“I must now acquaint you, that by my Lord Treasurer’s Advice, I have made a considerable retrenchment upon my expenses in Candles and Charcoal, and do not intend to stop there, but will, with your help, look into the late embezzlements of my dripping-pans and kitchen stuff; of which, by the way, upon my conscience, neither my Lord Treasurer nor my Lord Lauderdale are guilty. I tell you my opinion, but if you should find them dabbling in that business, I tell you plainly I leave ’em to you; for I would have the world know I am not a man to be cheated. “My Lords and Gentlemen, I desire you to believe me as you have found me; and I do solemnly promise you, that whatsoever you give me shall be specially manag’d with the same conduct, trust, sincerity, and prudence, that I have ever practised since my happy Restoration.” The commencement of party warfare as now recognized in parliamentary life may be dated from the Stuarts, and to account for the designations of Whig and Tory it is necessary to glance back at the parliamentary troubles of Charles II., 1679-1680, when that monarch, acting under the encouragement of Louis XIV., was inclined to make a misguided attempt to govern without a legislative chamber. In 1679 the monarch refused a Speaker to his Commons, finding that functionary obnoxious; and between this date and 1681 parliament was prorogued seven times: in fact--as a summary of Charles II.’s parliaments discloses--the discords of the previous reign were revived; the “town and country party” petitioned zealously for the reassembling of parliament, while the Court party counter-petitioned “to declare their _abhorrence_ of the late tumultuary petitioning.” Those who were urging on the struggle for popular representation and freedom were designated _Petitioners_, the king’s “friends” were voted “betrayers of the liberties of the people, and abettors of arbitrary power,” and expressively stigmatized as _Abhorrers_;[9] from these two parties, which were ready to exterminate one another, arose the nicknames of Whigs and Tories, as is explained in Tindal’s “Rapin.”[10]