The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby Volume I: Ascent, 1799-1851

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THE FORGOTTEN PRIME MINISTER

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THE FORGOTTEN PRIME MINISTER The 14th Earl of Derby volume 1 ascent: 1799–1851

ANGUS HAWKINS

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Angus Hawkins 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 978–0–19–920440–3 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

To John Vincent in gratitude for his inspiration, encouragement, and support


Preface In restoring a political presence largely lost to historical view this is a work of rehabilitation. Although thrice prime minister and Conservative leader for twenty-two years, the 14th Earl of Derby has hitherto lacked a full biography based upon his papers and correspondence. Once noted the omission is striking. This work seeks to fill this gap. Claiming an unwarranted significance for your subject is the occupational hazard of the biographer. Where readers, with a healthy scepticism, might suspect inflated claims on Derby’s behalf in what follows, in revising the received portrayal of a dull and politically uninterested aristocrat, justification lies in Derby’s genuine achievements and his prominence in the calculations and intentions of others. Derby emerges from contemporary conversations, diaries, and correspondence as an influential and complex figure, whose absence renders crucial aspects of the period harder to understand. By placing the young Derby in the shifting context of party politics I have sought to explain his importance through the contingent complexity of events as they unfolded, where the future was as yet unknown and the present a site of struggle between those with conflicting aspirations. This volume, the first of two, traces the political career, intellectual development, and religious belief of Edward Geoffrey Stanley, after 1834 Lord Stanley, through to his succession as the 14th Earl of Derby in 1851. It explores his public doctrine and private faith as a young Whig in the 1820s, his period as Chief Secretary for Ireland and Colonial Secretary in the early 1830s, his bid for political pre-eminence in 1834–5, his migration to Peelite Conservatism in the late 1830s, his return to the Colonial Office in 1841, his role in the Conservative schism over Corn Law repeal in 1846, and his leadership of the Protectionists prior to his first premiership in 1852. This throws important light on the various strands of early nineteenth-century Whiggism, British policy towards Ireland, Reform, and the empire, and the dynamics of parliamentary politics during the 1830s. Restoring Stanley’s pivotal role in the political calculations of the mid-1830s enables us to retrieve that sense of contingent uncertainty, lost with hindsight, that shrouded perceptions of the future. It also reveals

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that in politics, as in chess, the manoeuvres of an opponent anticipated, forestalled, and never played can be as important as those moves actually made. As a Conservative, after 1838 Stanley’s career illuminates the strains within Peelite Conservatism, the ambiguities at the heart of early Victorian colonial policy, the conflicts precipitated by Corn Law repeal, and the challenges confronting the Protectionists in opposing Free Trade. Rescuing the Protectionists from languishing as an embittered agricultural rump and restoring their credibility as a responsible and respectable governing party called on Stanley’s skill, tact, and forbearance, while drawing on the Whig constitutional principles of his youth, his aversion to religious extremism, and his conviction that stable progress required enlightened landed aristocrats to safeguard the rule of law, parliamentary liberties, and the harmonious interdependence of those varied social interests comprising the national community. From these beliefs was woven the fabric of a mid-Victorian Conservatism that helped to shape the pattern of national life during the 1850s and 1860s. I have incurred many debts in exploring the view from Knowsley. The present Lord Derby, who gave generous permission to reproduce portraits hanging at Knowsley, has helped and encouraged by his kind interest. The convivial conference at Knowsley, graciously hosted by Lord Derby in March 2004, bringing together those with an active historical interest in the earls of Derby, was an enjoyable and rewarding occasion. Humphrey Chetwynd-Talbot kindly made available family papers in his possession. A huge debt is owed to John Vincent, hence the grateful dedication of this work. Andrew Jones and Alan Beattie guided my early thinking on Derby’s career. The late Colin Matthew warmly encouraged the project, as have my Oxford colleagues Lawrence Goldman and Peter Ghosh. Jeremy Black, David Brown, Tom Buchanan, Joe Coohill, Judith Curthoys, Richard Davis, David Grylls, Theo Hoppen, Tony Howe, Terry Jenkins, Bruce Kinzer, John Powell, John Prest, Philip Salmon, Peter Sloan, and Mark Smith have all given valuable advice. Seaborne conversations with David Cannadine and Linda Colley brought illumination. Those young historians at the University of East Anglia who, under the guidance of John Charmley, are extending our knowledge of the Victorian Derbys in important ways, Geoff Hicks, Bendor Grosvenor, and Lloyd Mitchell, provided an enjoyable and beneficial stimulus. The comments of seminar groups at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London, Exeter, and East Anglia have helped to clarify my understanding of Derby. The suggestions of the two anonymous readers for Oxford University Press were invaluable.

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Peter Elvins performed a critical service as an interested and intelligent general reader. For any surviving errors I am solely responsible. I am grateful to the National Trust, Disraeli Papers, the Trustees of the Broadlands Archives, and the Hampshire Record Office for permission to quote from papers for which they hold the copyright. I am also grateful to the staff of the National Register of Archives, both in London and in Edinburgh; the Clerk of the Records, the Record Office, the House of Lords; the Suffolk Record Office; Lambeth Palace Library; the British Library; the University of Nottingham Library; the Leeds District Archives; the Department of Palaeography and Diplomatic, the University of Durham; University College London; the Scottish Record Office; the National Library of Scotland; the Glamorgan Archive Service; the Somerset Record Office; the Hertfordshire Record Office; the Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, York; the Kent Archives Office; and the National Archives, Kew. I apologize for any inadvertent infringement of copyright. I owe a great debt to the successive archivists of the Derby Papers at Liverpool Record Office, Naomi Evetts and Ruth Hobbins, and the professional guidance of their staff, as well as the Curator of Collections at Knowsley, Emma Tate. Alison Adam and Hazel Arrandale expertly prepared the typescript, while Christopher Wheeler and Matthew Cotton have been supportive and patient editors. For longer than I care to remember my family, Esther, Emma, and Kate, have lived with the 14th Earl of Derby; their tolerance and encouragement have been unstinting and beyond repayment. Angus Hawkins Oxford January 2007


Contents List of plates

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Genealogical Tables

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1. Groomed for Greatness: 1799–1830 2. Coercion and Concession: 1830–1834

1 74

3. ‘Visions of the Helm’: 1834–1835

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4. Conservative Consolation: 1835–1841

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5. Colonies and Corn Laws: 1841–1845

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6. Conservative Schism: 1846–1848

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7. Protection and Popery: 1849–1851

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Notes Bibliography

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Index

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List of Plates 1. Knowsley Hall (Knowsley) 2. The 12th Earl of Derby with his first wife, Lady Elizabeth Hamilton and their son, later the 13th Earl of Derby, by Angelica Kauffmann (Knowsley) 3. The 12th Earl of Derby, by George Romney (Knowsley) 4. Elizabeth Farren, Countess of Derby, by Sir Thomas Lawrence (Knowsley) 5. The 13th Earl of Derby by William Derby (Knowsley) 6. Charlotte Hornby, Countess of Derby, by Sir Thomas Lawrence (Knowsley) 7. Edward Geoffrey Stanley, by George Harlow (Knowsley) 8. Edward Geoffrey Stanley, by Sir George Hayter (Knowsley) 9. Emma Bootle-Wilbraham, Countess of Derby, with Edward Henry Stanley, by Frederick Hurlstone (Knowsley) 10. Lord Lansdowne, by William Egleton after Sir Thomas Lawrence (National Portrait Gallery) 11. Lord Anglesey, by Henry Meyer after Sir William Beechey (National Portrait Gallery) 12. Lord Grey, by Sir Francis Leggatt (National Portrait Gallery) 13. Daniel O’Connell, by Bernard Mulrenin (National Portrait Gallery) 14. Sir Robert Peel, by John Linnell (National Portrait Gallery) 15. Old Attitudes in New Positions, by John Doyle 16. The Duke of Wellington, by Alfred, Count D’Orsay (National Portrait Gallery)

Plate 1, licence granted courtesy of The Rt Hon. The Earl of Derby 2007. Photography by Jarrold Publishing. Plates 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, licence granted courtesy of The Rt Hon. The Earl of Derby 2007. Plates 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, and 16, National Portrait Gallery, London.

T he Stanley Family (1774) (1797) Lady Elizabeth Hamilton = Edward Stanley = Elizabeth Farren (1753– 1797) (1752–1834) (1762– 1829) 12th Earl of Derby Lady Lucy Stanley (1799–1809)

Hon. James Stanley (1800–1817)

(1798) Charlotte Hornby = Edward Smith Stanley (1776–1817) (1775– 1851) 13th Earl of Derby

(1821) Lady Mary Stanley = 2nd Earl of Wilton (1799–1882) (1801–1858) (1795)

Lady Elizabeth Stanley = Stephen Cole (1778– 1857) (1765–1835)

(1796) Lady Charlotte Stanley = Edmund Hornby (1776–1805) (1773– 1857) (1825) (1835) (1835) Emma Bootle-Wilbraham = Edward Geoffrey Stanley Hon. Henry Stanley = Anne Woolhouse Lady Ellinor Stanley = Revd Frank Hopwood (1805–1876) (1799– 1869) (b. 1807) (1811–1890) (1803– 1875) (1807– 1887) 14th Earl of Derby (1823) Lady Charlotte Stanley = Edward Penrhyn (d. 1861) (1801– 1853) (1870) Mary, Lady Salisbury = Edward Henry Stanley (1826– 1893) (1824 – 1900) 15th Earl of Derby

(1825) Lady Louisa Stanley = Samuel Long (1800–1881) (1805– 1825)

(1864) Hon. Frederick Stanley = Lady Constance Villiers (1841–1908) (1840– 1922) 16th Earl of Derby

(1860) Lady Emma Stanley = Sir Patrick Chetwynd Talbot (1835 – 1928) (1817–1898) Edward George Stanley (1865– 1948) 17th Earl of Derby

(1836) Hon. Charles Stanley = Frances Augusta Campbell (1810–1878) (1808 – 1884)

T he H ornby–Stanley Family (1714) Edward Stanley = Elizabeth Hesketh (1689–1776) (1694– 1776) 11th Earl of Derby

James Stanley, Lord Strange (1717– 1771)

(1746) = Lucy Smith (1710– 1759)

(1772) Revd Geoffrey Hornby = Lucy Stanley (1750 – 1812) (1751– 1833)

(1796) Lady Charlotte Stanley = Edmund Hornby (1773– 1857) (1776– 1805) daughter of the 12th Earl of Derby N ote: Not all the children of the Revd Geoffrey Hornby are shown.

Edward Stanley (1752–1834) 12th Earl of Derby

(1798) Charlotte Hornby = Edward Smith Stanley (1776– 1817) (1775 – 1851) 13th Earl of Derby

T he Bootle -W ilbraham Family Revd Edward Taylor (1734–1798)

Sir Herbert Taylor (1775–1839)

Mary Taylor (1781–1840)

(1796) = Edward Bootle-Wilbraham (1771–1853) 1st Lord Skelmersdale

(1832) Jessy Brooke = Richard Bootle-Wilbraham (1813–1892) (1801–1844)

(1825) Emma Bootle-Wilbraham = Edward Geoffrey Stanley (1799–1869) (1805–1876) 14th Earl of Derby

(1860) Lady Alice Villiers = Edward Bootle-Wilbraham (1841–1897) (1837–1898) 2nd Lord Skelmersdale Created Earl of Lathom 1880

N ote: Not all the children of the 1st Lord Skelmersdale are shown.

chapter 1

Groomed for Greatness: 1799–1830 He would not assert that there might not be circumstances which would justify an interference with the property of the church, but he would maintain that no such circumstances could exist which would not equally justify an interference with landed, funded and commercial property. (Hear, hear.) (Stanley to the Commons on the Church of Ireland, 6 May 1824)

The old and stubborn spirit of Toryism is at last yielding to the increased liberality of the age. (Stanley, 18 February 1828, Hansard, new ser., xviii. 517–24)

chievement and fame are fickle partners. Edward Geoffrey Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, was the first British statesman to become prime minister three times. He remains the longest-serving party leader in modern British politics, leading the Conservatives for twenty-two years from 1846 to 1868. As a member of Lord Grey’s government he was a powerful advocate for the 1832 Reform Act. In 1833 he abolished slavery within the British Empire. As prime minister he oversaw the introduction of the 1867 Reform Act. When he retired in 1868 he had participated in parliamentary politics for forty-six years. In his youth he was hailed as ‘the only brilliant eldest son produced by the British peerage for a hundred years’.1 In 1829 William Huskisson called him ‘the Hope of the Nation’.2 More pointedly, the acerbic Lord Brougham observed that at 30 Derby was by far the cleverest young man of the day, and that at 60 he would be the same.3 Yet Lord Derby may also claim to be the forgotten prime minister. Arguably, he achieved much: it is undeniable that he has been much neglected. Some of the reasons for this neglect are obvious. Though prime minister three times, he held power for brief periods on sufferance. He never enjoyed a Commons majority as premier. For eighteen of his twenty-two years of Conservative leadership he headed a party in opposition. Moreover, the view of posterity has been shaped by those

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groomed for greatness: 1799 –1830

with reasons to belittle his accomplishments. In his widely read journals (first edited between 1874 and 1887 by Henry Reeve) the sardonic Charles Greville, Clerk to the Privy Council from 1821 to 1859, stated that Derby was ‘of all men, the one to whom I have felt the greatest political and personal repugnance’.4 Derby was too much affected by ‘the Newmarket style of life’, Greville concluded, to be a serious politician. Derby’s long-time lieutenant Benjamin Disraeli also had reason to diminish Derby’s stature. In his biography of Lord George Bentinck, published in 1852, Disraeli portrayed Derby as ‘a secondary personage in the party and legislature’.5 This selfserving bias was faithfully amplified by Disraelian apologists creating a Beaconsfield tradition. The journalist T. E. Kebbel, in the 1880s, portrayed Derby as an apathetic leader who frustrated Disraeli, the suppressed genius of the mid-Victorian party. Kebbel concluded that Derby had ‘no taste for those strategical manoeuvres which are as necessary in politics as in war’.6 Finally, no reverential multi-volume ‘tombstone’ biography was produced. Unlike Lord Salisbury, Derby did not give journalistic expression to a philosophy couched in pessimistic phrases. Nor, as with Stanley Baldwin, were poignant rural valedictions on the English ‘stock’ collected in volumes of speeches. After his death Derby’s papers remained closed to historical scrutiny. Historians were not kind. Two short biographies of Derby, both written to complete a series on Victorian prime ministers, were published in 1892 and 1893. The High Tory man of letters George Saintsbury described Derby from the authorial standpoint of one who would have opposed Catholic Emancipation, repeal of the Corn Laws, and the whole Irish legislation of Gladstone’s Liberal party.7 Kebbel’s biography softened some of his earlier sharper judgements, portraying Derby as the link between the old-fashioned Conservatism of the English aristocracy and Disraeli’s popular Toryism.8 Yet neither study displaced the abiding impression of a man whose prominence outweighed his substance. Subsequent narrative histories sustained a portrait that was neither complimentary nor compelling. In his history of Conservatism in 1933, F. J. C. Hearnshaw damningly stated that Derby’s ‘incurable frivolity made him more a burden than a blessing to any cause he professed to support’.9 The inherited view of Derby was preserved of a man, in the words of one modern historian, ‘lacking the qualities of ambition and dedication normally necessary for successful party leadership’.10 It became his fate to be overshadowed by his predecessor as Conservative leader, Sir Robert Peel, and his colourful successor, Benjamin Disraeli.


