The Liberal Ascendancy,

Transcription

1 The Liberal Ascendancy,

2 British Studies Series General Editor: JEREMY BlACK Published T. A.Jenkins The Liberal Ascentfanq, 183o-1886 ForthcoiDing C. J. Bartlett Glenn Burgess John Charmley W. H. Fraser Brian Hill J.P. Kenyon David Loades Diarmaid MacCulloch Allan Macinnes Alexander Murdoch W. Rubinstein Andrew Thorpe High Politics and Grand Str~: Britain and the World since 1945 British Political 17wught from 14formation to Revolution British Conservatism in the Twentieth Century The JOse and Fall of British Trade Unionism British Parties since 1688 Britain, Power in Sixteenth-Century Britain The Rgormation in Britmn, 148o-1680 The British Revolution British History, 166o-1832 History of Britain in the Twentieth Century A History of the lahour P~

3 The Liberal Ascendancy, T. A. Jenkins M MACMILLAN

4 T. A. Jenkins 1994 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written pennission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence pennitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WlP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. Fust published 1994 by 'IHE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN (ebook) DOI /

5 Contents list of T ahks V1l Acknowledgements viii Introduction ix I. The Spirit of Refonn Introduction 1 Whigs 2 Radicals 9 Nonconformists 14 Irish Repealers 20 The Crises of The Second Melbourne Administration, A Liberal Party? The Slow Birth of Liberal England Introduction 44 The Genesis of Victorian Liberalism 45 LordJohn Russell's Leadership 50 Liberal Diversity in the 1840s 58 Cobden and Radicalism 63 The Decline of Russell's Ministry 67 The Future of Whiggery? Lord Palrnerston and Mid-Victorian Liberalism Introduction 76 The Domestic Uses of Palmerstonian Foreign Policy 78 The Formation of the Liberal Party? 84 The Second Palmerston Administration, Conclusion The Rise and Fall of Gladstonian Liberalism. Gladstone and Liberalism 110 Gladstone and the Liberal Mind 116 The Second Reform Crisis 120

6 vi Contents The Liberal Party in Liberal Reforms, The Political Costs of Liberal Reform 132 Parliamentary Decline 138 The General Election of Gladstone's First Retirement Whigs, Radicals and Gladstonians The Whig Duumvirate 151 The Liberal Party and the Eastern Question 143 The Whig Leaders and the Liberal Party 157 The Liberal Revival, Gladstone's Second Ministry and the Empire 169 Gladstone's Second Ministry and Ireland 172 Gladstone and Liberal Unity 177 Joseph Chamberlain and the 'Radical Programme' 183 The 'Radical Programme' and the General Election of The Outcome The Crisis of Late-Victorian LiberaliSIIl Conclusion Bibliography Index Introduction Changing Social and Electoral Patterns Intellectual Challenges Gladstone and Irish Home Rule The Liberal Schism of 1886 Consequences of the Liberal Schism Gladstone's Legacy The Liberal Predicament

7 List of Tables 1 Distribution of Liberal Seats, Social Background of Liberal MPs, The Liberal Victory in Social Background of Liberal MPs, The 1874 General Election in the British Boroughs Social Background of Liberal MPs, Social Background of Liberal MPs, Election Results in the English Counties, Social Background of Liberal Unionist MPs, British General Election Results, 1885 and V1l

8 Acknowledgements The Universities of Exeter and East Anglia have provided me with pleasant, temporary berths, which have gready facilitated the writing of this book, and both have been generous with financial assistance to cover research expenses. I would especially like to thank Bruce Coleman, whose support helped to get this project off the ground, Geoffrey Searle, who has bravely read the whole book in draft, and Brian Hill, who provided helpful comments on the early chapters. Colin Davis, though not a nineteenth-century scholar, has done more than a litde to aid the completion of this book by kindly lending me his word-processor. I am also grateful to my students, at Cambridge, Exeter and East Anglia, for giving me numerous opportunities to try out and refine my ideas: if this book proves to be of use to other students, it will be in large part thanks to them. The author and publishers wish to thank the following for permission to use copyright material: The British Library for material sourced to their collections; Lord Clarendon for the extracts from the Clarendon MSS deposited in the Bodleian Library; the Earl of Derby for the extract from the Derby MSS deposited in the Liverpool Record Office; Devon Record Office, on behalf of Lady Margaret Fortescue, for the extract from the Fortescue MSS; the Clerk of the Records, House of Lords, for the extracts from the Brand Papers; Maurice A. T. Rogers for the extracts from the Rogers MSS deposited in the Bodleian Library; the Royal Historical Society for the extracts from 7he Parlimnentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny, , ed. T. A. Jenkins; the University of Birmingham Library for the extracts from the Chamberlain MSS; the University of Southampton Library, on behalf of the Trustees of the Broadlands Archives, for the extracts from the Broadlands MSS. Every effort has been made to trace all the copyright-holders but if any have been inadvertendy overlooked the publishers will be pleased to make the necessary arrangement at the first opportunity. Vlll

