Tory (Irish toiridhe, 'a pursuer'), a name first given to certain bands of outlaws, half robber, half insurgent, who professed the Roman Catholic faith, and harassed the English in Ireland. It is used in this sense in Gayton's Pleasant Notes upon Don Quixot (1654), the Irish State Papers (1656), and R. Burney's Kerdiston Dōron (1660)—'Wilful peasants . . . degenerate into torces and moss-troopers.' About 1679, the time of the Popish Plot, it began to be applied as a term of reproach to the Cavalier or Court party, as supposed abettors of that trumped-up conspiracy. Oliver Heywood's Diaries (ed. by J. H. Turner, 1881) refer, under the date 24th October 1681, to 'the Ranters calling themselves Torys . . . an Irish title for outlawed persons,' which shows that the nickname was soon adopted by one of the two great political parties in Great Britain—the adherents, namely, of the ancient constitution of England without change, supporters of regal, ecclesiastical, and aristocratic authority; 'their prejudice,' said Dr Johnson, 'is for Establishment, while that of the Whigs is for Innovation.' As Whig (q.v.) has been largely superseded by Liberal, so, since 1830, has Tory been by Conservative (q.v.). Since 1880 it has a good deal revived, in the sense frequently of a non-conservative Conservative.
See Kebel's History of Toryism from Pitt to Beaconsfield (1885); and Standish O'Grady's Toryism and the Tory Democracy (1886).