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To relinquish a reputation to detractors is a guarantee of disparagement. Yet no man becomes prime minister three times by accident or default. A passion for horse racing has done the reputations of lords Palmerston, Hartington, and Rosebery less harm. And Derby’s private devotion to Homeric translation—his rendering of The Iliad into English blank verse was published in 1864 to much critical praise—was a pastime he shared with that most earnest of prime ministers, William Gladstone. It is historical judgement, not history, that repeats itself. In 1956 the American scholar Wilbur Devereux Jones published Lord Derby and Victorian Conservatism, whose merits were hampered by an unavoidable reliance on Disraeli’s papers and lack of access to Derby’s own archive.11 All too often, therefore, Jones replicated the perspective on Knowsley, Derby’s Lancashire residence, from Hughenden, Disraeli’s country estate in Buckinghamshire. Not until 1971 was the historian Robert Stewart, in The Politics of Protection: Lord Derby and the Protectionist Party, 1841–1852, able to assess one period of Derby’s life with the benefit of close examination of his own papers.12 A more balanced appreciation of Derby’s career acknowledges that intelligence and ability noted by his colleagues, while recognizing the bluff reserve that kept many at a distance. In private Disraeli marvelled at Derby’s capability; ‘his mind always clear, his patience extraordinary, he rises in difficulty, and his resources never fail’.13 The flamboyant Conservative minister and novelist Edward Bulwer Lytton thought Derby ‘the cleverest public man he had ever met. Others had more genius, more knowledge, more pure intellect, but no one seemed to rival Derby’s cleverness.’14 The Whig Lord Chancellor Lord Campbell declared Derby to be ‘a host in himself. He has marvellous acuteness of intellect and consummate power in debate. There is no subject which he cannot master thoroughly and lucidly explain.’15 Nor should Derby’s public nonchalance and affected disdain for public distinction, entirely characteristic of his upbringing, be confused with lack of commitment. This confounds manner with motivation. Derby loftily declined to show any overt desire for office. Open ambition was a vulgar embarrassment to one of his aristocratic background. Political pre-eminence was an obligation not a prize. Yet beneath such apparent lack of interest lay an earnest resolution. As he reminded Disraeli in 1849: He who has put his hand to the parliamentary plough cannot draw back. I do not speak, of course, of the great majority of members of both Houses, who act as parliamentary units, giving numerical strength and nothing else,

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groomed for greatness: 1799 –1830 to the party to which they attach themselves, but of those whom talent, or station, or accident has placed in the foreground and enabled them to exercise, whether they will or no, an influence over numbers of their brother members. For them there is no retreat … 16

Derby was not a dilettante. Even in moments of despair, often aggravated by the excruciating pain of gout, when he believed the game was lost, he remained determined to play it out to the end. Subordinates rebuffed by his aristocratic hauteur, observers of his total absorption in betting or battue shooting, and those distanced by his famously robust sense of humour, might see indifference or apathy. But intimates rarely doubted his genuine political commitment. Derby the man has remained an ill-defined historical presence. Bulwer Lytton’s much-quoted poetic portrait in The New Timon characterized Derby as aloof, impetuous, and a perennial juvenile. Here Stanley meets—how Stanley scorns!—the glance; The brilliant chief, irregularly great, Frank, haughty, rash, the Rupert of Debate; Nor gout nor foil his freshness can destroy, And time still leaves all Eton in the boy. First in the class, and keenest in the ring, He saps like Gladstone, and he fights like spring!17

Likewise, in 1859 Matthew Arnold described Derby as ‘the true type of the British political nobleman’, with ‘eloquence, high feeling, and good intentions—but the ideas of a school-boy’.18 The public image of the headstrong youth shadowed Derby into old age. But beyond such public perceptions lay a personality both prey to periodic depression and rooted in an evangelical Christian faith. The sudden death of his mother when he was aged just 18; his sense of Providential purpose; his belief in the redemptive power of God’s grace; his abiding love for English literature, the liturgical beauty of the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, and the poetic prose of the Authorized Bible; as well as his private moral sense of personal duty and social obligation, shaped a far more complex personality than that adolescent persona evoked by those with whom he was not intimate. The close loving relations he enjoyed with his wife, children, and grandchildren, particularly with his elder son ‘dearest Eddy’ (later 15th Earl of Derby), provided a domestic security rarely glimpsed by outsiders. The affectionate private man, reading Shakespeare and the Bible aloud to his family, formed a striking contrast to his brusque social manner. A boisterous jollity at race meetings gave little clue to the precise scholarship


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with which he pursued his private passion for Homeric translation. What was evident to acquaintances outside the family ‘circle’ was an aristocratic manner which received deference as a birthright and assumed authority as an entitlement. Derby ‘never pays compliments, you know, that’s not his way’, Lord Malmesbury observed in 1849.19 Similarly, the hostile Lord Clarendon slighted Derby’s want of graciousness: ‘No generosity, never, to friend or foe; never acknowledged help, a great aristocrat proud of family and wealth.’20 Disraeli once remarked that nobody is forgotten when it is convenient to remember them. But Derby’s memory has never been regarded as useful by later generations of Conservatives. This neglect has left a significant gap in our history of Conservatism. We have received a history of the party with Derby largely written out. His absence from our pantheon of Victorian worthies has left aspects of nineteenth-century politics harder to understand. Shortly after Derby’s death in October 1869 Disraeli paid his long-serving leader an eloquent tribute. Derby had, Disraeli declared, abolished slavery, educated Ireland, and Reformed parliament. But as the distillation of a long political life this memorial owed much to an emergent vision of Disraelian Conservatism. Derby did establish the Irish National Education system in 1832, pass the Abolition of Slavery Act in 1833, and initiate the second Parliamentary Reform Act of 1867. But to compose his career around the single leitmotif of enlightened reform imposes one simple pattern on the complications of his public life and the complexity of his personality. Rather, the keys to his temperament lay in the circumstances of Derby’s birth—aristocracy, property, and an evangelical Anglicanism. The responsibilities of the aristocracy, the importance of property to the order and prosperity of the nation, and the necessity of scriptural morality to social harmony and public service provided the cornerstones of his life.

Achilles, lov’d of heaven. (Lord Derby, The Iliad of Homer (1864), i. 5)

On 29 March 1799 Edward Stanley was born at the imposing family seat of Knowsley Hall, Lancashire. As part of the landed elite, his resolute personality was to achieve, almost by inheritance, a prominent role in the affairs of the nation. The earls of Derby owned 60,000 acres in Lancashire, 27,000 of those acres surrounding Knowsley, as well as land in Ireland. The Derby lineage, represented by the family portraits at Knowsley, hanging

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alongside Rembrandt’s Belshazzar’s Feast and Rubens’s Death of Seneca, as well as paintings by Castiglione, Titian, and Van Dyck, displayed impeccable aristocratic credentials. Set in the largest park in the county, containing ornamental gardens and ancient oaks, Knowsley enjoyed open views towards the west, graced to the east by a large lake nearly a mile in length. The original red sandstone medieval Hall had been greatly enlarged in the 1730s, the extensive English baroque-style apartments and private chapel being fronted by a striking two-storey Doric and Ionic colonnade, an ingenious variation on Palladio’s design for the Palazzo Chericati in Vincenza. Atop the portico stood the Derby heraldic arms, supported by a griffin and stag, framing the family motto, ‘Sans Changer’. Yet the broad acres of the Knowsley estate lay on elevated ground just 8 miles north-east of the commercial bustle of Liverpool. The expanding industrial communities of Manchester, St Helens, Warrington, Widnes, Wigan, Bolton, and Preston were nearby. Knowsley Park sat on the main road heading east out of Liverpool where the turnpike divided, heading south-east to Warrington and on to Manchester in one direction, and north-east to St Helens, Wigan, and Bolton in the other. In 1710 the 10th Earl of Derby bought property in Bootle and Kirkdale on the coast just west of Knowsley which, by the end of the century, was sold at an immense profit for the development of Liverpool Docks. At the time of Stanley’s birth Liverpool’s population was approximately 82,000. Just thirty years later, in 1831, this had grown to well over 200,000, and through its docks passed four-fifths of Britain’s cotton imports from America. By his death in 1869 there were nearly 500,000 people living and working in the seaport. A Stanley first became Mayor of Liverpool in 1585 and since 1626 a member of the family had regularly been its MP, a reflection of the fact that they were the largest landlords in the borough. Between 1800 and 1839 the income of the Derby estates quadrupled, largely because of the increasing value of Liverpool and Bury ground rents. By the mid-nineteenth century biochemical pollution, carried on the wind from the neighbouring alkali works of St Helens and Widnes, was killing trees and vegetation in the Knowsley grounds, as expanding manufacture closed in around the pastoral seclusion of the estate. In the early 1860s Derby estimated that half his Lancashire property lay in manufacturing districts. The proximity of the leafy comforts of Knowsley to the urban dynamism of Liverpool and the surrounding industrial communities forcefully represented the growing challenge facing Britain’s landed elite. Around the historic relations between aristocracy, property, and the Anglican Church was rising an increasingly diverse, urban, and


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religiously pluralistic society. The privileged power of landowners, as well as the Established Church, was being challenged by broadening social and industrial interests. In the face of these developments the entitlements of the people, Stanley learnt, were to be extended, while the status of the aristocracy was to be preserved. This was the setting into which Stanley was born, defining the context within which his eventful public life played itself out. The Stanley family traced their line back to the twelfth century and, through the name Audley, to the Norman Conquest. During the thirteenth century Sir John Stanley laid the foundation for future greatness by marrying the heiress of the estates of Lathom, near Ormskirk, and Knowsley. He also received the Isle of Man from Henry IV on the forfeiture of the Percys. His grandson Sir Thomas Stanley, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, was summoned to parliament as Baron Stanley in 1456. In 1482 the second Baron Stanley married Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of Henry Tudor, Earl of Richmond, and became a prominent Yorkist supporter. At the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, a date still dutifully commemorated by the Knowsley household 400 years later, Stanley placed the crown of Richard III on the head of his victorious stepson, who, as Henry VII, bestowed on Stanley an earldom. As the earls of Derby the Stanleys became the pre-eminent family of Lancashire. The 1st Earl, as a demonstration of soaring fortunes, enlarged the family house at Lathom and the hunting lodge at Knowsley, in part for the use of his royal stepson. The 3rd Earl was Lord High Steward at the coronation of Queen Mary and one of the wealthiest peers at Queen Elizabeth’s court. The 7th Earl, a devoted royalist during the Civil War, was captured by the parliamentarians at the Battle of Worcester and subsequently beheaded at Bolton in 1651. His wife, meanwhile, achieved fame for her spirited defence, first of Lathom House, which was largely destroyed in 1644, and then of the Isle of Man in 1651 against parliamentary forces. A stone inscription placed in the new fabric of Knowsley Hall in 1732 records, however, that after the Restoration Charles II, despite the 7th Earl’s loyalty to the Crown, refused to restore all the estates to the family. Stuart ingratitude towards the ‘Martyr Earl’ was engraved, both physically and figuratively, on the family memory. After the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the 9th Earl wedded the Stanleys to the Whig cause. His brother the 10th Earl established Knowsley as the principal family residence, building during the 1730s an enlarged mansion. The Gothic Royal Lodgings were greatly expanded with an extensive range of apartments and surrounding stables. Designed by the architect Henry Sephton and faced with red brick, stone

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dressings, and decorative parapets in the baroque style, the new building provided extensive accommodation for the members of the family, finished internally with rich stucco decoration undertaken by Italian craftsmen. A picture gallery, four ‘Painting Rooms’, and a ‘Statue Room’ provided an impressive setting for the Earl’s collection of old master paintings and classical sculptures. The architectural result was what one visitor in 1766 described as a ‘patchwork’. More scathingly Benjamin Disraeli, upon his first visit to Knowsley in 1853, described the house as a vast ‘irregular pile of many ages; half of it like St. James’s Palace, low, red, with turrets; the other like the Dutch façade of Hampton Court’. With the death of the 10th Earl, in 1736, the direct male line ended. The claim to the Isle of Man devolved upon the Duke of Atholl, while the earldom passed to the 10th Earl’s kinsman Sir Edward Stanley of Bickerstaffe. Sir Edward’s grandson, born in 1752, succeeded to the title as 12th Earl of Derby in 1776. Under the 12th Earl of Derby the manners and morals of the Stanley household became the epitome of Regency Whiggery. The physically diminutive Earl’s forceful personality revelled in the high thoughts and low pursuits of that brilliant social milieu which characterized Whiggery excluded from political power. Educated at Eton from 1764 to 1770 and Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1771 to 1773, he was, as a ‘very raw, light, young man’, chiefly known for his passions for horse racing and cockfighting.21 Much of his time up at Cambridge was spent pursuing the established family interest in horse breeding and racing at nearby Newmarket. After coming down from Cambridge he was elected MP for the county of Lancaster in 1774. The same year he was elected to the London club White’s, became an enthusiastic member of the Jockey Club (founded in 1750), and began refurbishing his elegant town house, designed in the fashionable neo-classical style by Robert Adam, at No. 23 Grosvenor Square. The year 1774 also saw the marriage of this eligible bachelor to Elizabeth Hamilton, daughter of the 6th Duke of Hamilton. An elaborate engagement party, or fête champêtre, costing £5,000 was held at the Stanley shooting lodge on Epsom Downs, the Oaks, extended with a pavilion designed by Robert Adam for the event. The prenuptial festivities were organized by the bridegroom’s uncle by marriage General John Burgoyne, with the actor David Garrick directing troupes of performers, actresses, and musicians combining opera, archery, and Druidic ritual as an entertainment. Derby dressed as Rubens and Lady Elizabeth as Rubens’s wife for the occasion. Following their marriage the couple immediately established themselves in Grosvenor Square as the generous hosts of some of the more brilliant events of the London ‘season’. One


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contemporary noted that ‘their suppers are magnificent, but their hours are abominably late’.22 The new Countess Elizabeth indulged her passion for whist and piquet played for high stakes, keeping her guests at the card table until dawn. The birth of their first child, the future 13th Earl, in April 1775, was celebrated with a spectacular regatta on the Thames. Barges fancifully decorated after the styles of the Doges of Venice bore a large company of guests along the river to watch boat races between Westminster Bridge and London Bridge, which were followed by a concert and dancing in the rotunda at Ranelegh, the amusement resort in Chelsea, until the early hours of the morning. Robert Adam was commissioned to reconstruct the Oaks, adding an extended classical villa around the original castle, although the scheme was never completed. The fashionable painter Angelica Kauffmann painted the young family, while portraits of Countess Elizabeth were commissioned from both Joshua Reynolds and George Romney. But the marriage was not a success. The domestic contentment suggested by Kauffmann’s skilled brush was an illusion. Allegedly Countess Elizabeth, as a reluctant red-haired beauty of 21, had been sacrificed in betrothal to Derby by the vanity of her mother, now the Duchess of Argyll. By 1778 Countess Elizabeth was involved in a scandalous affair with the handsome and unsavoury Duke of Dorset, a notorious womanizer. But the 12th Earl refused to consider a divorce. As a result his wife faded into social ostracism, removing herself to the Continent for a period before returning to London in 1782. Derby settled on her an allowance of £2,000 per year and she took up residence in her brother’s house in Portman Square. Attempts by Derby’s mother-in-law to bring about a reconciliation failed. It was a sad fate for one whom some, including the Prince of Wales, found to be an intelligent, attractive, and kindly woman. By 1790 she was an invalid and increasingly a recluse. Derby, meanwhile, a small, restless figure, prone to overweight from early middle age, after burning the portrait of Countess Elizabeth hanging at Knowsley, took charge of their three young children and threw himself into his pleasures. Horse racing and his stud farm at Newmarket remained his passions. In 1779 he founded the Oaks, to be run on Epsom Downs, winning the first race with his filly Bridget. The following year he founded the Derby, also run at Epsom, which quickly became the premier race in the flat season calendar. He gained a reputation as a billiards player and, against heavy odds placed on him at Brooks’s, won a bet making an ascent in a balloon. The breeding and fighting of game cocks became one of his most avid pursuits; the Black-Breasted Red, known widely as the

