Liberal Unionist Research Articles

Lord Salisbury and his Northern Audiences

'COMPLEXAND MYSTERIOUS' is how one eminent scholar descrioes the longest serving prime minister since Lord Liverpool. 1He is not alone in finding Salisbury elusive; the Conservative party's leading historian has difficulty in classifying an illustrious Tory figure: 'the problem with Salisbury is to think of any stereotype at all'. While noting his electoral success, and acknowledging his possession of a striking combination of personal and political qualities, most students of the man and the period tend to agree with Lord Blake, who pronounces Salisbury 'a great foreign minister, [but] essentially negative, indeed reactionary in home affairs'. 2 It is a verdict that would have surprised Salisbury's contemporaries, Tory and Liberal, and the popular audiences he addressed in big northern towns. Gladstone, for one, privately denounced him as a 'socialist' in 1885, on the strength of his declared interest in wider state action to contain some of the evils of chronic poverty. The 'Tory democracy' that Gladstone deplored as subversive of the traditional, ordered society in which he, with his roots in an older Toryism, believed, owed more to Salisbury than to Lord Randolph Churchill.3 It was Salisbury, and not Churchill, who cemented the Unionist alliance with Joseph Chamberlain that resulted in the social legislation of the 1890s whichhlarked the approach of the welfare state. As Liberals recognized, the partnership between Salisbury and Chamberlain changed the nature of an historic party. Tories and Liberal Unionists became, in effect, the national party that Chamberlain had envisaged. Even when they were fiercely opposed to each other, before 1886, the two men the head of the House of Cecil and the Brummagem industrialist were converging in their perception of political and social trends, and in the conclusions they drew for the

The last of the Whigs: a political biography of Lord Hartington, later eighth Duke of Devonshire (1833-1908)

This political biography covers Lord Hartington's career as a junior minister in British liberal governments, as opposition leader in the House of Commons, as Gladstone's acknowledged successor, and as leader of the Liberal Unionists after his break with Gladstone.

The Funding of the Liberal Unionist Party and the Honours System

The Funding of the Liberal Unionist Party and the Honours System

Irish Home Rule and the Social Basis of the Great Separation in the Liberal Party in 1886

Though Mr Gladstone was speaking of the opposition to home rule in the country, rather than in the parliamentary Liberal party alone in the statement quoted above, this has become the rather standard interpretation of the great separation in the Liberal party in 1886. As one modern historian of the Liberal disruption puts it, ‘a striking characteristic of modern British history has been the class alignment of political parties… The Liberal Unionist party (those who seceded on the home rule question) was a half-way house, which entertained for a time much of the wealth and territorial influence which had been Liberal and was to be Conservative.’ One of the most influential historians of late-nineteenth-century Britain puts the issue in broader terms. The origins of Conservative dominance as well as the leakage of the landed and business classes to the Conservative party, Sir Robert Ensor argues, are to be found in the undermining of English and Irish agriculture by the invasion of North American wheat. This produced, in turn, agrarian revolution in Ireland, the rise of violent nationalism in Ireland, the growth of social and political conflict, and, ultimately, the rejection of Irish political demands by the English. Yet another attributes the fall of Gladstone's third ministry to a general revolt against the Liberal party by railway directors and other businessmen who had been alerted to the dangers to property which the government's railway policies implied. This theme has been taken up and many have come to argue that class voting emerged in 1886 when the upper – and middle-class Liberals, taking home rule as an excuse, departed to the Conservatives in a reaction against growing social radicalism.

SCOTTISH CATHOLICS AND THE BRITISH LEFT, 1918-1939

At least up to 1918, the Liberal party was the chief repository of the Catholic working-class vote. Liberals advocated both Irish Home Rule and moderate social reform and so were an obvious pole of attraction to enfranchised and politically aware Catholic voters of Irish descent. Perhaps just as important, the only alternative in the two-party British political framework was the Conservative party (known after 1911 as the Unionist party in Scotland), which was antagonistic to both Irish national and Catholic interests. From 1885 down to 1914, only a minority of enfranchised Catholics were likely to vote regularly at elections. A community, the bulk of whose members were to be found at the lower end of the social scale, was hardly likely to be a deep depository of political consciousness. The everyday struggle for survival or else the flight from the harsh realities of life induced by alcohol or more benevolent opiates like sport sapped the energies of most working-class men in Scotland no less than elsewhere. Paradoxically it was the Irish issue which, in the first instance, drew working-class activists into Scottish and British politics. In the 1880s, their real loyalty was often reserved for the United Irish League (UIL), the British section of the Irish Home Rule Party, even though some campaigned for the Liberals in their home area during elections. Launched during the heyday of Charles Stewart Parnell in the 1880s, the UIL (initially known as the Irish National League) usually delivered the Catholic Irish vote to the Liberals, principally because they were thought most likely to grant Ireland home rule.1 In practice, little love was lost between Irish activists and their Liberal allies, who, in Scotland, tended to be less radical and more prounionist in sentiment than elsewhere, to the extent that a Liberal Unionist Party emerged in Glasgow during 1885-86.2 For three decades up to 1918, the UIL was a formidable force in several Scottish constituencies. Valuable political training was given to working-class activists who, in many cases, could put their skills to good use elsewhere. Without the intrusion of the Irish question into domestic British politics, it is unlikely that so many unskilled workers would have become involved in politics.3 Bodies like the UIL, along with social and recreational offshoots like the Ancient Order of Hibernians and football clubs, gave newly arrived immigrants an opportunity to display political and organisational talents which otherwise would have lain fallow. Another view might see the Irish question as a diversion and an irritant which replaced a working-class consciousness with a nationalist one and, as well as obstructing the rise of a socialist party, triggered off sectarian quarrels within the working-class. There must be some truth in this argument but, going by the lacklustre growth of socialism in areas where emigration or the Irish issue did not count as factors, one might just as easily conclude that, minus Ireland and its troubles, the end result would not have been a faster socialist breakthrough but instead a more stable and hegemonic Liberal party.

