There has been no exclusively Liberal government in Britain for 95 years, but with Nick Clegg taking office as Deputy Prime Minister in a Lib Dem-Tory coalition, is British Liberalism at last coming out of its long coma?

If so, will the recovery last, or has the "miracle drug" of a hung parliament brought about a mere temporary awakening that presages a tragic relapse into political catatonia?

History suggests that the seeming health of the patient is a mere cruel illusion. Previous such coalitions have generally been a disaster for the Liberals, although this does not mean that the present government will necessarily break up in the short term. Rather, the risk is that if it survives, the Lib Dems, or a portion of them, will be permanently co-opted by a Conservative Party that, with accompanying honeyed words, has just demonstrated its historic ruthlessness in the pursuit of power.

Within seconds of David Cameron entering 10 Downing Street, commentators were describing the new government as "Britain's first peacetime coalition". This demonstrates that few in the media have a historical awareness predating 1945. There has of course been no coalition since then – the Lib-Lab pact of the 1970s involved no government jobs for Liberals – but in earlier times, coalitions were a not infrequent feature of the political landscape. Disraeli remarked in the 1850s that "England does not love coalitions", but later decades were to see not a few of them.

Politics was generally more fluid then, with lines between parties being blurred and shifting alliances between parties sometimes leading to changes of government between general elections as well as at them. The great Liberal split of the 1880s led to the formation of the so-called Liberal Unionists, who allied themselves with the Tories, keeping the Liberal party proper out of effective power for two decades. Joseph Chamberlain, the Liberal Unionists' leading light, had once been a genuine radical figure to the left of Gladstone.

In 1906, the Liberals regained their political foothold with a landslide election victory and governed successfully for the remaining years of peace. But the World War I split the party, and although David Lloyd George won the general election of 1918 as a Liberal Prime Minister at the head of a peacetime coalition, his MPs were heavily outnumbered by their Conservative allies. This meant that, with a tough economic and foreign policy environment, it was easy for the Tories to use him as the fall guy when things went wrong. Liberal hopes of a generous social policy ran up against the Conservative desire for spending cuts and the two-headed coalition ass – as it was depicted in contemporary cartoons – met its end in 1922. At the crucial meeting that decided its fate, future Tory PM Stanley Baldwin described Lloyd George as "a dynamic force" – apparently the worst insult he could think of.

During the interwar years, the Liberal Party gradually died as a major force in politics. Then, as now, there was a tension between its social reforming and free market instincts. In 1931, the party appeared to get another chance: by now split into three, two of its factions joined the so-called National Government, which formed as a result of a major financial crisis.

When the Tories insisted that Britain finally abandon free trade, the "Liberal National" group accepted this and hung on in office, serving as convenient fig-leaf for a government that claimed to be non-partisan. They were, however, reduced to futility and although they kept their label for some years they became, in effect, just another kind variety of Tory.

From the dismal years after World War II, one forgotten name stands out today. It is that of the Liberal leader Clement Davies – a man whose very obscurity is a standing joke among political historians. It was Davies who, after the 1951 election, bravely turned down Churchill's offer of a cabinet post and thus secured the future of the Liberals as an independent (if rather tiny) party. After the revival of 1974, Jeremy Thorpe too refused to do a deal with the Conservatives, although tin this case it was largely attributable to Tory stubbornness over the issue of electoral reform.

Now Nick Clegg has bitten the bullet – or is it a poison pill? – that Davies and Thorpe would not. He and his colleagues have been pushed into this situation more by their wish to avoid another costly election in the near future than by any real ideological affinity with the Tories. But at a stroke, they have given Labour the legitimacy of being the Opposition at a time when economic crisis and war abroad are going to require unpopular decisions to be made. This may give Clegg a sense of common cause with his Conservative colleagues in the face of adversity, but if the free market wing of the Lib Dems cleaves to Cameron's agenda the party's activist base will rebel. If Clegg's strategy ends up transforming him back (still under the title Liberal) to the Tory he was in his youth, it may yet fall to a small band of MPs to return, like some of their plucky predecessors, into the waterless but inspiring wilderness.

Richard Toye is associate professor of modern British history at Exeter University.