The Family Compact[1][2] was a small closed group of men who exercised most of the political, economic and judicial power in Upper Canada (today's Ontario) from the 1810s to the 1840s.

[3] At the end of its lifespan, the compact would be condemned by Lord Durham, a leading Whig, who summarised its grip on power: Fortified by family connexion, and the common interest felt by all who held, and all who desired, subordinate offices, that party was thus erected into a solid and permanent power, controlled by no responsibility, subject to no serious change, exercising over the whole government of the Province an authority utterly independent of the people and its representatives, and possessing the only means of influencing either the Government at home, or the colonial representative of the Crown.

"[5] The term Family Compact appeared in a letter written by Marshall Spring Bidwell to William Warren Baldwin in 1828.

[5] The historians P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins have emphasized that the British Empire at "the mid-nineteenth century represented the extension abroad of the institutions and principles entrenched at home".

Cain and Hopkins point out that "new money", the financiers rather than the industrial "barons", were gradually gentrified through the purchase of land, intermarriage and the acquisition of titles.

In the United Kingdom, the control exercised by the aristocracy over the House of Commons remained undisturbed before 1832 and was only slowly eroded thereafter, while its dominance of the executive lasted well beyond 1850.

The historian J. K. Johnson's analysis of the Upper Canadian elite between 1837 and 1840 measured influence according to overlapping leadership roles on the boards of the main social, political and economic institutions.

The origins of the Family Compact lay in overlapping appointments made to the Executive and Legislative councils of Upper Canada.

The rest of the members were mostly descendants of United Empire Loyalists or recent upper-class British settlers such as the Boulton family, builders of the Grange.

A triumvirate of lawyers, Levius Sherwood (speaker of the Legislative Council, judge in the Court of King's Bench), Judge Jonas Jones, and Attorney General Henry John Boulton were linked by professional and business ties, and by marriage; both Sherwood and Boulton being married to Jones’ sisters.

The uniting factors amongst the compact were its loyalist tradition, hierarchical class structure and adherence to the established Anglican church.

Following the war, the colonial government took active steps to prevent Americans from swearing allegiance, thereby making them ineligible to obtain land grants.

Bound by the ideals of public service and a spirit of loyalty to king, church and empire, solidified in the crucible of the War of 1812, they used the Law Society of Upper Canada as a means of regulating entry to elite positions of power.

[22] The men appointed to the magistracy tended to be United Empire Loyalists or "half-pay" military officers who were placed in semi-retirement after the Napoleonic Wars.

Second, he demonstrated that the significant damages Mackenzie received in his civil lawsuit against the vandals did not reflect the soundness of the criminal administration of justice in Upper Canada.

And lastly, he sees in the Types Riot "the seed of the Rebellion" in a deeper sense than those earlier writers who viewed it simply as the start of a highly personal feud between Mackenzie and the Family Compact.

Romney emphasizes that Mackenzie's personal harassment, the "outrage", served as a lightning rod of discontent because so many Upper Canadians had faced similar endemic abuses and hence identified their political fortunes with his.

Under Strachan's guidance, King's College was a religious institution that closely aligned with the Church of England and the Family Compact.

The lieutenant governor appointed four of the bank's fifteen directors making for a tight bond between the nominally private company and the state.

The overlapping membership on the boards of the Bank of Upper Canada and on the Executive and Legislative councils served to integrate the economic and political activities of church, state, and the "financial sector".

These overlapping memberships reinforced the oligarchic nature of power in the colony and allowed the administration to operate without any effective elective check.

The role of speculation in the vacant lands of Upper Canada ensured the development of group solidarity and cohesion of interest among the members of the Family Compact.

Of the 26 largest landowners in Peel County between 1820 and 1840, 23 were absentee proprietors, of whom 17 were involved in the administration of the province; of these 17, 12 were part of the Family Compact.

Society and politics in Upper Canada were dominated by interest and connection based on landed property, and only secondarily affected by ideologies and personalities.

[34] Members of the Family Compact were interested in building up estates in which they imitated the "improved farming" methods of the English aristocracy.

Although many meetings took place at the Grange, John Ross Robertson noted the small dining room, which could not hold more than 14 people, probably meant that many of the stories about the Family Compact gatherings were probably exaggerated.

The primary opposition to the Family Compact and these loyalist ideals came from the reform movement led by William Lyon Mackenzie.

Durham's Report on the Affairs of British North America states that it is impossible "To understand how any English statesman could have ever imagined that representative and irresponsible government could be successfully combined."

Canada is probably not unlike other western industrial nations in relying heavily on its elite groups to make major decisions and to determine the shape and direction of its development.

The nineteenth-century notion of a liberal citizen-participating democracy is obviously not a satisfactory model by which to examine the processes of decision-making in either the economic or the political contexts. ...