1859-1886
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Sir William Harcourt, 1827-1904
William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt was born at York on 14 October 1827, of a land-owning and clerical family which traced its ancestry to the Plantagenet kings. His elder brother, Edward Harcourt, was a staunch Conservative and for eight years an MP. William Harcourt’s views, however, began to take a Liberal turn in the…
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A squire in the House of Lords
The political life of John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley (1826 – 1902).
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John Stuart Mill on votes for women
'We ought not to deny to them, what we are conceding to everybody else' – House of Commons, 20 May 1867
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Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 1836-1908
There have been four Liberals at the head of clearly Liberal governments – Gladstone, Rosebery, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith. Three of them are well-known names. Yet of the four, ‘CB’ was far and away the best party leader. Only Grimond, in very different circumstances, can compare with him. Had Campbell-Bannerman not become leader in…
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Land and nation in England
Review of Paul Readman, Patriotism, National Identity, and the Politics of Land, 1880-1914 (Royal Historical Society, 2008).
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Celebrating 1859: Party, Patriotism and Liberal Values
On 6 June 1859, 280 Whig, Liberal, former Peelite and radical MPs met at Willis’s Rooms in King Street, St. James’s. They gathered to agree on a strategy to oust Lord Derby’s Conservative government from office. Angus Hawkins analyses the significance of this key event in Liberal history.
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‘The representative man’
Reviews of Kenneth Bourne, Palmerston: The Early Years 1783-1841 (Allen Lane, 1982) and Donald Southgate, The Most English Minister (Macmillan, 1966).