The British leaders Robert Walpole, Earl Grey, and Lord Melbourne, and the Americans Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Wm. Henry Harrison, and Millard Fillmore were all associated with which political party?

This diverse group of statesmen belongs to a political tradition that originated in 17th-century Britain. The original British Whigs championed the supremacy of Parliament over the monarch, a cause that gained prominence after the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Sir Robert Walpole, often considered Britain’s first prime minister, was a leading Whig who defined the party's early power. Later figures like Earl Grey, who oversaw the landmark Great Reform Act of 1832, and Lord Melbourne, Queen Victoria's first prime minister, continued this influential political lineage which eventually evolved into the modern Liberal Party.

Over a century later, an American political party adopted the name for a very similar reason. The American Whig Party formed in the 1830s in direct opposition to President Andrew Jackson, whom they derisively nicknamed "King Andrew I." They saw themselves as the spiritual successors to the British Whigs, resisting executive overreach. Led by titans like Henry Clay and Daniel Webster, the party promoted economic modernization and a strong central government. Though they successfully elected presidents William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor (succeeded by Millard Fillmore), the party could not survive the deep national divisions over slavery and collapsed by the mid-1850s.