Conservatism and British Foreign Policy, 1820–1920

The Derbys and their World

Geoffrey Hicks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780754669296
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317161851
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

The Derbys of Knowsley Hall have been neglected by historians to an astonishing degree. In domestic political terms, the legacies of Disraeli and his Conservative successors have long obscured their Lancastrian aristocratic predecessors. As far as foreign policy is concerned, twentieth century politics and scholarship have often suggested crude polarities: for example, the idea of 'appeasement' versus Churchillian belligerence has its nineteenth century equivalent in Aberdeen's apparent rivalry with Palmerston. The subtleties of other views, such as those represented by the Derbys, have either been overlooked or misunderstood. In addition, the fact that much crucial archival and editorial work has only been carried out in the last two decades has had a significant impact. Examining a range of topics in domestic and foreign policy, this collection brings a fresh approach to the political history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries through a series of innovative essays. It will appeal to those with an interest in the decline of the aristocracy, Victorian high politics and the politics of the regions, as well as the Conservative tradition in foreign policy.

Chapter 1
Derby Redivivus: Reflections on the Political Achievement of the Fourteenth Earl of Derby

Angus Hawkins

How does the recovery of the view from Knowsley alter our perspective of Victorian politics, British Conservatism and modern party history? Its impact is significant. This should be less surprising than the neglect in which it has been shrouded for so long. The earls of Derby were prominent in national politics throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. None more so than Edward Geoffrey Stanley, fourteenth Earl of Derby, who remains the longest-serving party leader in modern British politics, heading the Conservatives for twenty-two years between 1846 and 1868. He was the first British statesman to become prime minister three times, in 1852, from 1858–59, and from 1866–68. He was a powerful advocate for the 1832 Reform Act. In 1833 he abolished slavery in the British empire. And as premier in 1867 he oversaw the introduction of the Second Reform Act.1 Restoring the view from Knowsley not only extends our historical understanding; it also opens up a fresh perspective on seemingly familiar events. The vista from Knowsley challenges a conventional wisdom largely shaped by the views from Drayton Manor, Hughenden, Broadlands, Pembroke Lodge and Hawarden.

No reverential multi-volume biography of the fourteenth Earl of Derby, à la Morley or Monypenny and Buckle, was written after his death in 1869. Later generations of Conservatives have found greater inspiration in constructing mythologies around the figures of Benjamin Disraeli or, more recently, Sir Robert Peel. As a result, Derby became a shadowy and disregarded historical figure. As an aristocrat without the prerequisites of ambition and dedication, possessed of vitality though lacking in ideas, it was suggested, he oversaw the ‘dog days’ of Conservatism, as the party languished in impotent opposition during the 1850s and 1860s. So was the inheritance from Peel squandered and the genius of Disraeli suppressed. Yet this dismissal of Derby creates an historiographical puzzle. How is Derby’s evident prominence to be reconciled with the disparagement of posterity? An intellectual problem is the product of a tension between evidence and accepted knowledge. For the historian this highlights the relation between the archive and historical interpretation; the alignment of evidence extant with idées reçues. Derby’s extensive papers, correspondence and letter books, now housed in the Liverpool Record Office, enable us to revise the conventional portrait of Derby as a politically uninterested aristocrat, who regarded public affairs as a weary distraction from the high-spirited diversions of Newmarket and Epsom. From his papers Derby emerges as an astute, intelligent, and committed politician, whose public values and private beliefs reflected the convictions of his class and shaped the events of his day.2 A secure self-regard, a belief in the moral duties of an enlightened aristocracy, a perception of the natural interdependence of a hierarchical social order, a moderate evangelical Anglicanism, the boisterous enjoyment of field and turf, and a teasing social manner concealing the earnestness of his private convictions, shaped a complex personality, whose political faith left an indelible mark on his contemporaries.

The trajectory of Derby’s political career traces a journey from the Whig milieu of early nineteenth-century Knowsley and his mentorship under Lord Lansdowne to Lord Grey’s Reform government of 1830–34, his migration to Peel’s Conservatives in 1836, and his eventual emergence as Conservative leader in 1846. That mid-Victorian Conservatives were led by a man whose political principles were formed in the Whig tradition is central to understanding Derby’s successes and limitations as party leader. His Whig education shaped the Conservative party’s aspirations between the apostasy of Peel in 1846 and the ascendancy of ‘Beaconsfieldism’ in the 1870s. After Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, Derby entered Parliament in 1822, as MP for the ‘pocket’ borough of Stockbridge, while undertaking the ‘Grand Tour’ on continental Europe and extensive travels around North America. Then, as a young Whig MP, during the 1820s, he supported Lansdowne in Lord Goderich’s coalition ministry, advocated the revision of the Corn Laws, voted for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts in 1828 and Catholic Emancipation in 1829. Grey appointed him, aged thirty-one, Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1830. In 1833 he took up the office of Colonial Secretary, having become a cabinet member in June 1831. This early success was recognition of Derby’s evident talents and impeccable aristocratic credentials. It was also a reflection of his political beliefs, as inherited from his Whig grandfather and father, and as formed by Lansdowne in his Whig salon at Bowood.

