1830-1859
The Age of Russell and Palmerston, 1846-1868
The collapse of Sir Robert Peel's Conservative government, following the 1846 repeal of the Corn Laws, began a complex re-arrangement of British political parties; one that took more than a decade to complete. Paradoxically, by rejecting Peel, the remaining Tories held the advantage of unity in their desire to protect agricultural interests and the established…
The Anti-Corn Law League
The second Corn Law of 1828 sparked a wave of radical protest amongst Britain’s urban classes by introducing a sliding scale of duties on foreign wheat, thus causing bread prices to fluctuate excessively during a period that was plagued by high unemployment and poor harvests. The Corn Laws were seen to safeguard the interests of…
Free Trade and the Repeal of the Corn Laws
Belief in free trade became an enduring characteristic of British liberalism in the 19th century but its roots were complex. In part it stemmed from popular Radical hostility to monopoly in all its forms, in part from the diffusion of Smithian and Ricardian political economy and in part from the administrative pragmatism, reinforced by evangelical…
The legacy of Gladstone
The Grand Old Man’s record.
‘He would not stoop, he did not conquer’
Review of Robert Rhodes James, Rosebery (Phoenix, 1995).
Dizzy and the Grand Old Man
Review of Richard Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli (Hutchinson, 2006).
Let us open to them the door of the House of Commons
Speech by Thomas Babington Macaulay on Jewish Disabilities (House of Commons, 17 April 1833).
A political man
The political aspirations of William Taylor Haly, a perenially unsuccessful Liberal candidate in the 1850s.
William Ewart Gladstone, 1809-1898
As Roy Jenkins concluded in his masterly biography, ‘Mr Gladstone was almost as much the epitome of the Victorian age as the great Queen herself’. He was the political giant of his lifetime and even at the end of the twentieth century the principles and aspirations he brought to public life are still inherent in the…