The British historically had an extensive travel document system that kept the poor bound to their parishes, feudal relations -> capitalist relations came with changes to internal travel and criminalization of unemployment/poverty to address the want for a mobile, landless and dispensible workforce divorced from feudal obligations.
I don't think freedom had much to do with either their passport system or changes to internal travel policy, they were used to enforce relations even through the transition from feudalism to capitalism.
There was certainly rhetoric about liberty regarding passport reform among thinkers and the mercantile class later in London, Adam Smith talks about it in The Wealth of Nations, but I would not say there is a history of a liberatory British passport system.
