the climate of a newly libertine court culture and theatre allows fresh inflections of the politicised rhetoric of female heroism at work in Cavendish's authorial image. Yet, in her pindaric odes, in particular, Behn registers the limitations of the eroticised authorial image and seeks to assert her agency as a political writer distinct from the limitations of this construction. In her plays too, she interrogates the idea that sexual libertinism can provide an equally satisfactory expression of pro-Stuart loyalties for men and women alike. Where Behn's more head-on engagement with the literary marketplace often draws her writing closer to propaganda than that of Cavendish or Philips, she also uses her innovative prose fictions as a space to explore the political leverage available to the writer through control over literary representation.

The Suez Canal incident brought painful realizations of diminished power in the international arena along with currency restrictions, social spending cuts, and petrol rationing due to related oil supply issues. Britain implemented cuts in its military budget and activity and abandoned the nuclear defence programme, which further highlighted the spectre of dependency with the United States. However, there were successes on the domestic front brought about by conservative financial management and led to moderate economic growth, the resolution of another sterling crisis, low unemployment, and the stabilization of the balance-of-payments deficit led to an almost total Conservative party victory in the 1959 elections. Challenges to Tory rule were presented by the Labour Party as well as the growing nuclear disarmament group. The rise in living standards and affluence also masked problems of social inequality for marginalized citizens, housing inadequacies, and the monopolies of real estate developers.

This chapter first addresses the entry of women into higher education and professions in England. It specifically deals with Cornelia Sorabji in Somerville Hall, Oxford. When she joined Somerville Hall, she was not sure what course she would pursue. Her Oxford experience proved to be crucial in making her what she was to become. She also did become the first woman to study for the BCL at Oxford, a major landmark in the history of women's entry into higher education. Oxford treated Cornelia as an ‘exception’. She had the privilege of being inducted into the Oxford elite circle from her initial days at the university, and she took pride in this fact. The patronage that Cornelia received at Oxford was largely because of its multiple involvements with the sustenance of the Empire. Moreover, her response to the male bias in Oxford is revealed. Additionally, it covers the new Toryism, authoritarian liberalism and faith in the Empire. Once Cornelia had completed her studies in Oxford, life appeared to be more difficult than she expected.

This chapter focuses on the conservative reaction to the emergence of radical Whiggism in the 1750s and 1760s —termed the New Toryism—that developed during the 1760s and early 1770s. What was the character of the New Toryism? How and why did it transform British overseas expansion as a whole, from the colonies of North America and the West Indies to the trading settlements of South Asia? Before examining in detail the rise and development of the New Toryism during the early reign of King George III and the shift it led to in Britain's imperial expansion, it first settles accounts with the Namierite interpretation that has remained prominent for over six decades in the historiography on the politics of empire during the 1760s and 1770s.

The chapter outlines ‘dynastic discourse’, the political language that used dynasties as encapsulations of political alternatives. It situates John Locke in this context and argues for its continuance into the 1750s. It is difficult to reconstruct Paine’s early intellectual formation, but what is known is closer to the world of the 1690s than to that of the 1790s. The young Paine seems to have absorbed an ancient ideal of agrarian independence; his Newtonianism pointed in no republican direction, and Paine may in his youth have explored Deism and even Methodism. The dynastic language of ‘tyranny’ and ‘slavery’ was, however, still available to him in rural Lewes.