9 Introduction Little explanation is required for attempting to provide an up-to-date account of the history of the 'Liberal Party' in its heyday between 1830 and During this time, 'Liberal' governments were in power for a total of thirty-nine years, more than two-thirds of the whole period, and such was the electoral dominance of the Liberals that there were only two occasions - in 1841 and when their Conservative opponents succeeded in gaining an overall parliamentary majority. The Liberals, of course, were tk party of the left-centre, and it was not until the early decades of the twentieth century that their position came to be challenged by the newly created Labour Party. This latter subject, however, has been the one to which the most attention has been devoted by historians since the 1960s: the question of whether the decline of the Liberals and the rise of Labour was inevitable, or else whether it was the result of accidental circumstances, has provoked a strongly contested debate made all the livelier by its obvious implications for our perception of political developments during the 1970s and 1980s. By contrast, the period in which the Liberals enjoyed a more or less unchallenged position as one of the two main parties of State has been comparatively neglected, perhaps because of its lack of modem resonance. In the last decade or so, however, the situation has begun to be remedied with the appearance of a number of important monographs, many of them obviously highly specialised. If it remains surprising that no general survey of the Liberal ascendancy has previously been written, it can at least be said that the project now seems feasible in a way that would not have been true even a few years ago. Another reason why the Liberal party in the nineteenth century has always been such a forbidding subject for undergraduates is that what was known about the Liberals showed them to be patendy a diverse, and often highly fissile, coalition of interests. An air of confusion and uncertainty all too easily enveloped the subject, in consequence. For example, there is still no agreement amongst historians as to precisely when the 'Liberal Party', as such, actually came into existence, and dates as widely separated as 1835, 1846, 1859 and 1868 all have their ix

10 X Introduction advocates. (It will already have been noticed that I sometimes find it necessary to refer collectively to the 'Liberals', or the 'Liberal Party', in recognition of the fact that these terms were not universally used by contemporaries throughout the period covered by this book - but one must call them something.) Similarly, there continues to be a great deal of controversy over such a fundamental question as the causes of the great Liberal schism of 1886, which marked the end of the party's long period of political and electoral hegemony. The inspiration behind this book lies not in a desire to assert that matters are really simpler than previous scholars have made out, but in the belief that it should be possible to unravel the tangled threads of Victorian Liberalism and weave them into a fairly discernible pattern. The approach adopted in this book, therefore, is to identify the various components of the coalition which came together under the umbrella issue of parliamentary reform, in the early 1830s, and to consider their respective ideologies, what they represented in the constituencies, and how they interrelated. It will then be possible to trace the shifts that took place, over time, in the complex equation involving the various groups which have been defined - none of which was entirely homogeneous, as will become clear - and to see how these changes were reflected in the development of Liberal ideology. Central to the whole process will be the assessments of the roles of leaders such as Russell, Palmerston and Gladstone, which will look at the ways in which they related - and sometimes did not relate - to the different elements of the Liberal coalition. While there is no escaping the real difficulties in comprehending the nature of the nineteenth-century Liberal Party, the effort required can bring its full rewards. The Liberals, after all, succeeded to an extraordinary extent in combining traditional social groups with newer, highly dynamic ones - whether they be Whigs and radicals, landed and industrial interests, or church and chapel - to create a potentially formidable political force. It therefore seems reasonable to argue that, in spite of the problems they frequendy encountered, the Liberals operated as a more effective broad coalition of the 'left centre', at least until the 1880s, than the Labour Party has managed to be since the 1920s. For this reason alone, the era of the Liberal ascendancy would seem likely to repay a careful study. There are two aspects of this book which require a little explanation. First, particular emphasis is placed on the survival of the Whig tradition of aristocratic leadership, a theme that has recendy been explored by a

11 Introduction xi number of scholars working in different areas of nineteenth-century politics. The result is an account which places the Whigs at the centre of Liberal politics, rather than merely charting their supposedly inevitable decline in the face of Cobdenite/Chamberlainite radicalism and 'Gladstonian liberalism'. Secondly, although some space will be devoted to the intellectual influences on Liberal politicians, it should be noted that this book concentrates on the role of 'ideas' in shaping practical politics and political argument, instead of focusing on the abstract theories of intellectuals. Consideration will thus be given, for instance, to the ways in which the Whigs' conception of their own political function was shaped by the writings of Russell and Macaulay, the influence of Bentham's ideas on radical politics during the 1830s, the importance of the ideology of Free Trade in helping to create a new 'liberal' identity in the 1840s and 1850s, the significance of concerns about 'democracy' as an influence on Liberal politics from the 1860s onwards, and the way that the question of 'imperialism' contributed to the break-up of the Liberal Party in the 1880s. What will emerge from this history of the Liberal Party is a picture that is undoubtedly complex, but, hopefully, one that students will find fascinating at the same time. This is one way of saying that what makes the subject so interesting, to my own mind, is the fact that the liberals' political ascendancy, striking as it may seem in retrospect, was rarely an easy and straightforward process, free of perils; and certainly not one that contemporaries would have regarded as inevitable.