Derby’s youthful Whiggism grounded his political views. Though subsequently changing parties, he adhered to those convictions he had inherited from his family and Lansdowne. Indeed, it was the consistency of his beliefs, he insisted, that required his migration to the Conservatives, as Whigs such as Lord John Russell, he argued, became tainted by English and Irish radicalism during the 1830s. Derby understood progress as the defining attribute of the modern age. Moral, social and economic improvement distinguished Britain’s historical development. The role this prescribed for an enlightened aristocracy was ensuring that dynamic progress was combined with the preservation of civil order and legal liberties. Reform, constant judicious adjustment maintaining the stable equilibrium of society, should accommodate moral and material improvement; otherwise licence would lead to anarchy, or reactionary inflexibility incite revolution. Reconciling progress, stability and liberty, for the young Derby, defined responsible statesmanship. ‘His will be a glorious destiny’, he declared to a Glasgow University audience in December 1836, ‘who knows how to direct and turn into the proper channels the energies of the people, and to conduct with propriety, at this period, the government of this great nation; but if he shall imagine himself capable of stemming and abruptly resisting its force onwards, he will be swept along with the torrent’.3 The aristocracy’s highest calling was to govern in the interest of the nation as a whole. Ensuring the stability of a progressive and dynamic society, founded upon the rule of law and parliamentary liberties, was their particular responsibility; the violent bloodshed of the French Revolution demonstrating the fate of a privileged closed caste, heedless of its duties and obligations.

Derby saw the historic institutions of the nation, Parliament and the Established Church, as the essential foundations of civic order. Parliament constrained a potentially tyrannical Royal prerogative. It was in Westminster that those various ‘interests’ comprising the political nation were represented. It was from Parliament that government derived its authority. Westminster was sovereign. The sovereignty of Parliament also protected the judgement of the nation’s need from the clamour of demagogues and subversive agitation. It was in the deliberation of Westminster that genuine improvement was differentiated from reckless change. Avoiding a politically corrupting reliance on the prerogative and resisting dangerous popular agitation required politicians in Westminster to act as members of parties, formed upon shared ideals and mutual confidence. Parliamentary parties were both necessary and desirable, affirming Parliament’s status as the sovereign assembly of the nation. For Derby the support of party in Parliament was the only legitimate basis upon which politicians could hold office, enact legislation and command public respect. Throughout his life he remained hostile to popular extra-parliamentary movements seeking to dictate the deliberations of Westminster.

The historic Established Church, meanwhile, safeguarded those Anglican scriptural truths preserving the moral foundation of social order. Derby’s mother, before her premature death in 1817, had instructed him in the beliefs of moderate Anglican evangelicalism. From her he learnt of the social and moral duties accompanying wealth and privilege, and of the importance of personal faith in leading a Christian life. The memory of her sainted motherhood became, for Derby, a model of instruction in evangelical belief. His own writings on religion, Conversations on the Parables (1828) and The Miracles of Our Lord Explained (1839), reflected her moderate, though firm, Anglican convictions. Just as Parliament mediated the demands of change and the necessity for stable order, so the Church of England, he believed, represented a religious via media, avoiding the superstitions of Roman Catholicism and the puritanical pieties of nonconformity. In a society being transformed by progress, Parliament and the Anglican Church were the institutional bedrocks of political and moral stability.

Derby’s support for repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, Catholic Emancipation and parliamentary Reform, between 1828 and 1832, reflected his commitment to the responsible adjustment of political, religious and civic relations, in response to the advancement of intelligence, morality and wealth in society. In 1831 he introduced an education scheme for Ireland, proposing shared religious instruction for Protestant and Catholic children, so as to reduce sectarian tensions. In 1833 he abolished slavery in the British colonies; his first-hand experience of slavery in the United States having strengthened his deep moral repugnance for regarding the black population as a form of private property. Yet, at the same time, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, he staunchly defended the rule of law, in the face of Daniel O’Connell’s agitation against the tithe paid to the Church of Ireland, and in 1833 he introduced an Irish Coercion Act to restore order in areas disturbed by attacks on persons and property. In order to safeguard the Protestant Church of Ireland he drew up an Irish Church Temporalities bill in 1832, reforming the Church’s organisation and offices, so as to defuse mounting hostility to its Established status and property. So, under the hammer blows of rural violence and sectarian hostility, the anvil of Ireland hardened his commitment to the prescriptive rule of law and legally designated property rights. Responsible reform, he maintained, must stand on the authority of Parliament and obedience to its laws, the protection of the rights of property being fundamental to a civilised society. Only then could what he saw as the real ills of Ireland, the absence of a resident gentry, want of capital, shortage of employment and lack of adequate education, be addressed. Lack of respect for the rule of law, he concluded, rendered extensive reform in Ireland both dangerous and inappropriate. Unlike England, the necessary prior conditions for enlightened reform did not yet exist in Ireland.

