BBC - History - British History in depth: Choosing Sides in the English Civil War Choosing Sides in the English Civil War By Dr Mike Stoyle Last updated 2011-02-17 From royalism and religion to money and women, Dr Mark Stoyle uncovers the complex motivations behind the choosing of sides in the English Civil War. On this page Print this page Introduction Between 1642 and 1646 England was torn apart by a bloody civil war. On the one hand stood the supporters of King Charles I: the Royalists. On the other stood the supporters of the rights and privileges of Parliament: the Parliamentarians. Shortly before the war broke out, partisans of both sides began to apply an insulting nickname to their opponents, little dreaming that the two scornful labels which they had chosen for each other would ring down through the succeeding centuries. ...the two scornful labels which they had chosen for each other would ring down through the succeeding centuries. To the Parliamentarians, the Royalists were 'Cavaliers' - a term derived from the Spanish word 'Caballeros', meaning armed troopers or horsemen.

To the Royalists, the Parliamentarians were 'Roundheads' - a reference to the shaved heads of the London apprentices who had been so active in demonstrating their support for Parliament during the months before the fighting began. Both terms reveal a lot about what the two sides thought of each other. In Parliamentarian eyes, the typical Royalist was a dissolute gentleman, possessed of a suspiciously foreign air and prone to acts of sudden violence. As far as the Royalists were concerned, the typical Parliamentarian was a 'base mechanic': a low-born, lumpen townsman, inexperienced in judgment and inelegant in appearance. There was more than a grain of truth in these stereotypes, but it would be wrong to conclude from them that the Civil War was primarily a class war, a punch up between 'toffs' and 'toughs'. The considerations which prompted men and women to choose the sides they did between 1642 and 1646 were infinitely more varied and subtle than the two-party labels suggest. Top The personality of Charles I At the heart of the conflict lay the policies and personality of the King himself. Charles I was a reserved, slightly diffident figure whose abilities as a monarch left a good deal to be desired.

During the 1630s, his apparent determination to rule England without the assistance of Parliament, his introduction of all sorts of controversial financial measures and his support for 'high-church' religious practices aroused considerable alarm among his subjects. Many people, particularly the more zealous protestants, or 'puritans', came to fear that Charles was pursuing a hidden agenda: that he planned to remove his people's rights, or 'liberties', and to restore England to the Catholic fold. ...[Charles'] abilities as a monarch left a good deal to be desired. When, in 1637, Charles attempted to introduce a new form of prayer book in his northern kingdom of Scotland, a major rebellion erupted. The King did not have enough money to raise an army against the Scots and was therefore forced to summon a Parliament. Yet the men who assembled at Westminster were unwilling to give the King the money he needed until their own grievances had been dealt with. The angry, disaffected members of Parliament seized political control and set about dismantling the hated instruments of the Personal Rule.

During 1640-41, Charles I's prerogative courts were abolished, his ministers arrested or forced to flee, and his unpopular financial expedients declared illegal. To many contemporaries, it seemed that the kingdom's political problems were solved. In fact, they were only just beginning. Top The road to war A contemporary cartoon © In late 1640 Charles I had faced a political élite which was almost wholly united against him. In late 1641 this was no longer the case. By this time a split had emerged in Parliament - and, still more dangerously, in the country at large - between those who wished for further reform, and those who felt that the recent changes had gone quite far enough. Friction was particularly apparent between religious conservatives, men and women who were happy with the Church of England as it had been established at the time of the Reformation, and more 'Godly' protestants', those who considered the Church to be 'but half reformed' and were determined to rid it of the 'rags and patches of Rome'. As time went by, religious traditionalists became increasingly alienated from the more radical spirits and turned to the King for support.

Charles thus found himself with a swelling political constituency and, emboldened by this change in his fortunes, he made a bold attempt to seize back the political initiative. In January 1642 Charles strode into the Parliament house with a body of soldiers and demanded the persons of five MPs whom he had declared to be traitors. The King's plan went badly wrong. Not only did the men he sought manage to escape, but public opinion was outraged by his action. London was soon in an uproar, and the King, fearing for his life, was forced to flee. War was now inevitable and over the next few months rival sides began to emerge across the country. Top Class divisions Among the peerage and the greater gentry, a majority favoured the King: partly, perhaps, because they felt bound to him by ties of personal loyalty, mainly because they saw him as the chief guarantor of the established social order. Similar considerations influenced the lesser gentry. Among this group, too, it seems probable that supporters of the Crown outnumbered supporters of the Parliament, though by a considerably narrower margin. Beneath the level of the gentry it is harder to make definite connections between social status and political allegiance.