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Knowsley Breed, being renowned for its ferocity in the cockpit. At the same time, Derby had an affair with one of the numerous mistresses of the Duke of Dorset, Elizabeth Armistead. A shoemaker’s daughter, Elizabeth Armistead subsequently, after an affair with the Prince of Wales, became the devoted wife of Charles James Fox, though until her death she received an annuity from the Knowsley estates. With the encouragement of his uncle General Burgoyne, the 12th Earl also developed a love for the theatre and amateur theatricals. It was this interest which first introduced him to the celebrated and beautiful blueeyed young actress Elizabeth Farren, the daughter of an Irish apothecary. Farren made her London debut in a revival of Oliver Goldsmith’s comic play She Stoops to Conquer in June 1777. For the next twenty years she dazzled both London audiences and ‘the little earl’, while refusing to become Derby’s mistress during the lifetime of his wife. The constant presence of Elizabeth Farren’s mother as a chaperone ensured that, despite the devoted attentions of Derby and his frequent visits to her home in Green Street, near the Earl’s residence in Grosvenor Square, her reputation remained unblemished. In 1787 the Earl won the Derby with his colt Teazle, named after Farren’s critically acclaimed performance in Richard Sheridan’s School for Scandal. Likewise, in 1794 Derby won the Oaks with his filly Hermione, named after Farren’s famous role in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Thomas Lawrence’s stunning full-length portrait of Elizabeth Farren caused a sensation when it was hung at the Royal Academy in 1790. In March 1797 Lady Derby died. Two months later, after bidding a tearful farewell to the stage, the lowly born Elizabeth Farren married the 45-year-old Earl of Derby. Immediately following the ceremony, which was held by special licence in Derby’s Grosvenor Square house, the new Countess of Derby was presented to the Queen in the Drawing Room. The bride, one newspaper reported, ‘filled her new character with an ease and dignity every way becoming her rank’.23 The ebullient 12th Earl discovered, during the increasing time he spent with his second wife at Knowsley, that domestic contentment which had hitherto eluded him. As a generous host he was affectionately remembered for his joyful temperament and good cheer, the second Lady Derby for her devotion both to the family and to her husband’s happiness. The 14th Earl remembered her fondly throughout his life and spoke of her often. It was she who gave the young Stanley his earliest training in public speaking. In 1822 the Whig MP and diarist Thomas Creevey found ‘little Lord Derby’, now aged 70, ‘very, very old in looks, but as merry as ever’.24 To accommodate his lavish entertaining the 12th Earl added, after 1810, a


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new kitchen and an enormous Dining Room to the old wing of the Hall, approached through two great Gothic doors and illuminated by a thirtysix-light chandelier, designed by the accomplished Liverpool architect John Foster. Customarily, in this impressive Dining Room each Monday evening, the Earl entertained up to 100 of his neighbours, while on other evenings the dinner table was more modestly set for forty, including house guests, poor relations, and visitors. A local story survived of one guest, whom the Earl never met, occupying for a number of years rooms in an obscure corner of the extensive apartments of the main house. Another anecdote recounted how one evening, as the guests sat down for dinner, the patrician Earl noticed one visitor picking up and examining in wonderment the plate at his setting. Immediately the Earl rapped the table and loudly declared that ‘Mr So-and-So has called for his carriage.’ In the nervous lull that followed the culprit being shown out, the Earl pronounced: ‘Funny sort of fella, talking about a fella’s things.’25 Into old age the Earl continued to take evident pleasure in bantering with young female guests about their lovers. Creevey (whose natural father was Derby’s neighbour Lord Sefton of Croxteth Hall just 2 miles west of Knowsley) ‘never saw a man or woman live more happily with nine grown up children. It is my Lord Derby who is the great moving principle.’26 The marriage, around which this domestic contentment revolved, was a romantic union. Yet it was also a marriage which, because it was not made with a Cavendish, Howard, Spencer, or Ponsonby, moved Derby away from the inner family conclaves of ‘Grand Whiggery’. The bar was not a moral one, rather genealogical. After 1800 Knowsley became increasingly peripheral to the Chatsworth, Castle Howard, Bowood, and Holland House circuit. Entering the House of Lords in 1776 the 12th Earl of Derby acquired a lifelong commitment to the Whig politics and gaming company of Charles James Fox. At first, in part because of family loyalty to General Burgoyne, Derby supported the government’s policies in the American colonies. But in 1778, accompanied by Burgoyne recently returned from his defeat at Saratoga, he became a firm supporter of the Whig opposition. In 1780 Derby became a founding member of Fox’s Westminster Committee, which, in partnership with radicals, began campaigning for political Reform. He subsequently opposed the war with France in 1793 and the restriction of civil liberties that followed. Though briefly Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in 1783, and again from 1806 to 1807, he suffered the long years of opposition to which this allegiance condemned him. In 1820 he disapproved of George IV’s attempt to rid himself of Queen Caroline, while throughout his life he loyally supported the Whig interest

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in Liverpool and other Lancashire constituencies. Prolonged opposition hardened his Whiggish rhetoric and beliefs. These warned of the tyranny latent within the royal prerogative, proclaimed the importance of a vigilant aristocracy in checking arbitrary rule, and framed the cause of civil and religious liberty within a firmly hierarchical social vision. The sanctity of property was enshrined in the broad acres of a landed elite, upon whose rank and breeding rested a duty to direct national public affairs. The Derby title stood second in order of precedence among British earldoms, only the Earl of Shrewsbury holding an older title of that rank granted in 1442. From his cockfighting and his fifty-eight-year tenure as Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire to his parliamentary denunciations of arbitrary government, Derby embraced the full spectrum of Foxite tastes. A clubbable conviviality, worldly sophistication, an elevated rhetoric exalting liberty and a patrician aristocratic manner were all there. If the 12th Earl of Derby personified the ebullient, patrician, and secular character of Foxite Whiggery, his tall and athletic eldest son, the future 13th Earl, embodied a more austere view of the world. Edward Smith Stanley brought a sombre evangelicalism, as well as ornithology and zoology, into the Knowsley household, though for much of his life he remained under the shadow of his father’s forceful personality. Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, were followed by an unobtrusive political career dedicated to the Whig cause. In 1796, aged 21, he became one of the members for the borough of Preston. Since 1768 both MPs for Preston had been nominees of the Derby family. But in 1796 the local Tory interest, behind the candidacy of a Preston cotton manufacturer, John Horrocks, forced a contested election which it cost Stanley £7,700 to win. At subsequent elections in 1802, 1806, and 1807 both parties agreed to share the seats between them, until 1812, when Stanley left his Preston seat to his cousin and brother-in-law Edmund Hornby. Stanley himself took the county seat of Lancashire, which he held unopposed until 1832. He never did cut a figure in national politics, however. He returned loyal Whig votes in the division lobby until Lord Grey strengthened the Whig interest in the Lords by raising him to the Upper House in 1832 with the title Baron Stanley of Bickerstaffe. Two years later, upon the death of his father, he succeeded as the 13th Earl of Derby and in 1839 was made a Knight of the Garter. But the 13th Earl’s real interests lay elsewhere. As well as carrying out improvements to the Knowsley estate, his great passion was zoology. He became President of both the Linnaean Society and the Zoological Society. A large number of mammals, birds, reptiles, and insects, including


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the Stanley Crane, Derby’s Woolly Opossum, Derby’s Eland, Derby’s Parakeet, and a Giant Girdled Lizard, were named after him. In association with the Liverpool banker, fellow naturalist, and fellow Whig William Roscoe, he helped finance a zoological expedition to Louisiana. Through the Zoological Society he came to employ the young Edward Lear as an illustrator of his private collection. By the time of his death in 1851 his aviary and menagerie comprised over 400 species, covering 170 acres of the Knowsley estate. The collection included zebras, kangaroos, ostriches, bison, elk, quaggas, yaks, llamas, alpacas, and 200 parrots. Extensive new aviaries and pens were built around the stables just north of the Hall. It cost £15,000 per year to maintain, and part of the legacy he left his son was a debt of about half a million pounds. Upon his death the 13th Earl’s collection was promptly dispersed between the Zoological Society’s collection at Regent’s Park and the Queen’s private collection, while his 15,000 museum specimens formed the nucleus of the Liverpool City Museum. The 13th Earl’s devotion to his private interests, rather than public affairs, was complemented by the temperament of his wife. In 1798 he married his first cousin Charlotte Margaret Hornby, the quiet and pious daughter of the Revd Geoffrey Hornby, Rector of Winwick, in the domestic chapel at Knowsley. Two years earlier his sister Lady Charlotte Stanley had married her first cousin, Charlotte Hornby’s eldest brother, Edmund Hornby. Charlotte Hornby possessed an intense evangelical faith, in stark contrast to the worldly mores of her parents-in-law. She assumed responsibility for educating her children to the realities of justification through faith and good works, and the possibility of redemption through Christ’s atonement. From her the young Stanley acquired the conviction that inner faith must shape a sense of social duty, that the gospels were the authoritative guide to Christian conduct, and that the single most important event for later generations of faithful was Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. When she died, aged 41 in June 1817, she was survived by her husband, three sons, and three daughters. Her husband, a widower for the rest of his life, suffering from increasing deafness and in later life partial paralysis, immediately found solace in an intensified daily routine of zoological notes and observations. His susceptibility to prolonged periods of depression also subsequently became more marked, an emotional tendency later evident in his eldest son and the next generation of Stanley heirs. With the birth in March 1799 of Edward Geoffrey Stanley, as the eldest son of the 24-year-old future 13th Earl, three generations of Stanleys filled the numerous rooms of Knowsley. The nursery itself came to comprise

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a rapidly growing community overseen by the elderly housekeeper Mrs Brown, a stickler for etiquette yet kind companion to the children. Edward Stanley’s own siblings came to include Charlotte born in 1801, Henry born in 1803, Emily born in May 1804, who died just six months later, Louisa born in 1805, Ellinor born in 1807, and a brother born in 1808 named Charles James Fox Stanley. In addition, the Knowsley schoolroom included the children borne by the second Countess of Derby as Edward Stanley’s aunts and uncle. Lucy was born in 1799. A year later an uncle, James Stanley, was born, followed by the birth of another aunt, Mary Stanley, in 1801. By 1808 nine children, all born between 1799 and 1808 to either Edward Stanley’s grandparents or parents, made up the nursery at Knowsley. Further companionship was provided by the slightly older four illegitimate children of General Burgoyne by his mistress the opera singer Susan Caulfield. Following their father’s death in 1792 the 12th Earl took them into his home at Knowsley. Young Edward Stanley’s status among this extensive junior community, as heir to the title, reinforced that early self-confidence which, even prior to his departure for Eton aged 12, was a striking aspect of his personality. His attractive, slim appearance, brown wavy hair, the aquiline nose inherited from his mother, his full lips and firm chin, framed the steady gaze of youthful self-belief. He was, from his birth, a particular favourite of his grandfather. Under the patriarchal sway of the ‘little earl’ the large Knowsley household embraced the full spectrum of Whiggish disposition, from lively Foxite constitutionalism to austere evangelical moralism, and from actresses married to earldoms to rectors’ daughters married to eldest sons. Yet central to all were the tenets of a Whiggery that intoned the sacrosanct nature of property, the obligation of wealth, the constitutional primacy of parliament, loyalty to party, and a liberty safeguarded within a stable social hierarchy, buttressed by an Established Anglican Church. The dangers to be feared were an arbitrary prerogative and a lawless, ungodly mob. Edward Stanley well remembered a political catechism taught him as a young boy beginning: ‘What does A stand for? An Axe. What is an axe for? To chop off Kings’ heads.’27 When in 1812, aged 13, he heard of the Tory prime minister Spencer Perceval’s assassination, he thought the news too good to be true. Thus were ingrained into a young mind the partisan instincts of Whig opposition. Meanwhile, his mother’s catechism expressed itself in Stanley’s youthful poems, such as the following stanza written when he was 9 years old.


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The world’s a stage of wickedness Its pleasures are but pain They vanish and consume like smoke But a good act ne’er in vain.

The year that he learnt of Perceval’s death, aged 13, he wrote: Another year is past! another wave Has driven our bark still nearer to that shore On which we all must strike and none can save Or stay his destin’d course!28

Thus a private belief in Providence and Divine grace was fused with an understanding of the wider world that emphasized the role of an enlightened aristocracy as the bulwark of civilized liberty and order. Selfcontained domestic security and an assured assumption of status combined with an enthusiastic enjoyment of field and turf.

And pass’d in likeness of a princely youth, In op’ning manhood, fairest term of life. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 408)

Like his father and grandfather before him Edward Stanley, after an early education in the schoolroom at Knowsley, was sent to Eton. As an Oppidan he lived outside the college in a house under a master known as a Dame. Oppidans enjoyed a superior social status to the Collegers (Foundation scholarship boys) accommodated in the infamous Long Chamber. But, apart from this distinction, a robust egalitarianism prevailed among the pupils. One noble old Etonian remembered having his pride literally kicked out of him. The 2nd Earl Grey, Fox’s successor as leader of the Whigs, had been at Eton in the 1770s, as had the 2nd Viscount Melbourne in the 1780s. Both Grey and Melbourne were to head the reforming ministries of the 1830s. Another old Etonian, the 3rd Lord Holland, established the glittering literary salon at Holland House that became the social centre of Whig culture. In 1811 Stanley became a member of the fifth form lower division. In 1814 he joined the fifth form upper division, an elevation that exempted him from fagging and bestowed some liberty from the disciplinary regime imposed by the sixth form. As well as his uncle James Stanley, twelve months his junior, Stanley’s classmates comprised an unusually large number of boys destined to become prominent men. They included Edward Pusey, later leader of

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the Oxford Movement and Regius Professor of Hebrew; Richard Jelf, later Canon of Christ Church, Oxford; George Howard, later 7th Earl of Carlisle and Lord Lieutenant for Ireland; John Evelyn Denison, later Speaker of the House of Commons; Lord Graham, later the Duke of Montrose and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; Robert Vernon Smith, later Lord Lyveden and a Liberal President of the Board of Control; three future ambassadors, Lord Howard de Walden, John Bligh, and John Cradock; William Baring, later Lord Ashburton and Paymaster General; Frederick Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes, later 16th Baron Saye and Sele; and Lord Porchester, later 3rd Earl of Carnarvon. Also alongside Stanley in the fifth form was William Ewart, son of a Liverpool merchant and later MP for Liverpool, and Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, later Earl of Ellesmere. In this illustrious company Stanley moved with ease and assurance. At Eton, Pusey recalled, Stanley had ‘an iron will and an unbounded self-confidence’.29 Stanley arrived at Eton during the infamous regime of John ‘Flogger’ Keate, who was appointed headmaster in 1809. Keate was a gift to contemporary caricaturists. Little more than 5 feet in height, with an imposing voice and shaggy red eyebrows, he was a notoriously harsh disciplinarian, combating the inadequacy of his staff, the unruliness of his pupils, and the large size of the divisions. Approximately 170 boys were taught together in one room, the Upper School. There Keate suffered the indignities of having his desk smashed, songs being sung in chorus by boys during lessons, and the occasional fusillade of rotten eggs. His response was rough and immediate. Stories of Keate’s mass floggings became legendary. But he was also a brilliant classical scholar who, when he could, encouraged the intellectual abilities of his pupils. He nurtured the establishment of the Eton Society (to be known as Pop), formed by Charles Townshend as a debating club in 1811. Stanley became an early member of this nursery of some of the age’s greatest orators. Here boys debated historical topics according to parliamentary rules; the events of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as the trial of Charles I and the Glorious Revolution of 1688, providing the occasion for indirect comment on contemporary issues, which were formally barred from discussion. The importance of Pop was twofold. It provided a forum for boys to develop their practical forensic skills. It also broadened a curriculum that was otherwise exclusively classical. Books of extracts, the Scriptores Graeci and Scriptores Latini, Homer, Virgil, Horace, and the composition of Latin verses comprised the relentless diet of class work. At the end of 1816, during his final year at Eton, Stanley undertook an abridgement of Herodotus, to


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which he prefixed a summary of the periods prior to the Persian monarchy. In 1817 he completed an abridgement of Livy’s Roman history. At the same time, he also made extensive notes on Indian history examining Hindu chronology, classifications of the people, forms of government, Hindu law, manners, and religion, and the Muslim religion and culture. But this departure from classical study did not prompt him to question the superiority of European civilization. Hindu culture, he concluded, could only subsist under one of the ‘weakest states of the human mind’.30 What he did acquire at Eton was an intimacy with classical oratory and a lifelong love for Greek and Latin poetry and prose. Charles James Fox prescribed a knowledge of classical poetry as the necessary training for that largeness of view required by a statesman. Stanley also came to see it as an indispensable preparation for a public career. As he later told the students of Glasgow University: to the man who wishes to study politics, or the art of persuasion, nothing can be more necessary than to imbue his mind with the spirit of the ancient poets and historians, that he may be able to infuse into his own arguments and compositions, and to draw from that pure and crystal fountain, some of the copious diction, high sentiment and masculine thought, which so eminently distinguished those great men.31

The study and translation of classical poetry remained an absorbing comfort throughout his life. Compulsory attendance at chapel provided the only formal religious instruction at Eton. Stanley’s contemporary Pusey recollected that ‘of what is called divinity, of the contents, historical and doctrinal, of the Bible and of any illustrations of them, Eton boys are generally shamefully ignorant’.32 The pervading ethos among the pupils was described as vigorous heathenism. This was despite the assistant masters all being clerics and including, during Stanley’s time, the evangelical Revd John Sumner, later Archbishop of Canterbury. In 1815 Sumner published his book Apostolical Teaching and, in the following year, a two-volume Treatise on the Records of the Creation. Yet Keate responded to the religious enthusiasm of one Eton pupil with the threat that he would flog the conceit out of him. A youthful bigot, Keate declared, would eventually only sicken of religion and become an infidel. It was through his mother that Stanley acquired a close knowledge of the Scriptures. It was within the family, in particular as part of a mother’s education of her children, that he saw the young being introduced to the Bible as ‘the written word of God himself’.33 In 1828 Stanley was to give published expression to this

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belief in the form of conversations between a mother and her two young children on the beauty and meaning of the parables of the New Testament. At Eton familiarity with the outward forms of Anglicanism, less than the theological substance, was sufficient. During Stanley’s last months at Eton bereavement tragically transformed the family home. Already, in 1809, his eldest aunt, Lucy, had died aged 10 years old. Then on 3 April 1817 his uncle and classmate James Stanley also passed away. This was followed ten weeks later by the death on 16 June 1817 of his mother, aged just 41. The 18-year-old Stanley’s anguish expressed itself in the poetry he composed during the following months, as he grieved over those deep wounds that ‘force the heart to weep’. Memories of their walks, conversation, and reading together held in his mind a remembrance of his mother with whom his earliest years were ‘so closely … entwined’. Consolation lay in the faith which she had bequeathed him. The cup is bitter, and religion’s power Alone can soothe her in that lonely hour. Bid her with resignation kiss the rod, And e’en in chastisement adore her God. When Heaven shall open, Death shall have no power, Our re-united train glad hymns may raise, To tune th’all merciful Creator’s praise, And hail the year of woe, in mercy given, By short-lived pain, to fit our souls for Heaven.

