Volume 14 , Issue 32

Whigs & Tory Parties

The Tories were members of a British political party, founded in 1689, that was the opposition party to the Whigs and has been known as the Conservative Party (as in Canada) since 1832.

An American who, during the period of the American Revolution, favored the British side, were also called Loyalist. Often Tory a supporter of traditional political and social institutions against the forces of democratization or reform; a political conservative.

The "Whig" and "Tory" were political party labels that had been in use in England since 1681. Their specific meaning has varied with changing historical circumstances. As political labels, the terms derive from the factional conflict of the "Exclusion Crisis (1679-81)." Whigs being supporters of Exclusion (of the Catholic James, Duke of York, brother of the king and next in line for the English throne) and Tories being their Royalist opponents.

By extension the Whigs were seen as asserting the primacy of Parliament over the monarch, while the Tories were seen as asserting the inverse. This factional division of English political elites clearly echoed the divisions between Parliamentarians and Royalists in the era of the Civil Wars, and thus portended more than a simple difference of opinion on a particular (albeit rather important) policy matter.

Through the rest of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries, the terms "Whig" and "Tory" would continue to carry the weight of the Civil War conflicts, at least obliquely, even as the two factions came to be defined and redefined, first, in the Exclusion Crisis itself, then, in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688.   |  View or Add Comments (0 Comments)   |   Receive updates ( subscribers)  |   Unsubscribe

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