Home Rule Crisis Research Articles

Gladstone, Whiggery, and the Liberal Party, 1874-1886

This reassessment of the role of the aristocratic Whigs in the Liberal Party of the 1870s and 1880s studies the largely neglected Whig leadership of Granville and Hartington (1875-80), the leadership crisis of 1879-80, and the strategies of both front and back bench Whigs following Gladstone's return to power in 1880. Traditionally the Whigs have been dismissed as a recalcitrant and increasingly marginal element in an age characterized by `Gladstonian' Liberalism. Dr Jenkin's aim is to restore `Whiggery' to a position of significance in Liberal politics and, in the process, to re-examine Gladstone's leadership and the role played by Radicals such as Joseph Chamberlain in the years leading up to the Home Rule crisis of 1886. In asserting the central importance of the Irish Question to the split in the Liberal Party, the book rejects previous interpretations of the schism as merely the result of class divisions, or the result of cynical manoeuvring for personal advantage by ambitious politicians. The book is based on the author's thesis, which has been awarded the University of Cambridge's Prince Consort Prize for 1988.

United Irishmen and Unionists: Irish Presbyterians, 1791 and 1886

When Gladstone decided, some time in 1885, that the only way to achieve ‘social order’ in Ireland was to concede Home Rule, he was disappointed to find that among his most implacable and vociferous opponents were the Irish Presbyterians. In vain he was to remind them that their ancestors had been United Irishmen in the 1790s, the founding fathers of Irish republicanism. His appeal to them to ‘retain and maintain the tradition of their sires’ fell on deaf ears.It seemed to Gladstone as it has seemed to Irish nationalists and to some historians that the Irish Presbyterians had turned their political coats, that the grandsons of the United Irishmen had repudiated the principles of their grandfathers. Lecky, in his monumentalHistory of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century, writing in the context of the Home Rule crisis, expressed his magisterial opinion that ‘the defection of the Presbyterians from the movement of which they were the main originators, and the great and enduring change which took place in their sentiments… are facts of the deepest importance in Irish history and deserve very careful and detailed examination’.

Parliamentary politics and the home rule crisis: the British House of Commons in 1886

Parliamentary politics and the home rule crisis: the British House of Commons in 1886

Reviews and Short Notices

Reviews and Short Notices

FACTION IN THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY AND THE HOME RULE CRISIS, 1912–14

HistoryVolume 71, Issue 232 p. 222-234 FACTION IN THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY AND THE HOME RULE CRISIS, 1912–14 RICHARD MURPHY, RICHARD MURPHYSearch for more papers by this author RICHARD MURPHY, RICHARD MURPHYSearch for more papers by this author First published: October 1986 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-229X.1986.tb01444.xCitations: 5Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume71, Issue232October 1986Pages 222-234 RelatedInformation

La trahison des clercs:British intellectuals and the first home–rule crisis

In the early months of 1882 two of the writers who were to be prominent four years later in opposing Gladstone’s first Irish home-rule bill made similar complaints to correspondents about the state of British public opinion. ‘Less is thought of the Irish question than of the Australian cricketers’, wrote Goldwin Smith; while in characteristic vein, James Fitzjames Stephen waxed choleric about the ‘extravagant idiocy’ of a public obsessed with ‘Jumbo the elephant’, while ignoring ‘one of the most disgusting and brutally dangerous civil wars ever known in these islands’. Each had a particular reason to be preoccupied about Ireland. Smith’s pique was, in part at least, that of the ‘expert’ whose warnings and admonitions had gone unheeded, while Stephen lived part of each year on his small estate in County Louth. However, they also reflected a general concern among politicians and intellectuals which historians have tended to ignore or underestimate — a belief that trends and events in Ireland and the British response to them had serious implications for the future of Britain itself. The recent major study of the home-rule crisis of 1885-6 by Alistair Cooke and John Vincent is remarkable in British historiographical treatment of the Irish question only in the way in which the normal presuppositions are made explicit. Cooke and Vincent argue with admirable clarity, and in remarkable detail, that virtually none of the politicians involved in the crisis were concerned with the ostensible issues of the home-rule policy, each being exclusively concerned instead with exploiting the political crisis which Gladstone’s adoption of the policy (also purely for tactical political reasons) had created. This denial of any importance to ideological differences in political crises is a characteristic of the so-called ‘high politics’ school of historiography, and constitutes perhaps its most serious defect. It is reinforced in the case of the Irish home-rule crisis by the view that, as it was undoubtedly true that few among the political élite cared about Ireland as such, they were equally indifferent to the issues it raised. However, not alone can it be argued that there were important ideological dimensions to most political crises in late nineteenth-century Britain, there is considerable evidence to show that this was particularly true of those involving Irish questions, and of home rule above all.

