If “personality and not principles shape the age,” then certainly Henry Brougham left his mark not only on the Whigs, but on the very nature and style of modern British politics itself. In his account of the “Whig revival,” William Anthony Hay provides a cogent synthesis of many of the key social and political forces of late Georgian Britain and considers their role in the creation of a national political culture. The rapid expansion of pamphlet journalism, a wider readership as well as publication in the provinces, the rise to local and thence national prominence of a new manufacturing elite, all factor into Hay's understanding of a new kind of political nation and its need for a new style of political party. It is Hay's contention that parliamentarians like Henry Brougham understood not only political debate and party contest in the House of Commons, but also the ways in which those debates registered in the minds of a burgeoning provincial middle class. Brougham's understandings of publicity and journalism were brought to bear in molding this new and rapidly expanding industrial and commercial interest into a national political consciousness. Thus it is Brougham, in Hay's account, who reinvents interest as opinion and takes it from the aristocratic clubs of the metropolis to the county associations of a new, and middle-class, manufacturing elite based in the provinces.

Hay's study is a fascinating portrait of the metamorphosis of political men and political methods. To say that Brougham's party had endured a long dry season would be a temperate characterizion of the climate for Whig opposition, which lasted from the accession of George III in 1760 to the end of the Tory ascendancy that, as Hay describes it, finally “cracked” in 1827 with the stroke that left Liverpool “if not actually, at least politically dead” (137). Clearly, the Whigs had long been out of tune with the country and could not resume the old methods of patronage and oligarchy. The age-old and timely question was, for Brougham and the Whigs, how to reinvent and, by doing so, reinvigorate the politics of the day. Brougham did so by taking on “monopolies in Commerce, Religion and Politics” (4) but, particularly, in opposing the aristocratic political monopoly of the grandees. His assault on the hegemony of the old families was most forcefully demonstrated in his contest of the Lowther interest in Westmoreland. Although they did not win representation, his three contests of the Westmoreland elections earned him a reputation as a rabble-rouser and spoiler. Wordsworth viewed Lord Lowther as the very model of paternalistic nobility. In turn, he castigated Brougham as a “demagogue and proponent of political economy, … all Wordsworth feared about modernity” (82).

A curious and provocative implication of Hay's argument is that Brougham may have revitalized what had once been the essence of old Whig politics. While the Whigs of the latter part of the eighteenth century had descended to the factional cronyism that their “Honest” and “True” forbearers had derided as hallmarks of court patronage and corruption, Brougham's national (as opposed to Patriot) revival recovered the inclusive nature of the country's and the party's ideal of a participatory independence. Hay suggests this direction in Brougham's thinking early in his study: “Where Edmund Burke had earlier crafted an intellectual justification of party activity, Brougham applied the concept and extended it beyond the House of Commons to the Nation as a whole” (2). Here, then, Brougham would take Burke's emphasis on the concrete to heart and combine practice with principle—but the principle would be the pursuit of the very modernizing and progressive policies that had so alarmed Wordsworth. That said, it must be emphasized that Burke, unlike Wordsworth, was not a nostalgic. It was innovation and not advancement that concerned Burke. Brougham worked for an inclusive national politics through the strategic use of contested elections. In doing so, he opened up county and borough politics and effectively extended party contest from Westminster to the constituencies. In no small measure, this new political practice would bring representational politics to a national level to a greater degree than would the reshuffle of seats in 1832.

The recognition that the rapidly changing nature of public opinion was a development concomitant with the rising influence of regional or provincial interests allowed the Whigs to recapture the parliamentary ascendancy that had for almost seventy-five years eluded them. In some measure, Brougham co-opted the new Tory strategies of the 1780s and 1790s by recognizing the importance of the new commercial men, in the same fashion that had allowed William Pitt's governments to counter older, landed, aristocratic Whig interests. It is Hay's contention that Brougham turned the focus of this strategy away from the capital and brought it to bear on politics in the provinces. He did so by attaching his broadsides to questions that united local and national interests for the provincial middle class. However, this effort to identify and the unite a broad range of liberal reform interests did not suggest a harmonious alliance of party. The Whig revival was to be short-lived. It was, perhaps inevitably, a fragile coalition; and, indeed, when it dissolved, Brougham's “stock with the Whigs fell” (153). But his persistent attention to practical matters—to generating a new reforming social and economic policy, to addressing the “Condition of England Question,” to slaying the hydra of taxation, and, yes, to modernizing the political and economic nation—brought Brougham lasting support from provincial liberals. The business of government would, arguably, never be the same. If Hay is right, then the recognition of this change by national politicians, like Brougham, who understood the force of provincial journalism and opinion also transformed the language and culture of politics. Hay is an astute observer of political practice and political spin. Perhaps he has recognized the nineteenth-century origins of contemporary political life in the irrevocable alteration of principle through the person of Henry Brougham.