Whigs (British political party)

The Whigs began as a political faction that opposed absolute monarchy and Catholic emancipation, supporting constitutional monarchism and parliamentary government, but also Protestant supremacy.

The period known as the Whig Supremacy (1714–1760) was enabled by the Hanoverian succession of George I in 1714 and the failure of the Jacobite rising of 1715 by Tory rebels.

Great Britain approximated a one-party state under the Whigs until King George III came to the throne in 1760 and allowed Tories back in.

In the beginning, the Whig Party generally tended to support the aristocratic families, the continued disenfranchisement of Catholics and toleration of nonconformist Protestants (dissenters such as the Presbyterians), while the Tories generally favoured the minor gentry and people who were (relatively speaking) smallholders; they also supported the legitimacy of a strongly established Church of England.

By the first half of the 19th century, the Whig manifesto had come to encompass the supremacy of parliament, the abolition of slavery, the expansion of the franchise (suffrage) and an acceleration of the move toward complete equal rights for Catholics (a reversal of the party's late-17th-century position, which had been militantly anti-Catholic).

Under Lord Shaftesbury's leadership, the Whigs (also known as the Country Party) sought to exclude the Duke of York (who later became King James II) from the throne due to his Roman Catholicism, his favouring of monarchical absolutism, and his connections to France.

In response, King Charles prorogued Parliament and then dissolved it, but the subsequent elections in August and September saw the Whigs' strength increase.

Without Parliament, the Whigs gradually crumbled, mainly due to government repression following the discovery of the Rye House Plot.

[26] The 18th-century Whigs borrowed the concepts and language of universal rights employed by political theorists Locke and Algernon Sidney (1622–1682).

As Wilson and Reill (2004) note: "Adam Smith's theory melded nicely with the liberal political stance of the Whig Party and its middle-class constituents".

In his great Dictionary (1755), Johnson defined a Tory as "one who adheres to the ancient Constitution of the state and the apostolical hierarchy of the Church of England, opposed to a Whig".

He linked 18th-century Whiggism with 17th-century revolutionary Puritanism, arguing that the Whigs of his day were similarly inimical to the established order of church and state.

The economic historian William Ashley claimed that this Act witnessed the "real starting-point in the history of Whig policy in the matter of trade".

When the Tory minister Lord Bolingbroke proposed a commercial treaty with France in 1713 that would have led to freer trade, the Whigs were vehemently against it and it had to be abandoned.

Edmund Burke, Richard Sheridan, William Windham and Charles Grey all spoke out against the trade agreement on the same grounds.

[33] The Whigs' protectionism of this period is today increasingly cited with approval by heterodox economists such as Ha-Joon Chang, who wish to challenge contemporary prevailing free trade orthodoxies via precedents from the past.

The governments of Walpole, Henry Pelham and his older brother the Duke of Newcastle dominated between 1721 and 1757 (with a brief break during the also-Whig Carteret ministry).

The other group were the followers of Lord Chatham, who as the great political hero of the Seven Years' War generally took a stance of opposition to party and faction.

Early activists in the colonies called themselves Whigs,[example needed] seeing themselves as in alliance with the political opposition in Britain, until they turned to independence and started emphasising the label Patriots.

The research of Sir Lewis Namier and his disciples [...] has convinced all historians that there were no organized political parties in Parliament between the late 1750s and the early 1780s.

[40]The North administration left power in March 1782 following the American Revolution and a coalition of the Rockingham Whigs and the former Chathamites, now led by the Earl of Shelburne, took its place.

The following Shelburne administration was short-lived and Fox returned to power in April 1783, this time in an unexpected coalition with his old enemy Lord North.

While Fox and some younger members of the party such as Charles Grey and Richard Brinsley Sheridan were sympathetic to the French revolutionaries, others led by Edmund Burke were strongly opposed.

Generally, they stood for reducing crown patronage, sympathy towards nonconformists, support for the interests of merchants and bankers and a leaning towards the idea of a limited reform of the voting system.

[44] Hay argues that Whig leaders welcomed the increasing political participation of the English middle classes in the two decades after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815.

Whigs rejected the Tory appeals to governmental authority and social discipline and extended political discussion beyond Parliament.

The press organised petitions and debates and reported to the public on government policy, while leaders such as Henry Brougham (1778–1868) built alliances with men who lacked direct representation.

Whigs thereby forced the government to recognise the role of public opinion in parliamentary debate and influenced views of representation and reform throughout the 19th century.

The Liberal Party (the term was first used officially in 1868, but had been used colloquially for decades beforehand) arose from a coalition of Whigs, free trade Tory followers of Robert Peel and free trade Radicals, first created, tenuously under the Peelite Earl of Aberdeen in 1852 and put together more permanently under the former Canningite Tory Lord Palmerston in 1859.

Although the Whigs at first formed the most important part of the coalition, the Whiggish elements of the new party progressively lost influence during the long leadership of former Peelite William Ewart Gladstone.