The Tories were a conservative political party that existed sequentially in England, Great Britain, and the United Kingdom from 1678 to 1834.
The faction coalesced in 1678 in response to the Exclusion Bill, which would disqualify James, Duke of York from assuming the English throne due to being a practicing Catholic; the Whigs supported the bill and opposed papist influences in English politics. The epithet "Tory" came from the term toraigh, referring to Irish Catholic highwaymen; the name "Tory" implied violent Catholicism. During their early years, the Tories were a loose alliance of Catholics, High Churchmen, Jacobites, and Royalists (supporters of royal power over Parliament), and the party's Anglican supporters rallied around cries of "Church in Danger" during the late 1600s and early 1700s. The feudalist rural gentry affirmed landownership as the proper basis of wealth, power, and privilege, opposing the new "moneyed interest" represented by the pro-capitalist Whigs.
Tory MPs in 1705
Many in the party were legitimist supporters of the House of Stuart following the Glorious Revolution, which some Protestant Tories - in alliance with the Whigs - helped to bring about. The party drew its strength from the rural gentry and Anglicans, and the Tories opposed the reformism of the Whigs, such as expanding the franchise and increasing parliamentary representation for the lower classes. After 1688, most Tories accepted a limited version of Whiggish constitutional monarchy, but the original Tories never fully escaped accusations of being crypto-Jacobites due to many Tories heading Jacobite conspiracies following the Hanoverian succession. The Jacobite rising of 1715 stigmatized Tories as supporters of absolute monarchy and as being opponents of the Protestant succession, resulting in the "Whig supremacy" from 1715 to 1756.
In 1724, Henry St. John returned to England and led a Tory opposition to the "ministerial tyranny" of the Whig government, hailing the Whig rhetoric of earlier decades and appealing to both landed gentry and urban merchants. By this time, the Whigs sought to secure a centralized fiscal and military state machine and a web of financial interdependence controlled by the wealthiest aristocrats. The Tories criticized Whiggish military adventurism because of the financial and human cost, and they proved closer to the average voter, winning greater support in larger and more democratic boroughs.
By the early 1760s, due to the disintegration of the two major parties at the end of the Whig supremacy, the Tories ceased to exist as an organized political entity, and the term "Tory" was instead used to describe the faction of British politics known as "the King's Friends", who supported King George III's efforts to reassert royal power. This faction was led by the likes of Lord Bute and Lord North, and was opposed by the Rockingham Whigs, who supported the limitation of royal power over Parliament. Under William Pitt the Younger, the Tories transformed into a party of the country gentry, the merchant classes, and official administerial groups after 1784, and the party was staunchly opposed to the radicalism unleashed by the French Revolution. The Tories and Whigs soon divided along "liberal" and "conservative" lines, with the Tories supporting interventionism on the European continent during the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars. Under the Duke of Wellington's ministry, the Catholics were emancipated, and the older and more reactionary generation of Tories began to lose its influence as a younger and more moderate-reformist generation (led by men such as Robert Peel) came to power. The "Ultra-Tories" rebelled against Peel's generation in protest against Catholic emancipation, and the repeal of the Corn Laws led to the party splitting up into multiple factions, with the largest being the modern Conservative Party, founded by Peel in 1834.
During the Rage of Party, the Tories held majorities in more democratic boroughs where the franchise was held by households, freemen, and freeholders, while the Whigs held majorities in the more oligarchical boroughs where the franchise was held by corporation and burgage holders. The Tories were stronger in the Midlands (especially the West Midlands, with 59.9%), Wales (71.2%), and South West England (55%), while the Whigs were strongest in South East England (55.6%) and Northern England (51.8%). The undemocratic nature of the franchise and the prevalence of "rotten boroughs" during the "Whig supremacy" meant that the Tories' broad base of support in rural England never translated into a Tory majority in Parliament during that period. The shift of British politics during that period resulted in voter demographics changing, as the Tories lost the South West to the Whigs (falling to 44.8%), lost their monopoly on the Welsh vote as Wales became more competitive (the Tories winning 56.1% of the Welsh vote), saw a slight decrease of support in the East Midlands (53.2%) and increased their support in the West Midlands (67.5%) and the North (53%). In Scotland, the Tories initially won support from Catholic and Anglican voters, with the under-developed and clannish Scottish Highlands serving as their stronghold; from the 1780s on, however, the Tories rallied around a defense of Scots Law and opposition to the reform movement; the Scottish Whigs, based in the Scottish Lowlands, supported the Anglicization of Scottish civil institutions, while the Tories supported maintaining Scottish traditions within a united kingdom.