Gladstone, Disraeli and Later Victorian Politics

Paul Adelman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780582293229
• eBook ISBN: 9781317886631
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia británica

A major new edition of this introductory survey of the two main political parties, from the rise of the Liberal Party under Gladstone until the period of Conservative domination under Salisbury in the late nineteenth century. As well as assessing the impact of major political landmarks such as the Great Reform Acts, it also describes the nineteenth century political scene.

Part One:
The Setting

1
Gladstone’s Liberal Party

Early Development

The origin of the Liberal Party is usually found in the famous meeting held in Willis’s rooms on 6 June 1859, when the Whig, Peelite and Radical leaders in Parliament, drawn together by a common sympathy with Italy, agreed to combine together to expel the minority Conservative government of Derby and Disraeli. As a result, a new Liberal ministry was formed under Lord Palmerston, which contained for the first time both Gladstone and Lord John Russell. But the government of Lord Palmerston, which lasted for the next six years until his death in October 1865, was still basically only a reconstituted Whig ministry (it contained only one Radical) and indeed received the tacit support of the Conservative Party. Palmerston’s death, however, marked something of a turning point in British political history. A Parliamentary Reform Bill, which the old statesman had long opposed, now became inevitable as Pam’s successor, Lord John Russell, had long been an advocate of parliamentary reform and he was now supported over this by his outstanding, younger colleague, W. E. Gladstone.

The Reform Bill which the two Liberal leaders proposed in the spring of 1866 was a very moderate measure, which aimed to enfranchise only a small section of the better-off members of the urban working classes by lowering the borough franchise from ten-pound to seven-pound householders. But even this limited proposal was too much for some Liberal backbenchers; and a group of them, led by Robert Lowe, dubbed the Adullamites, combined with the Tory opposition in June 1866 to defeat the Bill. This was followed by the resignation of Russell and the coming into power of another minority Conservative government headed by Lord Derby and Disraeli. As a result of the brilliant tactics of Disraeli, it was the Conservatives who eventually pushed through the Reform Bill in the summer of 1867, a Bill which was a much more democratic measure than the original Liberal proposal since it was based on the principle of ‘household suffrage’. This was (in Derby’s phrase) the famous ‘leap in the dark’. The Reform Act of 1867 added about a million new voters to the electorate, most of them workingmen who now became a majority of the voters in urban constituencies.

The passage of the Second Reform Act was soon followed by the retirement of Lord John Russell and the succession of Gladstone to the Liberal leadership. Early in 1868 Lord Derby also retired and Disraeli became Conservative Prime Minister. But his period of power was short-lived. In the spring of that year Gladstone introduced a series of resolutions into the House of Commons in favour of the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, one of the pillars of the Protestant Ascendancy in that country, which were passed by comfortable majorities against the opposition of the government. The inevitable result was the dissolution of Parliament followed later that year by a general election.

Gladstone’s motives in introducing his original resolutions were, as often, a mixture of idealism and political shrewdness. Though he was moved by a sense of ‘justice for Ireland’, he also hoped that his action would serve to re-unite the Liberal Party after the divisions over parliamentary reform in 1866–67, and help him to regain the political initiative from Disraeli. Opposition to religious privilege was a subject on which all Liberals could unite. Moreover, he believed that with the enlarged electorate created by the Second Reform Act, Irish Church reform would appeal not only to Roman Catholics but also to nonconformists and workingmen throughout Great Britain, many of whom were opposed to the privileges of the Church of England. Gladstone’s expectations were largely fulfilled. Though religion was not the only factor at work, in the general election of November 1868 the Liberals, united and confident, were swept into power with a majority of more than a hundred and Gladstone formed his first Ministry. The Liberal Party had come of age.

