King's Friends

In the 1760s and 80s in Britain, those politicians, mainly Tories, who supported George III's view that the monarch had the right to choose his own ministers. The king presented this as a preference for good government over an administration riven by parties, but many Whigs regarded it as an attack on constitutional rule. Mostly Tories, who saw the Crown as a bulwark of conservatism. The term was later also applied to an inchoate group of politicians, including Winston Churchill, who supported Edward VIII's wish to marry Wallace Simpson and remain on the throne in the abdication crisis of 1936.