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Organized political parties emerged in England in the latter half of the seventeenth century, and this development has drawn historians' attention for more than twenty years. Party structure and behaviour in parliament and party contests in the constituencies, especially as they existed in the reigns of William and Mary and Queen Anne, have received close scrutiny. 1 Signs of party growth, of'court' and 'opposition' in the house of commons, in fact appear quite early during the long tenure of Charles IPs cavalier parliament. 2 Evidence for parallel development in the localities, however, only emerges in the course of the exclusion crisis of 1679-1681, when a series of elections fought over issues of national importance mobilized voters as tories and whigs. 3 Moreover, even at this time, party affiliations were fluid and often brief, a circumstance exacerbated by the first whig party's collapse after 1683* and perhaps accountable for historians' general neglect of local party in this period.The slow identification by historians of local party can partly be attributed to the complex interaction of personal rivalries and overtly political issues in local affairs from 1660 through the 1680s. This interpenetration has perhaps discouraged attempts to decipher in the counties the electoral contests and struggles for office, but H. S. Reinmuth's recent study of the Fletcher-Howard quarrel in Cumberland 6 demonstrates how such effort illuminates the seventeenth century as a whole. He * I am grateful for the suggestions and close readings of R.

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