From the latter part of the 17th century until the early 19th, there were essentially two major political parties in Great Britain: the Whigs and Tories. Neither could be described as "modern" in the sense of organised voters working together, compromising their differences for the sake of gain at the polls. In the 18th century, the only voters were men of means: the landed aristocracy and wealthy merchants. They considered party organization as dishonest and activities such as campaigning beneath their status. A "gentleman" was expected to be independent, to think for himself and to protect his own interests. He might ally himself with others on a particular issue, but such alliances were temporary and fragile. The early political parties were loose groupings of like-minded individuals (called "factions") with little discipline and less loyalty.

The party labels "Whig" and "Tory" began as derisive terms when they first appeared during the Monmouth Rebellion of 1679 and the succession crisis that followed from 1680 to 1685. Across the country people disagreed on the issue of whether or not James Stuart, Duke of York and heir to the throne, should be allowed to succeed King Charles II, his brother. The Tories believed that James should succeed, the Whigs that he should not.

The origins of this dispute are found in the religious and political controversies of the previous one hundred and fifty years. With much bloodshed and trauma, the Tudor monarchs of the 16th century had broken with the Catholic Church, created an Anglican Church and formed a Protestant state. This new allegiance was confirmed during the Civil Wars and the Interregnum of 1649 - 1660. At the same time, England had also begun to embrace some modern democratic ideas which empowered Parliament and constrained the Monarchy. King Charles II was probably secretly a Catholic but at least adhered publicly to the Anglican faith. James however was openly Catholic and very devout. Some saw his Catholicism as a threat to all the religious and political changes that had taken place. Therefore, the Whigs, as they came to be known, opposed James' succession to the throne. Those who supported James' hereditary right to the crown came to be known as Tories.

The term Whig was probably short for "Whiggamore" and referred to a horse thief; also to Scottish Presbyterians who were associated with republican ideas, with nonconformity, and with rebellion against legitimate authority. By calling them Whigs, the Tories tried to slander those who claimed the right to exclude the "legitimate" heir from the succession. In response, the Whigs tried to slander those who supported James' hereditary rights despite his faith by calling them "Tories." "Tory" was probably an Irish word meaning "papist outlaw." Both slanders backfired: each group embraced with pride the derisive term flung at them by their opponents.


The result of the initial struggle between the two "parties" during the succession crisis was that the Whigs lost and James became king when Charles II died in 1685. However, during his short reign of only three years, James II (1685 - 1688) managed to offend not only the Whigs but many Tories with his radical Catholicism and his claims to rule by "Divine Right", like the autocratic Catholic princes of Europe. Consequently, most Whigs and many Tories conspired to oust James during the Glorious Revolution of 1688. After a brief struggle, James ignominiously abandoned the throne and Parliament invited William of Orange and his wife Mary Stuart, both Protestants, to succeed jointly to the English crown.

Although the succession crisis was the specific event that led to the formation of the two major parties, the differences between them ran much deeper. Generally those who identified themselves as Whigs were inspired by the values of liberal democracy brought about by the Enlightenment, and consisted of the noble houses, wealthy merchants and non-Anglicans. Those who identified themselves as Tory consisted of the landed gentry and the Church of England, and were opposed to the reformism of the Whigs, such as expanding the franchise and increased Parliamentary representation for lower classes.

After 1688, most Tories accepted a limited version of the Whig theory of a Constitutional Monarchy. However, whether rightly or wrongly, their loyalty to the new order was suspect because they had supported James' succession in the first place. This suspicion was confirmed in 1714 when the Tory ministers of the late Queen Anne (1702-1714) were disgraced for negotiating for the return of James II on her death. This uprising in favour of a Stuart restoration (and another one in 1745) stigmatized the Tories as supporters of absolute monarchy and as being opponents of the Protestant Succession. Except for a brief ascendancy from 1710 to 1714, the Tories were in a weak political position for almost one hundred years. The Whigs became so dominant after the first Jacobite uprising that the period from 1714 to 1784 is often called the "Whig Supremacy." Many of the Prime Ministers categorised as Whigs did not actively support a party policy: for them it was in practice merely their nominal label.

With the French Revolution in 1789, and the ensuing wars, the Whigs split, with many aligning themselves with the then Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger against the Revolution. Pitt and his successors became known as Tories, originally as an insult, but by the time of the Earl of Liverpool they had accepted the term.

The Whig and Tory parties both altered after the enactment of the Great Reform Act of 1832. Two of the three major modern political parties, Conservative and Liberal, grew directly out of these earlier ones. The Conservative Party was founded in 1834 by Sir Robert Peel as a result of his Tamworth Manifesto, a speech in which he outlined the new political philosophy. The party has been consistently socially conservative but has shifted its position on economics, initially supporting free trade under Peel, then favouring protectionism for much of the nineteenth century, to become a party of economic liberalism and reduced government after World War II.

The Liberal Party was formed after the collapse of the Whig party due to the enfranchisement of the British middle class following the Reform Act 1832, and has typically been a reforming party. From the 1840s until the 1940s it was strongly defined by its support for free trade and social welfare, in contrast to Conservative preference for protectionism and private charity. The Liberals were also known for their pragmatic support for state intervention in the economy where necessary, whereas the Conservatives opposed such intervention on ideological grounds. In its last government, from 1906-1922, it introduced a number of social reforms including welfare, regulation of working hours and national insurance. The division of the Liberal Party in the early 1920s led many previous supporters to switch their allegiance to the Labour Party. The Liberal Democrats, the successor party to the Liberal Party, are socially liberal and typically support higher taxation to support the welfare state, but have an increasing faction of economic liberals.