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The British historian Herbert Butterfield used the term "Whig history" in his short but influential book The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). [9] It takes its name from the British Whigs, advocates of the power of Parliament, who opposed the Tories, advocates of the power of the king.
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.
A Tory (/ ˈ t ɔː r i /) is an individual who supports a political philosophy known as Toryism, based on a British version of traditionalist conservatism which upholds the established social order as it has evolved through the history of Great Britain. The Tory ethos has been summed up with the phrase "God, King (or Queen), and Country". [1]
In January 1681, the Whigs first began calling the supposed Irish plotters Tories, and on 15 February 1681 is recorded the first complaint from an English Royalist about the epithet Tory by the anti-Exclusion newspaper Heraclitus Ridens: "[T]hey call me scurvy names, Jesuit, Papish, Tory; and flap me over the mouth with their being the only ...
The Tories were opposed to this exclusion, while the "Country Party", who were soon to be called the Whigs, supported it. While the matter of James's exclusion was not decided in Parliament during Charles's reign, it would come to a head only three years after James took the throne, when he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
Political alignments in those centuries were much looser than now, with many individual groupings. From the 1780s until the 1820s the dominant grouping was those Whigs following William Pitt the Younger. From about 1812 on the name "Tory" was commonly used for a new party called by the historian Robert Blake "the ancestors of 'Conservatism.'".
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 ...