The October Club was a group of
Tory
A Tory () is an individual who supports a political philosophy known as Toryism, based on a British version of traditionalist conservatism which upholds the established social order as it has evolved through the history of Great Britain. The To ...
Members of Parliament, established after the
1710 general election.
The Club was active until approximately 1714. The group took its name from the strong ale they reportedly drank.
[Pat Rogers, â]
October Club (''act''. 1711–1714)
€™, ''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, May 2010, accessed 2 August 2010.
The group has been characterized as having
High Church
A ''high church'' is a Christian Church whose beliefs and practices of Christian ecclesiology, Christian liturgy, liturgy, and Christian theology, theology emphasize "ritual, priestly authority, ndsacraments," and a standard liturgy. Although ...
tendencies.
After the
Lord High Treasurer Robert Harley refused to set up an inquiry into the former administration's financial policies, on 5 February 1711 some Tories passed resolutions calling for inquires into suspected financial abuses. Initially 70 to 80 strong, the October Club attracted not just young and inexperienced
backbenchers but older Tories such as Ralph Freeman, Sir
John Pakington, Sir
Justinian Isham,
Peter Shakerley and Sir
Thomas Hanmer. The group grew to have "perhaps 200 members".
The group were, according to
H. T. Dickinson, "a major threat to the
Harley administration".
Linda Colley claims that the bulk of the membership were of
Royalist
A royalist supports a particular monarch as head of state for a particular kingdom, or of a particular dynastic claim. In the abstract, this position is royalism. It is distinct from monarchism, which advocates a monarchical system of gove ...
ancestry.
[Linda Colley, ''In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714-60'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 87.]
Notes
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Clubs and societies in London
Dining clubs
Tory MPs (pre-1834)