Disraeli (1804-1881) and Conservatism

Disraeli became Prime Minister for the second time in February 1874. This was his second period as Prime Minister as from February to October1868 he had headed a minority, caretaker administration, following Derby’s resignation because of ill health (gout). The Queen though this:

A proud thing for a Man “risen from the people” to have obtained.

Disraeli:

I have climbed to the top of the greasy pole.

During the years of opposition the Conservatives built up grassroots support. The Conservative Central Office was set up in 1870 and new associations were set up in many constituencies. In the election of February 1874, the Conservatives had a majority of 110 seats in England though only 50 in the nation as a whole. This pushed the Liberals more into the ‘Celtic fringe’, though in Ireland they lost seats to ‘Home Rulers’. Disraeli’s political cleverness lay in the fact that he enabled his party to take advantage of the slowly growing popularity of the Conservatives in the leafy suburbs. His election victory was such that die-hard former opponents such as the 3rd marquess of Salisbury (1830-1903) agreed to serve in his cabinet (India Office).

In August 1876 he moved to the Lords as Lord Beaconsfield - his wife, the former Mary Anne Lewis, had been given the title Viscountess Beaconsfield following the defeat of 1868. He sought to solace his craving for female company in a romantic attachment to two elderly sisters, the countess of Bradford and her sister the dowager countess of Chesterfield.

In spite of his commanding victory Disraeli believed,

Power has come to me too late.

He was 70 and in ill health, suffering increasingly from gout. He had led the Conservatives in the Commons for twenty-five years, though with only three brief periods on office. Now he had a substantial parliamentary majority but what was he to do with it?

His beliefs are hard to determine. He believed in a vague Christianity and was remarkably ignorant of Judaism. He was uninterested in the moral and intellectual problems of the day. In 1863 speaking in the Sheldonian in Oxford, he dismissed the Darwinian debate:

I am on the side of the angels.

This type of flippancy infuriated the intellectuals.

He also had a fantastic devotion to Queen Victoria, whom he figured as the second Gloriana, and styled to his inmates ‘the Fairy’. His relationship with her was similar to Victoria's with John Brown. The story that he said ‘we authors, ma’am’ ‘has never been authenticated, but it deserves to be true’. There were occasions when his language, if taken too literally, attributed anachronistic powers to the Queen. The monarchy was steadily losing power, largely as a result of the democratization of parliament and this made Disraeli’s romanticizing very unrealistic.

The Second Disraeli government
In contrast to Gladstone, he did not come into office with a programme of reforming legislation. A great deal of the government’s energy was devoted to the regulation of Anglo-Catholic clergy. In 1875 a disgruntled Conservative MP referred to ‘suet-pudding legislation’.

Disraeli had begun life as a radical, diagnosing England as ‘two nations’, rich and poor. As Prime Minister he presided over social legislation, though most historians do not believe that this was part of a considered programme. It was electorally necessary to make concessions to working-class demands, but his legislation did not mark a substantial shift from laissez-faire to state intervention. His Public Health Act was passed in 1875. His Home Secretary, R. A. Cross, with Disraeli’s full backing, reformed trade union law, by removing strike action from the law of conspiracy. The other major reform of 1875 was the Artisans’ Dwelling Act (1875), which empowered municipal councils to draw up improvement schemes for districts certified as unhealthy by a medical officer - though the scheme had many weaknesses and was never fully implicated. The Merchant Shipping Act was a cross-party measure.

Disraeli's campaign against Gladstone in the 1874 election had been fought on traditional Tory grounds - attacking him for menacing ‘every institution, every interest, every class and every calling in the country’. But these were defensive slogans. He needed others, and found them in two causes, the monarchy and the empire.

Disraeli and imperialism
The traditional version is that Disraeli set out his vision of empire in his Crystal Palace speech of 24 June1872. In it he had claimed that the working classes

are proud of belonging to a great country, and wish to maintain its greatness - that they are proud of belonging to an Imperial country, and are resolved to maintain, if they can, their empire.

