Whigs (British political party)

Rare card · No. 24232

The Whigs were a political party in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. Between the 1680s and the 1850s, the Whigs contested power with their rivals, the Tories. The Whigs became the Liberal Party when the faction merged with the Peelites and Radicals in the 1850s. Many Whigs left the Liberal Party in 1886 over the issue of Irish Home Rule to form the Liberal Unionist Party, which merged into the Conservative Party in 1912. The Whigs began as a political faction that opposed absolute monarchy and Catholic emancipation, supporting constitutional monarchism and parliamentary government, but also Protestant supremacy. Unlike the Tories, they supported tolerance for non-Anglican protestants. They played a central role in the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and were the standing enemies of the Roman Catholic Stuart kings and pretenders. The period known as the Whig Supremacy (1714–1760) was enabled by the Hanoverian succession of George I in 1714...

Read on Wikipedia