The October Club was a group of Tory Members of Parliament, established after the

1710 general election Year 171 ( CLXXI) was a common year starting on Monday (link will display the full calendar) of the Julian calendar. At the time, it was known as the Year of the Consulship of Severus and Herennianus (or, less frequently, year 924 ''Ab urbe con ...

. The Club was active until approximately 1714. The group took its name from the strong ale they reportedly drank.Pat Rogers, �
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 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

backbencher In Westminster and other parliamentary systems, a backbencher is a member of parliament (MP) or a legislator who occupies no governmental office and is not a frontbench spokesperson in the Opposition, being instead simply a member of the " ...

s but older Tories such as Ralph Freeman, Sir John Pakington, Sir

Justinian Isham Sir Justinian Isham, 2nd Baronet (1610 – 2 March 1675) was an English scholar and royalist politician. He was also a Member of Parliament and an early member of the Royal Society. Life He was admitted a fellow-commoner at Christ's College, ...

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and Sir

Thomas Hanmer Sir Thomas Hanmer, 4th Baronet (24 September 1677 – 7 May 1746) was Speaker of the House of Commons of Great Britain from 1714 to 1715, discharging the duties of the office with conspicuous impartiality. His second marriage was the subject o ...

. The group grew to have "perhaps 200 members". The group were, according to

H. T. Dickinson Harry Thomas Dickinson FRSE (born 9 March 1939) is an English historian specialising in British eighteenth century politics. He obtained his BA and MA from the University of Durham and his PhD from the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He was ...

, "a major threat to the Harley administration".

Linda Colley Dame Linda Jane Colley, (born 13 September 1949 in Chester, England) is an expert on British, imperial and global history from 1700. She is Shelby M. C. Davis 1958 Professor of History at Princeton University and a long-term fellow in history a ...

claims that the bulk of the membership were of Royalist ancestry.Linda Colley, ''In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party, 1714-60'' (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 87.

Notes

{{UK-poli-stub Clubs and societies in London Dining clubs Tory MPs (pre-1834)