Tories (British political party)
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.
About twenty 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 (the Pretender) king, he made no moves to do so.
[16] For the first time, Tory gentlemen could no longer employ their sons, as they traditionally had done, in public offices such as the Army, Navy, civil service and the Church.
[17] George Lyttelton wrote in his Letter to the Tories (1747): We are kept out of all public employments of power and profit, and live like aliens and pilgrims in the land of our nativity; [...] no quality, no fortune, no eloquence, no learning, no wisdom, no probity is of any use to any man of our unfortunate denomination, ecclesiastic or layman, lawyer or soldier, peer or commoner, for obtaining the most deserved advancement in his profession, or any favour of the Crown; whilst, to our additional and insupportable vexation, the bare merit of hating us, and everything we love and hold sacred, daily advances dunces in the law and church, cowards in our fleets and armies, republicans in the King's house, and idiots everywhere!
The conspirators intended to abandon the rising they had planned for the West Country, but the Scots forced their hand by unilaterally raising the Pretender's standard.
In January 1717, the government discovered this plot and won a vote of credit for defence measures against the projected invasion in the Commons against Tory opposition.
In 1722, Sunderland advised the King to admit leading Tories into government, thereby dividing them and ending their hopes for revenge by looking for support from abroad.
[35] The Tories resumed their cooperation with the opposition Whigs after receiving another letter from the Pretender in September 1741, ordering them to "pursue vigorous and unanimous measures in the next session of Parliament.
[...] In such cases I hope my friends will make no scruples in joining heartily with them for whatever their particular motives may be anything that tends to the disadvantage of the present Government and to the bringing it into confusion cannot be but of advantage to my cause".
[49] The English Tories repeatedly told the Jacobite court that only regular soldiers invading at the same time as their rising could achieve a Stuart restoration.
[52] In June 1745, the Tory leaders in the Commons, Wynn and Cotton (together with Beaufort), informed the Jacobite court that "if the Prince [Charles] lands in present circumstances with ten battalions or even smaller body of troops there will be no opposition".
A nineteenth-century historian who had examined many collections such as these, claimed that it was "the custom in Jacobite days to destroy all letters with any hint of political or religious feeling in them".
[64] In 2016, Frank O'Gorman noted that given the nature of the evidence, it is unlikely that the question will ever be answered, but added that "judged by the acid test of how they behaved in the '15 and '45 most Tories showed themselves to be Hanoverian and not Jacobite".
A meeting of leading Tories (including Beaufort, Wynn and Cotton) accepted the Prince's offer and replied assuring him of their support for his "wise and salutary purposes".
Thomas Carte wrote to the Pretender that "the attempt against the university of Oxford brought them all up at once to town, which nothing else would, and in their zeal on that account, they entered into a sort of coalition with Prince Frederick's party to stand by the university of Oxford, to join in opposing all unconstitutional points, but to be under no obligation to visit Prince Frederick's court, nor unite in other points".
Sentimental Toryism remained, as in the writings of Samuel Johnson, but in politics "Tory" was little more than an unfriendly epithet for politicians closely identified with George III.
[70] Applied by their opponents to parliamentary supporters of the younger William Pitt (1783–1801, 1804–1806), the term Tories came to represent the political current opposed to the Old Whigs and the radicalism unleashed by the American and French Revolutions.
The historian JCD Clark has written of the 1790s: "It cannot be too clearly stressed that no public figure at that date accepted the title 'Tory', and that they had the best reasons for denying its appropriateness".
While it maintained a sentimental and conservative respect for the symbolic institutions of the British monarchy, in practice Tory ministries allowed the King no more freedom than Whig ones.
The remaining Tories, under the leadership of the Earl of Derby (a former Whig) and Disraeli (once a Radical candidate for Parliament), adopted the Conservative label as the official name of their party.