But the reference to empire was quite casual, with India barely mentioned.
The two causes came together when he masterminded the visit of the Prince of Wales (described by Disraeli as ‘our young Hal’) to India in the winter of 1875-6. His initiative on imperialism enabled him to position the Conservatives as the imperialist party.

The Suez Canal
In 1869 the Suez Canal had been opened, enabling the journey from Britain to India to be cut by several weeks and some thousands of miles. In 1875 four fifths of its traffic was British, though most British ships continued to use the Cape route. Its strategic importance was even greater than its commercial. In the event of another Indian Mutiny or an invasion by Russia, it could carry reinforcements far more quickly than by the old Cape route.

In November 1785 Disraeli purchased the shares of the bankrupt Khedive of Egypt in the Suez Canal Company for £4m. This was a tricky operation because Parliament was not sitting and it could only be done by loan. The money was loaned by Baron Rothschild rather than the Bank of England. Disraeli to the Queen: ‘You have it, Madam’. To Lady Bradford: ‘The Fairy is in ecstasies’. In fact, Disraeli was confusing the ownership of the Canal Company with the ownership of the Canal itself, and he was wrong to believe that Britain now had a controlling interest in the Canal. But the loan prevented the strengthening of French interests and deepened the British involvement in Egypt. Gladstone was furious and attacked the episode in the Commons - though to no great effect. Disraeli managed to cloak the affair in a mysterious Asiatic melodrama and to claim that somehow the Canal had fallen into British hands.

India
The conferment of the title Empress of India in 1876 was another example of the importance he attached to the British position in Asia. Essentially it arose out of the trauma of the Mutiny and was a counter to the advance of the Tsar into Central Asia. However, the timing was not of his choosing but was chosen by the Queen, who badgered him into giving her the title.

The Empress-Queen demands her Imperial Crown.

It was also part of his policy to consolidate British rule by the reinforcement of hierarchies. By not consulting the opposition over the matter, he caused a row. The Queen never forgave Gladstone for the ferocity of his attack.

The Bulgarian crisis
See other post.
Disraeli despised Gladstone’s ‘ethical’ foreign policy, especially in the Balkans, and, in spite of gross human rights violations, he continued to support Turkish rule.

The Zulu War
In 1879 Disraeli’s relaxed approach to running a government eventually forced imperial affairs upon parliamentary and public attention in a manner highly damaging to the Conservatives. With the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa in the 1860s those who wanted to expand British territory there became more assertive.

In the spring of 1877 the Governor and High Commissioner Sir Bartle Frere annexed the Boer Republic of the Transvaal. In an attempt to mollify the outraged Afrikaaners, he then moved against the traditional enemies the Zulus. This was not British government policy: the Colonial Secretary Sir Michael Hicks Beach, told Frere that ‘we entirely deprecate the idea of entering on a Zulu war to settle the Zulu question'. But in an age before the telegraph, it was the men on the spot who held sway. On 11 December 1878 Frere sent an ultimatum to Cetshwayo, the Zulu chief that he knew would be disbanded. He naturally refused, and on 22 January 1879 a Zulu army destroyed General Lord Chelmsford’s temporary base at Isandhlwana. In one of the worst defeats the British Empire ever suffered, 800 white and 500 African soldiers were killed. On the same day 150-155 British troops of the 2nd Battalion, 24th Foot: later the South Wales Borderers and now the Royal Regiment of Wales, men of the Royal Artillery, Royal Engineers, Army Service Corps, Commissariat and Medical Corps, successfully held off 4,000 Zulu warriors at the Rorke's Drift outpost (a Swedish mission). The following day up to 500 wounded Zulus were slaughtered in cold blood. Eleven Victoria Crosses were (deservedly) won, but this was a smokescreen to disguise the disaster.

The news reached London in mid-February. In a period when racial prejudice was intensifying, a defeat at the hands of black men was a great humiliation and, to make matters worse, the government reacted indecisively. Lord Chelmsford escaped blame by blaming two conveniently dead officers though Disraeli told the queen that he held him responsible for a ‘dreadful disaster’. Victoria was not convinced.

