Whiggism

• 1. Introduction

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  Whiggism began not in a philosopher's study but in the chaos of civil war. When Parliament and King Charles I went to war in the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century, something new was forged in the conflict. A political philosophy emerged from those years of bloodshed that would go on to dominate British politics for generations, shape the American Revolution, and leave its mark on India.

  The Whigs took their name from the Whiggamores, the Scottish covenanting horsemen of an earlier rebellion. By the 1680s the word "Whiggism" was already in currency, naming a set of beliefs that centered on parliamentary supremacy, Protestant succession, and a deep suspicion of both monarchy and Catholic influence. Lord Shaftesbury gave the movement its concrete form during the Stuart Restoration, turning a factional instinct into a programme.

  At the heart of Whiggism lay a paradox. A movement that spoke the language of rights and free parliaments also enforced religious persecution, blocked civil freedoms for Catholics and Scottish Episcopalians, and dismissed its opponents as Jacobites or their dupes. The questions that linger are these: how did a philosophy so tightly bound to a specific English religious settlement come to shape revolutions on the other side of the Atlantic? And how did thinkers like Edmund Burke and William Wilberforce, who drew on early Tory critics for inspiration, still call themselves Whigs at all?

• 2. The Exclusion Crisis

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  In 1673, the discovery that James, Duke of York, was a Roman Catholic set in motion a constitutional crisis that would crystallise Whig identity for a century. Charles II had no legitimate heir, and the prospect of a Catholic succession horrified Protestant England. The Popish Plot of 1678 deepened the alarm, and from 1678 to 1681 a Country Party fought a Court Party in Parliament over the Exclusion Bill, which aimed to bar James from the throne entirely.

  Sir Henry Capel put the case plainly on the 27th of April 1679, speaking in the House of Commons. "From Popery came the notion of a standing army and arbitrary Power," he told his fellow members. "Lay Popery flat, and there's an end of arbitrary Government and power. It is a mere chimera, or notion, without Popery." For Capel and for Whigs generally, anti-Catholicism was never simply a matter of religious preference. It was a constitutional argument. Popery stood in for foreign domination, arbitrary rule, and the end of parliamentary government.

  The Exclusion campaign failed. James did succeed his brother and took the throne. But the Whigs, in alliance with William of Orange, brought him down in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. What followed was their greatest practical achievement: the Bill of Rights of 1689, which made Parliament, not the Crown, supreme, established free elections to the Commons, guaranteed free speech in parliamentary debates, and prohibited cruel or unusual punishment.

• 3. Philosophers and Factions

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  Lee Ward, writing in 2008, traced the philosophical roots of Whiggism to three works published in the decades straddling the Glorious Revolution. James Tyrrell's Patriarcha Non Monarcha appeared in 1681, John Locke's Two Treatises of Government in 1689, and Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government in 1698. All three were written against Sir Robert Filmer's defence of divine right and absolute monarchy.

  Tyrrell argued for a moderate constitutionalism, reading England's mixed constitution as the product of history, custom, and natural law working together. Sidney pushed in a more radical direction, grounding Whig ideology in the sovereignty of the people and calling for a constitutional reordering that would democratise Parliament. His thinking drew on classical republican ideas of virtue. Locke built his version of Whiggism on a radically individualist theory of natural rights and limited government.

  Tyrrell's moderate position came to dominate British constitutionalism from 1688 through to the 1770s. Sidney's and Locke's more radical ideas found less fertile ground in Britain but, as Ward argues, they became the dominant strand in American republicanism. When the Stamp Act crisis erupted in 1765, it forced a confrontation between parliamentary sovereignty as Tyrrell understood it and popular sovereignty as Sidney and Locke had framed it, and that tension tore Whiggism apart on both sides of the Atlantic.

• 4. England, Scotland, and the Empire

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  After the Acts of Union joined England and Scotland in a single Parliament in 1707, Whiggism spread across both nations but wore different faces in each. English Whiggism centred on parliamentary power, constitutional monarchy, and a Protestant succession guaranteed by the House of Hanover. Scottish Whigs gave higher priority to the religious dimension, working to maintain the authority of the Church of Scotland, justify the Protestant Reformation, and honour the memory of the Covenanters.

  In North America, colonial Whiggism shared its British inheritance but developed its own priorities as the relationship with Westminster deteriorated. What made the American transformation remarkable was its direction of travel. American Patriots, who largely identified as Old Whigs, turned Whig arguments about the social contract and the right of revolution against the Whig-dominated government in Westminster and against the Hanoverian monarchs themselves. In doing so they moved the philosophy from monarchism toward republicanism and Federalism, absorbing along the way positions traditionally associated with Jacobitism, Counter-Enlightenment thought, and early Toryism.

  In India, according to Prashad writing in 1966, it was Edmund Burke's ideas that carried Whiggism into the mainstream of Indian political thought. Indian thinkers adopted from it a belief in the natural leadership of an elite, the great partnership of civil society, and the best methods of achieving social progress.

• 5. Opponents and Self-Reinvention

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  The Whigs' most determined enemies were the Jacobites, a legitimist movement that promised freedom of religion and civil rights to those outside the Established Churches, devolution within the United Kingdom, and linguistic rights for minority languages. Whig politicians in power made a practice of denouncing all opponents and critics as Jacobites or as dupes of the movement, regardless of their actual affiliations.

  Yet within Whiggism itself, a quieter transformation was under way. Figures including Edmund Burke, Henry Grattan, William Wilberforce, Daniel O'Connell, and William Pitt the Younger all described themselves as Whigs while drawing on ideas from early Tory critics such as Jonathan Swift, Lord Bolingbroke, and David Hume. These reformist Whigs, like their American counterparts, refused to apply the label "Tory" to anything except as a term of abuse against those with more traditionalist Whig ideology. Over time, this rhetorical manoeuvre changed the word's meaning entirely.

  The official history that supported the Whig party's self-image was largely built by Thomas Babington Macaulay, whose Whig history justified the party's record and past practices and remained the standard account of the British Empire for generations. Serious challenges came from John Lingard, William Cobbett, Hilaire Belloc, G. K. Chesterton, Roger Scruton, Saunders Lewis, and John Lorne Campbell, each chipping away at the narrative Macaulay had erected.

• 6. Decline and Legacy

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  Whiggism dominated English and British politics from the Exclusion Crisis and the Glorious Revolution through to about 1760, a period some modern historians now call the "age of the Whig oligarchy," covering the years from 1714 to 1783. The turning point came when King George III was crowned in 1760 and allowed the Tories back into government. After that, the Whigs splintered into competing factions.

  Even in their years of ascendancy, the Whigs had never achieved a clean ideological victory. They had grudgingly conceded a strictly limited religious toleration for Protestant dissenters while maintaining the persecution and disenfranchisement of Roman Catholics and Scottish Episcopalians. They had secured the Protestant Hanoverian succession in 1714, placing the throne beyond the reach of James II's Catholic descendants. But the contradictions between their language of rights and their practice of exclusion were always present.

  The term "Old Whigs," which American Patriots had claimed for themselves before and during the Revolution, pointed forward to what Whig ideology could become when stripped of its English establishment assumptions. Whig ideology is associated today with early conservative liberalism, a label that itself reflects how thoroughly the movement's core tensions between individual rights and institutional authority never found a stable resolution. Daniel Defoe, writing in 1702 in the satirical guise of a Tory, had wished for the spirit of Whiggism to be "melted down like the Old-Money." It was not melted down; it was reminted, again and again, into currencies its founders would not have recognised.