Many historians believe that the 'middling sort' of people were more inclined to favour Parliament than the King because Parliament's party was less rigidly hierarchical - and this may well have been so. Yet, for the vast majority of ordinary men and women, it was factors other than those of 'class' or 'rank' which determined the eventual choice of sides. Mercenaries and conscripts I care not for your Cause, I... fight for your halfe-crowne[s], and your handsome woemen. Some had no particular preference for either party, but joined up with the first army which happened to come along, in the hope of pay and plunder. Captain Carlo Fantom, one of the hundreds of foreign mercenaries who flocked to England during the Civil War, frankly admitted that 'I care not for your Cause, I... fight for your halfe-crowne[s], and your handsome woemen'. Others found themselves forced to fight when they would much rather have stayed at home: tenants called out by their landlords, for example, and village rogues conscripted by parish constables who were anxious to see them gone. Some were even compelled to fight at gunpoint.

In Lancashire, the Royalists press-ganged crowds of local men and marched them away to attack the Parliamentarian garrison at Bolton, 'the reare being brought up with troopers that had commission to shoot such as lagged behind, so as the poor countrymen ... [were] in a dilemma of death, either by the troopers if they went not on, or by the... shot of the towne if they did'. Top Ideological and ethnic divisions Yet for every man who enlisted under compulsion, or for purely mercenary reasons, there was another who did so because he sincerely believed in what he was doing. One of the best definitions of the ideological division which lay at the heart of the Civil War was given by the Worcestershire clergyman, Richard Baxter. 'The generality of the people... who were then called puritans, precisians, religious persons', Baxter wrote, those 'that used to talk of God, and heaven, and scripture, and holiness... adhered to the Parliament. And on the other side...

[those] that were not so precise and strict against an oath, or gaming, or plays, or drinking nor troubled themselves so much about the matters of God and the world to come [adhered to the King]'. Baxter's view was biased, of course. Royalist sympathisers would have countered that it was not that they were irreligious, but that they remained true to a purer, more traditional form of Protestantism: one which was untainted by puritan 'zeal'. Nevertheless, Baxter's words convey an essential truth. Across the country as a whole, it was religion which ultimately divided the two parties. Puritans everywhere supported the Parliament, more conservative protestants - together with the few Catholics - supported the King. ...it was religion which ultimately divided the two parties. Beneath the all important religious divisions lurked anxieties about nationhood and ethnicity. Parliament set out, from the very first, to portray itself as the party of 'Englishness', and although this image played well throughout most of the kingdom, it provoked a counter-reaction in 'Celtic' Cornwall and Wales.

Here, the overwhelming majority of the population came out for the King in 1642, and throughout the rest of the war these two regions remained Charles I's most important 'magazines of men'. Cornish and Welsh troops were vital to the Royalist war effort, but the King's reliance upon them reinforced his opponents' claims that the royalist party was fundamentally 'un-English'. So did Charles' use of soldiers brought over from Ireland, many of whom, the Parliamentarians maintained, were Catholics. During the first half of the war, Parliament's close links with the Scots tended to undermine the claim that Parliament's cause was the cause of England itself - and anti-Scottish feeling undoubtedly helped to bring many English men and women into the King's camp. Once the relationship between Parliament and the Scots started to deteriorate in 1645, however, and the King began to court the Scots in his turn, this situation changed. Top The final choice: subjugation or liberation As Charles I's attempts to secure 'foreign' soldiers in any way he could became more widely known, the choice facing the English people seemed increasingly to be one between national subjugation under the King and national liberation under the Parliament.

It was a choice to which there could only be one response. Those who had initially rallied to the King's banner now deserted him in droves - and the defeat of the Royalist party in arms was the inevitable result. In June 1646 the King's wartime capital, Oxford, was surrendered to the Parliamentarian New Model Army. Charles fled in disguise and put himself under the protection of the Scots - but they soon handed him back to Parliament. Two years later the King was led out to the executioner's block, his attempts to recover his position by fomenting a new war - this time between the Scots and Parliament - having finally hardened his captors' hearts against him. On 30 January 1649 the King was beheaded in front of a huge crowd at Whitehall. 'The man Charles Stuart' was gone - but, thanks to the subsequent efforts of royalist propagandists, the memory of 'the martyr king' would live on in the English popular imagination for centuries to come. The British Wars 1637-51 by P. Gaunt (Routledge, 1997) Revolt in the Provinces by J.

Morrill (Longman, 1999) Understanding Popular Violence in the English Revolution: The Colchester Plunderers by J. Walter (Cambridge, 1999) Links The English Civil War Society Group dedicated to re-enacting 17th Century battles. Places to visit The Museum of London has a huge collection of Cromwell documents, artefacts and 'memorabilia'. There is a Cromwell museum in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire and an English Civil War centre at the Commandery , Worcester. Carisbrooke Castle on the Isle of Wight was used during the Civil War as a prison for Charles I. 1000+ images about English Civil War on Pinterest | English, The sword and Civil wars Forward An English civil war Roundhead by John Pettie. Roundhead" was the name given to the supporters of the Parliament during the English Civil War. Also known as Parliamentarians, they fought against King Charles I and his supporters, the Cavaliers (Royalists), who claimed absolute power and the divine right of kings. The goal of the Roundhead party was to give the Parliament supreme control over executive administration.

