Misplaced Pages

This article is part of a series on
Liberalism in the United Kingdom
Schools Classical Gladstonian Libertarian Manchester Whiggist Conservative Muscular Economic Green Neo Radical Social
Principles Capitalism Civil and political rights Due process Economic freedom Economic liberalism Environmentalism Equality before the law Freedom of the press Freedom of religion Freedom of speech Laissez-faire Natural law Rule of law Social justice Welfare state
History English Civil War Glorious Revolution Anti-Corn Law League Victorian era Chartism
Intellectuals Acton Arnold Bentham Berlin Beveridge Burke Byron Chesterton Collingwood Fawcett Freeden Green Hammond (Barbara) Hammond (John Lawrence) Hayek Hobhouse Keynes Locke Macaulay Mill (James) Mill (John Stuart) Muir Paine Priestley Ricardo Shelley Smith Spencer Taylor Mill Trevelyan (George) Trevelyan (George Macaulay) Wilson Wollstonecraft
Politicians Asquith Bass Bright Burke Cable Campbell-Bannerman Chamberlain Clegg Cobden Fox Gladstone Hunt Jenkins Kennedy Lloyd George Mill (John Stuart) Muir Naoroji Rosebery Simon Steel Thorpe
Parties Alliance Party of Northern Ireland Liberal Democrats Liberal Party Peelite Radicals Scottish Liberal Democrats Social Democratic Party Whigs
Media The Economist Financial Times The Guardian The Independent The Sunday Times The Times
Related topics Centrism Centre-left Centre-right Conservatism in the United Kingdom Liberal conservatism Libertarianism in the United Kingdom Politics of the United Kingdom Scottish Liberals for Independence Socialism in the United Kingdom Liberal socialism
Liberalism portal United Kingdom portal
v t e

Part of a series on
Liberalism
History Age of Enlightenment List of liberal theorists (contributions to liberal theory)
Principles Consent of the governed Due process Democracy Economic liberalism Economic globalization Equality Gender Legal Federalism Freedom Economic Market Trade Press Religion Speech Harm principle Internationalism Invisible hand Labor theory of property Laissez-faire Liberty Negative Positive Limited government Market economy Natural monopoly Open society Permissive society Popular sovereignty Property Private Public Rights Civil and political Natural and legal To own property To bear arms Rule of law Secularism Secular humanism Separation of church and state Separation of powers Social contract Social justice Social services Welfare state Whig history
Philosophers Milton Locke Spinoza Montesquieu Voltaire Rousseau Smith Kant Turgot Burke Priestley Paine Beccaria Condorcet Bentham Korais De Gouges Wollstonecraft Staël Say Humboldt Constant Ricardo Guizot List Bastiat Martineau Emerson Tocqueville Mill Spencer Arnold Acton Weber Hobhouse Croce Cassirer Mises Ortega Keynes Collingwood Čapek Hu Hayek Popper Aron Berlin Friedman Rawls Sen Nozick Kymlicka Badawi
Politicians Jefferson Kołłątaj Madison Artigas Bolívar Broglie Lamartine Macaulay Kossuth Deák Cobden Mazzini Juárez Lincoln Gladstone Cavour Sarmiento Mommsen Naoroji Itagaki Levski Kemal Deakin Milyukov Lloyd George Venizelos Ståhlberg Gokhale Rathenau Madero Einaudi King Roosevelt Pearson Ohlin Kennedy Jenkins Balcerowicz Verhofstadt Obama Macron
Organizations Africa Liberal Network Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe Party Arab Liberal Federation Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats European Democratic Party European Liberal Youth International Alliance of Libertarian Parties International Federation of Liberal Youth Liberal International Liberal Network for Latin America Liberal parties Liberal South East European Network
Regional variants Europe Latin America Albania Armenia Australia Austria Belgium Bolivia Brazil Bulgaria Canada Chile China Hong Kong Colombia Costa Rica Croatia Cuba Cyprus Czechia Denmark Ecuador Egypt Estonia Finland France Georgia Germany Greece Venizelism Honduras Hungary India Iran Israel Italy Liberism Japan Latvia Lithuania Luxembourg Mexico Moldova Montenegro Netherlands New Zealand Nicaragua Nigeria North Macedonia Norway Panama Paraguay Peru Philippines Poland Cracovian Portugal Romania Russia Senegal Serbia Slovakia Slovenia South Africa South Korea Spain Sweden Switzerland Taiwan Thailand Tunisia Turkey Ukraine United Kingdom Cobdenism Gladstonian Manchester Whiggism United States Arizona School Classical Jeffersonian Modern Uruguay Venezuela Zimbabwe
Related topics Anti-authoritarianism Anti-communism Bias in American academia Bias in the media Capitalism Democratic Centrism Radical centrism Economic freedom Egalitarianism Empiricism Humanism Individualism Anarchist Land value tax Libertarianism Left Right Pirate Party Progressivism Sexually liberal feminism Utilitarianism
Schools Classical Conservative Cultural Feminist Equity Green Internationalist Muscular National Neoclassical Neo Ordo Radical Religious Christian Catholic Islamic Jewish Secular Social Techno Third Way
Liberalism portal Politics portal
v t e

The Whigs were a political party in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and the 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs became the Liberal Party when the faction merged with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s. Many Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 over the issue of Irish Home Rule to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Conservative Party in 1912.

The Whigs began as a political faction that opposed absolute monarchy and Catholic emancipation, supporting constitutional monarchism and parliamentary government, but also Protestant supremacy. They played a central role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and were the standing enemies of the Roman Catholic Stuart kings and pretenders. 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. The Whigs took full control of the government in 1715 and thoroughly purged the Tories from all major positions in government, the army, the Church of England, the legal profession, and local political offices. The first great leader of the Whigs was Robert Walpole, who maintained control of the government from 1721 to 1742, and whose protégé, Henry Pelham, led the government from 1743 to 1754. 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. But the Whig Party's hold on power remained strong for many years thereafter. Thus historians have called the period from roughly 1714 to 1783 the "long period of Whig oligarchy". During the American Revolution, the Whigs were the party more sympathetic to American independence and the creation of a democracy in the United States.

By 1784, both the Whigs and Tories had become formal political parties, with Charles James Fox becoming the leader of a reorganized Whig Party arrayed against William Pitt the Younger's new Tories. The foundation of both parties depended more on the support of wealthy politicians than on popular votes. Although there were elections to the House of Commons, only a few men controlled most of the voters.

Both parties slowly evolved during the 18th century. 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. (The so-called High Tories preferred high church Anglicanism, or Anglo-Catholicism. Some, particularly adherents of the non-juring schism, openly or covertly supported the exiled House of Stuart's claim to the throne—a position known as Jacobitism.) Later, the Whigs came to draw support from the emerging industrial reformists and the mercantile class while the Tories came to draw support from farmers, landowners, royalists and (relatedly) those who favoured imperial military spending.

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).

Name

The term Whig began as a short form of whiggamore, a term originally used by people in the north of England to refer to (cattle) drovers from western Scotland who came to Leith to buy corn. The Gaelic-speaking Scottish cattle drivers would call out "Chuig" or "Chuig an bothar"—meaning "away" or "to the road"; this sounded to the English like "Whig", and they came to use the word "Whig" or "Whiggamore" derisively to refer to these people. During the English Civil Wars, when Charles I reigned, the term "Whig" was picked up and used by the English to refer derisively to a radical faction of the Scottish Covenanters who called themselves the Kirk Party (see the Whiggamore Raid). It was later applied to Scottish Presbyterian rebels who were against the king's Episcopalian order in Scotland.

The word Whig entered English political discourse during the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1679–1681: there was controversy about whether King Charles II's brother, James, Duke of York, should be allowed to succeed to the throne on Charles's death, and Whig became a term of abuse for members of the Country Party, which sought to remove James from the line of succession on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic (Samuel Johnson, a fervent Tory, often joked that "the first Whig was the Devil".).

Eventually, Country Party politicians themselves would start describing their own faction as the "Whigs".

In The History of England, c. 1760, David Hume wrote:

The court party reproached their antagonists with their affinity to the fanatical conventiclers in Scotland, who were known by the name of Whigs: The country party found a resemblance between the courtiers and the popish banditti in Ireland, to whom the appellation of Tory was affixed. And after this manner, these foolish terms of reproach came into public and general use; and even at present seem not nearer their end than when they were first invented.

Origins

The parliamentarian faction

This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (January 2024)

The precursor to the Whigs was Denzil Holles' parliamentarian faction, which was characterised by its opposition to absolute monarchism.

Exclusion Crisis

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. They believed the heir presumptive, if allowed to inherit the throne, would endanger the Protestant religion, liberty and property.

The first Exclusion Bill was supported by a substantial majority on its second reading in May 1679. In response, King Charles prorogued Parliament and then dissolved it, but the subsequent elections in August and September saw the Whigs' strength increase. This new parliament did not meet for thirteen months, because Charles wanted to give passions a chance to die down. When it met in October 1680, an Exclusion Bill was introduced and passed in the Commons without major resistance, but was rejected in the Lords. Charles dissolved Parliament in January 1681, but the Whigs did not suffer serious losses in the ensuing election. The next Parliament first met in March at Oxford, but Charles dissolved it after only a few days, when he made an appeal to the country against the Whigs and determined to rule without Parliament. In February, Charles had made a deal with the French King Louis XIV, who promised to support him against the Whigs. Without Parliament, the Whigs gradually crumbled, mainly due to government repression following the discovery of the Rye House Plot. The Whig peers, the Earl of Melville, the Earl of Leven, and Lord Shaftesbury, and Charles II's illegitimate son the Duke of Monmouth, being implicated, fled to and regrouped in the United Provinces. Algernon Sidney, Sir Thomas Armstrong and William Russell, Lord Russell, were executed for treason. The Earl of Essex committed suicide in the Tower of London over his arrest for treason, whilst Lord Grey of Werke escaped from the Tower.

Glorious Revolution

After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, Queen Mary II and King William III governed with both Whigs and Tories, despite the fact that many of the Tories still supported the deposed Roman Catholic James II. William saw that the Tories were generally friendlier to royal authority than the Whigs and he employed both groups in his government. His early ministry was largely Tory, but gradually the government came to be dominated by the so-called Junto Whigs, a group of younger Whig politicians who led a tightly organised political grouping. The increasing dominance of the Junto led to a split among the Whigs, with the so-called Country Whigs seeing the Junto as betraying their principles for office. The Country Whigs, led by Robert Harley, gradually merged with the Tory opposition in the later 1690s.

History

18th century

Although William's successor Anne had considerable Tory sympathies and excluded the Junto Whigs from power, after a brief and unsuccessful experiment with an exclusively Tory government she generally continued William's policy of balancing the parties, supported by her moderate Tory ministers, the Duke of Marlborough and Lord Godolphin. However, as the War of the Spanish Succession went on and became less and less popular with the Tories, Marlborough and Godolphin were forced to rely more and more on the Junto Whigs, so that by 1708 they headed an administration of the Parliament of Great Britain dominated by the Junto. Anne herself grew increasingly uncomfortable with this dependence on the Whigs, especially as her personal relationship with the Duchess of Marlborough deteriorated. This situation also became increasingly uncomfortable to many of the non-Junto Whigs, led by the Duke of Somerset and the Duke of Shrewsbury, who began to intrigue with Robert Harley's Tories. In the spring of 1710, Anne dismissed Godolphin and the Junto ministers, replacing them with Tories.

The Whigs now moved into opposition and particularly decried the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which they attempted to block through their majority in the House of Lords. The Tory administration led by Harley and the Viscount Bolingbroke persuaded the Queen to create twelve new Tory peers to force the treaty through.

Liberal ideals

The Whigs primarily advocated the supremacy of Parliament, while calling for toleration for Protestant dissenters. They adamantly opposed a Catholic as king. They opposed the Catholic Church because they saw it as a threat to liberty, or as Pitt the Elder stated: "The errors of Rome are rank idolatry, a subversion of all civil as well as religious liberty, and the utter disgrace of reason and of human nature".

Ashcraft and Goldsmith (1983) have traced in detail, in the period 1689 to 1710, the major influence of the liberal political ideas of John Locke on Whig political values, as expressed in widely cited manifestos such as "Political Aphorisms: or, the True Maxims of Government Displayed", an anonymous pamphlet that appeared in 1690 and was widely cited by Whigs. The 18th-century Whigs borrowed the concepts and language of universal rights employed by political theorists Locke and Algernon Sidney (1622–1682). By the 1770s the ideas of Adam Smith, a founder of classical liberalism became important. 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".

Samuel Johnson (1709–1784), a leading London intellectual, repeatedly denigrated the "vile" Whigs and praised the Tories, even during times of Whig political supremacy. 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. Johnson recommended that strict uniformity in religious externals was the best antidote to the objectionable religious traits that he linked to Whiggism.

Protectionism

At their inception, the Whigs were protectionist in economic policy, with free trade policies being advocated by Tories. The Whigs were opposed to the pro-French policies of the Stuart kings Charles II and James II as they believed that such an alliance with the Catholic absolute monarchy of France endangered liberty and Protestantism. The Whigs claimed that trade with France was bad for England and developed an economic theory of overbalance, that is a deficit of trade with France was bad because it would enrich France at England's expense.

In 1678, the Whigs passed the Prohibition of 1678 that banned certain French goods from being imported into England. 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". It was repealed upon the accession of James II by a Tory-dominated House of Commons but upon the accession of William III in 1688 a new Act was passed that prohibited the importation of French goods. In 1704, the Whigs passed the Trade with France Act that renewed protectionism against France. In 1710, Queen Anne appointed the predominantly Tory Harley Ministry, which favoured free 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.

In 1786, Pitt's government negotiated the Eden Agreement, a commercial treaty with France which led to freer trade between the two countries. All of the Whig leaders attacked this on traditional Whig anti-French and protectionist grounds. Fox claimed that France was England's natural enemy and that it was only at Britain's expense that she could grow. Edmund Burke, Richard Sheridan, William Windham and Charles Grey all spoke out against the trade agreement on the same grounds.

Ashley claimed that "he traditional policy of the Whig party from before the Revolution down to the time of Fox was an extreme form of Protectionism". 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.

Later on, several members from the Whig party came to oppose the protectionism of the Corn Laws, but trade restrictions were not repealed even after the Whigs returned to power in the 1830s.

Whig Supremacy

With the succession of Elector George Louis of Hanover as king in 1714, the Whigs returned to government with the support of some Hanoverian Tories. The Jacobite rising of 1715 discredited much of the Tory party as treasonous Jacobites, and the Septennial Act ensured that the Whigs became the dominant party, establishing the Whig oligarchy. Between 1717 and 1720 the Whig Split led to a division in the party. Government Whigs led by the former soldier James Stanhope were opposed by Robert Walpole and his allies. While Stanhope was backed by George I, Walpole and his supporters were closer to the Prince of Wales. Following his success in defeating the government over the Peerage Bill in 1719, Walpole was invited back into government the following year. He was able to defend the government in the Commons when the South Sea Bubble collapsed. When Stanhope died unexpectedly in 1721, Walpole replaced him as leader of the government and became known as the first Prime Minister. In the 1722 general election the Whigs swept to a decisive victory.

Between 1714 and 1760, the Tories struggled as an active political force, but always retained a considerable presence in the House of Commons. 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 leading entities in these governments consistently referred to themselves as "Whigs".

George III's accession

This arrangement changed during the reign of George III, who hoped to restore his own power by freeing himself from the great Whig magnates. Thus George promoted his old tutor Lord Bute to power and broke with the old Whig leadership surrounding the Duke of Newcastle. After a decade of factional chaos, with distinct Bedfordite, Chathamite, Grenvillite and Rockinghamite factions successively in power and all referring to themselves as "Whigs", a new system emerged with two separate opposition groups. The Rockingham Whigs claimed the mantle of Old Whigs as the purported successors of the party of the Pelhams and the great Whig families. With such noted intellectuals as Edmund Burke behind them, the Rockingham Whigs laid out a philosophy which for the first time extolled the virtues of faction, or at least their faction. 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.

The Whigs were opposed by the government of Lord North which they accused of being a Tory administration. While it largely consisted of individuals previously associated with the Whigs, many old Pelhamites as well as the Bedfordite Whig faction formerly led by the Duke of Bedford and elements of that which had been led by George Grenville, it also contained elements of the Kings' Men, the group formerly associated with Lord Bute and which was generally seen as Tory-leaning.

American impact

The association of Toryism with Lord North's government was also influential in the American colonies and writings of British political commentators known as the Radical Whigs did much to stimulate colonial republican sentiment. Early activists in the colonies called themselves Whigs, seeing themselves as in alliance with the political opposition in Britain, until they turned to independence and started emphasising the label Patriots. In contrast, the American Loyalists, who supported the monarchy, were consistently also referred to as Tories.

Later, the United States Whig Party was founded in 1833 on the basis of opposition to a strong presidency, initially the presidency of Andrew Jackson, analogous to the British Whig opposition to a strong monarchy. The True Whig Party, which for a century dominated Liberia, was named for the American party rather than directly for the British one.

Two-party system

Dickinson reports the following:

All historians are agreed that the Tory party declined sharply in the late 1740s and 1750s and that it ceased to be an organized party by 1760. 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. Even the Whigs ceased to be an identifiable party, and Parliament was dominated by competing political connections, which all proclaimed Whiggish political views, or by independent backbenchers unattached to any particular group.

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. After Rockingham's unexpected death in July 1782, this uneasy coalition fell apart, with Charles James Fox, Rockingham's successor as faction leader, quarrelling with Shelburne and withdrawing his supporters from the government. 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. Although this pairing seemed unnatural to many at the time, it was to last beyond the demise of the coalition in December 1783. The coalition's untimely fall was brought about by George III in league with the House of Lords and the King now brought in Chatham's son William Pitt the Younger as his prime minister.

It was only now that a genuine two-party system can be seen to emerge, with Pitt and the government on the one side, and the ousted Fox-North coalition on the other. On 17 December 1783, Fox stated in the House of Commons that "f a change must take place, and a new ministry is to be formed and supported, not by the confidence of this House or the public, but the sole authority of the Crown, I, for one, shall not envy that hon. gentleman his situation. From that moment I put in my claim for a monopoly of Whig principles". Although Pitt is often referred to as a Tory and Fox as a Whig, Pitt always considered himself to be an independent Whig and generally opposed the development of a strict partisan political system. Fox's supporters saw themselves as legitimate heirs of the Whig tradition and they strongly opposed Pitt in his early years in office, notably during the regency crisis revolving around the King's temporary insanity in 1788–1789, when Fox and his allies supported full powers as regent for their ally, the Prince of Wales.

The opposition Whigs were split by the onset of the French Revolution. 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. Although Burke himself was largely alone in defecting to Pitt in 1791, much of the rest of the party, including the influential House of Lords leader the Duke of Portland, Rockingham's nephew Lord Fitzwilliam and William Windham, were increasingly uncomfortable with the flirtations of Fox and his allies with radicalism and the French Revolution. They split in early 1793 with Fox over the question of support for the war with France and by the end of the year they had openly broken with Fox. By the summer of the next year, large portions of the opposition had defected and joined Pitt's government.

19th century

Many of the Whigs who had joined with Pitt would eventually return to the fold, joining again with Fox in the Ministry of All the Talents following Pitt's death in 1806. The followers of Pitt—led until 1809 by Fox's old colleague the Duke of Portland—rejected the label of Tories and preferred to call themselves The Friends of Mr. Pitt. After the fall of the Talents ministry in 1807, the Foxite Whigs remained out of power for the better part of 25 years. The accession of Fox's old ally, the Prince of Wales, to the regency in 1811 did not change the situation, as the Prince had broken entirely with his old Foxite Whig companions. The members of the government of Lord Liverpool from 1812 to 1827 called themselves Whigs.

Structure and appeal

By 1815, the Whigs were still far from being a "party" in the modern sense. They had no definite programme or policy and were by no means even united. 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. Most Whig leaders, such as Lord Grey, Lord Grenville, Lord Althorp, William Lamb (later Lord Melbourne) and Lord John Russell, were still rich landowners. The most prominent exception was Henry Brougham, the talented lawyer, who had a relatively modest background.

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. The fresh support strengthened their position in Parliament. Whigs rejected the Tory appeals to governmental authority and social discipline and extended political discussion beyond Parliament. Whigs used a national network of newspapers and magazines as well as local clubs to deliver their message. 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. This new approach to the grass roots helped to define Whiggism and opened the way for later success. 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.

Return to power

Whigs restored their unity by supporting moral reforms, especially the abolition of slavery. They triumphed in 1830 as champions of Parliamentary reform. They made Lord Grey prime minister 1830–1834 and the Reform Act 1832 championed by Grey became their signature measure. It broadened the franchise and ended the system of "rotten and pocket boroughs" (where elections were controlled by powerful families) and instead redistributed power on the basis of population. It added 217,000 voters to an electorate of 435,000 in England and Wales. Only the upper and middle classes voted, so this shifted power away from the landed aristocracy to the urban middle classes. In 1832, the party abolished enslavement in the British Empire with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833. It purchased and freed the slaves, especially those in the Caribbean sugar islands. After parliamentary investigations demonstrated the horrors of child labour, limited reforms were passed in 1833. The Whigs also passed the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 that reformed the administration of relief to the poor and the Marriage Act 1836 that allowed civil marriages.

It was around this time that the great Whig historian Thomas Babington Macaulay began to promulgate what would later be coined the Whig view of history, in which all of English history was seen as leading up to the culminating moment of the passage of Lord Grey's reform bill. This view led to serious distortions in later portrayals of 17th-century and 18th-century history, as Macaulay and his followers attempted to fit the complex and changing factional politics of the Restoration into the neat categories of 19th-century political divisions.

In 1836, a private gentleman's Club was constructed in Pall Mall, Piccadilly as a consequence of the successful Reform Act 1832. The Reform Club was founded by Edward Ellice Sr., MP for Coventry and Whig Whip, whose riches came from the Hudson's Bay Company but whose zeal was chiefly devoted to securing the passage of the Reform Act 1832. This new club, for members of both Houses of Parliament, was intended to be a forum for the radical ideas which the First Reform Bill represented: a bastion of liberal and progressive thought that became closely associated with the Liberal Party, who largely succeeded the Whigs in the second half of the 19th century.

Until the decline of the Liberal Party in the early 20th century, it was de rigueur for Liberal MPs and peers to be members of the Reform Club, being regarded as an unofficial party headquarters. However, in 1882 the National Liberal Club was established under William Ewart Gladstone's chairmanship, designed to be more "inclusive" towards Liberal grandees and activists throughout the United Kingdom.

Transition to the Liberal Party

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. Subsequently, the majority of the old Whig aristocracy broke from the party over the issue of Irish home rule in 1886 to help form the Liberal Unionist Party, which in turn would merge with the Conservative Party by 1912. However, the Unionist support for trade protection in the early twentieth century under Joseph Chamberlain (probably the least Whiggish character in the Liberal Unionist party) further alienated the more orthodox Whigs. By the early twentieth century "Whiggery" was largely irrelevant and without a natural political home. One of the last active politicians to celebrate his Whiggish roots was the Liberal Unionist statesman Henry James.

In popular culture

The colours of the Whig Party (blue and buff, a yellow-brown colour named after buff leather) were particularly associated with Charles James Fox.

Poet Robert Burns in "Here's a health to them that's awa" wrote:

It's guid to support Caledonia's cause
And bide by the Buff and the Blue.

"The British Whig March" for piano was written by Oscar Telgmann in Kingston, Ontario, c. 1900.

Punk band The Men That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing have a song named "Doing It for the Whigs".

Electoral performance

Parliament of England

Election	Leader	Votes	%	Seats	+/–	Position	Government
1661	Denzil Holles	N/A		139 / 518	139	2nd	Minority
March 1679	Anthony Ashley Cooper			218 / 522	79	1st	Plurality
October 1679				310 / 530	92	1st	Majority
1681				309 / 502	1	1st	Majority
1685	John Somers			57 / 525	252	2nd	Minority
1689				319 / 551	262	1st	Majority
1690				241 / 512	78	2nd	Minority
1695				257 / 513	16	1st	Majority
1698				246 / 513	11	1st	Plurality
January 1701				219 / 513	27	2nd	Minority
November 1701				248 / 513	29	1st	Plurality
1705				184 / 513	49	2nd	Minority

Parliament of Great Britain

Election	Leader	Votes	%	Seats	+/–	Position	Government
1708	John Somers	N/A		291 / 558	45	1st	Minority
1710				196 / 558	95	2nd	Minority
1713				161 / 558	25	2nd	Minority
1715	Charles Townshend			341 / 558	180	1st	Majority
1722				389 / 558	48	1st	Majority
1727				415 / 558	26	1st	Majority
1734	Robert Walpole			330 / 558	85	1st	Majority
1741				286 / 558	44	1st	Majority
1747	Henry Pelham			338 / 558	52	1st	Majority
1754	Thomas Pelham-Holles			368 / 558	30	1st	Majority
1761				446 / 558	78	1st	Majority
1768	Augustus FitzRoy			N/A		1st	Majority
1774	Charles Watson-Wentworth			215 / 558	unknown	2nd	Minority
1780				254 / 558	39	2nd	Minority
1784	Charles James Fox			155 / 558	99	2nd	Minority
1790				183 / 558	28	2nd	Minority
1796				95 / 558	88	2nd	Minority

