The Loyal Brotherhood and the Cocoa Tree

In the light of previous historiography any reference to tory organization in the mid-eighteenth century is likely to seem a contradiction in terms. In the Enid Muir Lecture of 1954, Sir Lewis Namier argued that by the 1750s ‘tory’ had become effectively redundant as a party name: that the term could no longer be used to describe a particular set of political beliefs, nor applied to any recognized group within parliament; that those few individual M.P.'s who still called themselves tories should more properly be regarded as independent country gentlemen: ‘a nationwide group without a leader or programme or deeper coherence’. As Namier went on to remark, hardly any political correspondence between leading tories has survived for the period after 1715. The consequent temptation for historians to rely either on the ill-informed and frequently contemptuous assessments of the tory party supplied by whig observers, or to assume that the lack of any easily available evidence presupposes a concomitant paucity of tory organization, has usually proved irresistible

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