The Liberal Democrats, at the time of writing, have only fourteen MPs. Yet the significance of Liberalism in the history of the Constitutional History of the United Kingdom does not lie in the immediate present: this is a story that stretches deep into the past; covering not merely the giants of the historic Liberal Party in the nineteenth century, but the Whig inheritance from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century constitutional disputes. Hence, while this chapter will conclude with reference to the modern Liberal Party – an alliance, from 1981, between historic Liberalism and the Social Democratic Party; fusing formally in 1988 – it will primarily consider the longer history of Liberalism and the British Constitution.

The most significant figure in the opposition to Walpole, besides Bolingbroke, was the Whig William Pulteney. However, Pulteney’s involvement with Bolingbroke’s Country party platform, whose raison d’être was to unite Tories and Whigs, ended upon the fall of Walpole in 1742. After Walpole’s resignation, Pulteney abandoned the Tories when he resisted attempts to prosecute Walpole and accepted a seat in the Lords as the Earl of Bath. John Perceval wrote a notorious pamphlet defending Pulteney/Bath, entitled Faction Detected by the Evidence of Fact (1743). In Faction Detected, Perceval distinguished between legitimate and factious opposition, associating the former with Whigs and the latter with Tories and Jacobites. This chapter also discusses various reversionary oppositions and the transitory broad-bottom administration in the mid-1740s.

This chapter demonstrates the importance of Paul de Rapin-Thoyras (1661–1725) for subsequent discussion of political parties in the eighteenth century. Before his famous Histoire d’Angleterre (1724–7), the Frenchman had already made a name for himself by writing a pamphlet entitled Une Dissertation sur les Whigs et les Torys (1717), which is the chief focus of this chapter, although the Histoire is also briefly surveyed and contextualised. The chapter examines Rapin’s intervention against the backdrop of his expulsion from France along with other Huguenots in 1685, the Glorious Revolution of 1688–9, and the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. By focusing on Rapin’s Dissertation, this chapter demonstrates the centrality of religion and religious denominations in the construction of political parties. In political theory, Rapin’s Dissertation can be regarded as an intellectual milestone, as it was the first clear expression of the idea that balance between parties, as distinct from Machiavelli’s social orders, is recommendable as a way to achieve proper balance in a mixed constitution.

Few, if any, political thinkers of the eighteenth century dealt as thoroughly and extensively with party as David Hume (1711–76). This chapter considers Hume’s first batch of essays on British politics, published in 1741–2. Hume analysed how the Whig–Tory and Court–Country alignments were integral to British party politics, with the former dividing the political nation along dynastic and religious lines and the latter being a natural expression of the workings of the mixed constitution and interparliamentary conflict. His analysis can be read as a compromise between Bolingbroke and Walpole. Yet it was something more than that – and arguably the most ambitious attempt to make sense of party in British politics to date.