His later writings on the Scriptures were a memorial to her influence. Her sainted motherhood became in his mind a model of spiritual instruction. The grave, he wrote in 1828, does away with all distinctions except those of superior goodness and piety. The great and good God, he affirmed, gives us earthly parents to be the instruments and representatives of himself.34 Stanley left Eton with a love for the classics and an intelligence refined by diligent application to translation and précis. His self-assurance and robust directness of manner assimilated maternal earnestness without subverting a temperament that embraced pleasure as enthusiastically as study. He departed Eton shortly before the revolt of the pupils against Keate’s draconian rule in 1818 when rioting broke out in the school and mass floggings followed. But he had been present in 1814 when the Emperor of Russia, the King of Prussia, and Marshal Blücher visited the College. They represented the Continental alliance bringing an end to the epic European struggle with Napoleon, victory at Waterloo in 1815 concluding a conflict that hung over the first sixteen years of Stanley’s youth.


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From the fagging and flogging of Keate’s Eton, in 1817 Stanley went up to the reformed Christ Church, Oxford, of Dean Cyril Jackson. Under the autocratic Revd Jackson, Christ Church acquired a formidable reputation as the foremost Oxford college for intellectual rigour, producing capable and educated leaders for Church and State. In 1808 Robert Peel graduated from Christ Church having achieved a double first in the newly revised university examination system. Following Jackson’s retirement in 1809, however, Charles Hall, arguably the worst Dean in Christ Church’s history, succeeded the forceful university reformer. Jackson’s legacy passed into the hands of those tutors he had gathered around him. A number of Etonians matriculated alongside Stanley in October 1817. These included Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, John Evelyn Denison, William Ewart, Edward Portman, and Rose Lambert Price. Stanley went up to Christ Church with the privileged status of a gentleman commoner. Upon payment of additional fees, among other benefits, gentleman commoners were given better rooms in college than ordinary undergraduates, which included accommodation for a servant. He was duly ensconced in Peckwater Quad (Staircase 7, Room 4), where the spacious rooms built between 1707 and 1714 were fronted in the style of an Italian Renaissance palazzo as an early example of English Palladianism. As an Etonian gentleman commoner at Christ Church, he immediately became part of the smartest set. Undergraduate social life was rigidly hierarchical, different sets or social groups among the students denoting subtle graduations of status informed by family background, wealth, and disposition. Thus a student was identified as either a ‘reading’, ‘idle’, or ‘sporting’ man. One non-Etonian undergraduate, on coming up in October 1817, found it ‘a most difficult thing to get into the good society of Christ Church, as the men are very formal’. Let ‘a man try to be as civil as he can, without you are in his set he cannot do much for you’. Though ‘a man may know almost every man to speak to, he has nothing to do with him without he is in his set’.35 Within these close groups were forged strong friendships. Eton men at Christ Church formed the nucleus of the most prestigious undergraduate set in the college. The vast majority of the Oxford undergraduates who were peers or the sons of peers were at Christ Church and ‘the House’ was well known for its bucks and bloods, showy and swaggering rich young men of fashion. Upon one hapless contemporary remarking that he thought the generality of Etonians went to Cambridge, it was bluntly pointed out to him that all ‘the gentleman-like’ Etonians came to Christ Church.36 Very few but the Foundation scholars from Eton, it was declared, went up to Cambridge.

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Among his own set Stanley formed close friendships with Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, Henry Labouchere, John Evelyn Denison, and John Stuart Wortley. They were brought together by common literary tastes, similar political views, and a shared intellectual curiosity. The cultivated Lord Leveson-Gower, younger son of the 2nd Marquess of Stafford, was at an early age publishing translations of Goethe and Schiller. At Christ Church, Stanley also continued, as at Eton, to write poems marking special events, such as his mother’s birthday, and translating Greek and Latin verse outside his formal reading. In Lord Leveson-Gower’s company he also began translations of French and German poetic verse. After entering the Commons in 1822 as a supporter of George Canning and an eloquent advocate of Free Trade, Lord Leveson-Gower quickly became Lord of the Treasury, a Privy Councillor in 1828, and Chief Secretary for Ireland. Inheriting in 1833 estates from his uncle, the 8th Earl of Bridgewater, worth an estimated £90,000 per year, he assumed the surname Egerton and was awarded a DCL degree by Oxford in 1834. Fellow Etonian John Evelyn Denison, a future Speaker of the House of Commons, was remembered as ‘a man of considerable culture and intellectual refinement’.37 The evangelical Henry Labouchere, who was to gain a first-class degree in Classics in 1820, entered parliament as a Whig MP in 1826. John Stuart Wortley, later 2nd Baron Wharncliffe, gained a first-class degree in Mathematics in 1821, became an MP in 1823, and was memorialized as ‘an enlightened agriculturist and a cultivated man’.38 Within this group Stanley found a companionship which matched his intellectual interests. It also provided a camaraderie born of their mutual high spirits. In January 1819 Stanley, heading a group of drunk undergraduate friends late at night, pulled the figure of Mercury, erected in 1695, down from its plinth in the centre of Christ Church’s Great Quadrangle. Since then the fine bronze head of the statue has remained in the safety of Christ Church Library. No formal disciplinary action was taken against Stanley, the authorities drawing a discreet veil over what was portrayed as a boisterous gentlemanly escapade. In Aristotle’s words, his gusto gave glitter to his virtues. In 1817 Oxford University was a Tory institution supporting an Anglican State. Each year special University sermons commemorated the failure of the Gunpowder Plot, the martyrdom of Charles I, and the Restoration. Chapel attendance was compulsory for all undergraduates, although Stanley declared to the Commons in 1834 that mandatory chapel attendance by undergraduates, sometimes under the influence of drink, ‘was most injurious to the morals of the youth of the country, and was calculated more to deaden all feelings for religion, than if all the Dissenters of


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England were admitted to the honours of the University’.39 The Peterloo Massacre in 1819 prompted the University to send an address to the King denouncing blasphemy and sedition. During the Queen Caroline affair town crowds protested in support of the Queen, to be met by a gown mob and a Vice-Chancellor reading the Riot Act and calling in the Yeomanry. Again, the University sent a loyal address to the King pronouncing in favour of law and order. Yet Stanley’s student friendships complemented his own Whiggish allegiances. Indeed, though not a close friend, Stanley’s circle in Christ Church included the Etonian William Ewart, who in 1828 was to enter parliament as a radical Reformer. Likewise, the Etonian Edward Portman was to graduate from Christ Church in 1821 with a first class in Classics and enter the Commons as a Reform MP for Dorset in 1823. The Tory ethos of Oxford had little impact on Stanley’s Whiggish views. Stanley’s tutor at Christ Church was the amiable Revd Edmund Goodenough, later Dean of Wells. Goodenough was a man of broad cultural interests, a linguist, and an excellent scholar. In Stanley’s first term he set his pupil reading Herodotus and Euclid. He initiated Stanley’s study of mathematics, which had not formed part of the Eton curriculum. Yet a fellow student of Goodenough observed that their tutor was popular among neither ‘reading’ nor ‘idle’ men. ‘The former do not like him because by his sending for them so seldom they cannot have the passages explained to them which they cannot make out till they almost forget what they are about, and the latter because though he sends seldom yet he expects a great deal to be done.’ The same student, upon asking Goodenough what he should read, was told that ‘he thought I had better entirely suit myself in that respect’.40 In 1819 Goodenough left Christ Church to become headmaster of Westminster School, in which position, despite his scholarly abilities and cultivated interests, he proved sadly ineffective. Nevertheless, as recorded in the Christ Church collections book, Stanley worked his way through Herodotus, Thucydides, Horace, Aeschylus’ Antigone, Plato’s Phaedo, Aristotle’s Ethics, Tacitus, Virgil, and Juvenal between Michaelmas Term 1817 and Hilary Term 1820.41 At Oxford he read nothing written after the first century. The great texts of the classical age, it was firmly believed, provided sufficient ‘critical scholarship for the learned avocations’. They stimulated ‘a proper state of ferment and anxiety for further knowledge’ and ensured ‘an expansion of intellect and a maturity of taste’.42 For one term Stanley read mathematics under the Revd Thomas Short (later Bishop of St Asaph), who subsequently commented in his notebook that Stanley was ‘a clever promising young man’.43 Through his

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reading and tutorials Stanley acquired that knowledge of Aristotle which was the requirement for scholarly success at Oxford at the beginning of the nineteenth century, while Homer was held up by his tutors as a model of style for truthful directness. But, not untypically for a son of the peerage, he left Oxford without taking a degree. He gave up full-time residence at Christ Church in February 1820, visited intermittently during March, and finally went down in April at the end of the 1820 Hilary Term. Far more importantly than taking a degree, in 1819 he won the Chancellor’s Prize for Latin composition with his spirited poem Syracuse, a prestigious honour signalling his scholarly abilities. With the Chancellor’s Prize to his name he made his mark as a clever young nobleman of considerable intellectual gifts.

And sage debate, on which attends renown, Me then he sent, instructor of thy youth, To prompt thy language, and thine acts to guide. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 289)

After Oxford it was to the cultured 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne, a leading Foxite, son of the prime minister Lord Shelburne and a youthful Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Ministry of All the Talents of 1806–7, that Stanley looked for an education beyond the classics. Lansdowne was nineteen years Stanley’s senior and personified that urbane sophistication which characterized Whig gatherings at Bowood, Holland House, and Wilton. Supposedly on the advice of Jeremy Bentham, Lansdowne had studied at Edinburgh University after Cambridge. There he digested a rich intellectual diet of David Hume, Adam Smith, and Dugald Stewart. From Stewart’s lectures, while also a lodger in Stewart’s house, Lansdowne learnt that the House of Commons was in command of the other parts of the constitution in a convergence of executive and legislative power. He also heard Stewart arguing, in turn influenced by Hume, that the proper source of executive authority was influence, working through status and deference, and operating through parties in parliament led by responsible aristocrats. Lord John Russell, Lord Brougham, the future editors of the Edinburgh Review, Francis Jeffrey, Francis Horner, and Sydney Smith, as well as Lord Palmerston, shared Lansdowne’s education at Stewart’s feet. Then, as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1807, aged 27, Lansdowne emerged as a possible future leader of the Whigs. Following Francis


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Horner’s death in 1817 he also became the foremost Whig spokesman on political economy. Lansdowne formed an intellectual bridge between the literary sophistication of ‘Grand Whiggery’, as represented by the Foxite illuminati of Holland House, and the liberal impulses of the Scottish Enlightenment, as expressed in the new social sciences and political economy. The atmosphere at Lansdowne’s country house Bowood, compared to Holland House, was quieter and more serious. The Irish poet Tom Moore was resident on the estate and the economist Nassau Senior a regular visitor. While Lord Holland’s tastes lay with literature and poetry, Lansdowne’s interests were in the fine arts, sculpture, and painting. Lansdowne and Holland also differed in temperament. Lansdowne lacked overt ambition, was less of a social being than Holland, had little inclination for sport, and often came across as mild and compliant. Yet behind this reclusive manner lay a sharp intelligence. By the 1820s, while only privately admitting the desirability of parliamentary Reform, Lansdowne was devoting himself to the questions of education and the problems of Ireland, its economy, Church, and central administration; issues to which he brought a cool intellect little animated by religious feeling. On coming down from Oxford it was under Lansdowne’s tutelage that Stanley placed himself. Stanley confessed to Lansdowne in September 1821 that ‘my reading hitherto has been so desultory and so interrupted that I feel almost that I was beginning again’, although he was convinced that resolution and method were ‘the two prime secrets’ for success.44 As an aspiring young Whig preparing himself for public life, Stanley acquired from Lansdowne a future philosophy of action rooted in a particular view of the English past. As Lansdowne advised: ‘Bacon says all men are artificers of their own fortune, and I am sure they must ultimately be artificers of their own minds.’45 Lansdowne prescribed readings for Stanley intended to train his mind for a political career, with lessons drawn from the nation’s historical experience. This Whig intellectual tradition, in which Stanley now immersed himself, highlighted the emergence of the unique genius of the English national character evident in past politics, particularly that of the Tudor and Stuart periods. This provided models of statecraft that had shaped the particular formation of the English nation state, despite, from the Whig point of view in the early 1820s, the literature being barren of anything like an acceptable general history. David Hume’s History of England, the major established work published between 1754 and 1761, was regarded as factually unreliable. Hume’s Tory bias was undisguised. Particular mischief had been done,

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Whigs felt, by his argument that the liberties of England were of a late date, having been extorted by violence from weak Plantagenet princes. Hume implied that these liberties were almost wholly disregarded by the Tudors. This Tory interpretation of English history portrayed the Tudors as aspiring despots, whose submission of parliament denied the Stuarts the possibility of restoring a constitutional equilibrium. It was a view from which Stanley learnt strongly to dissent. Rather, at the outset of the great struggles of the seventeenth century, he believed, parliamentary leaders were contending for established legal liberties; not for novelties, but for privileges never denied before the Stuart accession. This was their language, supported, he learnt from Lansdowne, by a philosophy of government that instructed them that it was better to be free than the slaves of princes. The Tudors, Stanley believed, offered the perfect contrast to the destructive Stuarts. The state of the law found in Fortescue bespoke a stable parliamentary constitution to which deference had been paid since the thirteenth century. The central theme in this Whig view of the past was the safeguard of liberties through the historical evolution of parliament. Within Westminster the national interest was discerned, emerging from calm debate between the estates of the realm. Thus arbitrary rule and violent demagogues were held in check. This triumphant resolution of constitutional tensions was secured by the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which restored the supreme power of parliament, left at full liberty to legislate for the good of the country. This narrative embodied an important practical truth. The destructive powers of conflicting interests should be conciliated by timely reforms. Whigs were deeply sceptical of a priori constitutions built upon abstract notions of inalienable natural rights, as argued by Thomas Paine and proclaimed in the American and French revolutions of the 1770s and 1780s. Rather, English liberty had emerged as a particular historical development, subject to unforeseen and contingent circumstances. This was not an inevitable process, but one in which previous generations of able and virtuous men had safeguarded, through Magna Carta and the Declaration of Right of 1689, a cherished legacy of legal rights and political entitlements. While repudiating the Tory perspectives of Hume, this Whig view of English history also rejected notions central to the contemporary radical interpretation of the nation’s past. In particular, it dismissed the suggestion of ancient Anglo-Saxon liberties suppressed by the conquering Normans as a foreign aristocracy in 1066—liberties never subsequently recovered. For Whigs the constitution was not a prescriptive blueprint, but the complex creation of unique historical experience. Thus


