Abstract
The Liberal Party came into existence in the nineteenth century because the country’s political system so obviously lagged behind its industrial development. True, following the Municipal Reform Act of 1835, rival middle-class groups vied for control in the major urban centres, but in the counties local government remained largely in the hands of the landed interest. At national level the predominance of the aristocracy was equally apparent. It had become customary to entrust offices like the Presidency of the Board of Trade to men of commercial backgrounds and experience, but the prestigious Secretaryships of State were, almost invariably, given to members of one of the great aristocratic families. In Parliament, too, the landed interest was predominant. The House of Lords could almost be seen as its institutional embodiment; only after 1885 did middle-class men become ennobled in any significant numbers and it would take decades before this significantly affected the composition of the Chamber as a whole. As for the Commons, here landowners and their dependents never comprised less than one half of the membership of the House. A traditional ‘ruling class’, it seemed, controlled political life, an elite all the stronger in that it was connected with other bastions of state power, like the diplomatic service, the court, the armed services, and the Church of England.1
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Notes
For a vivid, if exaggerated, view of the power and prestige of the landed aristocracy before 1880, see Cannadine, D., The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy (New Haven, 1990).
Inglis, K. S., ‘Patterns of Religious Worship in 1851’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 11 (1960), esp. pp. 82–6;
see also Pickering, W. S. F., ‘The 1851 religious census — A useless experiment’, British Journal of Sociology, 18 (1967), pp. 403–5.
In any case, the removal of Nonconformist disabilities did not immediately obliterate them as political issues. Alfred Illingworth, the Bradford millowner, a Congregationalist who later became a Liberal MP, singled out the requisitioning of his father’s goods in 1866 (for non-payment of church rates) as the most important factor in determining his own political career (Jowitt, T., ‘Patterns of Religion in Victorian Bradford’, in Wright, D. G. and Jowitt, J. A., Victorian Bradford [London, 1981], p. 42).
Barker, M., Gladstone and Radicalism: The Reconstruction of Liberal Policy in Britain 1885–1894 (Hassocks, 1975), p. 39.
Taylor, A. J. P., The Trouble Makers: Dissent over Foreign Policy 1792–1939 (London, 1957).
Cobden to F. Cobden, 11 Sep. 1838, in Morley, J., The Life of Richard Cobden (London, 1881; 1896 ed.), Vol. I, p. 130.
Hurst, M., ‘Liberal Versus Liberal: The General Election of 1874 in Bradford and Sheffield’, Historical Journal, 15 (1972), p. 669. Among the early defectors from within the northern business community were H. W. Ripley of Bradford and Edward Akroyd of Halifax. The latter had always been an Anglican; the former left the Congregational Chapel in which he had been brought up for the Church of England.
Howe, A., The Cotton Masters 1830–1860 (Oxford, 1984), esp. Chapter 7.
On Whiggery’s capacity to survive and adapt, see Jenkins, T. A., Gladstone, Whiggery and the Liberal Party 1874–1886 (Oxford, 1988).
An older, but still very valuable, study of the subject is Southgate, D., The Passing of the Whigs 1832–1886 (London, 1962).
A Cornish squire, Sir John Trelawny, was the parliamentary leader of the agitation against church rates, but he baulked at Disestablishment. See Jenkins, T. A. (ed.), The Parliamentary Diaries of Sir John Trelawny 1858–1865 (London, 1990).
John Vincent, Pollbooks: How Victorians Voted (Cambridge, 1967), passim.
Lubenow, W. C., Parliamentary Politics and the Home Rule Crisis: The British House of Commons in 1886 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 178–82.
Bagehot, W., The English Constitution (London, 1867; Fontana ed., 1963), p. 175.
Perkin, H., The Origins of Modern English Society 1780–1880 (London, 1969; 1972 edn), p. 380.
Unfortunately, neither of the two outstanding recent studies of Gladstone cover the entire span of his career. See Shannon, Richard, Gladstone, Volume 1 1809–1865 (London, 1982);
Matthew, H. C. G., Gladstone, 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986).
Barker, Gladstone and Radicalism, pp. 250–1. Steele, E. D., ‘Gladstone and Ireland’, Irish Historical Studies, 17 (1970–1), pp.58–88.
Hunter, J., ‘The Politics of Highland Land Reform, 1873–1895’, Scottish Historical Review, 53 (1974), pp. 45–68.
Hamer, D. A. (ed.), The Radical Programme, with a Preface by J. Chamberlain, 1885 (Hassocks, 1971).
The most famous work in the genre was Andrew Mearns’ The Bitter Cry of Outcast London of 1883.
See Jones, G. S., Outcast London (Oxford, 1971).
Armytage, W. H. G., A. J. Mundella 1825–1897: The Liberal Background to the Labour Movement (London, 1951).
Spinner, T. J., George Joachim Goschen: The Transformation of a Victorian Liberal (Cambridge, 1973). There were many other ‘conservative’ businessmen who by the 1880s were beginning to lose confidence in Gladstone and the Liberal Party, like Nathan de Rothschild, Liberal MP for Aylesbury. On the political perspectives of the ‘railway interest’, see Chapter 4.
Roach, J., ‘Liberalism and the Victorian Intelligentsia’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 13 (1957), pp. 58–81;
Harvie, C., The Lights of Liberalism: University Liberals and the Challenge of Democracy, 1860–86 (London, 1976);
Dunne, T., ‘La trahison des clercs: British intellectuals and the first home-rule crisis’, Irish Historical Studies, 23 (1982–3), pp. 134–73.
Perkin, H. J., ‘Land Reform and Class Conflict in Victorian Britain’, in Butt, J. and Clarke, I. F. (eds), The Victorians and Social Protest (Newton Abbot, 1973), pp. 177–217.
There are numerous accounts of the Irish Crisis and the party realignment. A good starting point might be Hamer, D. A., Liberal Politics in the Age of Gladstone and Rosebery (Oxford, 1972), Chs. 5–6. Aspects of the subject are examined in greater length in the following two chapters.
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© 1992 G. R. Searle
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Searle, G.R. (1992). The Rise of the Liberal Party. In: The Liberal Party. British History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22165-3_2
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