Whigs (British political party)
휘그당 (영국)
A party in the Parliaments of England, Great Britain and the United Kingdom that contested power with the Tories from the 1680s to the 1850s. It opposed absolute monarchy and supported constitutional monarchy and parliamentary government. Returning to power in 1830 as the champion of parliamentary reform, it passed the Reform Act 1832, and in the 1850s it merged with the Peelites and Radicals into the Liberal Party.
In depth
The word Whig is a shortening of Whiggamore, a nickname for a Scottish Presbyterian, particularly a Covenanter. During the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–1681 over whether the Catholic Duke of York should succeed to the throne, his opponents were nicknamed Whigs and his supporters Tories, and the two words later became neutral names for the two main factions in British politics. The Whigs played a central role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.
After the Hanoverian succession of 1714 the Whigs took full control of the government in 1715 and purged the Tories from all major positions in government, the army, the Church of England and the law. Their first great leader, Robert Walpole, ran the government from 1721 to 1742, and Great Britain approximated a one-party state under the Whigs until George III came to the throne in 1760. By 1784 both Whigs and Tories had become formal parties, with Charles James Fox leading a reorganised Whig Party against William Pitt the Younger’s new Tories. The Whigs at first favoured the aristocratic families but later drew support from the emerging industrial reformists and the mercantile class.
After the fall of the Ministry of All the Talents in 1807 the Foxite Whigs stayed out of power for the better part of 25 years. Reunited by moral reforms, above all the abolition of slavery, they triumphed in 1830 as champions of parliamentary reform, made Lord Grey prime minister and passed the Reform Act 1832, which ended the rotten and pocket boroughs and widened the franchise, the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 and the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834. Only the upper and middle classes gained the vote. Palmerston, until then a Tory, changed allegiance in 1830 and in November became Foreign Secretary in Grey’s government.
The name Liberal Party was used officially only from 1868, but the coalition of Whigs, Peel’s free-trade Tories and Radicals was first formed under the Peelite Earl of Aberdeen in 1852 and made more permanent under Palmerston in 1859; the meeting at Willis’s Rooms on 6 June 1859 formed the Liberal Party. Whig influence waned during Gladstone’s long leadership, and in 1886 most of the old Whig aristocracy left the party over Irish Home Rule to help form the Liberal Unionist Party.