posed to individuals' rights by overmighty rulers or governments with

standing armies and intrusive officials.

The Whig and Tory parties, however, were very different beasts from the
Country; they represented "another level of political consciousness."25
Whigs and Tories were competing for power and they stood for programs.
If one party was in power, then for all the anti-party rhetoric the other was
obliged to oppose the government. These were not modern political parties,
but they often look like them. Whig and Tory positions first crystallized in
the Exclusion Crisis. The Whigs were more of a coalition than a united
party: some were moved by fear of James, others by a desire to help
Nonconformists, yet others were part of the London radical tradition
derived from the Levellers of the 1640s. In parliament the Exclusionist vote
was precarious; by 1680 the backbenchers, whose fear of popery had led
them at first to join in the Whig attack on Charles and James, began to
identify the rabble-rousing methods and extreme rhetoric of the Whigs as a
greater threat to their ordered world. MPs of this kind began to be
convinced by the Tory cry that "1641 was here again." It was the
controlling conservatism of these squires which ensured the failure of
Exclusion as a parliamentary demand. The Exclusion battle helped give the
Tories a sharper definition. The Tory position was based on real principles,
the indefeasible divine right of monarchy, and non-residence. In Charles's
last years, the Tories encouraged, and often invited, vigorous royal interferenc
e
in provincial government. The Commissions of the Peace were
purged of all their opponents; and town charters were revised to give the
Tories the electoral advantage. This was to give hostages to fortune: James
II, and later George I, turned these weapons against the Tories themselves.
For most of the 1680s, the existence of Whig and Tory parties can be
attributed to mutual hostility and fear. Once the parties had cohered and
men began to assume or be attributed the labels of Whig and Tory, once
political and local offices began to be distributed according to party
allegiance, a process of self-perpetuation had begun.
The Glorious Revolution, like the French Revolution, threw up enough
dust to obscure its antecedents; and like 1789, it became a cause in itself:
attitudes toward the Revolution and the settlement became the touchstones
by which Whigs and Tories were identified. After 1689 the Whigs and
Tories were clearly distinguished by their views on the Revolution and on
the related issues of the succession, the defense of the Church of England,
the conduct of "King William's war," and the abjuration of James II and his
descendants. In particular, these clear party lines gave rise to party voting
and discipline; thus it can be shown from division lists in Queen Anne's
parliaments that the vast majority of MPs voted consistently on party