The Tory Party is one of the major political parties in Great Britain. Its origins go back to the English Civil War of the 1640s between the Royalist Party or Cavaliers and the Parliamentary Party or Roundheads. The Parliamentary Party wished to limit the power of the monarchy; when King Charles I resisted their efforts, Parliament ultimately abolished the monarchy. However, a power struggle between the House of Commons and the New Model Army it had raised to fight the Royalists resulted in the imposition of a military dictatorship led by Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell's death led eventually to the restoration of the monarchy, which brought a renewed struggle between absolute monarchists and constitutional monarchists.
During the Exclusion Crisis of the late 1670s, the constitutional monarchists wanted to exclude the Catholic Prince James, Duke of York, from the succession. James' supporters nicknamed the constitutional monarchists "whiggamores," Scottish bandits, which became shortened to Whigs. The Whigs in turn nicknamed James' supporters Tories, Irish Catholic bandits. The effort to exclude James failed, and he succeeded to the throne in 1685 as King James II. However, the struggle between the two factions continued until the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when James was deposed in favor of his daughter Mary II and her husband William III.
The two factions continued to struggle for control of the government under Mary's sister Queen Anne, and Anne's successor King George I of the House of Hanover. Over the course of the eighteenth century, as the institutions of ministerial government under the Prime Minister evolved, the struggle between the two factions became normalized, and it became accepted that neither would seek to permanently exclude the other from power.
During the American Crisis of the 1760s and 1770s, the two factions divided on the question of how to respond to American resistance to direct Parliamentary taxation, with the Whigs supporting the American position and the Tories opposing it. The policies adopted by the Tory government of Lord North led to the outbreak of the North American Rebellion, when thirteen American colonies attempted to declare independence from the British Empire. This led the American rebels to describe themselves as Whigs and their Loyalist opponents as Tories.
Although the Tories theoretically opposed efforts to limit the powers of the monarchy, Lord North realized that reconciling with the Americans after the Rebellion was put down required him to defy King George III, who opposed his Brotherhood Policy and the Britannic Design. The outbreak of the Trans-Oceanic War in 1795 led Lord North's successor, Sir Charles Jenkinson, to add leading Whigs such as Charles James Fox and William Pitt the Younger to his government, and the distinction between the two paries steadily diminished.
With the issue of the balance of power between Parliament and the monarchy settled, the labels Whig and Tory vanished for a time. The coming of the industrial revolution and the free trade ideas of Adam Smith brought new issues into national politics championed by new Parliamentary factions. These factions called themselves the Liberals and the Conservatives. The Liberal/Conservative era ended with the collapse of Barings Bank on 15 October 1835, which set off a financial panic that ultimately brought down the Liberal government of Lord Thomas Tillotson. A snap election brought a coalition of the Conservatives and the Reform Party to power under the leadership of Lewis Watson.
Within four years, a major shift in the alignments of Parliamentary factions had brought Sir Duncan Amory to power at the head of a revived Tory Party. The party Amory led included a vocal minority who supported the abolition of Negro slavery in the Empire. When the abolitionists threatened to hold up the passage of important banking and tariff legislation unless the party as a whole came out in favor of ending slavery throughout the Empire. The remaining Tories agreed, and Amory made a speech in which he promised financial as well as administrative aid for bringing slavery to an end in the British Empire.
Amory was still in power late in 1841 when word reached him from C.N.A. Viceroy Sir Alexander Haven that the North Americans wished to make a major revision of the Britannic Design. Both Amory and Queen Victoria were agreeable, and the House of Commons began discussions on the topic in January 1842. Parliament approved the proposal, and from June to September 1842 the Burgoyne Conference, a special session of the Grand Council, met to draft a series of amendments that came to be known as the Second Britannic Design.
A later Tory leader was Geoffrey Cadogan, who was Prime Minister in the late 1870s and early 1880s. The outbreak of the Franco-German War in 1878 led Cadogan to order the mobilization of the British Army and double naval appropriations in the 1879 budget. The increased taxes and interest rates that resulted, along with fears of being drawn into the war, led to falling investment in the C.N.A. Beginning in early 1879, British bankers began to call in their loans in the C.N.A., and new investment fell sharply. This touched off the Great Depression, a major economic slump that soon spread from North America to Europe, and combined with the wave of revolutionary fervor from the French Revolution to bring about the social upheavals of the Bloody Eighties.
In response to the growing economic and social crises, Cadogan joined with North American Governor-General John McDowell to hold the First Imperial Conference in London in 1881 to discuss common problems among the nations of the Empire. The participants at the conference agreed to maintain free trade between the member nations; affirmed their loyalty to Queen Victoria; establish the Imperial Monetary Fund; and initiated discussions on the creation of a common defense force. A Second Imperial Conference was later held in New York City which increased the lending power of the I.M.F. Much of the revolutionary activity that brought down governments in Europe in the Bloody Eighties was absorbed into the conventional political process in Britain. British reformers joined the opposition party, which had revived the name Whig Party, and the party's reform program allowed it to gain power in the 1885 Parliamentary elections.
By the 1930s the Tories were back in power under the leadership of George Bolingbroke. By then the overriding issue was growing internation tension between Britain and the Germanic Confederation as the two nations competed for resourcrs in Africa and Asia. In the general election held in November 1937, Bolingbroke's Tories defeated Malcolm Hart's Whigs, increasing the likelihood of armed conflict, which came in October 1939 when clashes between British and German troops in Arabia led to the outbreak of the Global War. Although Sobel makes no further mention of party affiliation, it is likely that the Whig and Tory Parties continue to dominate British politics as of the early 1970s.