ames II. The party was largely responsible for the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which established the supremacy of Parliament over the king. Backed by the growing British mercantile and industrial interests, the landed but untitled gentry, and the Protestant dissenters, or nonconformists, the Whig party achieved control of the government in 1714 on the accession of King George I. For nearly 50 years the Whigs remained in power, until in 1760 the opposition Tory party (bolstered by fears stemming from the early whispers of revolution in America) rode a wave of conservative sentiment into office. During this period, those American colonists who supported the American Revolution were also known as Whigs, a point that is somewhat confusing since the two groups were in fact very dissimilar in fundamental ways.
This was not the end of the Whig party, although it spent decades as the opposition party. During the next 70 years out of power it began to be transformed into something very different from what it once had been and when it returned to power in 1830, it had become something very much like the a modern liberal return. The Whigs of the 19th century put forth a reform platform that won popular support û this is in fact what returned them to office û and during their first years in power they passed important reform legislation, known collectively as the Reform Bills. At the same time, the Whig party became known as the Liberal party and the Tory party as the Conservative party. This change in nomenclature was not simply a question of pouring old wine into new bottles but marked a significant political change in the identity and nature of the two parties, and this change of name marked a real and impermeable discontinuity with the parties of the same names but of different politics and belonging to a different era.2
It is important in any analysis of the Whigs (in assessing either their strengths or their weaknesses) not to assume...