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Party Turns? Or, Whigs and Tories Get Off Scott Free*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Tim Harris
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Extract

The Restoration period has attracted renewed scholarly interest in recent years, with the result that many of our commonly held assumptions about politics in the reign of Charles II have come under increased critical scrutiny. Nowhere is this more true than for the Exclusion Crisis and the subsequent Tory Reaction. For a long time we thought we had the dynamics of this period worked out: the Exclusion Crisis gave birth to two parties—the Whigs and Tories—with the Whigs being the anti-Catholic, exclusionist, and Parliamentarian party, who carried with them the support of the people out-of-doors, and the Tories being the party of divine-right, absolute monarchy, anti-populist in their outlook, putting their belief in the sanctity of the hereditary principle before the interests of the people. The Whig challenge was essentially defeated with the dissolution of the Oxford Parliament in 1681, and thereafter the 1680s saw a drift towards monarchical absolutism, until this trend was defeated by the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89.

Type
Order and Authority: Creating Party in Restoration England
Information
Albion , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , Winter 1993 , pp. 581 - 590
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1993

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Footnotes

*

I should like to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for the award of a Summer Stipend to help support some of the research undertaken for this article. A version of this article was delivered at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association in Washington in December 1992.

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