John Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl Gower
John Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl Gower, PC was an English Tory politician and peer who twice served as Lord Privy Seal from 1742 to 1743 and 1744 to 1754. Leveson-Gower also served in the Parliament of Great Britain, where he sat in the House of Lords as a leading member of the Tories, prior to switching his political affiliation and serving in various Whig-led government ministries until his death in 1754.
John Leveson-Gower, 1st Earl Gower
A portrait of Granville Leveson-Gower, 1st Marquess of Stafford by George Romney c. 1790
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