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Stanley distilled a philosophy for the present from his Whig understanding of the English past. Around this historical narrative Stanley looked to the standard works of country house libraries to elaborate the design, such as Lord Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England, Bishop Gilbert Burnet’s History of his Own Time: From the Restoration of Charles II to the Treaty of Utrecht, and Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England. No English gentleman, Lansdowne advised, could consider his education complete without careful study of these authors. Clarendon was to be read alongside John Rushworth’s eight-volume Historical Collections and Sir James Whitelocke’s Memorials, while Bishop Burnet’s History of the Reformation of the Church of England, published between 1679 and 1714, was as deserving of attention as that of his own times. William Camden’s History of Queen Elizabeth described the equipoise of the Tudor regime. Stanley read John Locke for his singular integrity and unrivalled mental power, despite Locke’s being outdated in his arguments. Certainly he found nothing dangerous in Locke, if one kept in mind that Locke was engaged in a controversy with Sir Robert Filmer, whose Patriarcha, published in 1680, argued for the unlimited power of kings. Similarly with Sir Algernon Sidney, whose celebrated treatise Discourses concerning Government was to be admired. Sidney’s Discourses, in the posthumous editions available after 1698, muted his extreme republican sentiment and religious declarations, presenting a secular plea against tyrannical rule. Dressed in the toga of Roman classicism, the martyr Sidney became known as ‘the British Brutus’, whose writing provided a powerful justification for resistance to arbitrary monarchy. Among Stanley’s arbiters of intellectual taste the constitutional studies of Britain by the foreigners Montesquieu and de Lolme were considered beneath contempt. It was to the works of Edmund Burke and Lord Bolingbroke one had to turn, despite the latter, Lansdowne warned, being inferior to Burke in eloquence and integrity of purpose. Regarding Ireland, Stanley was directed to Sir John Davies, appointed Irish Solicitor General in 1603, whose Historical Tracts were edited by George Chalmers in 1786. Here Stanley found the argument that the subduing of Ireland required the replacing of a native system of personal law with an English system of property law as the precondition for civil order and progress. Davies predicted that this would transform Ireland from being a stricken Egypt into a fruitful Canaan. Stanley admitted to Lansdowne, in August 1822, that he had been leading too ‘rambling a life’ without ‘the opportunity of applying seriously to any regular occupation’.46 Shooting on the Knowsley estate and sharing

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his father’s enthusiasm for stag hunting with hounds, he feared, had occupied in an enjoyable, but inconsequential, fashion too much of his time. He now dedicated himself to a political apprenticeship at Bowood. He was, visitors noted, ‘looked up to by the Whigs as full of promise’.47 The young Stanley’s self-assurance was bolstered by the esteem of his mentor. Like his host, he took to wearing the old Whig uniform of a blue coat with brass buttons and a buff waistcoat. To Lansdowne he confessed his desire to distinguish himself in public life. ‘I am well aware’, he observed, ‘that the reading of a schoolboy and of a young man at College is a very different thing (even with the same books in their hands) from that of a man who is reading to fit himself for public life and ambitious, as I confess myself, of being usefully distinguished in it.’48 Stanley now undertook ‘to prepare myself for that which I consider my profession in life’.49 Lansdowne prescribed further reading, through which, he advised, Stanley might settle his habits to that application indispensable to political success.50 Stanley supplemented Hume’s history with Sharon Turner’s History of the Anglo-Saxons, John Lingard’s History of England (the first volumes of which were published in 1819), Francis Bacon’s History of the Reign of Henry VII, Collins’s collection of State Papers, and Lord Strafford’s letters. For the period after 1688 Lansdowne judged there was nothing deserving of the name of history in a philosophical sense. Whigs such as Charles James Fox, Sir James Mackintosh, and later Lord John Russell passed over the period from 1714 to 1760 in their own historical writings on the English constitution. But William Coxe’s enlarged 1808 edition of the Memoirs of Sir Robert Walpole, though heavily written, was full of original and interesting documents. Horace Walpole’s Memoirs of the Reign of George II, which appeared in 1822 edited by Lord Holland, provided an entertaining collection of anecdotes, while the historical sections of the Annual Register for the early part of George III’s reign deserved attention, Lansdowne suggested, as being chiefly written by Burke. Lansdowne encouraged Stanley to read Burke as widely as possible. From Burke’s writing Stanley could derive an understanding of the disposition to preserve and an ability to improve as the hallmark of successful statesmanship. When bad men combine, Burke warned, the good must associate. Therefore party, safeguarding the authority of parliament and the rule of law, was inseparable from free government. These Burkean axioms underpinned Stanley’s public doctrine for the rest of his life. Lansdowne urged Stanley to study Ireland, with its increasing population and the peculiar circumstances of Church and State. Henry Grattan’s speeches, published in 1811 and 1822, were essential for the modern period,


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Lansdowne suggested, as was the Life of John Curran, the Irish judge, MP, and supporter of Catholic relief and parliamentary Reform, written by Curran’s son. Of particular interest, being full of excellent sense and eloquence, was an anonymous pamphlet published in 1820 entitled Thoughts and Suggestions on the Education of the Peasantry of Ireland. The pamphlet shaped Stanley’s early thinking about Ireland, influencing him ten years later when he began as Chief Secretary drafting an Irish Education Bill. In England, the pamphlet argued, the education of good habits prevailed, while in Ireland there was some education of letters, but no education in civic morality. England possessed all the advantages which impressed good conduct on the people: a long settled order of government; ascertained rights regarding property, particularly in land; an established religion which was the faith of the great majority of the people; and a resident aristocracy. Ireland lacked any of these advantages. Thus a knowledge of letters, when imposed upon depraved habits, only gave a powerful weapon to the enemies of social order. Education in letters, the anonymous author argued, must be combined with religious instruction. ‘Religion soothes, restrains, consoles and establishes right relations between sovereign and subject, and man with man.’51 The Church of Ireland, therefore, while not forgoing its tithes, should make some return to the people. ‘There are innumerable means within the power of the Protestant pastor which, leaving his Catholic flock unmolested on the ground of their ancient faith, might be mightily efficacious for its diffusion.’ Protestant clergymen should seek to instil the doctrines which were not of the Church of England, or the Church of Rome, but of the Church of Christ. Church of Ireland clergy were too often seen as almost secular figures, possessing ‘the simple characteristics of a well-bred and perhaps humane and charitable country gentleman’. Moreover, the Irish gentry were ‘of a lofty and disdainful spirit, intrepid and tyrannical, divided from the people by old animosities, by religion, by party and by blood’. There was, Stanley agreed, a common body of Christian doctrine, aside from sectarian differences, providing a basis for young Protestants and Catholics to receive religious instruction together. Through common spiritual instruction the moral basis of an ordered civil society could be established in a community deeply divided by sectarian animosities. Ireland became an abiding concern of the young Stanley, both as a landlord and as a politician. To help with oratory Lansdowne recommended Bacon’s Advancement of Learning, Cowley’s Essays, Dryden’s Prefaces, some of Milton’s prose, Berkeley’s philosophical works, and Dugald Stewart’s philosophy of the human mind. But to resist the corruption of vulgar oratory the best stylistic

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models, as Stanley well knew, were the classics. Finally, Lansdowne, with a reverence learnt from Dugald Stewart, recommended Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Besides being the main branch of political economy, upon which David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus were grafted, Smith’s magnum opus, Lansdowne observed, was an admirable example of clear reasoning upon difficult subjects.52 Lansdowne believed that the differences between Ricardo and Malthus were far less significant than their respective disciples maintained, the essential truths of political economy having been laid out by Smith. Thus Stanley’s Whig intellectual inheritance was leavened with the liberal nostrums of Scottish political economy, as Lansdowne’s syllabus helped to shape a mind reaching beyond the partisan instincts of Grand Whiggery. In particular, Stanley’s Bowood apprenticeship established potential points of sympathy with prominent liberal Tories such as George Canning, MP for Liverpool. In November 1821 Stanley attended the marriage of his aunt Lady Mary Stanley (who was two years his junior) to the young Earl of Wilton, second son of the Marquess of Westminster. Stanley’s exact contemporary, Lord Wilton (who had succeeded to his maternal grandfather’s title aged 15), proved a lifelong friend, although Stanley was often impatient of Wilton’s foibles. Despite his languid and highly refined manner, Wilton was an accomplished horseman, an excellent shot, an enthusiastic yachtsman, and a talented musician, who was devoted to his amusements and good food. The Royal Yacht Club at Cowes, his fine estate at Heaton Park near Manchester, and his residences at Egerton Lodge, Melton Mowbray, and 7 Grosvenor Square provided him with the social prominence he eagerly enjoyed throughout his life. Between 1823 and 1842 Lady Mary and Wilton had eleven children, five of whom survived into adulthood. Pious in his own fashion, a regular church attender and a composer of hymns, Wilton, however, was also an inveterate womanizer and, while Stanley enjoyed his sporting company, Wilton’s marital indiscretions introduced an unspoken ambivalence into their relationship. In early 1822 Stanley broke off his private studies for a tour of Italy. Since the end of the Napoleonic War it had become possible to resume the ‘Grand Tour’ as part of a young man’s cultural education. As well as exposing Stanley to the arts and architecture of classical and Renaissance Europe, the tour also illustrated contrasting aspects of Stanley’s personality. During his travels he completed a series of Sonnets to Italy, giving poised Petrarchan expression to his admiration for the surviving wonders of the classical age. But while in Naples, which some English visitors regarded as possessing the best climate and worst government in Europe, Stanley


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knocked down a Neapolitan official for a perceived insult. As a result, he was sentenced to one day in the black hole and thirteen days in the common jail. He thus acquired the distinction of being the only British prime minister to have been incarcerated in a Neapolitan jail, where conditions were to prompt Gladstone thirty years later to decry Neapolitan barbarity. Contemporaries at Oxford noted Stanley’s headstrong nature and sensitivity to criticism. His tender self-regard was easily inflamed by foreign officialdom. Certainly the incident did little to dispel the general reputation in Europe that young Englishmen on the Grand Tour had acquired for wealth and insolence. Both the refined and robust facets of Stanley’s character were revealed during his Italian journey. Proud of his family and status, often haughty in manner, both boisterous and intelligent, his self-assurance cloaked a literary sensitivity and evangelical belief familiar only to his intimates. Never quick to compliment others, the combative Stanley expected deference as the natural acknowledgement of his birthright and abilities. He returned to England with a strengthened resolve to embark upon a political career.

Then, in the great Assembly, when to all Their public speech and argument they fram’d, In fluent language Meneläus spoke, In words though few, yet clear; though young in years, No wordy babbler, wasteful of his speech. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 92)

Stanley entered public life on 30 July 1822, when he was elected MP for the notoriously venal constituency of Stockbridge in the Whig interest. The small market town north of Southampton had been controlled and represented by the Tory West Indian proprietor Joseph Barham, who, because of financial difficulties, sold his interest in the constituency for £70,000 to the Whig peer Earl Grosvenor. Lansdowne and Grosvenor (Lord Wilton’s elder brother) immediately proposed that Stanley should stand, feeling it important to get such promising young talent into the Commons as soon as possible. Barham himself, resigning the seat in mid-session, introduced Stanley to the ninety-two borough voters, who dutifully elected him as their MP, although some subsequently complained that their ready compliance had gone unpaid. So, as with many other future statesmen prior to 1832, Stanley entered the Commons by way of a ‘rotten borough’. Like many similar constituencies Stockbridge was to be

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disfranchised in 1832. But in 1822 it served its purpose for the Whigs by enabling Stanley to join his father, MP for Lancashire, and other members of the opposition in the Commons. The parliamentary world Stanley entered in 1822 was experiencing real, if not obvious, ferment. Prior to his death in 1806 William Pitt the Younger developed a governing ethic merging administrative efficiency and managerial professionalism with a sense of moral tutelage. From this fertile ground sprang able young office holders such as William Huskisson, George Canning, and Robert Peel. In 1822 the unassuming Huskisson was elected alongside the fluent orator Canning as MP for the borough of Liverpool. As prime minister since 1812, Lord Liverpool had overseen the final phases of the Napoleonic War and the difficult years of economic distress, protectionism, and social unrest that immediately followed. By 1822, however, the post-war threat to law and order appeared to be subsiding. Liverpool’s ministry was able to consider more liberal policies in a way that highlighted the differences between High Tory and liberal Tory ministers. As liberal Tory ministers such as George Canning, Frederick Robinson, and William Huskisson came to the fore, and tensions between them and their High Tory ministerial colleagues such as Lord Eldon and Lord Sidmouth increased, it required all Liverpool’s political talents to keep his government together. Consequently, the most intense political struggles of 1822–4 occurred within the cabinet. Following Lord Castlereagh’s suicide in August 1822, Liverpool was obliged to appoint Canning as both Foreign Secretary and leader of the House of Commons. As Pitt’s most brilliant disciple, Canning opposed parliamentary Reform and had supported Sidmouth’s repressive measures after 1815. But he also possessed a strong sympathy for Catholic Emancipation, supported Greek independence, and disliked Russian autocracy. By recognizing the independence of the Spanish American colonies he opened up Latin America for British commerce. This, along with a reputation for deviousness and his clear ambition, made him an object of increasing mistrust among his High Tory colleagues, such as the Duke of Wellington. For the Whig opposition Canning’s possible secession from his illiberal colleagues offered an intriguing possibility for the future. Canning’s differences with his Tory colleagues mattered because the Whigs themselves were not well placed for effective offensives against the government. Indeed, at the opening of the 1822 session J. G. Lambton, MP for Co. Durham (in 1828 created Lord Durham), lamented that it was ‘impossible to conceive anything more disunited than the opposition’.53


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The Whig leader, Lord Grey, was given to moods of torpor, exacerbating divisions between his followers. He combined weary despondency with a dislike of Canning’s foreign policy. After 1822 Whig commitment to parliamentary Reform waned. While young Whigs such as Lord John Russell, with his Commons motions of 1822 and 1823, pushed the issue forward, moderates like Lansdowne felt only a lukewarm desire for Reform. By 1823 Catholic Emancipation and the plight of Ireland were emerging as more urgent issues in English political consciousness. During 1820–1 the Irish potato crop failed. In 1823 the Irish lawyer Daniel O’Connell formed his Catholic Association as a populist base for the campaign for Emancipation. Within parliament, given Canning’s sympathies, the issue suggested to Whig minds new configurations of political sentiment. The elderly Lord Derby was gratified by favourable reports of his grandson’s successful debut at Stockbridge. Anxious as he was for Stanley’s success in the House, however, he advised that speaking in parliament was very different from speaking on the hustings or at an election dinner.54 He urged Stanley not to be in too great a hurry to begin. Obedient to his grandfather’s wishes, Stanley waited until 1824 to make his maiden speech, while continuing his reading in the libraries at Bowood and Knowsley. In the meantime, he returned loyal Whig votes in the division lobby. In April 1823 he voted, alongside his father, in support of Russell’s motion for a Reform of parliament. It called for the disfranchisement of the smallest boroughs and the redistribution of seats to the counties and unenfranchised towns. In the event, Russell’s unsuccessful motion marked the high point of Whig commitment to Reform in the 1820s. By the end of the session the impression prevailed that the country was enjoying general prosperity and contentment. In early 1825 Lansdowne observed that ‘the prosperity of the country’ had driven parliamentary Reform ‘almost out of the heads of Reformers’.55 At the beginning of the 1824 session Stanley became a member of the committee, chaired by his father, examining a bill for gaslight in Manchester. On 30 March, after celebrating his twenty-fifth birthday the previous day, he made his maiden speech to the Commons, explaining the proceedings of the committee and the reasons for their recommendations.56 Though hardly a momentous issue, it afforded him the opportunity for what was acknowledged to be a very creditable debut. The Whig Sir James Mackintosh recorded it as giving the greatest satisfaction to all who heard it, showing much talent, and promising to give much lustre to parliamentary debate. The particular charm of Stanley’s oratory lay in the pure tenor of his voice combined with the precision of his diction. What

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Edward Bulwer Lytton later described as ‘the pure Saxon’ of Stanley’s ‘silver style’.57 This lent power to his carefully polished phrases, though for the rest of his life he remained racked by nerves prior to giving a major parliamentary statement. Such unease, however, was never apparent to his audience. By 1824 a less florid style of Commons speaking was replacing earlier taste. A plainer oratory exemplified by rising men of business such as Robert Peel, well suited to the commercial subjects of the day, provided models for Stanley, who, nevertheless, enjoyed lacing his speeches with suitable Latin quotations. It was the subject of Ireland, however, that occasioned Stanley’s first major political statement to the Commons on 6 May. Two days before, he supported Captain Maberly’s unsuccessful motion for an advance of capital to Ireland to assist in the employment of the poor. But the issue of the Church of Ireland, the Established Protestant Church in Ireland, engaged far more intense emotions. On 6 May the Benthamite radical Joseph Hume requested an inquiry into the Church of Ireland. Stanley immediately rose to decry Hume’s motion as calculated to lower the character of the Irish Established Church; this being only the latest instalment, he announced, in a campaign, often carried on by the press, of casting odious aspersions on its clergy.58 The failings of some individuals were being allowed to overshadow the unassuming virtues of the majority of Anglican clergy. Moreover, he averred, any interference with the property of the Church would justify interference with all landed, funded, and commercial property. Nor, he argued, would the Irish peasantry derive any benefit from the reduction of the Church of Ireland’s property. He declared himself committed to the economic and moral improvement of the Irish poor. But the status of the Established Church was irrelevant to what he saw as the actual causes of Irish distress, the want of a resident gentry, want of capital, want of employment, and the lack of adequate education. William Plunket congratulated Stanley on his sound intelligence and manly eloquence. Accompanied by his father, Stanley voted against both Hume’s motion and a large number of his Whig colleagues. The elderly Lord Derby was reportedly made ill by his grandson’s action. Five days later, when the prominent Whig Lord Althorp called for an inquiry into the state of the Irish peasantry, Stanley spoke in support of the motion as rescuing Ireland from disregarded misery. But he found himself thrown upon explanations of his earlier opposition to Hume.59 His reluctant previous vote was, he declared, the result of the hostile spirit to the Church of Ireland which breathed through Hume’s motion. Rather than initiating a free inquiry, Hume’s request prejudged the institution


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prior to any investigation. Stanley’s vote for Althorp’s unsuccessful motion, however, did little to quiet the dismay he had prompted in Whig circles. The nation’s continued prosperity and tranquillity fuelled opposition frustration. Grey privately lamented that there was ‘no public question which excites, no public feeling which produces any sympathy, no public prospects which can engage one in future speculations’.60 This aggravated the anger caused by Stanley’s display of Whig disunity. Immediately he began plans for a trip to Canada and the United States. Many in London society thought this unusual journey for a young English aristocrat a wild scheme and disapproved of it.

