The Tories were a loosely organised political faction and later a political party, in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. They first emerged during the 1679 Exclusion Crisis, when they opposed Whig efforts to exclude James, Duke of York from the succession on the grounds of his Catholicism. Despite their fervent opposition to state-sponsored Catholicism, Tories opposed his exclusion because of their belief that inheritance based on birth was the foundation of a stable society.
In the 18th century, the Tories' overarching ideology and stated objective was maintaining a strong established Church of England; in practice, this meant they opposed tolerance not only for Catholics (which at the time the Whigs also opposed) but also for dissenting Protestants (which the Whigs supported).W.A. Speck, Tory & Whig: The Struggle in the Constituencies 1701-1715, (London, 1970), p.96. Their religious politics were occasionally stronger than their support for monarchical principles, with some Tories opting to support the Exclusion Bill due to James' support for partial freedom of worship.
Under the later Stuart monarchs, Tories participated in government under the Ministry of the Chits, Carmarthen ministry, Godolphin–Marlborough ministry and Junto Tory ministry, and formed the major component of the Harley ministry (1710–14).
After the succession of George I in 1714, the Tories had no part in government. They ceased to exist as an organised political entity in the early 1760s; however, the term continued to be used in subsequent years as a term of self-description by some political writers. During the American revolution, Tory became synonymous with loyalist as ex-tories in parliament showed fervent support for the crown in suppressing the revolution, as opposed to patriots, or Whigs.
About 20 years later, a new Tory party (which had no real link to the old Tory party except for its name) arose and participated in government between 1783 and 1830, with William Pitt the Younger followed by Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool; the new Tories generally opposed expansions of voting rights and supported crackdowns on protests and subversive movements, driven by fears that Britain could face a revolution like the one which had taken place in France. The Whigs won control of Parliament in the 1831 election, which was fought largely on the issue of electoral reform, opposed by the Tories. The Representation of the People Act 1832 removed the rotten boroughs, many of which were controlled by Tories and the Party was reduced to 175 MPs in the 1832 elections.
Under the leadership of Robert Peel, who issued a policy document known as the Tamworth Manifesto, the Tories began to transform into the Conservative Party. However, his repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 caused the party to break apart; the faction led by the Earl of Derby and Benjamin Disraeli went on to become the modern Conservative Party, whose members are still commonly referred to as Tories.
Name
As a political term, Tory was an insult (derived from the Middle Irish word , modern Irish , meaning "outlaw", "robber", from the Irish word , meaning "pursuit" since outlaws were "pursued men") that entered English politics during the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1678–1681. Whig (from whiggamore, a "cattle driver") was initially a Scottish insult for the Covenanter faction in Scotland who opposed the Engagers (a faction who supported Charles I during the Second English Civil War) and supported the Whiggamore Raid that took place in September 1648.Samuel R. Gardiner. History of the great civil war 1642–1649 p. 228). While the Whigs were those who supported the exclusion of James, the Duke of York from the succession to thrones of Scotland, England and Ireland (the Petitioners), the Tories were those who opposed the Exclusion Bill (the Abhorrers).
In 1757, David Hume wrote:
History English Civil War The first Tory party traces its principles and politics to the English Civil War which divided England between the Cavaliers (supporters of King Charles I) and the Roundheads (the supporters of the Long Parliament upon which the King had declared war). This action resulted from the Parliament not allowing him to levy taxes without yielding to its terms. At the beginning of the Long Parliament (1641), the King's supporters pursued a course of reform of previous abuses. The increasing radicalism of the Parliamentary majority, however, estranged many reformers even in the Parliament itself and drove them to make common cause with the King. The King's party was thus a mixture of supporters of royal autocracy and of those Parliamentarians who felt that the Long Parliament had gone too far in attempting to gain executive power for itself and, more specifically, in undermining the episcopalian government of the Church of England, which was felt to be a primary support of royal government. By the end of the 1640s, the radical Parliamentary programme had become clear: reduction of the King to a powerless figurehead and replacement of Anglican episcopacy with a form of Presbyterianism.
