Party names ought to be ephemeral, the statesman Lord Halifax wrote in 1688, for otherwise people grow nauseous from hearing them repeated so often. ‘Whig, Tory, and Trimmer have had their time, now they are dead and forgotten, being supplanted by the word Equivalent, which reigneth in their stead.’

Equivalent fell into the deepest oblivion of all: the names of ‘Tory’ and ‘Whig’ waned, but were never eclipsed. The dominant political party in the House of Commons from 1783 until 1830 was sometimes known as the Pittites, after its first leader William Pitt the younger, but more generally as the Administration. In the period after 1815, some Pittites took conservateur to denominate their political creed, which opposed the ideas and deplored the consequences of the French Revolution. This was anglicized to ‘conservatory’, but the word had its political meaning spoilt by the patter of auctioneers selling villas with appendant glass-houses displaying exotic blooms and wicker chairs. ‘Conservatory’ was amended, in turn, to ‘conservative’. George Canning, who was Prime Minister in 1827, was one of the first parliamentary leaders to call himself a Tory. Robert Peel is accepted to have been the first ‘Conservative’ Prime Minister in 1834. The party label ‘Unionist’ was a fin-de-siècle usage by supporters of the Salisbury governments of the 1890s. It gained national currency by the renaming of the Conservative and Unionist Party in 1912.

Keith Feiling, the Examination Fellow in History elected by All Souls in 1906, who returned to the college, 40 years later, after his appointment as Chichele professor in Modern History, wrote histories of Toryism, and a biography of the Conservative leader Neville Chamberlain; but his feelings, and the set of principles on which he acted, should, he felt, be called ‘conservatory’. The dominant mentality of the nineteenth century had been commercial: it had created a social order based on buying and selling, movement and speed; insanitary factory towns brought more menacing and unruly forms of malcontent than filthy villages; modernity had produced, in sum, unsettlement. Feiling’s conservatory ideas were intended to tranquilize England, to address the estrangement of factory workers, and to protect people from unpredictable, abrupt disturbances that did mental and cultural harm exceeding any political or economic good. If his values had to be reduced to one word, Feiling said that word would be ‘permanence’.