Swift as the mind of man, who many a land Hath travell’d o’er, and with reflective thought Recalls … (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 77)

It was a painful personal crisis, not just political considerations, that prompted Stanley’s journey to North America, although both involved his grandfather’s censure. In 1823 Stanley met the 18-year-old Emma BootleWilbraham at the Knutsford Ballrooms. Her family lived at Lathom House, near Ormskirk, 11 miles from Knowsley Hall, which, until 1714, had been part of the Derby estate. Emma’s father, who was created Lord Skelmersdale in 1828, assumed the additional name of Bootle when he married the heiress to Lathom House. By January 1824 Stanley was convinced that his feelings for Emma were a ‘deep-rooted permanent affection’, not merely ‘a young man’s fancy’.61 But the elderly Derby had fierce objections to the proposed union and refused to allow Stanley to enter into an engagement. Against her family Derby had ‘prejudices of such old-standing, so deep-rooted, and so violent that’, Stanley despaired, ‘I am hopeless of being able to surmount them’.62 Emma’s family were Tory in their politics and known for their social aspirations. Not only did Derby refuse to allow an engagement, he also required Stanley to spend a period abroad and forbade him to undertake any communication with Emma. Prolonged travel, Derby hoped, would encourage his grandson to abandon his desire for such an unsuitable match. So, on 16 June 1824, Stanley set off from Liverpool on an extensive tour of North America with a cloud of disfavour hanging over him. Following the Louisiana purchase of 1803 the United States extended over approximately

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1 million square miles of the North American continent and governed a population of around 10 million people, opening up to Stanley ‘infinite varieties of soil, climate, laws, manners and people’. To ‘an unprejudiced Englishman’, he believed, the United States ‘must be a subject of great and increasing interest’. The ‘bold experiment’ of her constitution ‘affords subjects of momentous enquiry to the Statesman, the Philosopher, and the Moralist’.63 Recent history added further interest. After Britain retired, sullen and discomfited, from the War of Independence in 1783, conflict had again broken out between the newly fledged United States and Britain in 1812. In America, Stanley found the war of 1812 was regarded ‘as one of the greatest events that ever happened’, while in Britain ‘a great portion of our population … were actually ignorant of its existence’. Following the Treaty of Ghent, concluding the war in 1814, peaceful, though wary, relations between the two nations were resumed. Stanley was struck by American anxiety for Britain’s good opinion. Links of history, language, law, and literature were so strong, he concluded, that Americans could not divest themselves of ‘veneration for the Mother Country’. Moreover, as a young nation, with her character to make, the United States was ‘more liable to be injured in public opinion by misrepresentation and … galled at attacks and exalted by praise which an old nation hears with equal indifference’. Stanley travelled to the New World with three Christ Church friends, the fellow Etonians John Evelyn Denison and John Stuart Wortley, aged 23 and 24 respectively, and the 26-year-old Henry Labouchere. Two of the party, Stanley and Wortley (who became the 2nd Lord Wharncliffe), were heirs to aristocratic titles. Labouchere would later become Lord Taunton and Denison later Lord Ossington. Three of the young men were already MPs, Stanley, Denison (MP for Newcastle under Lyme since 1823), and Wortley (MP for Bossiney since 1823). Labouchere was to enter the Commons as MP for St Michael’s in 1826. ‘Contrary to our friends’ anticipations,’ Stanley reported, ‘we go without quarrelling and get on well.’64 In turn, the Americans they encountered evidently enjoyed meeting this distinguished youthful group. ‘Everyone has received us with the greatest attention and civility,’ Stanley observed, ‘and the Americans are much tickled at the visit of three MPs.’ Throughout his journey he reported his vivid impressions of North America in letters to Lansdowne, his grandfather, and also Lady Derby, who, despite her husband’s fierce disapproval, encouraged the young man not to abandon all hope of marrying Emma Wilbraham. While honouring his grandfather’s instruction not to communicate directly with Emma while he was abroad, Stanley sent frequent letters to Emma’s mother, and so maintained a link


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with the Lathom household. His letters to Mrs Wilbraham, he understood, would be eagerly shared with her daughter. Stanley’s party arrived in a democratic republic emerging from postwar economic depression and espousing nationalist ambitions. Rapid western expansion, slavery, protectionism, and banking were challenging the unity of the young republic, while the Monroe Doctrine, enunciated in December 1823, defiantly asserted that the American continents were no longer regions open to future European colonization. Eight years after Stanley’s broad sweep through North America the young French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville famously characterized for Europeans the public culture of the United States. The first volume of his Democracy in America appeared in 1835 describing ‘an equality of conditions’ among white settlers unknown in Europe and a restlessness that suggested something provisional about their lives. This incessant bustle and robust egalitarianism were pointedly ridiculed by the Englishwoman Frances Trollope, whose Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832, comfortably confirmed the superior self-regard of her British readership and caricatured the uncouth habits of American citizens. This boorishness Trollope ascribed to the American ‘universal pursuit of money’. Stanley himself observed many of those characteristics recorded by de Tocqueville and Trollope. ‘Differences of rank’ were ‘much less real, as well as apparent, than in an older nation’. To ‘the aristocratic prejudices of an Englishman, the air of indifference to your wants and the absence of that alacrity to serve which he expects from the classes of tradesman and mechanics’ was at first shocking.65 In New England these egalitarian dispositions accompanied, he noted, a material prosperity and generally decorous conduct. It was unusual to see anyone in rags, begging was rare, and public drunkenness or riotous behaviour out of the ordinary. The ‘genius of the constitution’ was ‘constantly at work, amalgamating the whole, and gradually reducing them all to the uniform line of equalising democracy’. This was a society without those distinctions of birth and education which shaped British attitudes. Thus, ‘when one of the lower class rises by successful industry into that above him, he finds himself, not as with us, still having the insurmountable barrier of manners and early habits, preventing him from attaining a full equality’.66 The ‘free intercourse between all’ was evident in the American use of language. In New England a uniformity of accent and vocabulary, reflecting a sense of republican equality, contrasted with the variety of pronunciation and dialect in England expressing differences of rank and region. In America, he concluded, ‘a more equable diffusion of ease and enjoyment among a

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greater portion of the community’ than existed in England affirmed ‘that republican equality which, however visionary in some respects, really exists and produces its effects in others’.67 But of the Southern and Midwest States Stanley gained a deeply unfavourable impression. The moral stain of slavery and the uncouth habits of the white settlers profoundly offended his sensibilities. The widespread gambling, drunkenness, licentiousness, and idleness in these states he attributed to the pernicious institution of slavery. The union of republicanism and domestic slavery ‘produced a most unhappy effect’.68 The practice of slavery was a damning reproach to the ideals of the nation. After a comfortable passage of thirty-seven days, despite the fog and rough weather off Newfoundland, Stanley and his companions arrived in New York on 21 July 1824. Already a dynamic centre of commerce and finance, Stanley was immediately struck by the brash plutocratic drive of New York. ‘No city in the world’, he observed, ‘is increasing in commercial importance with such rapidity as New York.’ But ‘few of the houses have any pretensions to architectural beauty and there are not many handsome streets’.69 From New York, on 27 July, the party travelled up the Hudson valley. After visiting the Military Academy at West Point they arrived in the state capital, Albany, on 31 July. Here Stanley witnessed a meeting of the State Legislature. It was ‘a highly amusing scene of political intrigue, wheel within wheel, marked by a great variety of conflicting, combining and intriguing interests’. In outward appearance the assembly resembled ‘a body of Gentlemen’s Stewards in England, with a mixture of farmers and some country attorneys’.70 The provision in the chamber of ‘a spitting box’ for each of the representatives caused him wry amusement. Local celebrities included Joseph Bonaparte, the former King of Spain, ‘a vulgar looking man with nothing striking in his countenance’.71 As they travelled through upstate New York, Stanley was entertained by ‘the confusion of names, Indian, English, Ancient and Classical, bestowed upon the little villages’. Niagara Falls created an impression of awe that he never forgot. No description, he recorded, could convey ‘anything so stupendous as the reality’.72 His eye was also struck by the glowing tints displayed by the New England foliage in its various autumn hues. On 6 September the party took a steamboat across Lake Ontario to York, the capital of the Canadian Upper Province. But the ‘miserable, straggling unpaved village’ of York failed to impress, and via Kingston the group journeyed quickly on to Montreal in the French-speaking Lower Province. Here they encountered for the first time large numbers of Irish immigrants, ‘a mass of misery which cannot be contemplated


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without the most painful feelings’.73 Whereas the Upper Province, with its mixture of English, American, German, and Dutch settlers, had no formed national character, in Montreal and Quebec Stanley observed a homogenous society, ‘French by birth, by language and in their hearts’. The community possessed all ‘the gaiety, light heartedness and formal politesse of the French paysan of the old times’.74 Since 1791 the Upper and Lower Provinces had lived under two distinct governments, the tense political relations between the Provinces being intensified by the more rapid settlement in the English-speaking region. To Lansdowne Stanley reported that the possibility of legislation from Westminster uniting the two Provinces was an issue of great interest and widely expected. ‘I hope it will not be hurried through, though from what we hear … it seems to be necessary to do it.’75 He concluded that the Union would only work ‘if the full rights, laws and customs of the Catholic Lower Province are protected’. Property law in the Lower Province was ‘French feudal’ and the Catholic clergy were supported by a tithe. But agriculture in the Lower Province would only be improved by the introduction of English modes of tenure. Antagonism between the Provinces should be soothed, he proposed, by encouraging Catholic French settlers to disperse themselves over the country. The mechanism for doing so might be legislation providing a certain proportion of land in all new townships for occupation only by Catholics. In the event, it was not until 1840 that an Act of Union, on terms different from those Stanley favoured, was finally passed. While travelling down the St Lawrence river, during the bright moonlit nights, he composed poetry and undertook translations of Schiller.76 At the beginning of October, Stanley and his friends returned to the United States to spend a pleasant three weeks in Boston, where they found the residents ‘exceedingly civil’ and the time passing ‘very agreeably’. To ‘the eye of a European’, he noted, Boston, with its population of 70,000 people, had ‘more the air of a great and wealthy town than any of the American cities’.77 He secured a meeting with the 89-year-old former President John Adams, who, though very ill and affected with violent trembling, conversed with him cheerfully. A patriarch of the Revolutionary movement, Adams had assisted with the drafting of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 and succeeded George Washington as President in 1797. Their meeting afforded the young Stanley a direct link with the momentous events of the War of Independence of forty-five years before and reinforced his sense of the profound attachment of his hosts to their republican constitution.

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On 28 October, Stanley’s party moved on to Hartford, New York, and Philadelphia. Arriving in Philadelphia on 5 November, a ‘neat and striking’ city with banks as the most conspicuous public buildings, he then encountered for the first time a deeply repugnant racial prejudice.78 A contemptuous disgust for free blacks, founded on a belief in their worthless character, appeared universal. This attitude was especially strong in Philadelphia, he concluded, because it stood on the boundary between slavery and freedom. Stanley’s own view was clear. The moral degradation of the black population, he insisted, was the effect, not the cause, of political and social abasement. In Philadelphia he found the Irish emigrants, present in great numbers and in great distress, regarded with barely less contempt. During November, Stanley then journeyed West through the woods and mountains of Pennsylvania. On arriving at Pittsburgh, with its many coal and ironworks, they found the city ‘enveloped in perpetual smoke’.79 Moving down the Ohio River he visited a Shaker community and reached Cincinnati on 22 November. From there, two days later, the party travelled to Louisville and entered the slave-holding state of Kentucky. The contrast with the society of the east coast was striking. ‘As we advance West,’ Stanley recounted to Lansdowne, ‘we find a very material change for the worse, and I think if New England is a specimen of the most favourable kind, Kentucky is one of the most melancholy examples of a perfectly popular constitution.’80 In Louisville, Stanley judged ‘the morals of the population’ to be ‘almost as lax as their manners are rough’, with ‘murders and stabbing … cases of everyday occurrence and never punished’.81 Almost every man, he observed, carried a concealed weapon for defence or attack, six murders having occurred in the city during the previous three weeks. Kentucky appeared to him in a condition of complete stagnation. ‘The people have no confidence in their government, the landed interest is completely ruined, about half the properties being mortgaged to their full amount, the paper currency of the State is depreciated fifty per cent, and to complete the whole the Judicial and Legislative bodies are … in a state of open warfare.’ Drawn by the promise of a better life beyond, Stanley witnessed the early stages of the extraordinary movement of settlers into the vast North American heartland. Between 1821 and 1830 over 143,000 immigrants came from Britain, while more than 50,000 impoverished migrants arrived from Ireland. Many of them now joined the movement west of the Appalachian Mountains. It was a population, he observed, of lawless hunters and squatters. ‘Were I American I should look with some apprehension to this very rapid diffusion, and should fear that the extent of population shall


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increase in a far greater degree than the intelligence and good sense of the community’, which must lead to ‘utter ruin in a government where population alone is the rule by which the ratio of power is settled’.82 Stanley’s most acute revulsion, however, was prompted by his first direct contact with slavery. ‘I could not have conceived before’, he reflected, ‘how mischievously this system acts on the people (and they themselves are aware of it).’83 While travelling from Louisville to Lexington he was shocked to be told that the mulatto watering their horses, whose father was a rich local landowner and mother a slave, was a slave to his own father. The familiar expression for this, he was told, was ‘making his own niggers’.84 The moral disgust felt by Stanley was profound. It was true that the conditions of the slaves in Kentucky was better than further south. There being no market for agricultural produce in Kentucky, and the countryside providing subsistence in abundance, he noted that the slaves were ‘both better fed and treated than in the Southern States, where the produce being chiefly cotton and sugar, their maintenance is a subject of positive expense’.85 But the moral abhorrence of slavery, as a stain on a society claiming to be civilized, appalled him. The political and moral state of Kentucky was wretchedly low, and the root of the whole evil, he believed, was slavery, a system which, as de Tocqueville concurred, stripped black slaves of every vestige of the privilege of humanity. After being unhappily detained in a wintry Louisville for a week by the low waters of the Ohio River, on 13 December Stanley and his friends took the ferryboat down to the Mississippi. Moving southwards through sparsely populated country and into warmer weather, they observed black slaves at work in the cotton plantations, with the overseer on horseback in the midst of them, superintending their labours. Stopping at Memphis, Tennessee, they then travelled down the Mississippi to its delta on the Gulf of Mexico. Completing the journey of 1,500 miles from Louisville in eleven days, they arrived in New Orleans on 24 December 1824. Amid swamps and bayous, surrounded by magnolias and camellias with Spanish moss hanging from the trees, the city of New Orleans, with its exotic mix of Creole and Cajun culture, offered a colourful contrast to New England. They saw houses ‘of all possible shapes, sizes, colours and architecture, with facades highly ornamented, imitating the Italian’. Stanley found it impossible ‘to describe the variety of human beings attending the market—the strange jargon—the babble of tongues—the medley of complexions’.86 Joining the festively clad congregation at the main Catholic church on Christmas Day, they observed a ceremony performed with splendour, although ‘the great object of attendance … appeared to be to see and to be seen’. The