This prospective form of settlement was prevented by a coup d'état which shifted power from Parliament itself to the Parliamentary New Model Army, controlled by Oliver Cromwell. The Army had King Charles I executed and for the next 11 years the British kingdoms operated under military dictatorship. The Restoration of King Charles II produced a reaction in which the King regained a large part of the power held by his father. However, Charles' ministers and supporters in England accepted a substantial role for Parliament in the government of the kingdoms. No subsequent British monarch would attempt to rule without Parliament, and after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, political disputes would be resolved through elections and parliamentary manoeuvring, rather than by an appeal to force. Charles II also restored episcopacy in the Church of England. His first Cavalier Parliament began as a strongly royalist body, and passed a series of acts re-establishing the Church by law and strongly punishing dissent by both Roman Catholics and non-Anglican Protestants. These acts did not reflect the King's personal views and demonstrated the existence of a Royalist ideology beyond mere subservience to the Court.
A series of disasters in the late 1660s and 1670s discredited Charles II's governments, and powerful political interests (including some who had been identified with the Parliamentary side in the Civil War) began to agitate for a greater role of Parliament in government, coupled with more tolerance for Protestant dissenters. These interests would soon coalesce as the Whigs. As direct attacks on the King were politically impossible and could lead to execution for treason, opponents of the power of the Court framed their challenges as exposés of subversive and sinister Catholic plots. Although the matter of these plots was fictitious, they reflected two uncomfortable political realities: first, that Charles II had (somewhat insincerely) undertaken measures to convert the kingdom to Catholicism (in a 1670 treaty with Louis XIV of France); second, that his younger brother and heir presumptive, James, Duke of York, had in fact converted to Catholicism, an act that many Protestant Englishmen in the 1670s saw as only one step below high treason.
The Whigs tried to link the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, the Duke of Ormonde, with the foremost Irish Tory, Redmond O'Hanlon, in a supposed plot to murder Titus Oates. The Whig Bishop of Meath, Henry Jones, offered O'Hanlon a pardon and a bribe if he would testify to Parliament that Ormonde was plotting a French invasion. In December 1680, the government seized these letters and the plan collapsed. In January 1681, the Whigs first began calling the supposed Irish plotters Tories, and on 15 February 1681 is recorded the first complaint from an English Royalist about the epithet Tory by the anti-Exclusion newspaper Heraclitus Ridens: "[T]hey call me scurvy names, Jesuit, Papish, Tory; and flap me over the mouth with their being the only True Protestants".Robert Willman, 'The Origins of 'Whig' and 'Tory' in English Political Language', The Historical Journal, Vol. 17, No. 2 (June, 1974), p. 259. Within a few months, anti-Exclusionists were calling themselves Tories and a northern Dissenter called Oliver Heywood recorded in October: "Ms. H. of Chesterfield told me a gentleman was at their house and had a red Ribband in his hat, she askt him what it meant, he said it signifyed that he was a Tory, whats that sd she, he ans. an Irish Rebel, — oh dreadful that any in England dare espouse that interest. I hear further since that this is the distinction they make instead of Cavalier and Roundhead, now they are called Torys and Wiggs".Willman, p. 263.
The Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution In a more general sense, the Tories (also known as the Court Party) represented the more conservative royalist supporters of Charles II, who endorsed a strong monarchy as a counterbalance to the power of Parliament, and who saw in the Whig opponents of the Court a quasi-Republican tendency (similar to that seen in the Long Parliament) to strip the monarchy of its essential prerogative powers and leave the Crown as a puppet entirely dependent upon Parliament. That the Exclusion Bill was the central question upon which parties diverged, did not hinge upon an assessment of the personal character of the Duke of York (though his conversion to Catholicism was the key factor that made the Bill possible), but rather upon the power of Parliament to elect a monarch of its own choosing, contrary to the established laws of succession. That the Parliament, with the consent of the King, had such power was not at issue; rather, it was the wisdom of a policy of creating a King whose sole title to the Crown was the will of Parliament and who was essentially a Parliamentary appointee.
On this original question, the Tories were in the short run entirely successful as the Parliaments that brought in the Exclusion Bill were dissolved, Charles II was enabled to manage the administration autocratically and upon his death the Duke of York succeeded without difficulty. The rebellion of Monmouth, the candidate of the radical Whigs to succeed Charles II, was easily crushed and Monmouth himself executed. However, in the long run Tory principles were to be severely compromised. Besides the support of a strong monarchy, the Tories also stood for the Church of England, as established in Acts of Parliament following the restoration of Charles II, both as a body governed by bishops, using the Book of Common Prayer whilst subscribing to a specific doctrine and also as an exclusive body established by law, from which both Roman Catholics and Nonconformists were excluded.