MDMD(2)---Mason & Whig(gery), p59 Chap 7

[Eric Alan Weinstein]

Shaftesbury starts the Whigs (derived from the Wigamores,
who had marched on Edinburgh) a party named by their rivals, the Tories. 
A Whig in the 1670's  had been slang for  "a sour, bigotted, canting money
grubbing Scots Presbetrian". Dr Johnson said he always thought that the
first Whig had been the Devil. Tory benches satirized the Whigs as
typically talking of ---
 "new light and prophecy; spiritual incomes, indwellings, eminations, 
manifestations. (The Whig) prays for the King---but with more distictions
and mental reservations than an honest man would in taking the covenant." 
It is this Tory-derived description of the Whigs and their "talk"  which Bonk 
seems to have in mind whenhe tells Mason to keep his Whig views to Dixon
and himself.

Meanwhile the term Tory, so named by their Whig party rivals,
refered to  "Irish papist bandits ravaging estates and manor houses." From 
the back benches the Whig party members described their Tory counterparts
as "a monster with an English face, a French heart, and an Irish conscience;
a creature of a large forehead, prodigoius mouth, supple hands, and no brains. 
They are a sort of wild boar that would root out the Constitution....blow up
the 
bullwark of our freedom, Paraliment, and juries." 

 Lest we think that the Whigs were merely or  purely a party of Irish bashers, 
(there were a few bastards, but this would be unfair to pin on all)
they were in fact the party of parliment, the equal rule of law, religious 
toleration  (as long as that didn't mean a Catholic king on the throne who
would 
likely  take away such liberty and rekindle ties to Rome.) England's most
venemous 
anti-Catholic laws were replealed in 1672, during the cash deal 
with France over the Dutch wars which saw New Amsterdam
turn into New York (after the King's brother James,  
himself a Catholic the Duke of York.).

While the Tories were a party which drew a great deal of its support,
initally,  from the landed gentry who were more traditionally Royalist,
and more pro-Catholic, The Whigs were less firmly Royalist (in the sense
of the King's actual power, rather than his right to position) and a bit more
 in the radical tradition (though most Whigs could not be called very radical.)

 (These quotes taken from Christopher Lee's "This Septred
Isle.")
Eric Alan Weinstein
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk