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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.
While in power, Whig politicians frequently denounced all their political opponents and critics as "Jacobites" or "dupes of Jacobites". The terms "Old Whigs" and Patriot Whigs were also used in Great Britain for those Whigs who formed a de facto coalition with the Tories and jointly opposed Robert Walpole as part of the Country Party. [4]
The Whigs were also deeply committed to preventing executive tyranny, which they saw as an existential threat to republican self-government. [12] Whig thought was typically rooted in evangelical Christianity, as expressed in the Second Great Awakening. Many Whigs would argue that the Bible was the best of Western civilization. [151]
The Whig Party's first major action was to censure Jackson for the removal of the national bank deposits, thereby establishing opposition to Jackson's executive power as the organizing principle of the new party. [24] In doing so, the Whigs were able to shed the elitist image that had persistently hindered the National Republicans. [25]
At the turn of the 18th century, the Whig influence in Parliament was rising. The Whigs and Tories’ major disagreements were in regards to who should run the country. [1] The conservative, Tory, party supported the influence of the monarchy of the inner-goings of government, while the Whigs insisted that Parliament take on a greater role. [1]
The 18th-century Whigs, or commonwealthmen, in particular John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Benjamin Hoadly, "praised the mixed constitution of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, and they attributed English liberty to it; and like Locke they postulated a state of nature from which rights arose which the civil polity, created by mutual ...
Patriots, also known as Revolutionaries, Continentals, Rebels, or Whigs, were colonists in the Thirteen Colonies who opposed the Kingdom of Great Britain's control and governance during the colonial era, and supported and helped launch the American Revolution that ultimately established American independence.
According to Arthur Marwick, however, Henry Hallam was the first whig historian, publishing Constitutional History of England in 1827, which "greatly exaggerated the importance of 'parliaments' or of bodies [whig historians] thought were parliaments" while tending "to interpret all political struggles in terms of the parliamentary situation in ...