The Tories’ 340th birthday

It is impossible to be absolutely precise about the moment of birth. 1679, the year when it happened, witnessed intense, unending political crisis. Tempers flared and insults flew at Westminster against a background of seething discontent, regularly punctuated by violence, in the nation at large.

Lord Danby, King Charles II’s chief minister (the office of Prime Minister had not yet been created) was impeached by Parliament and sent to the Tower of London where he remained for the next six years. A new term of political abuse, Tory, began to be hurled around. It meant thief or brigand in Gaelic, a language then universally regarded as totally barbaric. Curiously, those on the receiving end of the new insult did not reject it angrily: on the contrary, they embraced it warmly and started to use it as their own preferred name.

So too did those on the other side of the sharp political divide, now described rudely as Whigs, another Gaelic word meaning sour milk. In this way the political vocabulary acquired two of its most prominent words – forerunners of Conservative and Liberal, which did not make their appearance until the 1830s, some one hundred and fifty years later.

No one found a way of calming the extraordinary political turmoil, which gave birth to the Tories and Whigs. Throughout Britain there remained ‘an atmosphere of cruel panic’, as Keith Feiling, the first academic Conservative historian, put it in his History of the Tory Party 1640-1714, published in 1924. The reason why there was such turmoil was that a so-called ‘Popish Plot’ had been uncovered.

Though there was no real substance to the plot, people became absolutely convinced that Britain’s minority Roman Catholic community was in league with France, the great external threat in the late seventeenth century, which was planning to conquer the country, undo the Protestant Reformation and re-impose Catholicism by force. Every Catholic was suspected of being a traitor.  ‘Many innocent Catholics were executed amid the howls and curses of frenzied mobs’.

The heir to the throne, Charles II’s brother the Duke of York, was a Catholic .The new Whig party in Parliament sought to make itself the dominant force in politics by championing legislation to bar the Duke of York from the throne. For that purpose it introduced a number of Exclusion Bills between 1679 and 1681. The Tories fought hard and successfully to stop them, believing that any tampering with the monarchy would turn the existing acute instability into total anarchy.

For a time at the beginning of the eighteenth century the first Tories carried all before them, winning elections and running the government. Then disaster struck. The Whigs ruthlessly exploited the start of a new monarchical dynasty, the Hanoverians, to gain a monopoly of power, which lasted for the rest of the century. But there was a much deeper significance to what happened 340 years ago. It created momentum for change that was to transform the character of British politics. Winston Churchill described it eloquently in his History of the English-Speaking Peoples. ‘The collective mind of England was moving forward from the ravines of religious entanglement to broader if less picturesque uplands…To the sombre warfare of creeds and sects there succeeded the squalid but far less irrational or uncontrollable strife of parties’. This above all is why the Tories’ 340th birthday should be remembered.

Alistair Cooke, the Party’s official historian, has published a fuller account of the birth and development of Toryism is his Party of Change: A Brief History of the Conservatives (2008). His most recent book, Tory Policy-Making: The Conservative Research Department 1929-2009, was published last month. Copies of both works can be ordered by emailing lucy.absolom@conservatives.com.

Over the holiday period read more of Alistair Cooke’s snapshots of Conservative history on the history section of the website.

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