The Conservative Split in the Scottish Counties, 1846–1857

Abstract

A great split in a party on a vital issue is, in the opinion of the prominent historian of the Conservative party, Robert Blake, usually very difficult to heal with any degree of sincerity. This insight lends plausibility to the widely held belief that those who remained loyal to Sir Robert Peel when the Conservative party split in 1846 had mostly taken what turned out to be an irrevocable step.1 The courses followed by the leading members of this group of Peelites, as they came to be known, seem to show this very clearly. It has been pointed out that none of the fifteen Peelite members of Lord Aberdeen's administration ever again joined a Conservative gov ernment.2 What began over the repeal of the Corn Laws ended in Willis's Rooms in 1859 with the formation of a united front against Lord Derby's Conservative Government, an event which saw 'the final absorption into the Liberal Party of the remnant which continued to support Peel'.3 The same line has been advanced to explain political realignments in Scotland at this time. The supporters of Peel in Scotland, it is argued, either eventually became Liberals, or left active politics, and the net result was overall Conservative retreat.4 McCalmont gives a total of twenty-two Conservatives elected at the 1841 general election, twenty of them in the counties. By 1857 this had fallen to ten Conservatives, all of them county members, and six Liberal-Conservatives, likewise all sitting for county seats. This was a dramatic decline if the Liberal-Conservatives, or their seats, were indeed on their way to becoming Liberal.5 There is, however, room to doubt whether this interpretation captures fully what was happening on the ground in Scottish constituencies or whether it even offers an accurate account of what happened amongst leading Scottish Conservatives. W. E. Gladstone, writing at a later period, recalled that his contemporaries in the 1850s had moved in two directions, either