In July that Cetshwayo was defeated and captured at the battle of Ulundi (at which Napoleon III's son, the Prince Imperial, was speared to death), his army destroyed and his kingdom broken up. Zululand was annexed and incorporated into Natal. With the Zulu threat removed, the Boers quickly recovered. In retrospect it had been a grave mistake to go to war with the Zulus, who would have been very useful allies against the Boers.

Cetshwayo was reinstated in 1883 but he died, probably of a heart attack, in 1884.

The second Afghan War
See other post.

Gladstone's First Administration, 1868-74

The period 1868-80 is remarkable for the starkness with which political differences were epitomized by dramatic confrontations between its two leading men: Gladstone (1809-98) and Disraeli (1804-81) and two political parties (see Iolanthe, 1882).

The 1867 Reform Act had brought in household suffrage in the boroughs. Of all males aged 21 and above, a third now enjoyed the vote in England and Wales, just under a third in Scotland and just under a sixth in Ireland. Over all, about a million were added to the electorate. In the decades after this reform, British political parties slowly took on the characteristics of a modern party.

The general election of 1868 was held under the new franchise, but in many respects it was a typical general election. There was much violence. About 80 seats remained under the control of the landed patrons, while in the industrial North factory owners were emerging as a new political elite. Religion was still a major issue. Most MPs came from the usual backgrounds: aristocracy, landed gentry and commerce. John Stuart Mill was defeated at Westminster. The result was hardly an earthquake. The Conservatives lost 20 seats and the Liberals gained 20, giving the Liberals a majority of 110.

Gladstone himself lost South-west Lancashire, but a week before he had been elected for Greenwich. As Roy Jenkins puts it in his biography of Gladstone,

The public were used to politicians shuffling constituencies about as quickly as a Mississippi steamboat gambler did a pack of cards.

He was MP for the borough for eleven years, but rarely visited it. He received the news that the Queen had asked him to form a government at Hawarden.

Gladstone and the Liberals
In December 1868 Gladstone headed the first of his four Liberal administrations. The Liberal party was an uncertain animal, divided between old-fashioned Whigs and radicals. It was never an easy party to lead and as leader, Gladstone, who on some questions was an extreme Radical and on others an old-fashioned Conservative, stood outside his party.

Gladstone’s career and character
He had begun, in Thomas Babington Macaulay's phrase, as ‘the rising hope of the stern, unbending Tories’, and had followed Peel into the wilderness. At the end of 1852 he became Chancellor in Aberdeen’s Liberal/Peeling coalition. In 1859 he became Chancellor in Palmerston’s Liberal government.

He moved with bewildering rapidity from disturbingly frequent bouts of prostration to displays of almost manic energy. He found time to translate Homer, write works of theology and to read voraciously. His physical energy found release in chopping down trees. Lord Randolph Churchill said:

The forest laments so that Mr Gladstone may perspire.

In spite of his happy marriage in 1839 to Catherine Gwynne (which brought him the ownership of Hawarden) there were sexual tensions which found release in good works among prostitutes. This had begun systematically in 1849 as part of an Anglo-Catholic charitable enterprise. But for Gladstone it involved temptation and after many of his meetings his diary records a sign for scourging. His association with prostitutes was an open secret in political circles. In 1896 he told his clergyman son, Stephen that he had never ‘been guilty of the act which is known as that of infidelity to the marriage bed’. But what did he mean by infidelity?

Even more potentially embarrassing was his deeply emotional friendship with the ex-courtesan turned theosophist preacher, Laura Thistlethwayte. In November 1869 while he was piloting the Irish Land Act through Parliament, he was especially obsessed with her. His relationship was carried on in the full knowledge of the political elite.

Religion was the motivating force in his life. He had moved from Evangelicalism to High Anglicanism. He was friends with Bishop Samuel Wilberforce and (until his conversion) with Henry Manning. He was also friends with the liberal Catholic Döllinger, but he detested Ultramontanism and ‘Vaticanism’: see his publication of The Vatican Decrees (November 1874). In spite of his Anglicanism, his electoral base came largely from the Nonconformists.

