Why Are UK Conservatives Called Tories?

The Conservative Party in the UK is known colloquially as the Tory Party. Its supporters are generally called Tories. Why? 

Many Americans may assume that it derives from the American Revolution. In the USA, the term "Tory" is generally associated with the War for Independence. People who supported the British government during the war were generally called Tories by their "Patriot" enemies.

American "Tories" did not embrace that term. Instead, they called themselves "Loyalists." The Patriots often called themselves "Whigs." Both Tory and Whig derived from British politics of the previous century, from a succession crisis during the reign of Charles II (1660-1685). 

Charles had no legitimate heir. According to the rules of hereditary succession, the Crown would pass on his death to his brother, James, Duke of York. [Images: Charles II and James II, by Sir Peter Lely]

 

Normally, James's succession would not have been a problem. What made it a problem was that James had converted to Catholicism. The great majority of people in England and Scotland were by this time Protestants of one kind or another. (Ireland was a different matter).

The Protestants generally feared and detested the "Papists." In their view, the Roman Catholic faith was not only religiously wrong, but politically dangerous. They associated it with the royal absolutism of Louis XIV of France. Many of them wanted James to be excluded from the thrones of England and Scotland. 

In the late 1670s a group within Parliament mounted a campaign to exclude James. Opponents of their "Exclusion Bill" called them Whigs, then a word used to describe fanatical Scots Presbyterians. 

The Whigs opposed what they saw as a trend toward absolute monarchy in Britain. They supported religious toleration for all Protestant sects, but not Catholics. The Whigs called their opponents in Parliament Tories. Tory was then a term used for Irish bandits. As political labels, both Whig and Tory originated as terms of insult. 

The Tories in Parliament were Protestant. But they were staunch defenders of the established Church of England who opposed any form of religious toleration. They were also firm royalists who did not want the monarch's power to be too restricted.  

The Tories foiled the Whig attempt to exclude James from the throne. Some radical Whigs plotted against the government, which struck back with arrests and executions. The Whig leader Lord Shaftesbury fled to the Netherlands where he died soon after. [Image: Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, by John Greenhill]

James became king when Charles died in 1685. But three years later Whig and Tory leaders cooperated to force James from power in what became known as the Glorious Revolution. Some leading Tories had also become alarmed by James's arbitrary and pro-Catholic actions.   

In the aftermath of the Revolution, Whigs and Tories continued to compete for ascendancy in Parliament. Between 1714 and 1760 the Whigs all but eliminated the Tory opposition, a period known as the Whig Supremacy. 

The Supremacy collapsed after George III came to the throne in 1760. He believed the Whigs had gained too much power and had corrupted the political system. He sought the support of "new men" outside the Whig oligarchy. Many of them were disaffected Whigs. 

The Old Whig establishment blamed George III for their decline. They claimed he was bent on tyranny, which was not the case. He considered his role to be that of a constitutional monarch, although he sometimes acted in a clumsy and ill-advised manner. (George wasn't "mad" either until almost 30 years later).

British Whig attacks on King George influenced events in North America. The colonists' real problem was not with the king, but with the British Parliament, which claimed the right to tax them. But the American Whigs adopted the rhetoric of their British namesakes and attacked the king. They called his supporters Tories, although none of them used or accepted that term. 

By the 1780s, what some historians call the Second Tory Party was emerging. Its supporters did not call themselves Tories but "Independent Whigs" or "Pittites," after their leader, William Pitt the Younger. It was only around 1812 that Pitt's successors began to use the term "Tory" to describe themselves. 

The Tories of the early 19th century are the true ancestors of the present-day Conservatives. In 1834, they changed their name officially to the Conservative Party. In the 1880s, they officially became the Conservative and Unionist Party, after a merger with Liberals opposed to Irish Home Rule. That bulky term is little used nowadays. But everyone still calls them Tories, a term they use themselves. 

"Whig" is no longer used to describe a political party. Why not? That is a subject for another post.