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following day they visited a plantation for the Sugar Festival celebrated with singing and dancing by the slaves. But their wish to reach Washington for the inauguration of the President at the beginning of February prompted their departure in early January by schooner for Mobile, Alabama. They travelled ‘rather faster than was for all purposes desirable; but at the same time getting a general notion of the state of a large part of the country of which we should otherwise have no idea’.87 Stanley was favourably struck by ‘the new and flourishing’ state of Alabama, recently admitted into the Union in 1819. But the plight of the local Indian tribe, the Choctaws, was a pitiable contrast to the wealth of the white settlers. These Indians, he observed, were ‘miserably degraded by their intercourse with the whites’. Entering a Choctaw village, he recorded: ‘I never saw in my life a more disgusting sight: all of them were nearly naked and most of them drunk: some were lying, men, women, children and dogs, huddled together in their wigwams, some dancing with horrible yells, and all disgustingly filthy.’88 By horseback they travelled through the land of the Creek Indians. Unlike the Choctaw, the Creek tribe had retained their hostility to the white settlers, resisting the introduction of Christian missionaries. But Stanley perceived that their spirit was broken. The Creek Indians were soon to be displaced by forced migration west of the Mississippi. Through Augusta, Georgia, and Charleston, South Carolina, the party made their way northwards, via Baltimore, to the ‘extraordinary city’ of Washington, DC.89 Stanley and his companions arrived in Washington on 8 February 1825 for the climax of the Presidential election. Through the good offices of the British Minister Plenipotentiary, Henry Addington (brother of the former prime minister Lord Sidmouth), Stanley met the leading American politicians of the day. The Presidential campaign had focused on the rival candidacies of John Quincy Adams from Massachusetts, a fine intellect but a less than adept politician, and the Indian-fighter and victor over the British at the Battle of New Orleans, General Andrew Jackson. The charming and colourful Henry Clay from Kentucky, Speaker of the House of Representatives, had challenged Jackson as spokesman for the Western States. Stanley found Clay ‘tall and ungainly, not unlike Brougham in figure, but considerably more slouching in gait’. Clay’s manner was ‘awkward’, but Stanley noted his reputation for powerful and impressive oratory.90 The complex manoeuvring between Adams, Jackson, and Clay had brought political infighting to the fore. ‘There can be no speaking in public on the subject,’ Stanley reported to Lansdowne, ‘but there will be, and has been already, a vast quantity of intrigue and management.’91


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Andrew Jackson, he observed, ‘is the decided favourite with the lowest classes and the wildest and roughest States’. As predicted by Stanley, none of the candidates gained a majority in the Electoral College. This placed the choice of President in the hands of Congress and produced ‘a very curious trial of strength of parties’.92 In the event Clay, in order to scuttle the hopes of his rival Jackson, cynically threw his support behind Adams, who, despite having received less of the popular vote, was duly elected President; an arrangement dubbed by opponents ‘the corrupt bargain’. This unedifying process did not endear the political arrangements of the democratic republic to Stanley. They ‘gave rise to a good deal of intrigue, bargaining and jobbing for office’.93 It was impossible, in such a system, Stanley concluded damningly, ‘for any man to act a consistent part if he wishes to hold office’. Nor was Stanley impressed by the personal qualities of the candidates themselves. On attending a Washington levee given by the outgoing President, ‘the wary old [James] Monroe’, who ‘played his part with great dignity and propriety’, Stanley was introduced to Adams. The President-elect ‘seemed to have the most decided air of vulgar hypocrisy and low cunning of any man I ever saw’.94 The popular democratic process, he concluded, was inimical to men of integrity assuming the responsibilities of political leadership. Among those attending the crowded Washington celebrations Stanley came upon Robert Owen, the cotton mill owner from Lanark, Scotland, and social reformer. The two men had first met on the ferryboat travelling down the Ohio River. Owen was purchasing land in New Harmony, Indiana, in order to establish a cooperative community based upon his utopian social principles. On this subject Stanley judged Owen to be ‘perfectly insane’.95 The social reformer was, Stanley observed, ‘more sanguine and more visionary than it is possible to conceive, and has in the opinion of all who know anything about it, made a bad bargain in his late arrangements’.96 Indeed, within three years of the establishment of the experimental community at New Harmony in 1825, disputes among the residents led to its acrimonious demise. The French hero of the American Revolution, who had fought alongside George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette, was also attending the celebrations. After serving as a member of the French Chamber of Deputies from 1818 to 1824, Lafayette had been invited to Washington to receive a monetary gift from Congress. Stanley coolly watched Lafayette ‘playing off upon his American friends with a most flagrant exhibition of extraordinary affection’. This distasteful display of vanity, he commented, should have

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left Lafayette ‘almost suffocated with the gross fumes of the incense which has been offered up’.97 Moreover, he thought the superficiality of these blatant shows of affection was revealed by the small amount of money and land actually voted by Congress to compensate Lafayette for his services to American liberty. Stanley also met the powerful orator, lawyer, and Representative of Massachusetts Daniel Webster, the novelist James Fenimore Cooper, and John Quincy Adams’s Vice-President, John Calhoun. He judged the general manner and conversation of Calhoun ‘superior to those of any American with whom I made acquaintance’.98 All in all, Stanley found the company of ‘the three MPs’ much in request and their party the object of much attention from every quarter, although, as he reported to his grandfather, some US newspapers suggested that they were British agents sent over to prevent the election of Henry Clay as President.99 Stanley was ‘much disappointed’ with the debates he heard in the Senate and House of Representatives, although ‘one most extraordinary quality is certainly the universal fluency of expression. I never heard a single American at a loss, or hesitate.’100 He seldom heard ‘any speaker attempt to rise into a high tone of eloquence’, owing to a ‘universal want of correctness of taste and the general poverty of imagination’. Moreover, speakers generally lacked an ‘intonation and modulation of voice’, resulting in ‘a monotony which produces a most wearisome effect upon an European ear’. He was more impressed by the Supreme Court where he heard ‘much good argument and much good speaking’. The distinguishing feature of the American people, Stanley concluded, was their practical, matter-of-fact character. He admired the universal education of the Northern and Eastern States. The absolute destitution known in England was, apart from the condition of recent Irish immigrants, noticeably absent. This general diffusion of comfort he attributed to the abundance of fertile and unoccupied land. But if dire poverty was rare, so was refinement largely unknown. ‘The higher orders of luxury, the production of the arts, and the higher refinements of society are equally unattainable and unappreciated.’101 Democracy gave an egalitarian hue to culture and manners. There was much truth, he concluded, in the expression that the United States was ‘the poor man’s Paradise, and the rich man’s Hell’. The corrupting stain on the young republic was the institution of slavery; a source of civic immorality which, in the Southern States, led to gambling, drunkenness, licentiousness, and idleness. All this left Stanley ‘without much admiration for the attractive qualities’ of American society, but a persuasion ‘of the firmness of the foundation on which their political structure is built’.102


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In Washington, Stanley found diplomatic gossip preoccupied with who was to succeed Addington as Britain’s Minister Plenipotentiary. In the event, the diplomat Charles Vaughan, former British representative to the confederated states of Switzerland, was posted to Washington in 1825 as Addington’s successor. What these republicans want, Stanley believed, is ‘a good plain man of business, and a little rank thrown into the scale would tickle them extremely’.103 Vaughan provided the first, if not the second, qualification. What had ‘excited a good deal of interest here, and much satisfaction’, was George Canning’s recent recognition of the independence of Mexico, a decision which Lansdowne enthusiastically supported. The British Foreign Secretary, Stanley noted, ‘is very popular in general in this country’.104 Stanley regretted the scarcity of news they received from England during their journey and ‘grieved to hear the accounts we do of the state of Ireland’. During 1824 the populist agitation of the Catholic Association, under the adept leadership of O’Connell, had become increasingly vociferous. Although Stanley thought the actions of the Catholic Association ‘very ill-judged’, his greater worry was that the pro-Emancipation Attorney General for Ireland, William Plunket, had got himself ‘into a scrape’ by moving to prosecute O’Connell for sedition.105 In a public speech O’Connell had declared that Ireland, ‘driven mad by persecution’, needed a new Bolívar to champion its grievances.106 As Stanley anticipated, Plunket’s prosecution encouraged a Protestant backlash. All this, he feared, ‘will set up the Orange party and the Ultras in triumph’.107 In February 1825 a discomforted Plunket found himself obliged to support legislation suppressing the Catholic Association while, during the same month, speaking in favour of Sir Francis Burdett’s bill for Catholic Relief. Plunket’s difficulties crystallized the quandary moderate Reformers confronted in Ireland. Following the Presidential Inauguration on 4 March 1825 Stanley and his companions left Washington for Baltimore. But the arrival of a letter from England promptly caused him to leave his friends and, on 16 March, immediately sail by packet for home. On 3 February his delighted father had written informing him that his grandfather had finally relented in his opposition to Stanley’s marriage to Emma Wilbraham. Lord Derby now recognized that Stanley’s love for Emma remained firm and that his initial disapproval should no longer prevent his grandson’s happiness. Derby granted permission for them to become engaged.108 In the same communication, marked ‘read this letter alone’, Stanley’s father also informed his son of his sister Louisa’s engagement to

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Lieuten-ant-Colonel Samuel Long, their marriage being planned for 18 April. After a seventeen-day transatlantic voyage an elated Stanley, having celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday on board ship, landed at Kinsale on 2 April and, in order to hasten his return, took a steamboat to Milford Haven and journeyed on to London. During the voyage, in a mood of joyous exaltation, he set down in poetry his euphoric emotions: Tho’ our path be known to the Heavens alone, And yon silent lights above, There are hearts that ere now breathe for us the vow And the wordless prayer of love. Then give the white sail to the joyous gale, Till her yards the billows kiss, Till rapid she seem as the kindling dream Of love and hope and bliss.

On arriving at his parents’ house in Upper Grosvenor Street he immediately wrote to Emma’s mother declaring his ‘long, long term of banishment’ over, ‘my term of silence is also at an end’, and affirming that he had his grandfather’s full permission ‘to open my whole heart’.109 Emma and Stanley immediately became engaged. Two weeks later he attended the marriage of his 19-year-old sister Louisa. Intense preparations for his own marriage were then begun. The ceremony took place in Marylebone six weeks later on 31 May. Devout, physically small, and of delicate health, Emma was to prove a loving companion, providing Stanley with a secure domestic contentment that withstood subsequent private and public crises. Over the next forty-four years, whenever they were apart, he regularly wrote to her (’my dearest love’) apprising her of his doings, anxieties, and successes. The newly-weds immediately established a residence in Ireland on the Derby estate of Ballykisteen in Co. Tipperary. Set in 4,400 acres about 2 1/2 miles from the town of Tipperary, Ballykisteen became the Stanleys’ first married home. Pleasantly situated on rising ground, the estate was set in the pasturage of the ‘Golden Vale’ north of Tipperary. Here Stanley undertook the building of a new family home called Stanley Lodge, as well as overseeing the establishment of schools and the improvement of the property. Lansdowne had encouraged Stanley’s interest in the problems of Ireland. Prior to travelling to North America, Stanley had read and been much affected by Maria Edgeworth’s 1812 novel The Absentee, Edgeworth being a regular attender of Lansdowne’s Bowood salons. The personal resonances of Edgeworth’s work for Stanley were striking. The novel’s


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hero is a clever and ardent young aristocrat, Lord Colambre (son of Lord Clonbrony), whose romantic feelings for his poor cousin are strongly disapproved of by his parents. Colambre, however, refuses to deny his affections and rejects his parents’ enticements to marry a more suitable heiress for money. Colambre then visits incognito his father’s neglected Irish estate, which Lord Clonbrony has long since left in the hands of an unscrupulous Dublin agent, Nicholas Garraghty. He finds the estate in desolation, with miserable dwellings, ruined houses, impassable roads, and an impoverished tenantry suffering under the tyranny of Garraghty’s harsh management. The experience awakens Colambre to the duty of Irish landowners to their tenantry. Colambre’s literary epiphany struck Stanley forcibly. Edgeworth’s moving portrayal of the suffering allowed by absentee landlords prompted him to seek his grandfather’s permission to oversee personally the Ballykisteen estate, hitherto management being in the hands of the Dublin attorney’s firm of McGuire. Assisted by his Northumbrian land agent, Thomas Bolton, Stanley hoped to remedy what he saw as his family’s previous neglect. From America he declared to Emma’s mother: ‘Poor Ireland! It is very near my heart and I do entertain a confident hope that I may be able to do some good there.’110 But melancholy reports he received in New York that local Catholic priests were preventing the children of his Ballykisteen tenants from attending the school he had built on the estate depressed him profoundly. He now hoped to demonstrate how enlightened English landlords might, by conscientious stewardship, secure genuine benefit for an estranged and neglected peasantry. So might the ills of an absent gentry, want of capital, lack of employment, and inadequate education be cured. Four years later, when he read Michael Sadler’s pamphlet Ireland: Its Evils and their Remedies, he agreed that the root of Irish problems was absentee landlordism.111 Though he disliked Sadler’s contemptuous polemical style, he accepted that Irish landlords must do more to remedy the distress within their communities. He regretted that his grandfather did not allow him to use more of the rental income from the Ballykisteen estate to improve the property. He wished to do more to aid sickness and infirmity among his tenants and their families. His personal commitment to the estate expressed his genuine compassion for the hardship he saw around him in Tipperary. Yet he also believed that the alleviation of rural suffering was a call on private charity not the public purse. Nor did distress justify attacks on private property or flaunting of the law. Only by the steady maintenance of legal authority and through a personal awareness of Christian obligation could judicious kindness be exercised responsibly and the seditious threat of lawlessness resisted. His devotion to the Ballykisteen

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estate after 1825 drew directly on his evangelical notions of social duty and his Whiggish commitment to the rights of property and the rule of law. By November 1825 Emma Stanley was pregnant. Their first child, a son baptized Edward Henry Stanley, was born on 21 July 1826. But both children born subsequently, Ferdinand Charles in July 1829 and a daughter in May 1832, died within hours of birth. Emma Stanley’s health became increasingly fragile. For long periods she remained a semi-invalid prone to bouts of depression. For the rest of her life she wore a bracelet, given to her by her husband, the central locket of which contained the names and strands of hair of each of their babies. Not until Christmas Day 1835, with the birth of a daughter, Emma Charlotte, did their son acquire a healthy sibling. This saddened, yet did not seem to undermine, the security of Stanley’s marriage, although the dramatic shock of his sister Louisa’s death in December 1825, just eight months after her own marriage, was a sudden affirmation of mortal frailty. Marriage, fatherhood, and bereavement prompted Stanley to write about the importance of early religious instruction for the young. This brought together his memory of maternal instruction and his views on the moral guidance of his family. He wished to show how personal faith should influence conduct, the importance of the Gospels as a guide to individual behaviour, and the salvation offered by Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross. In 1828 his Conversations on the Parables of the New Testament for the Use of Children was published. It describes how, through daily conversations, a mother explains to her two young children, a daughter aged 9 and a son aged 7, the beauty and truth embodied in the parables drawn from the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. In form the book echoed Stanley’s own introduction to Christian truth. In interpretation it also drew on the writing of his former Eton master John Sumner’s Evidence of Christianity published in 1824, in which the evangelical Sumner argued from the vitality of Christianity to its divine origin.112 By the 1820s Sumner was one of a number of prominent Anglican clergy arguing that an evangelical Providential world order, emphasizing individual responsibility and free moral choice, was consistent with Malthusian views of political economy, although, as a moderate evangelical, he opposed the premillennial fervour and biblical literalism of more extreme ‘Recordite’ evangelicals. In his Conversations Stanley emphasized the danger of carelessness and inattention leading a child away from the grace of God. The care, riches, and pleasures of the world should not cause neglect to the service of their Maker. Every individual would ultimately be called to God to give an account of their life and how their worldly advantages, good disposition, joys, and sorrows


