Sir Richard Cocks: The Political Anatomy of a Country Whig

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Abstract
Sir Richard Cocks (c. 1659–1726) was a rare bird among the crook-taloned specimens perching on the back benches of King William III's House of Commons. He seems to have displayed every hallmark of that declining species, the Country Whig; impeccably Whiggish, indubitably rustic, learned in Greek and Roman history and versed in contemporary neo-Harringtonian literature; profoundly tolerant and resolutely erastian in his religious inclinations, even somewhat Puritan in outlook. He supported the Revolution settlement but opposed a standing army and entertained a healthy suspicion of placemen; approved of trade but distrusted the new power of finance; assisted Quakers and inveighed against priestcraft. What is more, he was never tempted to compromise his principles with the taint of office, nor to forsake his patriotism for Treasury gold. Old Whig, radical Whig, Roman Whig, Vulgar Whig, and independent country gentleman rolled into one, he stood almost alone among his fellow M.P.s, sometimes literally as well as metaphorically. Unlike the vast majority of these parliamentary colleagues, he left posterity a detailed record of his opinions, in the form of two albums or memoranda-books, now in the possession of the Bodleian Library, a handful of letters and essays scattered through various repositories, and a clutch of publications, religious tracts and charges delivered to grand juries in his native Gloucestershire. Of those contemporaries who kept diaries or preserved their personal papers the one whose social and political profile perhaps most resembles Cocks's is the Yorkshire baronet Sir Arthur Kaye, a Country Tory rather than a Country Whig, and with an archive of parliamentary diaries, letters, and speeches, mostly dating from the 1710s, that is nowhere near as extensive. Cocks's writings offer a unique opportunity to examine some of the thought processes at work in the mind of a rank-and-file Country Whig in what might be considered the golden age of Country Whiggery at the turn of the seventeenth century.

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