The Parliamentary Liberal Party which thus came into existence in the 1860s bore all the marks of its origins. It was less a party in the modern sense – organised, disciplined, united around a programme – than a loose alliance of groups of many shades of opinion, reminiscent rather of the parliamentary ‘connections’ of the age of George III, than of the marshalled party battalions of today. The most famous of these groups, usually regarded as forming the extreme right wing of the party, was the Whigs [76]. A clique of wealthy aristocratic landowners, easygoing, affable and frank, but suspicious of what they did not understand, the Liberalism of the Whig grandees of the period was the product rather of tradition, habit and loyalty than of deeply felt ideas or principles. Indeed, they prided themselves on their commonsense and freedom from dogma. ‘A Whig’, said one of their number, ‘has no fear of the people or of party cries. He merely says of all reforms “Prove your case and I will go with you…”’[53 p. 8]. The Whigs then were not as reactionary as has often been made out; and they saw themselves as an important and necessary element within the Liberal Party, a view which has been commended by a number of recent historians [53; 69]. In the classic description of Lord Hartington, their outstanding leader during the Gladstonian period, given in a public speech in 1883: the Whigs ‘have formed a connecting link between the advanced party [the Radicals] and those classes which, possessing property, power and influence, are naturally averse to change’. They had ensured, he added, that necessary reforms came about ‘by the calm and peaceful process of constitutional acts’[47, i pp. 405–6].

The importance of the Whigs lay not in their numbers, for though they were a large and important corps in the House of Lords, they formed only a small section of the Parliamentary Liberal Party in the Lower House in the 1860s; nor in their wealth – which though enormous was hardly tapped at all in the service of the Liberal Party. The Whigs embodied, it has been said, ‘a tradition of aristocratic leadership’ [53 p. 3]. Their real importance lay, therefore, in their domination of government – their virtual monopoly of many of the key posts in any Liberal ministry – and the extraordinary esteem of their colleagues and the Parliamentary Party.

At the opposite end of the party’s spectrum were the Radicals, that is, those MPs who were committed to fundamental reform, political, religious and social [1]. They too, like the genuine Whigs in the Commons, were a small group – only about fifty members – though on specific reform proposals, particularly in relation to religion, they could generally count on considerably more support. The Radicals contained intellectuals like Henry Fawcett and John Stuart Mill, who sat briefly for Westminster from 1865 to 1868; but their most important constituent was the great nonconformist manufacturing interest, containing men like Samuel Morley, Titus Salt, William Rathbone and – greatest of all – John Bright, who represented mainly the new industrial constituencies in the North and Midlands. The radical group was the one section of the Liberal Party which was genuinely and passionately committed to challenging the established order in both church and state; and, in this respect, their greatest obstacle was not so much the glittering but tiny array of Whigs, but the pedestrian mass of moderate Liberals who, neither Whig nor Radical, formed the bulk of the membership of the Parliamentary Liberal Party. The moderate Liberals were the ballast which every great parliamentary party must contain. Landowners, lawyers, gentlemen of leisure, army and naval officers, their background and attitudes made them distrustful of ‘enthusiasm’ in either religion or politics, and inclined them therefore to be a cautious, but a reasonably openminded, force within the party. In these ways they had much in common with the Whigs. Nor is this surprising, since most of the moderate MPs were associated with landed society in one way or another and a number of them were directly related to the Whig aristocracy. It has been estimated that about 60 per cent of members of the Parliamentary Liberal Party in the 1860s belonged to the landed classes, while only about 16 per cent were members of the commercial and industrial classes [54 pp. 126–7]. On the whole, the moderates were content to accept the platitudes of contemporary Liberalism and follow the lead of the more distinguished men on the Liberal Front Bench. And indeed this was the major purpose of the Parliamentary Liberal Party as a whole: to sustain the power of a leadership which, in a rough and ready way, skimmed the cream of the administrative talent available in the Liberal ranks in both Houses of Parliament. It was this belief that Administration is the highest form of politics – the greatest legacy of the Peelites to the Liberals – that helped to make the governing hierarchy of the Liberal Party in the age of Gladstone something of a distinct group within, but also apart from, the Parliamentary Party; a group with its own traditions, its own loyalties, and its own code of disinterested, efficient and highminded service.

