Tories (British political party)
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.
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. About 20 years later, a new Tory party arose and participated in government between 1783 and 1830, with William Pitt the Younger followed by Robert Jenkinson, 2nd Earl of Liverpool. 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 that entered English politics during the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1678–1681. Whig was initially a Scottish insult for the Covenanter faction in Scotland who opposed the Engagers and supported the Whiggamore Raid that took place in September 1648. 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 Tories were those who opposed the Exclusion Bill.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 and the Roundheads. This action resulted from the Parliament not allowing him to levy taxes without yielding to its terms. At the beginning of the Long Parliament, 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 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 undertaken measures to convert the kingdom to Catholicism ; 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: "hey call me scurvy names, Jesuit, Papish, Tory; and flap me over the mouth with their being the only True Protestants". 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".
The Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution
In a more general sense, the Tories 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 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, 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.
During his reign, James II fought for a broadly tolerant religious settlement under which his co-religionists could prosper—a position anathema to conservative Anglicans. James' attempts to use the government-controlled church to promote policies that undermined the church's own unique status in the state led some Tories to support the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The result was a King established solely by parliamentary title and subject to legal controls established by Parliament, the principles that the Tories had originally abhorred. The Tories' sole consolation was that the monarchs chosen were close to the main line of succession as William III was James II's nephew and William's wife Mary was James's elder daughter. The Act of Toleration 1689 also gave rights to Protestant dissenters that were hitherto unknown, while the elimination of a large number of bishops who refused to swear allegiance to the new monarchs allowed the government to pack the episcopate with bishops with decidedly Whiggish leanings. In both these respects the Tory platform had failed, but the institutions of monarchy and of a state Church survived.
Balanced ministries and opposition
Despite the failure of their founding principles, the Tories remained a powerful political party during the reigns of the next two monarchs, particularly that of Queen Anne. During this time, the Tories fiercely competed with the Whigs for power, and there were frequent Parliamentary elections in which the two parties measured their strength. William III saw that the Tories were generally more friendly to royal authority than the Whigs, and he employed both groups in his government. His early ministry was largely Tory, but the government gradually came to be dominated by the so-called Junto Whigs. This tight-knit political grouping was opposed by the Country Whigs led by Robert Harley, who gradually merged with the Tory opposition in the later 1690s. Although William's successor Anne had considerable Tory sympathies and excluded the Junto Whigs from power, after a brief and unsuccessful experiment with an exclusively Tory government she generally continued William's policy of balancing the parties, supported by her moderate Tory ministers, the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Godolphin.The stresses of the War of the Spanish Succession which begun in 1701 led most of the Tories to withdraw into opposition by 1708, so that Marlborough and Godolphin were heading an administration dominated by the Junto Whigs. Anne herself grew increasingly uncomfortable with this dependence on the Whigs, especially as her personal relationship with the Duchess of Marlborough deteriorated. This situation also became increasingly uncomfortable to many of the non-Junto Whigs, led by the Duke of Somerset and the Duke of Shrewsbury, who began to intrigue with Robert Harley's Tories. In early 1710, the prosecution by the Whig government of the ultra-Tory preacher Henry Sacheverell for sermons delivered the previous year, led to the Sacheverell riots and brought the ministry into popular discredit. In the spring of 1710, Anne dismissed Godolphin and the Junto ministers, replacing them with Tories.
The new Tory ministry was dominated by Harley, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Viscount Bolingbroke, Secretary of State. They were backed by a strong majority in the Parliament elected in 1710, rallying under the banner of "Church in Danger". This Tory government negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713, which pulled Great Britain out of the War of the Spanish Succession ; the peace was enacted despite a Whig majority in the House of Lords, which Anne defeated by creating new Tory peers. Following a long disagreement between the ministers, Anne dismissed Harley in 1714. The arch-Tory Bolingbroke became in effect Anne's chief minister and Tory power seemed to be at its zenith. However, Anne was extremely ill and died within a few days. Bolingbroke had not been able to formulate any coherent plans for dealing with the succession, for if he thought of proclaiming the son of James II king, he made no moves to do so. The Elector George succeeded to the throne entirely peacefully, supported by the Hanoverian Tory grouping.