Lord Willoughby de Broke and the Politics of Radical Toryism, 1909-1914

In the midst of the political controversies of the early twentieth century, Lord Willoughby de Broke, a landed aristocrat with little parliamentary experience, emerged as a major political figure. An ally of the Chamberlains, Lord Milner, Sir Edward Carson, and Leo Maxse, editor of the National Review, he became a significant spokesman for extreme conservatism. During the Parliament Bill struggle, the battle over the Conservative leadership in the fall of 1911, and the Home Rule crisis, Willoughby de Broke organized the efforts of peers and other Conservatives radically dissatisfied with the direction of British politics. Since 1914 Willoughby de Broke has become a symbol of reaction and traditionalist resistance to change: the fox-hunting nobleman “whose face,” in Dangerfield's wellknown description, “bore a pleasing resemblance to the horse,” and who “was not more than two hundred years behind his time.” Such an analysis, however, is more amusing than accurate. In fact, while Willoughby de Broke's objectives were basically those of a traditional landed aristrocrat, his methods and emphases strongly prefigured those of later rightist politicians, both British and continental: tactics of political democracy could be mastered in order to preserve the status quo.Although Willoughby de Broke often fondly recalled the patriarchical society he had known in his childhood on a great estate, he did not merely attempt to recreate the past. He and his political associates, for all their commitment to conservatism, understood that important adaptations would have to be made to new conditions.

‘Parnellism And Crime’, 1887–90

The Home Rule crisis of 1885–86 is generally held to mark a water-shed in the history of Anglo-Irish relations. This it undoubtedly does, though not necessarily for the reasons commonly advanced. The crisis was certainly important in the sense that it obliged the Liberal and Conservative parties to define their attitudes towards Irish self-government and thus to demonstrate to the Irish nationalist party in the House of Commons that their main hope for the future lay with Mr Gladstone and those Liberals who had remained faithful to him after his declaration in favour of Home Rule. But the course of events during 1886 demonstrated just how far the Irish demand still was from being met. The inadequacies of the Home Rule Bill itself, the split in the Liberal party, the firm negative of the Conservatives, the violence of the Ulster Protestant reaction, the veto of the House of Lords which had not even to be deployed in 1886 but was there for future use when necessary—all these things suggested that Home Rule, if it came at all, would not happen overnight at the waving of any Parnellite wand, but would require years, perhaps decades, of labour before it came within sight of achievement.

IV. Liberalism and the Victorian Intelligentsia

Henry Sidgwick was one of the most prominent university reformers in later Victorian Cambridge. His resignation of his Trinity fellowship in 1869 helped to precipitate the final abolition of religious tests in 1871, and, in the following decades, he was the leader of those who wished to develop research and to open up new branches of study. In national politics he was, as might have been expected, a Liberal, yet, when the Home Rule crisis of 1885–6 came to a head, his allegiance veered over sharply. In 1885 he voted Liberal ‘after some hesitation’; the next year he voted for the Tory candidate for the borough of Cambridge who was elected by an increased majority. That summer he wrote: ‘Unionists gaining slowly but steadily. Dined in Hall, and was surprised to find the great preponderance of Unionist sentiment among the Trinity fellows—a body always, since I have known Trinity, preponderantly Liberal.’ In the history of Victorian politics more attention might be given to the change which converted a large part of the educated classes from the Liberal side to the Conservative. J. F. Stephen, writing in 1880 to the first Earl of Lytton, said of the Conservative leaders that they were ‘all of them people whose political creed was chosen when the Conservative party was emphatically the stupid party, and when to be a Conservative meant to be opposed to pretty well all the main intellectual movements of the time’. The phrase, ‘the stupid party’, comes from J. S. Mill, whose books had been the chief intellectual influence in triumphant mid-Victorian Liberalism. By the end of his life Mill himself was becoming sceptical of the results achieved by democracy. In Representative Government (1861) he had pointed out that a popular assembly was not fitted to conduct administration or to frame laws, and that one of the great problems of democratic government is to combine popular rule with the skilled administration of the modern state. The need for increased efficiency in a more competitive age was worrying many Englishmen by 1870, and, although their criticisms cut across party and sectional boundaries, they were hostile to much in conventional Liberalism. One answer was the ‘social engineering’ of the Fabians; another approach was Matthew Arnold's assault on our educational system and on the Philistinism of our semi-educated middle classes. The only remedy for the anarchic individualism of English life lay, he thought, in the positive activity of the state, which should purify and deepen the national culture and give it direction and purpose.