Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer
Robert Harley, 1st Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer, KG PC FRS was an English statesman and peer of the late Stuart and early Georgian periods. He began his career as a Whig, before defecting to a new Tory ministry. He was raised to the peerage of Great Britain as an earl in 1711. Between 1711 and 1714 he served as Lord High Treasurer, effectively Queen Anne's chief minister. He has been called a prime minister, although it is generally accepted that the de facto first minister to be a prime minister was Robert Walpole in 1721.
Portrait by Godfrey Kneller, 1714
Robert Harley by Jonathan Richardson, c. 1710.
Oxford (right), together with his friend and ally Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke and a portrait of Francis Atterbury. Engraving after a painting by Sir Godfrey Kneller.
Robert Harley pictured carrying the white staff of the Lord High Treasurer. Portrait by Jonathan Richardson.
Tories (British political party)
The Tories were a loosely organised political faction and later a political party, in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. They first emerged during the 1679 Exclusion Crisis, when they opposed Whig efforts to exclude James, Duke of York from the succession on the grounds of his Catholicism. Despite their fervent opposition to state-sponsored Catholicism, Tories opposed his exclusion because of their belief that inheritance based on birth was the foundation of a stable society.
James, Duke of York painted in a Romanesque costume
James Stuart, the Pretender during the Jacobite rising of 1715, by gaining some Tory support it was thus used to discredit them by the Whigs
William Pitt the Younger