Friday, August 14, 2020

The Tory Tradition

From The Imaginative Conservative:
The term “Tory” began as a seventeenth-century pejorative appended to Stuart loyalists, that in the original Gaelic meant “Irish robbers.” As often happens, the derogatory name was adopted by its adherents, and “Tory” stuck, soon labeling one of two political parties (the other being “Whig”) in the United Kingdom. The historical inspiration for Toryism also dates from the 1600s, in their identification with Royalism and the cause of King Charles I in the English Civil War. “The traceable origin of Toryism is the doctrine of the Divine Right of Kings as heads of a National Church,” wrote Maurice Henry Woods, private secretary to the Tory press baron Lord Beaverbrook, in 1924. “From the blood shed at Whitehall on that cold wintry morning went up a thin vapor which spread like a miasma over the later period of the Commonwealth.” After 1688, this royalism morphed into a loose political party united around loyalty to the Crown (oftentimes as protection against the depredations of the aristocracy) and Church, and largely populated by rural landowners, citizenry of the smaller cities and towns, and the Anglican clergy. (Read more.)
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