Whig Party (political party)

The Whig Party was a political party that emerged during and after the English Civil War. Its values were liberty and property, and it is loosely comparable to modern liberal political parties. The two main political parties in England for over two hundred years were the Whigs and the Tories. While members of both parties came from "old money" (aristocratic families and their allies), "new money" tended to gravitate toward the Whigs. "New money" refers to families who made fortunes either in industry or in the colonies. The Whigs were usually Protestant, and in their political feuds they never hesitated to associate the Tories with Catholicism, especially because in the early days of the Whig Party, the Tories wanted to reinstate the Catholic Stuart line to the throne. The Whigs advocated a constitutional monarchy, rather than an absolute monarchy. This means that they wanted mutual checks and balances in the power held by parliament and that wielded by the monarch. For the Whigs, all should be accountable to the laws and basic principles of the nation, as written in a constitution.

Background

During the seventeenth century, England experienced a lot of political instability and strife. In 1642, the English Civil War started, and it ended with the execution of the Stuart king Charles I in 1649. During the war, Oliver Cromwell became a powerful general, and eventually he defeated the royalist forces. His forces became known as "Roundheads," another term that would eventually be used to describe Whigs. Cromwell declared England a commonwealth, abolished Anglicanism in favor of Presbyterianism, and at one point he even dissolved Parliament. For twelve years, beginning with Charles I’s execution and the exile of Charles II, England did not have a king or queen. This ended when a re-formed Parliament invited Charles II back to resume the Stuart reign in 1661.

Both the Tory royalists and the Whigs established periodicals during the civil war as a propaganda strategy. After the war, the continued growth of print culture offered these two political parties the perfect medium through which to spread their views about politics, society, literature, and art. During this period, known as the Restoration, the Whig Party became more powerful.

In 1688, after more civil discord, seven lords persuaded William of Orange to invade England. Once there, he claimed that he did so to secure the throne for his wife Mary, who was of Stuart lineage. Once Parliament crowned her Queen, he threatened to withdraw his troops because he refused to be her mere subject. This resulted in the joint monarchy of William and Mary. While Mary was a Stuart, Whigs controlled a majority of Parliament, and William owed many of them favors. Thus, their reign was a major victory for the Whigs, who enjoyed an even greater reputation after a victory over the French in the War of Spanish Succession.

Whigs endorsed the idea of governance with an element of consent, but they did not fully embrace the notion of populism, or government from the ground up. Despite all their rhetoric against Catholic absolutism, the Whigs passed numerous laws suspending rights and privileges when Jacobite riots erupted 1715 to 1722. In striking what they considered the best balance between liberty and order, they showed themselves as capable of tyranny as their Tory counterparts.

In the early eighteenth century, the Whigs Joseph Addison and Richard Steele started publishing The Spectator, an early version of the newspaper. A robust literary culture emerged in the pages of such periodicals. The legendary writer Jonathan Swift met Addison during Swift’s Whig period. However, after working as an editor for The Examiner and meeting the head of the Tory party, who was the son of the patron of poet Alexander Pope, he switched his allegiance to the Tories. Through the eighteenth century, the debate between the Whigs and the Tories in these periodicals often reached high levels of viciousness.

Impact

Many of those who took up the Whig cause during the English Civil War left for the American colonies when the Stuart line re-captured the throne. During the increasing settlement of the New World, the Whigs played a major role in American politics well into the nineteenth century. Their anti-Catholicism had a decisive influence on social relations. When Irish immigration peaked during the potato famine, many Irish experienced harsh prejudice, in part because of their Catholicism. Whigs generally promoted the idea that proving one’s worth through hard work and savvy was far more valuable than pedigree or lineage, which became one of the core American values. Another Whig belief that became enshrined in the American Declaration of Independence was the right to overthrow an unjust government. These progressive beliefs, however, were not always in tune with their political strategies or practice.

Sometimes American Whigs used or even instigated prejudices of their supporters for questionable political ends. Furthermore, their emphasis on the importance of property put them at odds with the more progressive elements of their rivals in America: the Democratic party. In the early nineteenth century, especially during Andrew Jackson’s presidency, the Democratic party wanted to extend the vote to those who did not own property. The Whigs opposed this. Many Whigs, however, were more willing to entertain the idea of the equality of the sexes than their Democratic counterparts during this time.

Early in his political career, Abraham Lincoln ran for Congress as a Whig. However, the American Whig party collapsed over the slavery issue, and it was as a member of the new Republican party that Lincoln abolished slavery with the Emancipation Proclamation.

American Whigs were heavily influenced by Scottish thought, especially the free market ideology of Adam Smith. Like their English antecedents and Adam Smith himself, they viewed literature as a means of cultivating manners and morals. They championed moral rectitude and demonized what they perceived as the perversity and decadence of the old aristocracy. The Whigs played a crucial role in laying down the political, social, and cultural foundations of contemporary superpowers such as England and the United States.

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