See More Whig and Tory--Historical Outline Contact Me Whig and Tory [¶1] What follows is a discussion of the use of "Whig" and "Tory" as political labels during the Restoration and 18th century, not a rehearsal of Whig and Tory politics in the period. The two questions are not entirely separable, of course, but my effort here is to trace the emergence and continuing use of a particular political terminology, a political rhetoric, not to delineate the fortunes of Whig and Tory political groupings and policies. Shorter Elaboration (followed by a more extended discussion here ) [¶2] "Whig" and "Tory" are political party labels that have been in use in England since around 1681--and their specific meaning has varied somewhat with changing historical circumstances. As political labels, the terms derive from the factional conflict of the Exclusion Crisis (1679-81), Whigs being supporters of Exclusion (of the Catholic James, Duke of York, brother of the king and next in line for the English throne) and Tories being their Royalist opponents.

By extension, then, the Whigs were seen as asserting the primacy of Parliament over the monarch, while the Tories were seen as asserting the inverse. This factional division of English political elites clearly echoed the divisions between Parliamentarians and Royalists in the era of the Civil Wars, and thus portended more than a simple difference of opinion on a particular (albeit rather important) policy matter. Through the rest of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries, the terms "Whig" and "Tory" would continue to carry the weight of the Civil War conflicts, at least obliquely, even as the two factions came to be defined and redefined, first, in the Exclusion Crisis itself, then, in the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688. [¶3] During the Exclusion Crisis, the Whigs were seen as political revisionists, activist politicians willing to risk political turmoil in their opposition to the legitimate monarch, while Tories were political loyalists. After the Revolution of 1688-89, however, the Whigs became the defenders of the (new) status quo and the Tories were the political malcontents (and possible supporters of disruption of the new dynastic order).

Under the Hanoverians (from 1714), the Whigs monopolized political power, since the Tories (as adherents of the displaced Stuart dynasty) were anathemized by the new monarchs. In these new circumstances, Whigs were defenders of "foreign" and often unpopular monarchs (the Dutch William of Orange and the Hanoverian George I), while the Tories were partisans of the Stuarts (happily so under Anne, the last of the Stuarts, unhappily thereafter). In the early eighteenth century, Whigs were associated with "new" wealth, that is, with the moneyed interest (financiers and merchants), the Dissenting interest, and urban dwellers (in the City of London and elsewhere), while Tories were associated with the "old" landowning gentry class (the country squires) and with defenders of the privileges of the Anglican Church against the "encroachments" of the Dissenters.

[¶4] After a period of political realignments in the middle part of the century, the terms had shifted around somewhat again by the late eighteenth century: a Tory was a "conservative," a supporter of the status quo with its various privileges and exclusions, while a Whig was a "liberal" or "reformer," committed to modernizing the system of church and state. These latest inflections stuck through much of the nineteenth century, during which Tories or Conservatives opposed Catholic Emancipation, electoral reform, and Irish Home Rule, while Whigs or Liberals championed those causes. Subsequently, the term Tory has survived as a label for a conservative or reactionary political outlook; the term Whig has more or less completely died out, having been displaced by "liberal." [¶5] More generally, the terms refer fundamentally to divisions over conceptions of sovereignty and political power: Whigs conceive of power as ultimately residing in "the people" (or in the people's representatives) and view rulers as serving the will and welfare of the people (as embodied in Parliament); Tories conceive of sovereignty as residing in rulers and view "the people" as subjects whose duty is to obey.

Tories are thus identified with a system of hereditary power--exercised especially by monarchs and the established Church--while Whigs are associated with a system of popular power, though generally in the hands of the propertied rather than the populace at large. In the Tory vision, the political organization of society is hierarchical and patriarchal, with governors having a responsibility to look after the welfare of their subjects. In the Whig vision, political rulers are, likewise, responsible for the welfare of "the people," but they are also accountable to them (that is, to Parliament and the political nation it represents). Both Whig and Tory traditions have often had an upper-class bias to them (though they are both capable of making populist appeals, when necessary), and can usefully be distinguished from a properly democratic or "radical" tradition in British politics and society. [¶6] The terms "Whig" and "Tory" have also often carried strong sectarian (religious) associations, Tories being associated with High Church sentiments (including preservation of the privileges and exclusions of the established Church) and Whigs being associated with latitudinarianism and Protestant Dissent. At different times, both have been associated with strongly anti-Catholic sentiments.

In the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Whigs, as champions of Parliamentary rights over against the Stuart monarchs and as supporters of Protestant Dissent, developed a strongly anti-Catholic, militantly Protestant political rhetoric, while Tories were often seen as "tainted" by their support for the Catholic Stuarts. By contrast, since the early nineteenth century, Whigs have been champions of Catholic Emancipation and Tories have been associated with preservation of Anglican supremacy and privileges. The "high church" leanings of Tories have persisted throughout this era, which, in the nineteenth century, has meant both opposition to the political emancipation of the Catholic community in the UK and an association with the Tractarian Movement, just as, around 1688, it meant both opposition to the displacement of James II and a devotion to the supremacy of the Anglican Church. In the earlier period, Whigs saw themselves as militantly anti-Catholic defenders of the Protestant religion, while more recently Whigs have tended to see themselves as being "above" the sectarian religious politics of the Tories.