‘Ulster will Fight and Ulster will be Right’: The Protestant Churches and Ulster’s Resistance to Home Rule, 1912–14

Ulster will fight and Ulster will be right’. Randolph Churchill may never have uttered these emotive words during his visit to Ulster in 1886—they appeared in a public letter to a Glasgow Liberal unionist—but they undoubtedly expressed the belligerence and self-righteousness of the Ulster protestant resistance to the prospect of home rule for Ireland. Joseph Lee has observed correctly that ‘Orangemen did not need to be told that they were right or that they would fight’, but after 1886 it was not only Orangemen who made such claims, nor even opportunist tory politicians like Churchill, but protestant churchmen and solid middle class citizens and farmers who would previously have distanced themselves fastidiously from Orangeism. In this paper we shall examine the encouragement and support given by protestant churches and churchmen—Presbyterians in particular—to the movement to resist home rule by force in the period 1912–14.

Liberalism in north Antrim, 1900–14

In the general election of January 1906, R. G. Glendinning, a taciturn baptist linen manufacturer of Belfast, won the North Antrim parliamentary seat. The significance of this event was his success in an overwhelmingly protestant constituency at the expense of the highly articulate and intelligent unionist sitting member, William Moore, the principal architect of the Ulster Unionist Council and the leader of the unionist campaign to expose the devolutionary dangers of ‘Macdonnellism’. Furthermore Glendinning had campaigned as a ‘liberal unionist’, but had been condemned as a home ruler by his opponent and indeed upon arrival in the house of commons took his seat on the liberal government benches. Some years later, in 1913, despite the heightened political temperature, it was still possible for a meeting on 24 October in Ballymoney town hall attended by some four or five hundred protestants to denounce ‘the lawless policy of Carsonism’, and for this same meeting to be addressed by such noted nationalists as Captain Jack White, Sir Roger Casement and Mrs Alice Stopford Green. Their audience was invited to sign an anti-covenant devised by White and closely modelled on, though directly opposed to, the Ulster Solemn League and Covenant. As late as 1925 an independent protestant candidate, George Henderson, representing the Unbought Tenants Association, secured one of the seven County Antrim seats in the Northern Ireland parliament, thus preventing the election of an official unionist, R. D. Megaw. Then there is the interesting phenomenon of the Independent Orange Order which in the years before 1914 had established itself more firmly in north Antrim than anywhere else. The area also threw up in this period a number of prominent individuals who became active in non-unionist politics, of whom the Reverend J. B. Armour, the Reverend D. D. Boyle, John Pinkerton and Samuel Craig McElroy are perhaps the best known. Finally Bally money and the Route was the epicentre of the Ulster tenant-right movement in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.

The Changing Context of British Politics in the 1880s: The Reform Acts and the Formation of the Liberal Unionist Party

In the summer of 1886, the conservative “Whig” wing of the Liberal party, led by Lord Hartington, together with a small group of Radical Unionists under Joseph Chamberlain, broke with the Liberal leader, Prime Minister W.E. Gladstone, and formed the Liberal Unionist party. This not-unexpected event occurred in two stages. The first was the defection of ninety-three Liberals to the Conservative opposition on the second reading of Gladstone’s Irish Home Rule Bill in June, resulting in its defeat. The second stage was the decision of Hartington, Chamberlain, and their followers to contest, with Conservative support, parliamentary seats against Liberals in the ensuing July election which Gladstone called on the issue of Irish Home Rule.The election of July, 1886 proved to be a critical juncture in British party alignment. The shift in the strength of the parties caused by the return of seventy-eight Liberal Unionists to the parliament of 1886-92 and their support of the Conservatives ended forty years of Liberal domination and began a generation of Conservative hegemony. The Liberal Unionists maintained a parliamentary strength of about seventy members and a separate identity until they merged with the Conservatives in 1912; few of the dissident Liberal Unionists returned to the Liberal party. The formation of the Unionist (Conservative and Liberal Unionist) coalition had long-term ramifications as well because it set the stage for the emergence of class politics shortly after the turn of the century.