Parliament of the United Kingdom

Election	Leader	Votes	%	Seats	+/–	Position	Government
1802	Charles James Fox	N/A		269 / 658	184	2nd	Minority
1806	William Grenville			431 / 658	162	1st	Majority
1807				213 / 658	218	2nd	Minority
1812				196 / 658	17	2nd	Minority
1818	Charles Grey			175 / 658	21	2nd	Minority
1820				215 / 658	40	2nd	Minority
1826	Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice			198 / 658	17	2nd	Minority
1830				196 / 658	2	2nd	Majority
1831	Charles Grey			370 / 658	174	1st	Majority
1832		554,719	67.0%	441 / 658	71	1st	Majority
1835	William Lamb	349,868	57.3%	385 / 658	56	1st	Majority
1837		418,331	51.7%	344 / 658	41	1st	Majority
1841		273,902	46.9%	271 / 658	73	2nd	Minority
1847	John Russell	259,311	53.8%	292 / 656	21	2nd	Majority
1852		430,882	57.9%	324 / 654	32	2nd	Minority
1857	Henry John Temple	464,127	65.9%	377 / 654	53	1st	Majority
1859		372,117	65.7%	356 / 654	21	1st	Majority

See also

• Early-18th-century Whig plots
• Foxite
• King of Clubs (Whig club)
• Kingdom of Great Britain
• List of United Kingdom Whig and allied party leaders (1801–1859)
• Patriot Whigs
• Whig government
• Whig Party (United States)

Notes

1. Many Whigs were members of the established Church of England, but the party attracted much support from Dissenting Protestants