[¶7] In relation to both church and state, religion and politics, the terms Whig and Tory have been redefined and transformed in their associations and inflections in the period since they first achieved currency around 1681. Especially in relation to the earlier terrain (through the mid-eighteenth century), the modern associations of Whig and Tory with "liberal" and "conservative" can be misleading or, in any case, can fail to register the actual specificity of political alignments and divisions: neither party can easily be designated as "progressive" and each has to be examined in terms of its particular engagements in specific contexts. Extended Discussion [back to briefer discussion] §1.

Introduction: "Whig" and "Tory" in English Political Language [¶8] In the 19th century, Thomas Babington Macaulay opined that the political labels "Whig" and "Tory" are "two nicknames which, though originally given in insult, were soon assumed with pride, which are still in daily use, which have spread as widely as the English race, and which will last as long as the English literature" (The History of England from the Accession of James the Second [1849-61], quoted in Willman 1974 : 247).

But already by his time, these 17th-century terms (themselves successors to "cavalier" and "roundhead," "Royalist" and "Parliament-man") were being replaced by more modern political terminology such as "liberal" and "conservative," or "radical" and "reactionary," or, from the French Revolution context, "left-wing" and "right-wing." And, despite Macaulay's suggestion of unchanging continuity in the meaning of these terms up into his own time, they actually underwent several shifts and modifications of meaning over the century and a half from the time of their introduction into English political discourse around 1681. (Moreover, despite Macaulay's emphasis on the "Englishness" of the terms "Whig" and "Tory," associating them as he does with the "English race" and "English literature," they derive, in fact, from the wider linguistic world of the British Isles: Tory from Irish and Whig from Scots.) For us, now, the use of these terms across the long 18th century requires some elucidation.

[¶9] The terms "Whig" and "Tory" did not always function as political labels. They were appropriated and reinflected as "party" labels during the Exclusion Crisis, but they have an older history in English usage as general terms. Thus, in Maurice Atkins's Cataplus (1672), a burlesque of the Aeneid, Anchises avers, "I cou'd tell many pleasant stories / Relating to these drunken Tories" (lines 1709-10), where "Tories" means only ruffians. But since the Exclusion Crisis, these earlier usages have been overshadowed by the function of the terms as a central part of English political rhetoric in the Restoration and eighteenth century.

[¶10] In their English political usage, the terms derive from the factional conflict of the Exclusion Crisis (1679-81), when one faction (the Whigs) sought to exclude Charles II's brother, James, Duke of York, who was a professed Roman Catholic, from eligibility to succeed to the throne and the other faction (the Tories) insisted on the inviolability of the chain of succession and the necessity of acceptance of the legitimate heir. The Whigs asserted, in effect, the right of Parliament to determine the succession to the throne and hence, in a larger sense, the right of Parliament (and hence, on some interpretations, of "the people") to choose their rulers--or, in any case, they argued for an inalienable right of resistance when the fundamental rights and privileges of the people (including their religion) are imperilled. The Tories adhered to the older view that kings and queens are God's regents on earth or, in any case, are placed on the throne by God and so must be obeyed by their subjects under all circumstances (doctrines of passive obedience and non-resistance).

"Tory" thus became a label for political conservatives and royalists and "Whig" for political revisionists and "Parliament-men." [¶11] The factional division of English political elites during the Exclusion Crisis clearly echoed the divisions between Parliamentarians and Royalists in the era of the Civil Wars, and thus portended more than a simple difference of opinion on a particular policy matter. Through the rest of the seventeenth and the early part of the eighteenth centuries, the terms "Whig" and "Tory" would continue to carry the weight of the Civil War legacy, at least obliquely, and the fundamental ideological division between tradition-minded legitimists and reform-minded activists would continue to inform political thought through much of the eighteenth century. Its echoes are quite palpable in John Wesley's assertion in 1785 that, "he, his brother Charles, and their late father were Tories in the sense that they held God, not the people, as the origin of all civil power" ( Sack 1993 : 66), and the ideological distinction would be picked up and revitalized by Edmund Burke in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

Tories viewed the existing system of hierarchy and subordination as part of a God-given, time-tested order, while Whigs viewed political arrangements in quasi-utilitarian terms as variable means designed to achieve desired ends (e.g., public welfare). [¶12] In the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688, the Tories came to be identified with Stuart loyalists and the Whigs with supporters of the new Williamite and, later, Hanoverian political order. In the eighteenth century, in social terms, Tories were often identified with the "old" landowning gentry class (the country squires), with the conservative milieu of Oxford, and with High Church elements of the Anglican establishment, while Whigs were associated with the aristocratic elite and with "new" wealth, that is, the moneyed interest (whether derived from finance or commerce), with the Dissenting interest, and with urban dwellers (in the City of London and elsewhere).

