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Parties and Issues in Early Victorian England1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2014

William O. Aydelotte
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Extract

It has never been established how far, in the early Victorian House of Commons, voting on issues followed party lines. It might in general seem plausible to assume — what political oratory generally contrives to suggest — that there are ideological disagreements between parties and that it makes a difference which of two major opposing parties is in control of the Government. This is, indeed, the line taken by some students of politics. A number of historians and political observers have, however, inclined to the contrary opinion and have, for various reasons, tended to play down the role of issues in party disputes. Much of what has been written on political history and, in particular, on the history of Parliament has had a distinct anti-ideological flavor.

One line of argument is that issues on which disagreement exists are not always party questions. Robert Trelford McKenzie begins his study of British parties by pointing out that Parliament just before 1830 was “divided on a great issue of principle, namely Catholic emancipation,” and just after 1830, on another, parliamentary reform. He continues: “But on neither issue was there a clear division along strict party lines.” The distinguished administration of Sir Robert Peel in the 1840s was based, according to Norman Gash, on a party “deeply divided both on policy and personalities.” The other side of the House at that time is usually thought to have been even more disunited. It has even been suggested that, in the confused politics of the mid-nineteenth century, the words conservative and radical each meant so many different things that they cannot be defined in terms of programs and objectives and that these polarities may more usefully be considered in terms of tempers and approaches.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 5 , Issue 2 , May 1966 , pp. 95 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 1966

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Footnotes

1

This paper deals more fully with a question that was first opened up for discussion in an earlier article: W. O. Aydelotte, “Voting Patterns in the British House of Commons in the 1840s,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, V (1963), 134-63. The reader is referred to this article for a fuller account of the technical research which is taken as the basis of the present discussion. The author is indebted to the editor of Comparative Studies in Society and History for permission to reprint some of the figures in Table II and to republish several phrases which had to be repeated.

References

2. The term “ideology” is used in this article only in the restricted sense of the set of objectives pursued by each party in the House of Commons, as revealed by the votes of party members in the division lists. No attempt will be made to describe a party “program” in the sense of an amalgam of the pledges and promises made by various candidates in the general election of 1841, which might, as Betty Kemp has pointed out, be a rather complicated affair. Kemp, Betty, “The General Election of 1841,” History, new series, XXXVII (1952), 146–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Still less will any attempt be made to describe, for either party, an “ideology” in the sense of a general rationale or theory of politics designed to govern political decisions or to justify them. These notes deal only with the causes each party supported or opposed in Parliament.

3. McKenzie, Robert Trelford, British Political Parties (New York, 1955), p. 1Google Scholar.

4. Gash, Norman, “Peel and the Party System, 1830-50,” Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., fifth series, I (1951), 62Google Scholar.

5. Webb, Robert K., Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian (London, 1960), p. 363Google Scholar.

6. Balfour, A. J., Introduction, in Bagehot, Walter, The English Constitution (London, 1928), p. xxivGoogle Scholar.

7. Laski, Harold J., Parliamentary Government in England (New York, 1938), pp. 64, 69-73, 83, 86Google Scholar.

8. McKenzie, Robert Trelford, “Laski and the Social Bases of the Constitution,” British Journal of Sociology, III (1952), 260–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. SirJennings, Ivor, Party Politics, II, The Growth of Parties (Cambridge, 1961), 332Google Scholar; III, The Stuff of Politics (Cambridge, 1962), 466Google Scholar.

10. Hofstadter, Richard, The American Political Tradition (new ed.; New York, 1954), p. xGoogle Scholar.

11. Higham, John, “The Cult of the ‘American Consensus’: Homogenizing Our History,” Commentary, XXVII (1959), 94, 95, 99Google Scholar.

12. Woodward, C. Vann, “Our Past Isn't What It Used To Be,” New York Times Book Review, July 28, 1963Google Scholar. It should be added that not all students of American politics subscribe to these views. Higham, in the article referred to in note 11, expresses reservations about the “massive grading operation” which he describes. Seymour Martin Lipset, though keenly aware of the circumstances that work for political consensus, nevertheless holds that parties do on the whole represent the interests of different classes, as can be shown from an analysis of their appeals and their support. Lipset, Seymour M., Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics (Garden City, N. Y., 1960), pp. 220-23, 290-94, 306–09Google Scholar. David B. Truman writes, in regard to the American Congress: “Ample evidence already exists to support the proposition that, at least in the act of voting, the party label is consistently the most reliable predictor of a legislator's actions.” Truman, David B., The Congressional Party: A Case Study (New York, 1959), pp. vi–viiGoogle Scholar. Some other studies which express reservations about an undue emphasis on consensus in American politics are: Parsons, Talcott, “‘Voting’ and the Equilibrium of the American Political System,” in American Voting Behavior, ed. Burdick, Eugene and Brodbeck, Arthur J. (Glencoe, Ill., 1959), pp. 80–120Google Scholar; McClosky, Herbert, Hoffman, Paul J., and O'Hara, Rosemary, “Issue Conflict and Consensus Among Party Leaders and Followers,” American Political Science Review, LIV (1960), 406–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Prothro, J. W. and Grigg, Charles M., “Fundamental Principles of Democracy: Bases of Agreement and Disagreement,” Journal of Politics, XXII (1960), 276–94CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. Trollope, Anthony, Phineas Redux (London, 1873)Google Scholar, ch. xxxiii.

14. Bagehot, , The English Constitution, pp. 126–28Google Scholar.

15. Gladstone, William Ewart, “The Declining Efficiency of Parliament,” Quarterly Review, XCIX (1856), 529–30Google Scholar.

