Abstract
The decade of party strife which began with a huge Whig majority in 1832 and ended in Conservative triumph in 1841 was marked by the development of a constitutional principle which was not entirely new, but which had never before operated with such force: the notion that a government was responsible to parliament for the legislative measures which it laid before it. The word ‘programme’ still lay in the future, but the Whigs’ difficulties in the 1830s stemmed in great part from, or manifested themselves as, the failure to devise and carry through parliament a range of public policies able to command the assent of parliament and meet the aspirations of a majority of the electorate. In the past a government had fallen (when it was not the victim of royal whim) from mismanagement, from a realignment of parliamentary ‘connexions’ or groups of ‘friends’, or from the destabilising effects of a crisis. It did not fall from the failure to satisfy a variety of interests and its fall was not preceded by a war of attrition in which its strength slowly dwindled at successive elections.
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References
Hansard, 3rd Series, lviii, 803–4.
Ibid., p. 881. In 1848, when a Whig government was again losing public esteem by its inability to carry certain pieces of legislation, Lord John Russell, the prime minister, defended his government in language similar to Macaulay’s. ‘There have been in the course of the last thirty years very great changes in the mode of conducting the business of the House…. When I first entered parliament it was not usual for government to undertake generally all subjects of legislation… since the passing of the Reform Bill it has been thought convenient, on every subject on which an alteration of the law is required, that the government should undertake the responsibility of proposing it to parliament.’ Later in the session he returned to the theme. ‘I must remind the… House that the supposed duty of the members of a government to introduce a great number of measures to parliament and to carry those measures through parliament in a session, is a duty which is new to the government of this country. Let me call the attention of the House to the fact that the Ministers of the Crown are chiefly appointed to administer the affairs of the Empire.’ (Quoted in H. Parris, Constitutional Bureaucracy. The Development of British Central Administration Since the Eighteenth Century (London, 1969) p. 168.)
N. Gash, ‘The Historical Significance of the Tamworth Manifesto’, in Pillars of Government, is so thorough and perceptive an analysis that it must be considered the last word on the subject.
The prevailing view among historians that the early factory acts (1833, 1844 and 1847) were never adequately enforced because the inspectors were thwarted in their prosecutions of delinquent mill-owners by the leniency of the courts has been effectively challenged by A. E. Peacock, ‘The Successful Prosecution of the Factory Acts, 1833–55’, Economic History Review, May 1984. He has shown that in nineteen of the twenty-one years under his review the conviction rate was above 80 per cent and in twelve of those years above 90 per cent.
On Brougham as a law reformer see R. Stewart, Henry Brougham, 1778–1868. His Public Career (London, 1968), pp. 233–38 and 277–85, and D. B. Swinfen, ‘Henry Brougham and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council’, Law Quarterly Review, July 1974.
G. M. Young, Victorian England. Portrait of an Age, Oxford, 1960 paperback edition, 44. Mr Young’s classic essay, first published in 1936, allusive and sometimes whimsical, remains the most beguiling watercolour treatment of the Victorian age. ‘For that matter, what is History about?’ he asked in the introduction to the 1953 edition. ‘And the conclusion I reached was that the real, central theme of History is not what happened, but what people felt about it when it was happening.’
E. Halévy, The Triumph of Reform (1830–1841) (London, 1961 edition), p. 130.
Times, 26 February 1836.
Hansard, 3rd Series, xxiii, 666.
J. Prest, Lord John Russell (London, 1972), p. 65.
See A. D. Kriegel, ‘The Politics of the Whigs in Opposition, 1834–1835’, Journal of British Studies, May 1968.
See I. D. C. Newbould, ‘Whiggery and the Dilemma of Reform: Liberals, Radicals and the Melbourne Administration, 1835–9’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, November 1980.
This was the accusation brought against the clergy by the Reform Association (Close, ‘Two-Party Alignment’, p. 267).
Peel to J. Croker, 12 November 1837. Croker Diaries, ii, pp. 320–21.
N. Gash, Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics, 1832–1852 (Oxford, 1965), 69n.
G. Kitson Clark, Peel and the Conservative Party (London, 1929), p. 409.
See M. A. G. O. Tuathaigh, ‘The Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Problems of Integration’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1981.
Times, 21 June 1837.
Young, Victorian England, p. 30.
Croker to Peel, 20 July 1841. C. S. Parker, Sir Robert Peel from his Private Papers (London, 1899), ii, p. 475.
N. Gash, ‘Wellington and Peel, 1832–1846’, in D. Southgate (ed.), The Conservative Leadership, 1832–1932 (London, 1974), pp. 46–47.
See the tables in Fraser, Urban Politics, 227, and Stewart, Conservative Party, 384–5; and, more generally, Stewart, pp. 151–65 and I. D. C. Newbould, ‘Sir Robert Peel and the Conservative Party, 1832–41: A Study in Failure?’, English Historical Review, July 1983.
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© 1989 Robert Stewart
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Stewart, R. (1989). The Whig Decade. In: Party and Politics, 1830–1852. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19653-1_4
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