[¶13] A religious sectarian conflict was, no doubt, central to Whig-Tory divisions throughout the Restoration and 18th century--with the Tories seen as committed to the necessity of an established church and its various privileges and the Whigs as increasingly skeptical of the importance or even value of such a religious establishment--but this religious demarcation, like the political distinctions between Whigs and Tories, did not have a fixed, unchanging meaning. The historical malleability of these political labels becomes evident if we keep in mind the vehement anti-Catholicism of Whig rhetoric the late 17th and early 18th centuries (which was central to their opposition to the Stuart line with its Catholic representatives)--and contrast it with the early 19th century association of the Tories with adamantly anti-Catholic politics in the context of the Irish question and the Union of Great Britain and Ireland and Whig support of Catholic Emancipation.

Similarly, in the aftermath of the Civil War, the Tories decried their Dissenting opponents as "fanatics" and sectarian "zealots," while in the 19th century, the Tories saw themselves as the beleaguered defenders of religion and piety against the forces of atheism and libertinism and were seen by their opponents as sectarian "fanatics" and religious "obscurantists." [¶14] Some of these shifts in the religious associations of the two parties are to be explained by the fact that in their earlier phase, the Tories were distinguished by their adherence to a notion of prescriptive and hereditary rights and political principles (which tended to imply adherence to the Stuart dynasty), while in their "post-Jacobite phase," with the demise of the Stuart cause after 1745, the Tories retained their adherence to prescriptive rights but their central application of these principles shifted to the terrain of "churchly matters" (Sack 1993: 50).

But there were other shifts in positions that responded to other factors: one might note, for example, that during the period when the Tories were excluded from political power (and from "shire, judicial, Church, and military offices under the crown") in the era of Whig hegemony under the first two Georges, they decried "corruption" and supported "a thorough regeneration of the electoral system," while the Whigs sought to preserve the status quo (Sack 1993: 146). Then followed an era of Pittite and neo-Tory dominance at the end of the 18th century (during which the Tories were by no means uniformly opposed to parliamentary reform), but in the early 19th century the Whigs became the proponents of parliamentary "reform" against the conservative resistance of the ministries of Canning and Wellington (whose resistance to such reform echoed Lord North's contention, in opposition to Pitt's motion for reform in 1785, that the constitution secured in 1688-1714 was "the most beautiful fabric that, perhaps, had ever existed from the beginning of time.

He never would consent to any attempt to tamper with such a fabric") (Sack 1993: 149). [¶15] But whatever the reasons for the shifting valences of the two party labels, the point is that they do not function as unchanging political tags whose meanings can be defined independently of the context of their usage. There were, of course, stereotyped "characters" of Whigs and Tories in circulation from the time of the Exclusion Crisis, and, in the later 18th and early 19th century especially, we see the development of somewhat generalized, more abstract conceptions of these affiliations, so that it was always possible to speak of "Whig" and "Tory" values, dispositions, sentiments as though these existed as fixed entities, independent of and prior to any particular political issue or debate. But such generalized discourse about Whigs and Tories tends to reflect the configuration of Whig and Tory positions prevalent at a given moment of political strife and does not always give one a good window on the concrete meaning of Whig and Tory investments during diverse moments across the Restoration and up into the 19th century. §2.

Application of These Political Labels in the Exclusion Crisis [¶16] The terms seem to have entered the vocabulary of English politics around 1681, borrowed and adapted from their earlier use in Ireland and Scotland (Willman 1974: 251). In its original Irish (and English) usage, the term Tories refers to Irish brigands who were "popishly affected, outlaws, robbers, such as our law saith have Caput Lupinum, fit and ready to be destroyed and knocked on the head by any one that could meet with them"[ 1 ] (The Character of an Honest Man, whether stiled Whig or Tory [1683]; quoted in Willman 1974: 251-52). This notion of the Tory (or brigand) was popularized in Ireland "in the generation after 1660, following the Cromwellian conquest and the compounded confusion of the Restoration Settlement, which created a large body of footloose men, many of them former gentry, with opportunity and incentive to take to brigandage" (Willman 1974: 252).

[¶17] Most of the Tories preyed on "Irish peasants and petty traders" but the Tory chief Redmond O'Hanlon "began in the late 1670s to disturb the equanimity of the Anglo-Irish gentry by preying directly upon them"; in late 1679, his gang murdered Henry St John of Tanderagee after kidnapping him for ransom. "The event made news in England," as did the betrayal and death of O'Hanlon in April 1681: "O'Hanlon's depredations are important because, thanks to them, the notoriety of Irish Toryism was increased at a moment of extreme tension and anti-Catholic fear in England; and the career of the greatest Irish Tory reached its climax just at the height of the Exclusion Crisis" (Willman 1974: 252). (These "Tories" did not easily disappear: in 1707, the Irish Parliament passed an "Act for the more effectual suppression of tories, robbers, and rapparees" [Irish Act 6 Anne, c.

