Whilst the history of the Liberal Democrats stretches back 150 years to the formation of the Liberal Party in 1859, Liberal political thought goes back a further 200 years to the ferment of the English Civil War and the struggles with the monarchy over the power of Parliament. The following century saw the gradual establishment of two parliamentary groupings, the Whigs and the Tories. Broadly speaking, the Tories were defenders of the Crown and the established Anglican Church, while the Whigs drew their inspiration from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which established the supremacy of parliament over the monarchy.
In the late eighteenth century the revolt of the American Colonies and the French Revolution opened up a renewed debate about the ideological basis of government. Under Charles James Fox, the Whigs resisted Pitt’s authoritarian measures during the Napoleonic Wars and a prolonged period in opposition also encouraged them to embrace a more popular agenda, in the form of religious toleration and electoral reform. A Whig government under Lord Grey passed the Great Reform Act of 1832, which began the process of extending the franchise and, also, the need for politicians to engage with both ordinary electors and radical elements outside Parliament.
Out of this process grew the political parties that we recognise today. The Conservative Party came into existence in 1835 but it took longer for a cohesive liberal party to emerge. Uneasy alliances between the aristocratic Whigs and the middle-class liberals, elected after 1832 to represent the newly enfranchised industrial regions, could not be relied upon. There was also the problem of how to accommodate radical opinion, barely represented in the Commons. The glue to bind the various factions together was provided by the Peelites, a small but influential band of free-trade Conservatives who broke with their party in 1846 over the abolition of the Corn Laws (duties on the imports of grain). Free trade, which appealed both to the radicals and the working classes (because it kept food cheap) and the industrial manufacturers (because it made it easier for them to export) became a pre-eminent Liberal cause well into the twentieth century.