Short answers, pulled from the story.
Whiggism is a political philosophy that grew out of the Parliamentarian faction during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639-1653) and was concretely formulated by Lord Shaftesbury during the Stuart Restoration. Its immediate origins lay in the Exclusion Bill crisis of 1678 to 1681. The word "Whiggism" was already in use by the 1680s, and Edmund Hickeringill published a History of Whiggism in 1682.
Whiggism held that Parliament should be supreme over the monarch, that government should be centralised, and that Anglicisation should be enforced through the educational system. Whigs opposed granting freedom of religion, civil rights, or voting rights to those outside the Established Churches, and were determined to prevent a Catholic succession to the British throne.
The Bill of Rights of 1689 is considered the great Whiggish achievement. It made Parliament, not the Crown, supreme, established free elections to the Commons, guaranteed free speech in parliamentary debates, and prohibited cruel or unusual punishment. It followed the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689, in which the Whigs allied with William of Orange to remove James II from the throne.
American Patriots in the Thirteen Colonies adopted the name "Old Whigs" and turned Whig arguments about the social contract and the right of revolution against the Whig-dominated government in Westminster. In the process, American Whiggism transitioned from monarchism into republicanism and Federalism, absorbing positions traditionally associated with Jacobitism and early Toryism. The philosophical ideas of Algernon Sidney and John Locke, which had been marginalised in Britain, became dominant in American republicanism.
Thomas Babington Macaulay largely developed Whig history to justify the party's political ideology and past practices, and it remained the official history of the British Empire until it was seriously challenged. Critics who contested its claims included John Lingard, William Cobbett, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Roger Scruton, Saunders Lewis, and John Lorne Campbell.
Some modern historians call the period between 1714 and 1783 the "age of the Whig oligarchy." Whiggism dominated English and British politics from the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution through to about 1760, when King George III was crowned and allowed the Tories back into government. After 1760 the Whigs splintered into different political factions.