11].) [¶18] The term Whig, or its earlier form Whiggamaire, "had been in use in Scotland since the 1640s as a term for Covenanting rebels" (Willman 1974: 252), that is, it was applied to adherents of the Presbyterian cause in Scotland, who achieved victory during the Civil Wars but then were pushed aside at the Restoration when the Episcopalian Church was re-established. "English liberal Protestantism sympathized with the [Scottish Covenanting] rebels of 1679," exemplified, for instance, in "Monmouth's well-known leniency in dealing with them after Bothwell Brig," but "English fellow-feeling did not extend to the small band of sectaries who refused the settlement of 1679 and continued in arms. The Cameronian or 'Cargillite' movement justified itself in terms few English Protestants could accept, excommunicating the King as well as the Dukes of York and Monmouth from the 'true kirk' and declaring it lawful to kill them and all who followed them" (Willman 1974: 253).

Thus, by 1681, when the term Whig was applied to English Exclusionists (as in the reference to "these English Whigs . . . as well as their Brethren of Scotland" in Heraclitus Ridens [quoted in Willman 1974: 262]), it carried a negative valence, even for the party so labeled. [¶19] These terms were appropriated into the linguistic and political maelstrom of the Exclusion Crisis. "The passion for stigmatizing nicknames had begun in 1679 when Exclusionists, styling themselves 'True Protestants,' began to assail their Protestant opponents as 'Protestant Papists' or 'Protestants in Masquerade'" (Willman 1974: 254); the Royalists responded by mockingly calling the Exclusionists "True Blues" or (according to Roger North) "Birmingham Protestants, alluding to false Groats counterfeited at that Place" (Examen [pub. 1740]; quoted in Willman 1974: 249).

(The subtitle supplied for John Dryden's Mac Flecknoe when it was published in 1682--A Satyr upon the True-Blew-Protestant Poet, T.S.--alludes to this usage.[ 2 ]) "When Exclusionist petitions for the meeting of Parliament [in 1680] were countered by Royalist addresses 'abhorring' the petitions, the Exclusionists responded with a campaign of abuse which contributed 'Yorkist' and 'Tantivy'" to the language, as well as 'Abhorrer'" (Willman 1974: 254). [¶20] "It was only after the demise of the last Exclusion Parliament [in March 1681] that the first Royalist nickname for the Exclusionists began to appear in print, when the formula 'True Protestant' was expanded to 'True Bromidgham Protestant,' i.e., true counterfeit one" (Willman 1974: 255).

Commenting on this development, Laurence Echard, in his History of England (3rd ed., 1720), remarks that "Great Heats and Animosities were created by these Petitioners and Abhorrers . . . and about the same Time . . . arose the pernicious Terms, and Distinctions of WHIG and TORY, both Exotick Names, which the Parties invidiously bestow'd upon each other" (quoted in Willman 1974: 247); and Roger North, in his Examen: or An Enquiry into the Credit and Veracity of a Pretended Complete History (published 1740), describes the Exclusionists as giving their opponents a whole series of labels: "Yorkist," the first such term, "served for meer Distinction, but did not scandalise or reflect enough. Then they came to Tantivy, which implied Riding Post to Rome . . .

Then, observing that the Duke [i.e., James] favoured Irish Men, all his Friends, or those accounted such by appearing against the Exclusion, were straight become Irish, and so wild Irish, thence Bog-trotters, and, in the Copia of the factious Language, the Word Tory was entertained, which signified the most despicable Savages among the Wild Irish, and, being a vocal clever sounding Word, readily pronounced, it kept its Hold, and took Possession of the foul Mouths of the Faction" (quoted in Willman 1974: 249). Through James's "favoring" of Irishmen, the traditional English abusive rhetoric for the Irish gets appropriated here for domestic English politics. [¶21] The term Tories begins to appear in 1680 with reference to the Irishmen supposedly favored by James, Duke of York; and in 1681, it is being applied also to Englishmen who support the Duke (the Exclusionist Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome [no.

49, 13 May 1681] denounces "all the L'Estranges, Thompsons, Club of Heraclitus-Scriblers, Tories, Papists, Masquerade- Protestants, and other Vermin of that Stamp" [quoted in Willman 1974: 260]). The work that more than any other helped establish the use and the conjoining of the terms Whig and Tory in English political discourse was Roger L'Estrange's The Observator (begun on 13 April 1681). In no. 29 (2 July 1681), L'Estrange changed the name to The Observator in Dialogue and the publication, which had previously alternated between "Question" and "Answer," was now (and for the following two years) presented as a dialogue between "Whig" and "Tory": "This moment, 2 July 1681, appears to be the time when English politics were first envisaged as a dialogue between Whig and Tory; here the two words seem to have been first uttered in one breath, as natural complements to each other.

