Status Updates From Politics under the Later St...

The critical fault line during the Exclusion Crisis was attitudes towards religious dissenters - while Tories did take a more paternal view of government and Whigs believed in a kind of contract theory, constitutional doctrines were mixed between the parties. The defining issue was whether to tolerate dissenters or espouse high Anglicanism.

The politics of the later Stuarts resulted from the failure to settle both constitutional and religious questions at the Restoration. Different principled positions created the high church, more royalist Tories and the dissenting, Parliamentarian Whigs.