Blackwell Reference Online

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“Tory rebellion” is most commonly used in Irish history to refer to elite and popular Protestant resistance to concessions to Catholic nationalist interests. “Tory,” however, arose in mid-seventeenth-century Ireland as a term applied to outlaws, often assumed to have been dispossessed Catholics, although they may have had little political motivation. Later in the century it was imported into British politics as a term of derision applied to supporters of conservative Anglo-Catholicism and Jacobitism . Applications of the term shifted as the Jacobite threat receded, and late eighteenth-century “Tories” resumed a close relationship to the British monarchy and the Protestant establishment. By the nineteenth century, therefore, by association, supporters of the British establishment in Ireland – a predominantly Anglican group –were being labeled “Tories.” While the British political “Tory” party became more commonly referred to as the “Conservative” party in the nineteenth century, “Tory” continued to be used thereafter as a term of affirmation and derision. Most definitively, opposition to home rule by Protestant “Tories” backed by English “Tories,” especially in Ulster in the period 1911–14, is conceived of as Tory rebellion. This “rebellion” frustrated demands for home rule, and ultimately helped to avert the establishment of an all-Ireland jurisdiction. An echo of “Tory rebellion” ... log in or subscribe to read full text