The Changing Context of British Politics in the 1880s: The Reform Acts and the Formation of the Liberal Unionist Party

The Changing Context of British Politics in the 1880s: The Reform Acts and the Formation of the Liberal Unionist Party

The Liberal Unionist Party and the Irish Policy of Lord Salisbury's Government, 1886–1892

In the House of Commons on 23 May 1892, following a speech by Joseph Chamberlain in qualified support of Balfour's Irish Local Government Bill, Tim Healy assailed ‘our Birmingham Diogenes’ with considerable warmth for the manner in which such support was habitually rendered:What happens is this. The Government bring in a Bill. Its proposals are attacked, and the Government gets into distress, and then of course ‘a friend in need is a friend indeed’. The Rt.hon.Gentleman the Member for West Birmingham gets up and makes a speech. I have heard him make a speech on the Coercion Bill of 1887 in almost identical terms, and also on the Parnell Commission Bill of 1888.

The Ulster liberal unionists and local government reform, 1885–98

In the mid-1880s English political leaders found it essential to develop new policies for Ireland. While the liberals, led by Gladstone, were converted to the home-rule solution, the tories sought to preserve the union with a two-pronged policy. First, Ireland’s economic disorders were to be cured by vigorously developing the system of state-aided land purchase, and by having the imperial treasuly assume a large portion of the cost of developing the country’s natural resources and industrial potential. This aspect of the policy rested upon the tory conviction that Irish support of home rule would diminish in direct proportion to significant economic and social advance. The second part of the policy called for the establishment of a democratic system of local government which was to be the limit of political concessions to Irish nationalist sentiment.

The Belfast Protestant Association and the Independent Orange Order, 1901–10

For over ten years (June 1895–January 1906) a conservative and unionist government was in office, and, except for the minor devolution crisis of 1904-5, Irish home rule was not a serious issue at Westminster. In Ulster it was a period of relative quiet, undisturbed by the agitation and riots that had attended the home rule bills of 1886 and 1893. After 1886 conservatives and liberal unionists were united electorally and supported unionist parliamentary candidates, though they retained formally separate organisations; liberal home rulers were politically unimportant for most of the period, though they contested seats in Londonderry, Antrim and Tyrone.In the absence of an immediate external threat dissent grew among those not committed to nationalism. T. W. Russell, M.P. for South Tyrone, found himself increasingly at variance with his leaders over the claims of tenant farmers and stood as an independent unionist in 1906; he was later to become a home rule liberal. At the Belfast municipal elections of 1897 the labour movement of the city returned six candidates, and during the following decade contested the North Belfast parliamentary seat in three successive years. A serious and embarrassing challenge to the leadership of Ulster unionism and the Orange Order was offered by the electoral success in 1902 of T. H. Sloan, a shipyard worker and master of an Orange lodge, and by the formation of the Independent Orange Order in the following year. Sloan, who held his South Belfast seat until 1910, contended that official unionist and Orange leaders disregarded working-class interests and were too ready to yield to catholic and nationalist pressure. The radicalism of the new order was strengthened by one of its officers, Robert Lindsay Crawford, who wished it to follow his own evolution towards liberal nationalism. It is the purpose of this paper to trace the origin and growth of the Independent Orange Order, its rôle in the general election of 1906 and the revival of Ulster liberalism, and its relationship with the Belfast labour movement.

The Liberal Unionist Alliance: Chamberlain, Harrington, and the Conservatives, 1886–1904

The Liberal Unionist Alliance: Chamberlain, Harrington, and the Conservatives, 1886–1904

The origins of the Ulster unionist party, 1885–6

The years 1885–6 were years of political confusion in Great Britain and Ireland. No less than four governments were in office from the spring of 1885 to the summer of 1886. Gladstone's government, beset by ministerial quarrels, fell on 9 June 1885, and was succeeded by the caretaker government of Lord Salisbury. The general election of December prolonged this political instability. The liberals were returned but with a majority of only two over the other parties. Salisbury remained in power until 27 January 1886 when he was defeated in the house. Gladstone, already a convert to some form of home rule for Ireland, formed a cabinet and drew up two bills, the Government of Ireland Bill and the Land Purchase (Ireland) Bill. The former was introduced on 8 April and exactly two months later was defeated owing to the desertion of ninety-three liberal members. In the subsequent general election the conservatives and liberal unionists routed the Gladstonian forces.