Earl Fitzwilliam and the Corn Laws

Abstract

THE city in arms against a countryside tenaciously opposed to reform, farmer and squire resolutely allied and equally devoted to the cause of high prices and high rents, such in broad outline, until quite recently, has been the conventional account of the agitation against the Corn Laws in Victorian England. There has been more than a little of Manchester philosophy in the telling of the story, and this may account for a somewhat deceptive neatness that only a touch of myth can bring to the rough edges of historical reality. Seen from another point of view, from the land and its politics instead of from the city, historians in the past several years have shown how profitable it is to look at this old subject in a new way. I have in mind the work of Mr. Mosse on the Anti-League and, especially, the illuminating essays by Mr. Kitson Clark: Electorate and the Repeal of the Corn and Repeal of the Corn Laws and the Politics of the Forties. 1 In these Mr. Kitson Clark has provided students of nineteenthcentury England with a map of a difficult terrain that henceforth they will all have to use. My own aim is by comparison a most humble one: merely to draw in a few contour lines, perhaps a trifle more distinctly. I hope to do this by exploring the mind and career and landed possessions of a great Whig magnate who saw fit to devote a good part of his life to attacking the Corn Laws. He was Charles William Wentworth Fitzwilliam, fifth Earl Fitzwilliam, whose life spanned the years 1786 to I857. He sat in the House of Commons as Lord Milton from i8o6 to I833, Whig member for the county of Yorkshire for most of that time, and a critic of agricultural protection for the last eight years of it. In I833 he succeeded to vast landed estates, but persisted in denouncing the Corn Laws, despite the more hostile atmosphere of the House of Lords. The ideas and activities of this landed aristocrat should furnish some insight into the workings of the aristocratic mind, especially the Whig aristocratic mind, on the central issue of the Corn Laws.