ABSTRACT
The view that the debate about British policy towards the thirteen colonies in the years preceding the American Revolution can be seen simply as an expression of the ancient rivalry of Whig and Tory has long since ceased to hold attractions for historians. The polemical importance of the search for clear Whig and Tory identities was strongly felt by contemporaries. English allies of the American cause tended to assume that, in the context of 1776, Revolution principles were synonymous with American principles. In the end, the old Whigs went into the American War all too aware that it was a war not for the prerogative of the crown but for that parliamentary sovereignty which they were themselves supposed to venerate. For the deployment of traditional Tory emotions and beliefs in the service of parliamentary omnicompetence was carried out much more smoothly than the channelling of old Whig energies in a radical or reforming direction.
