associations

associations were a stage in the development of lobbies to express opinion and influence policy. They began innocuously as demonstrations of loyalty at times of crisis. Burghley and Walsingham sponsored an association to protect Queen Elizabeth in 1584 against the machinations of Mary, queen of Scots' supporters. Another association to support and, if necessary, avenge William III followed the discovery of Fenwick's conspiracy in 1696: the signatories wore orange ribbons with gold letters declaring ‘National Association for King William’. The archbishop of York launched an association in 1745 to repulse the young pretender and safeguard the Hanoverians. But associations could be turned to other purposes. The Yorkshire Association in 1780 called for economical reform and Lord George Gordon's Protestant Association deplored concessions to the catholics. The speaker of the House of Commons reflected conservative attitudes when he expressed his ‘total disapproval of the committees and associations: they were in his opinion extremely improper.’ In the 1790s, under the shadow of the French Revolution, Lord Henderland denounced the Friends of the People—an association for parliamentary reform: ‘what occasion for such associations, with such names?’ Shelburne in 1795 referred to associations as a discovery as momentous in politics as any in science, and J. F. Stephen, in his sardonic way, observed in 1850 that ‘for the diffusion of any blessing of which mankind can partake, there is a committee’.

J. A. Cannon