The Whigs were a political faction and then 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 merged into the Liberal Party with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s. Many Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 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 with a parliamentary system. 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 remained a single 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".
By 1784, both the Whigs and Tories had become formal political parties, with Charles James Fox becoming the leader of a reconstituted Whig Party arrayed against the new governing party of the new Tories led by William Pitt the Younger. 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 High Tories and Anglo-Catholics, 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 programme had come to encompass the supremacy of parliament, free trade, 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 Whigs were originally referred to as the Country Party.
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 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 applied to those who wanted to exclude James on the grounds that he was a Roman Catholic (Samuel Johnson, a fervent Tory, often joked that "the first Whig was the Devil".).