Other journalists took their cue from the Observator and began to use the words more frequently, and together" (Willman 1974: 262). [¶22] The use of these various party labels and terms of opprobrium deepened the partisan divisions of the age. In October 1681, Oliver Heywood (a Nonconformist) noted how "this is the distinction they make instead of Cavalier and Roundhead, now they are called Torys and Wiggs, the former wearing a red Ribband [in their hats], the other a violet--thus men begin to commence war" (quoted in Willman 1974: 263). In his prologue to Absalom and Achitophel (Nov. 1681), John Dryden writes: "He who draws his pen for one party must expect to make enemies of the other, for wit and fool are consequents of Whig and Tory, and every man is a knave or an ass to the contrary side" (quoted in Willman 1974: 262-63).

[¶23] Robert Willman's modern account of the adoption of Whig and Tory into English political discourse in 1681 and thereafter, summarized above, is less colorful than that offered by Daniel Defoe in his Review (no. 75, 16 Sept. 1710)--where he credits Titus Oates with popularizing the term Tories and the Duke of Lauderdale with the like service for Whig--but it is clearly more persuasive, though eighteenth-century historians often repeated Defoe's account. These early historians' interest in the political terminology of "Whig" and "Tory" speaks not only to a concern with the past, but also to conflicts that were still alive in their own era--for the partisan rancor of the Exclusion Crisis produced animosities that did not easily die down, even though the original issue and occasion were relatively quickly overtaken by the march of events. §3.

Use of Whig and Tory Idiom through the Early 18th Century [¶24] In his Dissertation on Parties (1735-38), Bolingbroke remarks that with the Revolution of 1688-89 and the effective "exclusion" of James II, "The real essences of Whig and Tory were thus [in 1689] destroyed, but the nominal were preserved" (OED, sv "Tory n. and a.," sense 3a).

But, of course, the dynastic issue was not entirely settled in 1689: the existence of non-jurors and Jacobites testified to the complications of the new settlement, and the accession of Anne (last of the Stuart monarchs of England) in 1702 renewed the emotions around the Stuart claim to the throne and the political language of Whig and Tory enjoyed a new lease on life during the partisan conflicts of Anne's reign (1702-14).[ 3 ] [¶25] But with the settlement of the succession in the Protestant line after the Revolution of 1688, and especially after the eventual accession of the Hanoverians to the throne in 1714, the changed political context meant that the political programs of the Whigs and Tories were radically altered: the Whigs now figured much of the time, and certainly after 1714, as the supporters of the established political order and the Tories were those who stood in opposition (whether or not they actually supported a return of the Stuart line).

In 1682, in an epilogue to the Duke of Guise, Dryden equates a "Whig" with a rebel: "When Sighs and Prayers their ladies cannot move, / They rail, write Treason, and turn Whigs to love" (OED, sv. "Whig n. and a.," sense 3b). But after 1688, and especially after 1714, it was the Tories who could be tarred with the charge of "disloyalty"--at least in relation to the political settlement. The flight of the Tory leader, Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, to France in 1715, seemed to cement the notion that the Tories were untrustworthy Jacobites and the unsuccessful Jacobite plots and risings (especially in 1715 and 1745) kept the Whig hegemony firmly in place--despite the fact that "about 100 country gentlemen, regarding themselves as Tories, remained members of the House of Commons throughout the years of the Whig hegemony. . . .

[and] at the level of local politics, administration, and influence, such 'Tories' remained of considerable importance" (Encyclopaedia Britannica, s.v. "Whig and Tory"). [¶26] The Tory adherence to the established privileges of the Anglican Church allowed them to retain a "loyalist" identity on the terrain of church issues and to cast their opponents as those who would upset the established order in the religious sphere. This dynamic produced a complex situation, in which the Anglican Church was divided between those with Whig and those with Tory leanings (though, given the political control of the upper levels of church patronage the upper hierarchy tended to have a Whig coloring). Moreover, whatever the personal antipathies between the Tories and Whigs fostered by a couple of generations of sectarian strife, as the eighteenth-century progressed many Tories increasingly accepted the Revolutionary Settlement of 1688-89 and the Whig notions of a limited or constitutional monarchy in place of the Tory battlecry of unlimited royal prerogative. As a result, the ideological differences between the two camps became less predictable.

[¶27] So, too, individuals could be of one mind in political matters and of another in church and religious matters. In 1713, Richard Steele introduces the persona of the Guardian in precisely these terms: "I am, with Relation to the Government of the Church, a Tory, with Regard to the State, a Whig" (The Guardian, no. 1 [12 March 1713]). Steele's amphibious Tory-cum-Whig stance is consonant with the outlook of Addison (who avers that "an honest Englishman is a Tory in church matters and a Whig in politics") and Swift (who writes in a letter to Thomas Tickell of 7 July 1726, "I am weary of living among Ministers whom I cannot govern, who are all rank Tories in Government, & worse than Whigs in Church, whereas I was the first Man who taught & practised the direct contrary Principle") (quoted in Stephens, ed. 1982 : 605n.10).