The meeting at Willis’s rooms, however, and the development of the Parliamentary Liberal Party, is only one side of the story of Liberalism in the 1860s. What is much more important, John Vincent has argued in an important book, is the growth of change – not at the centre – but at the grass roots; the development of new social forces in the country at large which looked to the Parliamentary Liberal Party for leadership and expression. What were these new social forces? There were, Vincent suggests, three: the creation of a cheap daily provincial Press, the growth of militant nonconformity, and the rise of organised labour [80].

The rise of a popular Press in the mid-Victorian years was one of the great silent social revolutions of the age. The repeal of the stamp and paper duties between 1855 and 1861 – together with the railway, the telegraph and the steam press – enabled the cheap provincial Press to make a great leap forward in both number of newspapers and circulation, and thus destroy the exclusive metropolitan domination of the ‘respectable’ newspapers like The Times [10]. Moreover, this new provincial Press was dominated mainly by local Liberal politicians, such as the Baines family with the Leeds Mercury, the Cowens’ Newcastle Chronicle, and the Leader family’s Sheffield Independent. These men used their papers for Liberal – often radical – proselytisation, and helped to build up, therefore, an articulate, self-conscious, provincial Liberalism which became one of the pillars of the new Liberal Party.

Another pillar was militant nonconformity [Doc. 1]. The nonconformist community as a whole, with the notable exception of the Wesleyans, had always of course traditionally looked towards the old Whig party as the opponents of that exclusive Anglicanism that marked their Tory rivals. That allegiance was now potentially available to the Liberal Party also, as the best instrument through which the nonconformists could realise those special religious, social and educational reforms, which could transform the purely legal equality granted to them in 1828 into practical reality. They had obtained some minor concessions from the Whig governments in the 1830s. But what they now wanted was the abolition of compulsory church rate paid to the Church of England, and the end of the Anglican monopoly at the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, as well as a dimunition of Anglican influence within the school system. Some militant nonconformist leaders went further. For men such as Edward Miall – editor of the Nonconformist and Liberal MP – no real advance towards religious equality could be expected while the Church of England remained as the Established Church of the land. Only the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church of England could really destroy the nonconformists’ status as second-class citizens. This was the major aim of the ‘Liberation Society’ which was organised by Miall and other militant colleagues in 1853. By the 1860s it had become the most famous and the most powerful of the great nonconformist pressure groups which aimed at influencing national and parliamentary opinion in their favour [1; 3].

The nonconformists believed they were in a position to make their weight felt. For they were now a dynamic, militant, wealthy and expanding community – the great Religious Census of 1851 had shown that about half the churchgoing population of the kingdom belonged to the nonconformist communities. Their strength was concentrated mainly in the great industrial cities of the North of England, scattered communities in the West and East Anglia, and in Wales where nonconformity eventually came to dominate the religious life of the people [18]. Socially, support came mainly from the middle classes and the artisans. The nonconformists were prepared to place their wealth, their votes – a bloc of 87 nonconformist MPs was returned at the general election of 1865 – together with their influence, their zeal and their organising ability at the disposal of the Liberal Party in return for the fond – but as it turned out largely delusive – expectation that the Parliamentary Party would foster their special interests. Thus began that peculiar love-hate relationship between the Liberal Establishment and the nonconformist world which lasted until, in the early twentieth century, the power of organised nonconformity declined, and with it, eventually, the Liberal Party itself [42; 3].

As with the nonconformists, so with the new working-class elite of trade union leaders and skilled artisans who were prospering with the mid-Victorian boom. Emancipation for them too could be expressed by supporting and voting for the Liberal Party: not only in the sense that, like the nonconformists, they had special interests to achieve – over trade union rights, taxes, hours of work – but in a more profound political and psychological way. ‘To vote Liberal’, as Vincent suggests, ‘was closely tied to the growing ability of whole new classes to stand on their own feet’ [80 p. xiv]. Working-class Liberalism was thus not entirely, or even mainly, based on simple economic motivation, and the provincial industrial workers were often at one with their masters in their support for the Liberal cause against the forces represented locally by Squire and Parson. Indeed, questions of personal status and subtle pressures within a local urban community were as much the determinants of Liberal allegiance generally, as the more overt economic and religious grievances [134; 154].