References

1. "Whig and Tory". Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 23 May 2014. Retrieved 5 February 2020.
2. Sykes, Alan (2014). "The Liberal Party: A Question of Origins: The Whigs and the politics of Reform". In Routlegde (ed.). The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism: 1776–1988. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-317-89905-1.
3. Leach, Robert (2015). Macmillan (ed.). Political Ideology in Britain. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 32–34. ISBN 978-1-137-33256-1. Archived from the original on 14 April 2021.
4. Lowe, Norman (2017). Macmillan (ed.). Mastering Modern British History. Bloomsbury. p. 72. ISBN 978-1-137-60388-3. Archived from the original on 14 April 2021.
5. Grampp, William D. (2021). "How Britain Turned to Free Trade". The Business History Review. 61 (1): 86–112. doi:10.2307/3115775. JSTOR 3115775. S2CID 154050334.
6. Jeroen Deploige; Gita Deneckere, eds. (2006). Mystifying the Monarch: Studies on Discourse, Power, and History. Amsterdam University Press. p. 195. ISBN 978-90-5356-767-8. ... preference for the (conservative-liberal) Whigs. But until the second half of the nineteenth century, ...
7. Efraim Podoksik, ed. (2013). In Defence of Modernity: Vision and Philosophy in Michael Oakeshott. Imprint Academic. p. 14. ISBN 978-1-84540-468-0. ... For Whig liberalism is also known as 'conservative liberalism' ...
8. "Whigs and Tories".
9. James Frey, ed. (2020). The Indian Rebellion, 1857–1859: A Short History with Documents. Hackett Publishing. p. XXX. ISBN 978-1-62466-905-7. British politics of the first half of the nineteenth century was an ideological spectrum, with the Tories, or Conservative Party, on the right, the Whigs as liberal-centrists, and the radicals on the left.
10. Clark, Jonathan Charles Douglas (2000). English Society, 1660–1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics During the Ancien Régime. Cambridge University Press. p. 515.
11. Hay, William (2004). The Whig Revival, 1808–1830. Springer. p. 177. ISBN 1-4039-1771-X.
12. Brent, Richard (1987). "The Whigs and Protestant Dissent in the Decade of Reform: The Case of Church Rates, 1833–1841". The English Historical Review. 102 (405): 887–910. doi:10.1093/ehr/CII.405.887. JSTOR 572000.
13. Holmes, Geoffrey; Szechi, D. (2014). The Age of Oligarchy: Pre-Industrial Britain 1722–1783. Routledge. p. xi. ISBN 978-1-317-89426-1.
14. Halevy, Elie (1950). A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, III; the Triumph of Reform (1830-1841). Barnes & Noble. pp. 60–70.
15. "Chuig an bothar in English". Glosbe.com. Retrieved 9 May 2021..
16. Harris, Tim (2005). Restoration: Charles II and His Kingdoms 1660–1685. London: Allen Lane. p. 241. ISBN 0-7139-9191-7.
17. Willman, Robert (1974). "The Origins of 'Whig' and 'Tory' in English Political Language". Historical Journal. 17 (2): 247–64. doi:10.1017/S0018246X00007731. JSTOR 2638297.
18. Newbould, Ian (1990). Whiggery and reform, 1830–41. p. 41. ISBN 0-333-53124-8.
19. Hume, David (1797). "LXVIII". The History of England. VIII. London. p. 126.
20. ^ Jones, J. R. (1961). The First Whigs. The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis. 1678–1683. Oxford University Press. OCLC 1431479.
21. Judd, Gerrit P. (1966). A History of Civilization. New York: Macmillan. p. 409. OCLC 224015746. Some remained loyal to James II
22. ^ Feiling, Keith (1924). A History of the Tory Party, 1640–1714. Clarendon Press. OCLC 503503.
23. The twelve peers consisted of two who were summoned in their father's baronies, Lords Compton (Northampton) and Bruce (Ailesbury); and ten recruits, namely Lords Hay (Kinnoull), Mountjoy, Burton (Paget), Mansell, Middleton, Trevor, Lansdowne, Masham, Foley and Bathurst. David Backhouse. "Tory Tergiversation In The House of Lords, 1714–1760" Archived 28 June 2006 at the Wayback Machine.
24. Hamowy, Ronald (2008). "Whiggism". The Encyclopedia of Libertarianism. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE; Cato Institute. pp. 542–543. ISBN 978-1-4129-6580-4. LCCN 2008009151. OCLC 750831024.
25. Williams, Basil (1949). The Whig Supremacy: 1714–1760. Clarendon Press. p. 75. OCLC 2963203.
26. Ashcraft, Richard; Goldsmith, M. M. (1983). "Locke, Revolution Principles, and the Formation of Whig Ideology". Historical Journal. 26 (4): 773–800. doi:10.1017/S0018246X00012693.
27. Zook, Melinda S. (2002). "The Restoration Remembered: The First Whigs and the Making of their History". Seventeenth Century. 17 (2): 213–34. doi:10.1080/0268117X.2002.10555509.
28. Wilson, Ellen; Reill, Peter (2004). Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. p. 298.
29. Boswell's Life of Johnson, Vol 2, p502
30. Chapin, Chester (1990). "Religion and the Nature of Samuel Johnson's Toryism". Cithara. 29 (2): 38–54.
31. ^ Ashley, W. J. (1900). Surveys: Historic and Economic.
32. Wakeman, Henry Offley (1909). Charles James Fox. London: Gibbings and Company. p. 127. OCLC 679500221.
33. Ashley, W. J. (1998). The Tariff Problem. London: Routledge. p. 21. ISBN 0-415-19467-9.
34. Ha-Joon Chang (2010). 23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism. London: Allen Lane. p. 70. ISBN 978-1-84614-328-1.
35. "The 1815–46 Corn Laws: your guide to the crisis and why they were repealed". History Extra. Retrieved 2 May 2022.
36. Williams, Basil; Stuart, C. H. (1962). The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760. Clarendon Press. OCLC 827608.
37. Elofson, Warren M. (1996). The Rockingham Connection and the Second Founding of the Whig Party 1768–1773. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press. ISBN 0-7735-1388-4.
38. Feiling, Keith (1938). The Second Tory Party, 1714–1832. London: Macmillan. OCLC 932376.
39. Howe, Daniel Walker (1973). The American Whigs: An Anthology. ISBN 0-471-41671-1.
40. H. T. Dickinson, "Tories: 1714–1830", in David Loades, ed. Reader's Guide to British History (2003) 2:1279.
41. Parliamentary History, xxiv, 213, 222, cited in Foord, His Majesty's Opposition, 1714–1830, p. 441
42. Christie, I. R. (1982). Wars and Revolutions. Britain 1760–1815. London: Edward Arnold. p. 283. ISBN 0-7131-6158-2.
43. Lowe, Norman (2009). Mastering modern British history. Palgrave master series (4th ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. p. 9. ISBN 978-0-230-20556-7.
44. Lowe, Norman (1998). Mastering Modern British History (3rd ed.). Macmillan. pp. 9–10. ISBN 0-333-72106-3.
45. William Anthony Hay, "'If There Is a Mob, There Is Also a People': Middle Class Politics and The Whig Revival, 1810–1830", Consortium on Revolutionary Europe 1750–1850: Selected Papers (2000), pp. 396–402.
46. E. L. Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815–1870 (1938), pp. 120–145, 325–330, 354–357.
47. Porritt, Edward (1912). "Political Parties on the Eve of Home Rule". The North American Review. 195 (676): 333–342. ISSN 0029-2397. JSTOR 25119718.
48. "Finance BILL". Parliamentary Debates (Hansard). 29 November 1909. Archived from the original on 8 March 2017. Retrieved 3 March 2018.
49. "Blue and Buff". Notes and Queries. 2nd ser. 1 (14): 269. 5 April 1856.
50. "Search Sheet Music – Sheet Music From Canada's Past – Library and Archives Canada". amicus.collectionscanada.gc.ca. Archived from the original on 7 July 2012. Retrieved 14 July 2018.