He brought his moral beliefs into politics, and there were many who found his overbearing moralism irritating - the Queen among them. Two causes in particular aroused the crusader in him: Ireland and the pursuit of an ‘ethical’ foreign policy. He favoured a concert of Europe rather than isolationism or imperialism. At the height of the Franco-Prussian war he set out his views in an anonymous article in the Edinburgh Review:

a new law of nations is gradually taking hold of the mind ... which recognises, as a tribunal of paramount authority, the general judgment of civilised mankind.

For him this was a religious rather than a secular ideology - taken from St Augustine.

Ireland
Gladstone was at Hawarden when he received the news that he had won the general election. He said,

My mission is to pacify Ireland.

In 1845 Gladstone had written in a letter to his wife: I

reland, Ireland, that cloud in the west, that coming storm of he vehicle of God’s retribution.

But however strong his feelings, he had never visited the country.

Since 1829 it had been possible for Catholics to be returned to Parliament. The 1850 Franchise Act finally overhauled the registration system and simplified the franchise to an occupational qualification based on a Poor Law valuation of £12 in the counties and £8 in the boroughs.
But this left a range of other grievances, which had intensified after the famine.

In September 1867 the Fenians had rescued two Irish prisoners from a police van in Manchester and shot one guard dead. In December they had blown up part of the wall of Clerkenwell prison, killing twelve people. This made it all the more courageous for Gladstone to campaign in the election on Irish grievances and it explains the reason for his defeat in South-West Lancashire.

In July 1869 Gladstone’s government disestablished the Irish Church - a major concession to Irish grievances, and a cause that united his disparate party. His Land Act of 1870 was more timid; it gave legal sanction to the so-called ‘Ulster custom’ by which departing tenants in good standing received generous ‘compensation’ from incoming tenants. The eviction of tenants without a lease (the majority) was to be made more difficult. As an immediate solution, the Act was a failure, but retrospectively it can be seen to have heralded the beginnings of the demise of the landed class in Ireland. Those conservatives who attacked it as an assault on property were ultimately right.

The Education Act
In 1870 there were 4.3 million children of school age in England and Wales. From the early 19th century primary education for the great mass of English children was in the hands of the churches: the National Society (Anglican, founded 1811) and the British and Foreign Schools Society (Nonconformist). In the 1830s ragged schools came into existence. These were intended for children who were too wretchedly dressed, and whose attendance was too sporadic, for the National Schools. They were co-educational and lured children with free buns and tea, with plenty of singing and short, enjoyable lessons. The facilities were inadequate, as classes were typically held in rented rooms of buildings not designed for the instruction of large numbers of children. In the 1860s, when the Ragged School Union was at its most active, it assisted 200 schools claiming an average total attendance of 20,000 pupils.

The state had given a small grant in 1833, but had taken no direct responsibility for schools. However, from the 1840s training colleges were set up for teachers (St Mark’s, Chelsea) and from the 1850s, school inspectorates were established. . In 1862 the Revised Code had laid down a syllabus (mainly the three ‘R’s) assessed by a school inspectorate, and the teachers were paid by results. Matthew Arnold: ‘the heaviest blow dealt at civilization and improvement in my time’.

By the time Gladstone formed his government in 1868, it was clear that the education system needed reform. England (not Scotland) lagged far behind (eg) Prussia. There was also the fact that the Second Reform Act had enfranchised considerable numbers of the urban working class. Robert Lowe: ‘We must see to it that our new masters learn their letters.’ However, denominational conflicts were a major problem. There were two main voluntary education bodies:
1. The National Educational Union (Anglican)
2. The Education League (Nonconformist)

The Union wanted to maintain the privileged position of the Church of England, the League campaigned for free, compulsory, non-sectarian schools.

In February 1870 an Elementary Education Bill was introduced by William Edward Forster (Matthew Arnold’s brother-in-law), Vice-President of the Council, aimed at providing for the first time a national system of primary education. He proposed to set up new directly elected local authorities called School Boards, which would have the power to direct their own schools, which would be paid for by the local rates. But the bill was designed to supplement voluntary and denominational effort in education not supersede it. The Board Schools would ‘fill in the gaps’ and provide education where there were no church schools. The boards had the power to pass bye-laws for compulsory attendance (so-called ‘permissive compulsion’), assist existing schools, and pay fees for poor parents.

