The first political factions, cohering around a basic, if fluid, set of principles emerged from the Exclusion Crisis and Glorious Revolution in late-17th-century England.[1] The Whigs supported Protestant constitutional monarchy against absolute rule and the Tories, originating in the Royalist (or "Cavalier") faction of the English Civil War, were conservative royalist supporters of a strong monarchy as a counterbalance to the republican tendencies of Whigs, who were the dominant political faction for most of the first half of the 18th century; they supported the Hanoverian succession of 1715 against the Jacobite supporters of the deposed Roman Catholic Stuart dynasty and were able to purge Tory politicians from important government positions after the failed Jacobite rising of 1715. The leader of the Whigs was Robert Walpole, who maintained control of the government in the period 1721–1742; his protégé was Henry Pelham (1743–1754).As the century wore on, the factions slowly began to adopt more coherent political tendencies as the interests of their power bases began to diverge. The Whig party's initial base of support from the great aristocratic families, widened to include the emerging industrial interests and wealthy merchants. As well as championing constitutional monarchy with strict limits on the monarch's power, the Whigs adamantly opposed a Catholic king as a threat to liberty,[2] and believed in extending toleration to nonconformist Protestants, or dissenters. A major influence on the Whigs were the liberal political ideas of John Locke,[3] and the concepts of universal rights employed by Locke and Algernon Sidney.[4]Although the Tories were dismissed from office for half a century, for most of this period (at first under the leadership of Sir William Wyndham), the Tories retained party cohesion, with occasional hopes of regaining office, particularly at the accession of George II (1727) and the downfall of the ministry of Sir Robert Walpole in 1742. They acted as a united, though unavailing, opposition to Whig corruption and scandals. At times they cooperated with the "Opposition Whigs", Whigs who were in opposition to the Whig government; however, the ideological gap between the Tories and the Opposition Whigs prevented them from coalescing as a single party. They finally regained power with the accession of George III in 1760 under Lord Bute.