Bibliography

• Black, Jeremy (2001). Walpole in Power. Stroud: Sutton. ISBN 0-7509-2523-X.
• Brewer, John (1976). Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Cannon, John Ashton, ed. (1981). The Whig Ascendancy: Colloquies on Hanoverian England. Edward Arnold. ISBN 0-7131-6277-5.
• Carswell, John (1954). The Old Cause: Three Biographical Studies in Whiggism. London: Cresset Press.
• Dickinson, H. T. (1973). Walpole and the Whig Supremacy. English Universities Press. ISBN 0-340-11515-7.
• Elofson, Warren M. The Rockingham Connection and the Second Founding of the Whig Party 1768–1773 (1996).
• Fairlie, Henry. "Oratory in Political Life," History Today (Jan 1960) 10#1 pp 3–13. A survey of political oratory in Britain from 1730 to 1960.
• Feiling, Keith; A History of the Tory Party, 1640–1714, 1924 online edition Archived 16 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine.
• Feiling, Keith; The Second Tory Party, 1714–1832, 1938 online edition Archived 16 November 2022 at the Wayback Machine.
• Forbes, Suzanne. "Whigs and Tories, 1709–1712." inPrint and Party Politics in Ireland, 1689-1714 (Palgrav
• Halevy, Elie. A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, III; the Triumph of Reform (1830-1841) (1950) online
• Hill, Brian W. British parliamentary parties, 1742-1832 : from the fall of Walpole to the first Reform Act (1985) online
• Harris, William (1885). The History of the Radical Party in Parliament. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.
• Hay, William Anthony (2005). The Whig Revival: 1808–1830. Studies in Modern History. Palgreave Macmillan. ISBN 1-4039-1771-X.
• Holmes, Geoffrey. "British Politics in the Age of Anne" (2nd ed. 1987).
• Jones; J. R. The First Whigs: The Politics of the Exclusion Crisis, 1678–1683, 1961 online edition.
• McCallum; Ronald Buchanan. The Liberal Party from Earl Grey to Asquith (1963).
• Marshall, Dorothy. Eighteenth Century England (1962) online. A standard scholarly history.
• Mitchell, L. G. (1971). Charles James Fox and the Disintegration of the Whig Party, 1782–1794. London: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-821838-9.
• Mitchell, Austin (1967). The Whigs in Opposition, 1815–1830. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
• O'Gorman, Frank (1989). Voters, patrons, and parties: the unreformed electoral system of Hanoverian England 1734–1832. Clarendon Press.
• Plumb, J. H. (1967). Growth of Political Stability in England 1675–1725. London: Macmillan.
• Reid, Loren Dudley. Charles James Fox: A Man for the People (1969) online
• Roszman, Jay R. "'Ireland as a Weapon of Warfare': Whigs, Tories, and the Problem of Irish Outrages, 1835 To 1839." Historical Journal 60.4 (2017): 971–995.
• Southgate, Donald. The passing of the Whigs, 1832-1886 (Macmillan, 1962) online.
• Speck, W. A. Stability and Strife: England, 1714–1760 (1977), A standard scholarly history.
• Trevelyan, George Otto. The Early History of Charles James Fox (1880) online edition.
• Williams, Basil, and C. H. Stuart; The Whig Supremacy, 1714–1760 (1962) online, a standard scholarly survey
• Willman, Robert. "The Origins of 'Whig' and 'Tory' in English Political Language." Historical Journal 17, no. 2 (1974): 247–64. online.
• Woodward; E. L. The Age of Reform, 1815–1870 (1938) online

Historiography

• Hill, Brain W. "II. Executive Monarchy and the Challenge of Parties, 1689–1832: Two Concepts of Government and Two Historiographical Interpretations." The Historical Journal (1970) 13#3 pp: 379–401. abstract.
• Hone, Joseph. "John Darby and the Whig Canon." Historical Journal 1-24. online Archived 24 June 2021 at the Wayback Machine
• Loades, David ed. Readers Guide to British History (2003) 2:1353–56.
• Pocock, J. G. A. (1985). "The varieties of whiggism from exclusion to reform: a history of ideology and discourse". Virtue, Commerce, and History: essays on political thought and history, chiefly in the eighteenth century. Cambridge University Press. pp. 215–310.
• Thomas, Peter D. G. "Party Politics in Eighteenth‐Century Britain: Some Myths and a Touch of Reality." Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies (1987) 10#2 pp. 201–210.

Primary sources

• Eagles, Robin. The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke. General Editor Paul Langford. Volume IV: Party, Parliament, and the Dividing of the Whigs 1780–1794 Edited by PJ Marshall and Donald C. Bryant. (Oxford University Press. 2015). xvi, 674 pp.

External links

• Karl Marx on the Tories and the Whigs (1852)

• Whigs (British political party)
• 1678 establishments in England
• 1859 disestablishments in the United Kingdom
• Centre-left parties in the United Kingdom
• Centrist political parties in the United Kingdom
• Classical liberal parties
• Conservative liberal parties
• Defunct liberal political parties
• Defunct political parties in the United Kingdom
• Liberal parties in the United Kingdom
• Politics of the Kingdom of Great Britain
• Political parties established in 1678
• Political parties disestablished in 1859
• Protestant political parties