In the 1860s, therefore, the Parliamentary Liberal Party became of major importance in the political life of the country because it established links with these new dynamic forces in the nation at large. The man who saw their importance and carried through this liaison, who used these great religious and social movements to breathe life into the dry bones of the Parliamentary Liberal Party, was W. E. Gladstone. By doing so he was able to assert an almost unquestioned personal ascendancy over them all for the next twenty years, and his inspiration continued long after his death.

Yet Gladstone had begun his political life at the time of the Great Reform Bill of 1832 as a vigorous High Churchman and Tory, and it was not until the later 1840s and the 1850s, by which time he was the outstanding leader of the Peelites in the House of Commons, that he started seriously to reconsider his early opinions. Even so, as Shannon and other historians have stressed, he was never able to shake off completely the influence of his early Tory beliefs [49; 68; 74], What pushed Gladstone towards Liberalism during this period was the collapse of his belief in the union of church and state and the acceptance of the notion of religious freedom and civil equality for all groups and sects. Under the influence of Sir Robert Peel – in whose great Ministry of 1841–46 he had served as President of the Board of Trade – he also came to believe that the free enterprise system, based on laissez-faire and free trade, would best lead to economic growth and prosperity for all sections of the community. Finally, Gladstone was now strongly influenced by the principle of nationality, particularly in relation to Italy, and in the 1850s he became more and more sympathetic to the cause of Italian unity and freedom. It was in fact the Italian question, on which the two statesmen more or less saw eye to eye, that helped Gladstone to overcome his suspicions of Lord Palmerston – whose bellicose foreign policy he had bitterly denounced a generation earlier – and join his new Liberal government in 1859. He was also tired of being out of office and profoundly concious of his own abilities and ambitions. ‘I saw great things to do’, he noted in his Diary, ‘particularly in the field of finance and trade’ [63, i p. 106]. He therefore accepted with alacrity the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1859, a position he held until the summer of 1866.

Gladstone’s great free trade budgets of the early 1860s were decisive in his career. They not only won him the support of the commercial and manufacturing interests and the working classes in the country, but also established his authority in Parliament and his indispensability to the government [63, i]. They also led though, owing to the way in which he stood up to both the Prime Minister and the House of Lords over his Paper Bill, to murmurings on the right wing of the Liberal bloc: ‘The Whigs hate Gladstone’, wrote Sir Robert Phillimore in 1860; and one of the greatest of that clan, Lord Clarendon, described the Chancellor as ‘an audacious innovator with an insatiable desire of popularity… his ungratified personal vanity makes him wish to subvert the institutions and classes that stand in the way of his ambition’ [76 p. 299]. Indeed, Gladstone’s independent stance in the government made him no more popular in the House than he had been in his Peelite days. Now, however, it mattered less, since, as Gladstone began to observe with increasing satisfaction, a mass opinion was being built up outside the House of Commons which moved gradually but inexorably towards him as its parliamentary spokesman. For the repeal of the paper duties – the ‘taxes on knowledge’ – not only helped to reinforce a middle-class provincial Liberalism based on a cheap Press, it helped also to sponsor a working-class Liberalism – to educate the country’s future masters.

Indeed, the main theme of Gladstone’s political life in the early 1860s is his fairly steady move to the left, much to the dismay of the Prime Minister [39]. What this now meant in practical terms was an increasing respect for and sympathy with the aspirations of the skilled workingmen and, to some extent, the nonconformists. And both cause and effect of this was Gladstone’s growing awareness of his superb power as a mass orator to move men, as seen in his great tours of the North of England. To win over these new national forces Gladstone quite deliberately, and successfully, used the publicity...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Dedication
• Editorial Foreword
• Foreword
• Note on the Second Edition
• PART ONE: THE SETTING
• PART TWO: THE STRUGGLE
• PART THREE: ASSESSMENT
• PART FOUR: DOCUMENTS
• Bibliography
• Index