[MUSIC] One of the very unfamiliar words that you may have encountered, although I believe if you are learned in American history, the term Whigs was a nineteenth century political party in America. But in our context, Whigs and Tories were the first political parties that originated out of the constitutional crisis of the Exclusion Bill, that attempted to remove the Duke of York who did eventually become James II, from the throne. So the Whigs and there's a lot of dispute about why they're called Whigs. It was nothing to do with what they wore on their head. It was probably a colloquial term for religious dissenters in Scotland. The Whig party grew out of the conflict between 1678 and 1681. And they were very, very explicitly organised around principles of freedom and liberty. They wanted to restrain Stuart absolutism and arbitrary power. By the 1700s, the Whigs and the Tories were almost explicitly modern organised political parties. They weren't quite you know having a central office, but they gathered around political propaganda, they organised themselves in Parliament. So the Whig party is a group of figures who, John Locke, who you may have encountered. Was in one sense a Whig, although he wasn't an MP. The Whigs are a group of political thinkers and political actors, who believe that Parliament has a priority over the monarchy, and that in one sense it is legitimate to resist a tyrant. That's the radical Whigs. By the time of the 1720s, the Whigs are the dominant political group, and even in the 1760s, the Whig Party negotiates, or attempts to negotiate, the colonial battle between liberty and tyranny in the Georgian reigns. So Whigs are just a very strange name for a political party. That we would now, there's no real equivalent today, you can't translate the Whig party into the Labour party, or the Torie party, as they where named in the 17th and 18th century. And not really necessarily the Conservative party today.