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The Religious Issue in Mid-Victorian Politics: A Note on a Neglected Source

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Walter L. Arnstein
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Extract

Students of British history continue to experience a certain haziness as to what precisely differentiated the Liberals and Conservatives of the mid-Victorian era, a haziness by no means allayed by the plethora of recent publications on the social and organizational structure of the nineteenth-century political party system. In 1832 political reform had constituted an apparently decisive issue—at least Grey and Russell had strongly favored it and Peel and Wellington had forthrightly opposed it. In the mid-1840s the Corn Laws had supplied a comparable cause for division. The Whigs and Radicals had provided Peel with his majority, and two-thirds of the Tories had disavowed their leader and resisted the abolition of the Corn Laws to the last.

Yet neither of these issues would seem to provide a key to the party rivalry of the 1860s. The manner in which Disraeli played the role of political magician in 1867 and pulled the Reform Act of that year out of his hat provides prima facie evidence that political reform as such was not then fundamental to inter-party rivalry. Nor was agricultural protection, the plank that Derby and Disraeli had quietly removed from their party platform a decade-and-a-half earlier. The cause of Italian unification, which had briefly divided parties in 1859 and had spurred Gladstone to cast his political lot once and for all with Palmerston and Russell, had become a fact and was no longer an issue.

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 6 , Issue 2 , Summer 1974 , pp. 134 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1974

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References

1 Thomas William Heyck provides an excellent bibliographical survey in “New Sources and Methods in the Study of the Nineteenth Century Parliament,” Albion, IV (Summer, 1972): 67–81Google Scholar. Ransome, Mary, “Some Recent Studies in the Composition of the House of Commons,” University of Birmingham Historical Journal, VI (1957–1958): 132–148Google Scholar, is now somewhat out-of-date.

2 Magnus, Philip, Gladstone: A Biography (London, 1954), pp. 139–140.Google Scholar

3 Cited by Cecil, Lady Gwendolyn, Life of Robert Marquis of Salisbury (London, 1921–1932), I: 98.Google Scholar

4 Quite obviously there are other sources of information about M.P.s in the 1860s in addition to Dod. Only a concentration upon a particular source, however, can make meaningful the comparative statistics that follow. The study from which the results that follow were drawn was made possible by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies and the assistance of my wife.

5 This is the practice of the current editors, and they know of no evidence that their Victorian predecessors followed a different practice.

6 (Cardiff, Wales, 1939).

7 No M.P.s identified themselves as members of a distinct Irish Party in 1865, and not long thereafter “in their alliance with the English and Scottish dissenters the Irish Catholics had formed one of the sectional alliances whose fusion, though temporary, constituted the Gladstonian Liberal Party in 1868.” Norman, E. R., The Catholic Church and Ireland in the Age of Rebellion, 1859-1873 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1965), p. 409.Google Scholar

8 “Of these men, some had really become Liberals and some Conservatives; but the task of classifying them is rendered less difficult by the curious psychological fact that most of them, though disliking to call themselves by a party name, were unusually constant in going into the lobby with the party whip.” Lowell, A. Lawrence, “The Influence of Party Upon Legislation in England and America,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1901, I: 326.Google Scholar

9 Smith, F. B., The Making of the Second Reform Bill (Cambridge, 1966), p. 236.Google Scholar

10 All statistics not otherwise attributed are my own and are compiled from a counting of heads in Dod's, Parliamentary Companions for 1865 and 1869.Google Scholar

11 Thus in 1865, 19% of the Liberals and 12% of the Conservatives alluded to their careers as barristers or solicitors, 9% of the Liberals and 22% of the Conservatives had served as army officers, and 18% of the Liberals and 8% of the Conservatives described themselves as merchants, bankers, or manufacturers.

12 Dod's, Parliamentary Companion, 1865 ed., p. 138Google Scholar; 1869 ed., p. 164.

13 For details see Annual Register for 1864, pp. 90–102.Google Scholar

14 Dod's, Parliamentary Companion, 1865 ed., p. 311.Google Scholar

15 Ibid., p. 158.

16 A content analysis of a complete compilation of extant election addresses would necessarily provide a far more comprehensive set of statistics, but no such compilation exists and no such analysis has been made.

17 See, e.g. Bodelsen, C. A. G., Studies in Mid-Victorian Imperialism (London, 1924)Google Scholar and Piatt, D. C. M., “The Imperialism of Free Trade: Some Reservations,” Economic History-Review, 2nd ser. XXI (1968): 296–306Google Scholar, and “Further Objections to an ‘Imperialism of Free Trade,’ 1830-60,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser. XXVI (1973): 77–91.Google Scholar

18 This generalization supports Blake's, Robert observation in Disraeli (London, 1966), p. 503Google Scholar that: “The 1860's was a decade in which religion played a predominant part in politics. This is indeed true of much of nineteenth century history, although the fact is only now beginning to be noticed by historians.” In his Reaction and Reconstruction in English Politics, 1832-1852 (Oxford, 1965)Google Scholar, Norman Gash reminds us of “the contemporary domination of religious issues in English political life” during the 1830s. He goes on to suggest that the general election of 1847 was fought on religious issues to the extent that it was fought on any issues at all (pp. 70, 98). Gladstone's comment to Granville in 1877 is equally pertinent “You can master them [the Liberal Party] for votes on religious liberalism (so to call it) and for little else.” Ramm, Agatha, ed., The Political Correspondence of Mr. Gladstone and Lord Granville, 1876-1886 (Oxford, 1962), I: 40Google Scholar. Hugh Berrington concludes that “the unity of British parlies was forged, not in the furnace of class war. but in the heal of ihe age-old struggles of nationality and religion.” “Partisanship and Dissidence in the Nineteenth-Century House of Commons.” Parliamentary Affairs, XXI no. 4 (August, 1968): 369.Google Scholar