16. Greville, Charles C. F., The Greville Memoirs (Second Part): A Journal of the Reign of Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1852 (London, 1885), II, 291Google Scholar.

17. Aspinall, Arthur (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth-Century Diaries (London, 1952), p. xxviGoogle Scholar.

18. Lowell, A. Lawrence, The Government of England (new ed.; New York, 1924), I, 452Google Scholar.

19. Key, V. O. Jr., Politics, Parties and Pressure Groups (4th ed.; New York, 1958), p. 244Google Scholar.

20. Foord, Archibald S., His Majesty's Opposition, 1714-1830 (Oxford, 1964), p. 8Google Scholar.

21. Brogan, D. W., Foreword, in Duverger, Maurice, Political Parlies: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State, tr. North, Barbara and North, Robert (London, 1954), pp. v, viiiGoogle Scholar. For a different version of de Jouvenel's epigram, see ibid., pp. 201-02.

22. Namier, Lewis B., England in the Age of the American Revolution (London, 1930), p. 207Google Scholar.

23. Lowell, , The Government of England, I, 452.Google Scholar

24. “As a first step toward the introduction of concreteness into the idea of consensus, let us turn our back on the ethereal notion of ‘basic’ or ‘fundamental’ consensus and examine opinions on specific issues.” Key, V. O. Jr., Public Opinion and American Democracy (New York, 1961), p. 28Google Scholar.

25. Gash, , “Peel and the Party System,” Trans. Roy. Hist. Soc., fifth series, I, 57–58Google Scholar.

26. Ibid., I, 62-63.

27. Namier, Lewis B., Monarchy and the Party System [The Romanes Lecture] (Oxford, 1952), p. 26Google Scholar.

28. Beales, Derek, review of Jennings, Ivor Sir, Party Politics, in Historical Journal, V (1962), 194.Google Scholar

29. Pares, Richard in King George III and the Politicians (Oxford, 1953), p. 192Google Scholar, states: “between 1807 and 1841, the man without a party label almost disappeared from the House of Commons.” For the Parliament of 1841 this statement is confirmed by the present investigation.

30. This includes a man who died before Parliament met, another who succeeded to a peerage before Parliament met, and a third who was elected later to fill one of the two seats which Daniel O'Connell secured in the general election. This disposition follows the principles Namier laid down in England in the Age of the American Revolution, pp. 248-49.

31. For examples of the first usage, see Times, July 2, 3, 5, and 6, 1841; for examples of the second, see Times, July 15, 16, 17, and 19, 1841.

32. “To use the term ‘Whig’ simply to denote political opinions is to forfeit half the flavour and force of the word.” Southgate, Donald, The Passing of the Whigs, 1832-1886 (London, 1962), p. 76Google Scholar.

33. A good account of the method can be found in the articles contributed by Guttman, Louis to Measurement and Prediction, ed. Stouffer, Samuel A., et al. (Princeton, 1950)Google Scholar, which is the fourth volume of Studies in Social Psychology in World War II. However, much more has been written on this subject, by Guttman and others, since this volume appeared, and the literature on scalogram analysis is now considerable.

34. For a more extended discussion of this point, see Aydelotte, , “Voting Patterns,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, V, 151Google Scholar.

35. The eighteen items in Table III were selected merely for illustration. It should not be inferred that the numbers of divisions in each of the three groups here described were the same. Actually, of the 111 divisions examined, 80 proved to fit this scale, though not all were wholly regular. Of the 80, 37 items divided the Liberals, 20 were straight party votes, and 23 divided the Conservatives. Even these figures, however, should not be taken to indicate the general incidence of intraparty cleavages: the divisions studied were selected simply because of their interest for various purposes, and no formal sampling procedure was employed. Nevertheless, this finding — that only one fourth of the items in this scale were straight party votes, while other items not in the scale were not party votes at all — fits quite well with the results obtained by A. Lawrence Lowell in his important study, over half a century ago, of party cohesion in the House of Commons in the period 1836-99. Lowell computed, for several dates about a decade apart, the proportion of divisions that were straight party votes in the sense that the two parties voted on opposite sides, each with a dissidence of less than 10 per cent. He gave no figures for the 1840s, but he found the proportion of straight party votes to be 23 per cent in 1836 and 16 per cent in 1850. By contrast, party cohesion was, according to his figures, much greater and rapidly increasing in the last three decades of the century, after the Reform Act of 1867. Lowell, A. Lawrence, “The Influence of Party Upon Legislation in England and America,” Annual Report of the American Historical Association jor the Year 1901 (Washington, 1902), I, 321–542Google Scholar. The present investigation is, of course, addressed to a different question from that considered by Lowell: it attempts to show that, even in a situation where straight party voting was infrequent, parties could still be related to attitudes on issues in a different and more complex way.

36. Halévy notes a similar difficulty in distinguishing in terms of votes between the groups on the Left in 1835. His text does not, however, make it clear how thorough or extensive his analysis was. Élie Halévy, A History of the English People in the Nineteenth Century, tr. Watkin, E. I. (New York, 1951), III, 180Google Scholar, note 1.

37. Clark, G. Kitson, “The Repeal of the Corn Laws and the Politics of the Forties,” Econ. Hist. Rev., second series, IV (1951), 7–8Google Scholar.

38. Gash, Norman, Politics in the Age of Peel: A Study in the Technique of Parliamentary Representation, 1830-1850 (London, 1953), pp. 3–11Google Scholar.