Initially, he proposed to give the boards the power to decide religious instruction. But this ran into heavy opposition from Nonconformists, who opposed any use of the rates to support denominational schools. In the end, after much wrangling, the ‘Cowper-Temple’ clause excluded denominational catechisms and formularies from rate-aided schools. This provision severed the local authority schools from the denominational schools (the latter were to be funded by central grants).

The ‘Board Schools’ were a conspicuous feature of late-Victorian and Edwardian education. The majority of schools were still voluntary schools, but it was a steadily declining majority. There was as yet no compulsion, but once the school boards were established, particularly in the big towns, they took compulsory powers, so that by 1873 40% and by 1876 50% of the population was under compulsory powers, 84% in boroughs. Even Tory squires and parsons in the rural areas now felt that more general powers to compel attendance were necessary to keep voluntary schools in rural areas in business. In 1876 the employment of children under ten was forbidden. In 1880 compulsion became general, though not yet quite universal.

For some years after 1870 a controversy raged round clause 25 in the act which enabled local authorities to pay the fees of needy children at denominational schools. The clause was thought by Nonconformists to give an unfair advantage to church schools in places where board schools did not exist - especially in the rural districts. In 1891 the remaining fees were effectively abolished for pupils at voluntary and board schools alike.

"Look at those big, isolated clumps of building rising up above the slates, like brick islands in a lead-colored sea." "The board-schools." "Light-houses, my boy! Beacons of the future! Capsules with hundreds of bright little seeds in each, out of which will spring the wise, better England of the future." Sherlock Holmes and Watson, in "The Adventure of the Naval Treaty" from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1892)

The abolition of privilege
The removal of barriers to advancement by merit and the establishment of full civic equality were part of the philosophy of Gladstonian Liberalism. He was a strange mixture of the elitist anti-democrat and the populist.

In June 1870 an Order-in-Council opened the civil service to competitive examination.
The fight against privilege was especially intense over the abolition of purchase of commission in the infantry and cavalry undertaken by Edward Cardwell, the Secretary for War. The matter became especially urgent after the Franco-Prussian War. But in the debates in 1871 the Tory opposition put down a long series of obstructionist motions. In a speech to his constituents at Greenwich, Gladstone accused his opponents of class selfishness. In the end the abolition of purchase did nothing to alter the social composition of the armed forces. Because pay was not increased, exactly the same kinds of men continued to be officers as before. The problems the army was to face in the Boer War show the limitations of the reforms in creating a truly efficient army.

A major move towards the abolition of privilege was the Ballot Act of 1872 - though it caused no general enthusiasm and the electorate did not thank him for it. Gladstone himself was lukewarm about secret voting.

The election of 1874
In retrospect the first Gladstone administration seems one of remarkable achievement. Unlike his predecessors, he considered legislation to be the main function of government, and acted upon this belief. But Disraeli touched a raw nerve in a brilliant speech delivered in Manchester in April 1872, which contained one of the great similes of political invective:

Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea.

In 1874 Gladstone sought a dissolution at a time when trade unionists were disappointed by his failure to enact social legislation. In addition his Licensing Act , which would have made it possible for magistrates to introduce fairly strict limitations on opening hours and the granting of licences, had led to minor riots and the collapse of the bill. This enabled the Tories to pose as champions of the beer-drinking working man. The election of 1874 was the worst Whig-Liberal result since 1841.

‘We have been swept away, literally, by a torrent of beer and gin.’

After this, he privately resigned the leadership of the Liberals though he kept his unloved Greenwich seat. In January 1875 the resignation was made public and Lord Hartington succeeded him. Forster, the obvious candidate, was still not forgiven. Disraeli: ‘

The Whigs were dished; now they are Cavendished.’

It might have looked as if Gladstone’s career was over.