Derby’s political beliefs were unremarkable in a young moderate Whig of the 1820s and 1830s. They reflected his Bowood apprenticeship and his wish to reconcile stable progress with the extension of political liberties. But his reluctance to introduce what he saw as premature reform in Ireland antagonised many of his Cabinet colleagues. His staunch commitment to the Established Churches of both England and Ireland came to mark out sharp differences with ministerial colleagues such as Lord John Russell. It was the status of the Established Church and its property, the appropriation of the Church of Ireland’s revenues for non-Anglican purposes, that became the flashpoint of government rupture in 1834, prompting Derby’s resignation from Grey’s Cabinet. Religious reform had precipitated the events of 1828–29 and it was religious differences that split Grey’s government in 1834. While Russell and other young Whig reformers looked to modify church-state relations, Derby favoured civil liberties for non-Anglicans, while preserving the Established status of the Anglican Church. His first major Commons speech, in 1824, had been an impassioned defence of the Church of Ireland’s property. It was this that drove him, accompanied by Sir James Graham, over to Peel’s Conservatives in 1836; his attempt to form a new centrist party (the ‘Derby Dilly’) during 1834–35 having failed. Defence of the Church Establishment defined Derby’s differences with more ‘advanced’ Whig reformers. Preserving the Established Church remained a cornerstone of his political beliefs throughout the remainder of his political career.

Derby became a Conservative with a public doctrine shaped by his Whig political education. His reading of Edmund Burke was fashioned into a Conservative philosophy. When Derby left the Commons and entered the House of Lords in July 1844 the Whig beliefs of his youth continued to determine his views of statesmanship and policy. Progress was a fundamental reality driving forward Britain’s moral, political and material advancement. The responsibility of aristocratic politicians, through the combining of judicious reform with the maintenance of social stability, was to pilot the nation on a steady course, as it was carried forward by the irresistible current of progress. Steering against the flow would capsize the nation into the turbulent waters of revolution. Allowing the nation to drift freely would carry it at increasing speed towards the dangerous rapids of democratic and demagogic turmoil. The sovereignty of Parliament and the authority of the Anglican Church were essential to maintaining the equilibrium of the nation. Party association in Parliament, particularly in the House of Commons, was the basis of government authority. It was parliamentary party support that placed ministers in office, not the prerogative or the electorate. Party association, in turn, imposed mutual obligations upon party leaders and their backbenchers. The loyalty of backbenchers gave their frontbench power and leaders owed due regard to the opinions of their supporters. When Peel pressed for the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 Derby strongly objected on two grounds. First, he was not persuaded that famine in Ireland either required or justified the complete abandonment of import tariffs; revision of the Corn Laws, not their total repeal, was a more appropriate course. Secondly and equally importantly, introducing Free Trade in corn breached the faith placed by Conservative backbenchers in Peel’s government. It was a violation of party trust. When Derby resigned from Peel’s Cabinet in December 1845, his parting words to his ministerial colleagues were that ‘they could not do this as gentlemen’.4

It was with reluctance that Derby became leader of the Protectionist Conservatives during the spring ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• Timeline
• Introduction: The View from Knowsley
• 1 Derby Redivivus: Reflections on the Political Achievement of the Fourteenth Earl of Derby
• 2 The Ultimate Test: The Fourteenth Earl, the Admiralty and the Ministry of 1852
• 3 The Fourteenth Earl and the ‘Political Chameleon’: Changing Views of Palmerston from Knowsley
• 4 The Struggle for Stability: The Fourteenth Earl and Europe, 1852–1868
• 5 ‘Only wants quiet riding’?: Disraeli, the Fifteenth Earl of Derby and the ‘War-in-Sight’ Crisis
• 6 Britain’s ‘most isolationist Foreign Secretary’: The Fifteenth Earl and the Eastern Crisis 1876–1878
• 7 Crossing the Floor: Mary Derby, the Fifteenth Earl and the Liberals, 1878–1882
• 8 Oiling the Entente: the Seventeenth Earl of Derby and the Paris Embassy, 1918–1920
• 9 Traditions of Conservative Foreign Policy
• Index