A footnote in By the Sword remarks,
By 1680 members of the Green Ribbon Club — who defended Parliament and Protestantism — were called Whigs, a shortened form of “Whiggamore” (literally, “horse thief”), the name of a Scots band active around 1648 against Charles I. “Tory” was an Irish word for robber, first applied to the Conservative Party by Titus Oakes in 1680.