A decade or so after the fires of revolution were expended in America, and as the first sparks of conflagration were beginning to spread in France, the self-professed Old Whig Edmund Burke identified a surprising source of ideological solidarity with the emerging New Whig radicals occupying the opposite end of the British political spectrum. He assured all concerned that “the old fanatics of single arbitrary power … maintained, what I believe no creature now maintains ‘that the crown is held by divine hereditary and indefeasible right’.” Burke's utterance and the political context from which it emerged exposed in a particularly acute manner the dual character of the Whig politics of liberty that formed the foundation of Anglo-American thought in the early modern period. I have tried to show that Whig political philosophy was both a capacious repository for practically all limited constitutionalist thought and sentiment in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Anglo-American world and a complex, heterogeneous body of divergent, distinct, and even conflicting ideas and philosophical commitments.

Burke perceptively identified the common source of Whig political thought in the constitutional and theological battles of seventeenth-century England. As we have seen, in their quarrel with Filmerian divine right and its political theology of monarchical absolutism and scriptural literalism, the first English Whigs built upon, modified, and in important ways departed from the venerable natural liberty tradition of their philosophical predecessors.