Why is the British political party called the Tories, or the Conservatives, but never the Conservatories?
‘Tory’ is a nickname going back 500 years, when the ‘Court’ party as they were known (as opposed to the ‘Country’ party, predecessor to the Whigs/Liberals) were in the King’s government. Catholic Ireland was subjected to tyrannies and injustices under this government and so the Irish came to call the Court party thieves, or in Irish Gaelic, Tories. The name stuck. In the 1840s the Tory party collapsed but reconstituted itself as the Conservatives. Incidentally, ‘Whig’ comes from the Scots Covenanter ‘whiggamore’, which is an Edinburgh rebel who carried his property in a cart which he pulled along.