[¶28] David Hume, taking stock of the new situation in the Hanoverian age in his essay "Of the Parties of Great Britain" (1741), ignores the church issue altogether and remarks that, "A Tory, . . . since the revolution [of 1688], may be defined in a few words, to be a lover of monarchy, tho' without abandoning liberty; and a partizan of the family of Stuart," while a "Whig may be defin'd to be a Lover of Liberty, tho' without renouncing Monarchy; a Friend to the Settlement in the Protestant Line" (OED, sv "Tory, n. and a.," sense 3a; "Whig, n. and a.," sense 4).

Hume's defintion of "Tory" and "Whig" maintains the centrality of the dynastic issue, but begins to transform the associations of the two political labels, so that Tories come to be seen as the party of "order" and Whigs as the party of "liberty." [¶29] In such a transformed context, the use of the labels "Whig" and "Tory" continued apace, but they were not so clear-cut in their reference as they had been in the era of Charles II and James II. With the Jacobite baggage adhering to the Tories, their formal proscription from ministerial power under the early Hanoverians, and the changing alliances among opposition groups (especially in the era of Walpole), there were manifest pressures for a "modernization" of political labels, not only through the kind of semantic transformation effected by Hume but also through the adoption of new political labels.

The ideological relevance of the old opposition between Whig and Tory was compromised by the 1730s, when the old idiom came to be overlayed and modified by a newer idiom in which the opposition between "court" and "country" or between "court" and "patriot opposition" became a more crucial political distinction--one that cut through the "Whig" camp, separating out court Whigs, on the one hand, and lumping country Whigs and Tories together (in the "patriot" grouping), on the other hand. The traditional Tories had been supporters of James II (and sometimes of the Jacobite succession); they had been Non-Jurors (or sympathetic with them) at the time of the Revolution of 1688; they had been staunch supporters of the Anglican establishment, against both Catholics and Dissenters ( Fabel 1974 : 101)--the first two of these allegiances became increasingly outdated as the 18th century progressed and with them the traditional meaning of "Tory" and, consequently, the traditional meaning of the Whig-and-Tory opposition.

[¶30] The definitions of "Whig" and "Tory" offered in various dictionaries and encyclopedias from 1699 through the 1740s suggests the primary importance of the Restoration era in the definition of these terms--and, by implication, the space for their modification and adaptation in the 18th century: From Abel Boyer's Royal Dictionary (1699), "which he had prepared for the use of the Duke of Gloucester in studying French": Whig (in opposition to Tory, a Nick-name given to the Fanaticks that were against the Kings Interest in King Charles the second and James the second's time.) un Fanatique, un ennemy du Roy ou de la Cour, un Republicain. From Dr. Adam Littleton's Linguae Latinae Liber Dictionarius (4th ed., 1703): A Whig is translated Homo fanaticus, factiosus; Whiggism, Enthusiasmus, perduellio; A Tory, bogtrotter or Irish robber, Praedo Hibernicus; A Tory opposed to whig, Regiarum partium assertor.

From the Kersey-Phillips New World of Words (1706; [a revision of Edward Phillips's The New World of English Words, 1658?]): Whig, Whay, or very small Beer; also a Nickname, contradistinguished from Tory, and given to those that were against the Court-Interest in the time of K. Charles II. and James II: A Fanatick, a Factious Fellow. From Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia (1728; 5th ed., 1741-43): the tories, says M. Rapin, appear fierce and haughty: they treat the whigs with the last contempt, and even somewhat hardly, when they have the advantage over them. . .

(These examples are all quoted from Kolb & Sledd 1952 : 882-85) [¶31] Kolb and Sledd note that "Nicholas Tindal, in his annotated translation of the Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys by Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, had used Burnet to correct Rapin's etymology of whig [see "A Dissertation on the Whigs and Torys," The History of England, by Paul de Rapin-Thoyras, 3rd ed. (London, 1743-47), II, 798]" (Kolb & Sledd 1952: 883). Rapin was the chief source for the article on Tories in Ephraim Chambers's Cyclopaedia [1728; 5th ed., 1741-43]: both Rapin and Chambers warn that the terms Whig and Tory are "alike equivocal, in that they referred both to moderates and to extremists, to matters political and to matters ecclesiastical" (Kolb & Sledd 1952: 884).

Rapin and Chambers warn us that "Whig" and "Tory" are complex terms, open to multiple inflections. And, one might add, the passage of time and changing political contexts only served to make the terms more equivocal. If David Hume resolved some of this complication by ignoring "matters ecclesiastical" in his brief definitions of Whigs and Tories (as noted above), Samuel Johnson, in his entries for the terms in his Dictionary (1755), excises any reference to the respective dynastic principles of the two parties that figure so prominently in Hume's defintion: From Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language (1755): Tory, n.s. [A cant term, derived, I suppose, from an Irish word signifying a savage.] One who adheres to the antient constitution of the state, and the apostolical hierarchy of the church of England, opposed to a whig. The knight is more a tory in the country than the town, because it advances his interest. xxxAddison.

Question: What was the nickname of the Parliamentary supporters during the mid 17th century English Civil War?
Answer: Roundheads