EXHIBITS

William III, 1689-1702 

Mary II, 1689-1694

Queen Anne, 1702-1714

George I, 1714-1727

While every era has its own factions, where one group strives against another, the story of party politics could arguably begin with the Whigs and the Tories. 

These political parties formed almost a century before the American Revolution in another period of crisis—in this case, the Exclusion Crisis which occurred between 1679 and 1681. Interestingly enough, both of these titles were originally pejoratives used to evoke certain fears. The word “Tory” is derived “from the Irish Toriadhe, meaning ‘bandit,’ or ‘outlaw’” and came into use shortly after the so-called Popish Plot and the word “Whig” comes from “the Scottish Presbyterian Whiggamores who revolted in 1679”[1].

The Whigs won the first clash between these two parties, winning three consecutive general elections and promoting an exclusion bill which would prevent the Catholic James, the Duke of York and the King Charles II’s brother, from inheriting the throne. Charles II did not approve the bill (or approve of its existence) and dissolved Parliament.

James II was crowned King of England and Scotland in 1685, but his Catholic leanings unnerved many of his subjects and in 1688, after the birth of his son, several influential Protestant members of Parliament invited Mary, the Protestant daughter of James II, and her husband, William of Orange, to come take over the throne. When they arrived in England, James II fled and Parliament declared that he had abdicated his throne and crowned William and Mary as co-rulers. This irregular succession is commonly referred to as the Glorious Revolution. As Gary de Kray put it, “the events of 1688-89 scarcely seem to fit the pattern of a revolution. They might not be so described at all were it not for the stubborn fact that one monarch lost the English throne and two others gained it, all by the declaration of an irregularly constituted Parliament”[2]

In the wake of the Glorious Revolution, Parliament held general elections every three years which lead to a preoccupation with party politics frequently called “the Rage of Party.” Between 1689 and 1715 “more general elections took place . . . than during the whole of the rest of the eighteenth century, and they were all very strongly contested.”[1] These party politics influenced every level of the government. During this period “parliament became a permanent feature of the British state; when it became an institution, rather than an event.”[3]

In this new age of politics, “party political affiliations increasingly reflected divergent Whig and Tory attitudes to the Revolution Settlement of 1689, dynastic legitimacy, ecclesiastical politics, and the conduct of domestic governance and foreign policy.”[3] But despite the exuberance of the political participation, a general dislike of William III [1] kept the Tories and the Whigs more or less pointed in the same direction. With the succession of Anne though, in 1702, the animosity between the two parties broke out in full strength.

Not long after George I (Anne's 2nd cousin, who was nowhere near her nearest blood relation, but who was her closest male Protestant relation) took the throne in 1714, he successfully squashed the Tories who had shown hesitation in accepting the Hanoverian succession. For more than forty years after his succession to the throne, the Whigs dominated British politics.