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were put to his service. The Conversations laid out Stanley’s guide to how a Christian life might be realized. The grace of a long-suffering God, who knows all our thoughts, Stanley warned, should not be presumed. Yet, if we turn to God through prayer with sincere repentance, in awareness of Christ’s Atonement, then none were unworthy of being saved from the consequences of their misconduct. Those guilty of wilful and unrepented sin, however, would be condemned to a hell in which there existed no forgiveness. It was, therefore, a bounden duty always to be prepared to account for oneself ‘whenever it shall please that same Almighty Wisdom to call us to another state’.113 God had placed, he wrote, individuals in their respective stations, allotted them duties, and bestowed on them powers and capacities of body and mind. It was a primary responsibility to God to dedicate those powers and skills to his service. But neither was it part of the divine scheme for all to have equal capacities or advantages. The vice of envy was its own punishment, bringing perpetual torment to those who succumbed to it. Rather, as Luke taught, ‘unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required’. The Conversations stressed charity as the most extensive Christian duty; the duty of man to man. But charity had to be both liberal and judicious. Indiscriminate charity was an extravagance. It was as much a duty not to give to the idle and wicked as it was to assist the industrious and relieve the sick and infirm. It was the first duty of each individual to attend to their own necessities, for to give away what was required to perform one’s own duty was an act not of generosity but of injustice. The other important Christian duty was humility and an awareness of the infinite distance between the best of men and the perfection of the Divine. Through such attributes, combined with a personal faith allowing his grace and work to be received, a dutiful Christian life might be attained. Stanley’s theology faithfully reflected the moderate evangelicalism of his mother and Sumner. What was called ‘vital religion’ was dependent upon conversion and grace, rather than the dry rationalism of natural theology. Existence on earth was ‘an arena of moral trial’ during which individuals were tested prior to the Day of Judgement. Misery and suffering, leading to repentance and salvation, were an essential part of God’s earthly order. The key to salvation was a personal relationship with God, realized less through the sacraments or priests, than by an individual conscience opened to divine grace by faith and repentance; redemption having been made possible by Christ’s Atonement on the Cross.114 Stanley’s moderate Anglican evangelicalism, a form of theological laissez-faire, complemented his readings in political economy. Material

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success was achieved by diligence and perseverance in the face of the trials of life. Adversity, bankruptcy, and debt distinguished the industrious from the idle, just as temptations differentiated the virtuous from the wicked. Excessive meddling by government or other institutions caused unnatural disruption and denied individuals the opportunity to prove their moral worth. Wealth and privilege were not a sin. Rather, it was the wilful neglect of one’s moral or material assets that violated God’s order. Evangelical economic liberalism, therefore, was less to do with commercial growth than with the discipline it imposed, in a post-Malthusian world, on the individual will. As Peel summarized it in 1826: ‘Much good, after some severe suffering, will prevail.’115 Stanley’s moderate evangelicalism had, during the 1820s, a fourfold effect on his politics. First, it reinforced his dedication to public duty as a requirement of his privileged social status. As he confessed to Lansdowne, the temptation of an idle, frivolous, and rambling existence was an enticement to be strenuously avoided. Secondly, it underpinned his defence of the Established Church as a legal imperative, rather than issuing from a specifically Anglican apostolic authority. Attacks on the Established Church were an assault on all forms of property. Thirdly, it confirmed his belief in a common core of Christian spiritual truths shared by Protestants and Catholics, all too often obscured by a preoccupation with sectarian differences. Just as the disagreements between Ricardo and Malthus stood upon the basic truths expounded by Adam Smith, so the Protestant and Catholic churches, despite their differences, shared a fundamental foundation in the Church of Christ. Finally, all this not only strengthened Stanley’s allegiance to the moderate Whiggism of Lansdowne, it also deepened those potential points of sympathy with liberal Tories such as Huskisson and Canning. At a personal level it supplied a private dimension to a robust public personality regarded by others as guilelessly self-assured. It was the private counterbalance to Stanley’s aristocratic manner of effortless insouciance.

His noble service recompens’d. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 168)

Stanley’s tutelage under Lansdowne affirmed his support for the two major reforms, Catholic Emancipation and revision of the Corn Laws,


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dominating parliamentary politics between 1825 and 1827. Both issues tested the unity of Liverpool’s increasingly fractious ministry. Both were supported by liberal Tory cabinet members such as Canning. In the months following Stanley’s trip to North America broadening support for Catholic Emancipation and an economic crisis, suggesting the necessity for modification to the Corn Laws, began to loosen the fabric of Liverpool’s government. For moderate Whigs, such as Stanley, this opened up promising opportunities for advancement. His youthful dedication to politics found a potential purpose amid shifting party allegiance. Stanley returned in 1825 to a parliament embroiled in the Catholic Emancipation question. Since 1815 Whigs had talked of making Catholic relief the main plank of the opposition platform. Lord Grey had fought the 1820 election on the Emancipation issue. In April 1821 Plunket’s Catholic Emancipation Bill was passed by the Commons, but rejected by the Lords. The question also offered the possibility of a coalition with Canning, despite his opposition to parliamentary Reform. In June 1822 Canning’s Catholic Peers Bill passed the Commons, only to be defeated in the Lords. Future cross-bench cooperation might isolate Tory hardliners in the Commons, leaving them to the leadership of Peel. As Stanley arrived back from America the Commons debated the veteran radical MP for Westminster Sir Francis Burdett’s Catholic Relief Bill, which was accompanied by two measures providing for the payment of Irish Roman Catholic clergy and, in order to disarm ‘Protestant’ opponents, the disfranchisement of the 40s. freeholder vote in Irish county constituencies. The latter was intended to prevent the swamping of the rural electorate with Catholic voters. Stanley voted in the narrow majority of 268 members which carried Burdett’s Emancipation measure against 241 hostile votes. The subsequent division on the raising of the Irish franchise, introduced by Littleton, witnessed a great deal of cross-voting. Some Reformers opposed the bill, others supporting it as a step towards wider change. Some anti-Reformers opposed the bill, while others supported it as an attempt to conciliate the Irish Protestant gentry to Burdett’s bill. Stanley thought the franchise bill good in itself, and would have voted for it independently of the Catholic question to which it formed an appendage. In the event, Littleton’s bill passed by 233 to 185 votes, while on 10 May, Burdett’s Catholic Relief bill passed its third Commons reading by 248 to 227 votes. The success of Emancipation in the Commons caused a major ministerial crisis. Both Liverpool and Peel threatened resignation, Peel being the

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only MP in the cabinet to oppose the measure. During the Lords debate of Burdett’s bill, Liverpool denounced the measure. This, in turn, gave Canning thoughts of resignation. The Lords’ emphatic rejection of the bill, however, restored calm. Subsequently there occurred indications of a ‘Protestant’ backlash. The Commons was flooded with petitions opposing Burdett’s bill. By the autumn Canning was cautioning Whigs not to raise the Emancipation issue in the coming year. Yet the impact of the Catholic issue in 1825 confirmed the ministerial divide between High Tories, such as Wellington, Eldon, and Peel, and liberal Tories such as Canning and Huskisson. Holland warned a reclusive Grey that only Lansdowne among Whig leaders seemed in accord with a current of events bringing some of the opposition together with liberal ministers in ‘a revolution of parties’.116 Following these events Stanley gave much thought to a scheme which had been in his mind since returning from Canada. He believed that, out of the lands at present set apart for the support of religion in Canada, a joint provision for the Protestant and Catholic churches should be made in such areas as were hitherto unsettled. This would not infringe existing rights, as there were already two churches in Canada established and supported by the government. Otherwise, Stanley feared, the evils of Ireland, a Catholic population with a Protestant Church, would be replicated. In the months after April 1825 he had extensive correspondence with Sir Robert Norton at the Colonial Office on Canadian policy. This shed an important light on Stanley’s thinking about the Church of Ireland. In Ireland, on grounds of neither justice nor policy could the Church’s revenues be touched because they were an established legal right. Their violation would threaten the rights of property everywhere. But, as he admitted to his friend Thomas Spring Rice, he wished this situation ‘had never existed, and I am unwilling to renew the experiment in the Trans-Atlantic world’.117 It was the status of the Anglican Church, within the United Kingdom and the colonies, that dominated Stanley’s early political thinking. He favoured Emancipation and the provision of property for the Catholic Church in Canada. His view on the latter issue was confirmed by his correspondence with the Hon. Thomas Talbot (younger son of Baron Talbot of Malahide Castle in Co. Dublin), who had taken up residence in British North America.118 What Stanley could not countenance, however, was the despoiling of the Established Church’s legally designated property in Ireland. This would be a violation of the sanctity of property which would, he believed, do nothing to alleviate the suffering of the Irish peasantry. It


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was social and economic factors that were causing Irish destitution. Responsible political reforms could remove religious disabilities. But abuse of property would only undermine the legal authority upon which civil society stood. Spending the 1825 recess in Ballykisteen with his new wife, Stanley looked to a short session of parliament in the coming year with a general election in June or July. But over the next months a growing economic crisis darkened the political horizon. Rampant speculation on loans to new Latin American republics and continental European governments culminated in a dramatic credit crisis, reminiscent of the ‘South Sea Bubble’ of 1720. By December 1825 a financial panic had taken hold. The commercial distress caused by the failure of provincial banks exceeded Stanley’s own initial apprehensions. Though he claimed, to one American correspondent, Daniel Webster, not to be well-versed in economic theory, he traced the crisis to overspeculation in all classes, and to an unlimited issue of paper currency, stimulated by and in turn encouraging those speculations, without a metallic currency sufficient to support the paper.119 Failure induced panic, which, as was always the case he observed, doubled and trebled the amount of failure. In these circumstances he disliked the prospect of a parliamentary debate on the Corn Laws. He wished to avoid having a general election with ‘men’s minds inflamed by discussion on so vital a question’. Liverpool’s government also attributed the crisis to over-speculation, particularly in foreign investments. Their response was to restrict the circulation of small notes by provincial banks. The subsequent Banking Act arrived on the statute book in May 1826. The political significance of such issues for the Whigs lay in the prominence they gave Lansdowne and the apathy shown by Grey. Grey resigned the Whig party leadership in the Lords, returning to seclusion in Northumberland, and giving way to Lansdowne. This, in turn, provided momentum to notions of moderate coalition. The merger of liberal Tories and moderate Whigs, with High Tories marginalized on one side and Grand Whiggery on the other, appeared a possibility. This strengthening current gave Stanley a political direction. During the spring of 1826 Stanley spoke to the Commons for the first time since his return from America. Initially, in April, it was family interests that brought him to his feet. He opposed the Liverpool–Manchester Railway Bill. It was, he declared, ‘a mad and extravagant speculation’.120 This was a defence of Lord Derby and his father-in-law’s economic interests and the carrying of coal from their estates to Ormskirk. The previous year Lord Derby and his son-in-law Lord Wilton, assisted in the Commons by Thomas Creevey, had defeated the first parliamentary application to build

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the Liverpool to Manchester line, despite the plan being supported by prominent Liverpool merchants such as John Gladstone (father of William Gladstone) and Huskisson, MP for Liverpool. During March and April 1826 Stanley marshalled opposition to the railway scheme, though in the event the holding action failed. On 5 May the Liverpool to Manchester Railway Bill received the royal assent and survey work began immediately south of Knowsley Park to build the world’s first railway carrying both passengers and goods between two large manufacturing towns. But of greater political significance was the debate into which Stanley found himself drawn just four weeks later, which he hoped could have been avoided, on the Corn Laws. Owing to a bad harvest the price of wheat had risen to its highest point since 1819. In April 1826 depression in the industrial districts and rioting in Lancashire brought matters to a head. Liverpool’s cabinet responded with an emergency measure for the immediate release of bonded wheat for the home market. On 8 May, Stanley expressed his agreement with the government’s proposed bill and regretted to see the harsh opposition adopted by some of the agricultural interest.121 But he regarded the measure as merely a palliative, a measure of temporary relief. Even so, he hoped it would create among the manufacturing classes a feeling of gratitude for the promptness with which parliament had acted. The bill passed with large majorities in both the Commons and the Lords. His speech helped to repair Stanley’s reputation in Westminster. It also encouraged a moderate alliance between Whigs such as Lansdowne and liberal ministers such as Huskisson. In private Stanley noted that the state of economic distress in manufacturing districts was appalling. Trade was getting lower every day and in many places the poor rates exceeded the amount of rent. He could not foresee the result of all this, but did not think the fund holders would escape. Yet the reduction of interest on the national debt was, in point of fact, a national bankruptcy—a desperate expedient at best. What worried him most was that everybody seemed at a loss fully to understand either the cause or the remedy of the present suffering. The theoretical nostrums of political economy remained their only refuge, with the centrist political prospects they proffered. In June 1826 parliament was dissolved and a general election called, the Corn Laws and Catholic Emancipation proving the dominant issues around the country. Stanley left Stockbridge to stand for his father’s former constituency of Preston, in place of his uncle Edmund Hornby. But he found his candidacy challenged by the popular radical William Cobbett. Aware that representing Preston would involve a contest, he had begun a personal canvass of the borough in April. During June, in daily reports to


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Emma in the final stages of her first pregnancy, he detailed the intense exertions that contesting the constituency entailed.122 He subsequently defeated ‘Peter Porcupine’, as he referred to Cobbett, in the polls on 26 June. But the violent invective of the contest did not diminish his dislike of popular politics. Rioting had occurred in Preston during the election. Twice troops were called out from the nearby garrison at Kirkham to break up the mob. All in all, he concluded, success in Preston was ‘not worth half the time, trouble and expense that it costs’, and would ‘never be had without a contest’.123 The candidates’ expenses exceeded the cost of any previous election. The recess of 1826 offered a welcome respite from the hustings. Stanley’s first son, Edward Henry Stanley (known as Eddy within the family), was born on 21 July. Yet, as the hot summer drew on, drought devastated the harvest. It was clear that some revision of the Corn Laws was necessary. In November the government announced their intention to modify the Corn Laws in the forthcoming year. Lansdowne encouraged colleagues to establish connections with liberal members of the cabinet. It was noted that Canning was a frequent visitor to Bowood, a fact which increased speculation about an imminent merger of liberal ministerialists and moderate Whigs. The session of 1827 proved critical both for Stanley and for the nation. Illness and death loosened the fabric of parliamentary politics. On 6 January the Duke of York, a prominent opponent of Emancipation, died. More importantly, on the morning of 17 February the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, was discovered partially paralysed in his breakfast room, having suffered a debilitating stroke. He barely hung on to life and office until his resignation in April. The Whig and influential lobbyist Edward Ellice warned that ‘great changes, not only affecting the situation of parties, but the vital interests of the country, are not far distant, and that the death of one or two individuals, or any other accidents within the compass of a reasonable probability, may accelerate them beyond the expectation of any party’.124 The issue of Catholic Emancipation remained the anticipated reference point. The question of the Protestant Church’s property in Canada foreshadowed the forthcoming Emancipation debate. On 20 February 1827 Wilmot Horton introduced a bill authorizing the sale of the Clergy Reserves in Upper and Lower Canada. Stanley spoke in support of Horton’s bill.125 From his personal acquaintance with Canada he knew there existed a near unanimity over the pernicious effects of the Clergy Reserves. When, in 1791, Pitt established the system he anticipated future modifications would be necessary. Stanley believed that events had shown

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the absolute mischief of the current arrangement. The Clergy Reserves operated as a serious obstacle to agricultural improvement in Canada. Those who followed Stanley in support of Horton’s bill, however, spoke of the appropriation of church property, the radical MP for Bridport, Henry Warburton, suggesting appropriated revenues be used for education. This made Stanley acutely uncomfortable. If support for Horton’s bill meant the appropriation of church property, it contradicted his famous defence of the Church of Ireland three years earlier. Feeling impelled to speak a second time, he admitted that, in supporting Horton, he was aware of the nature of the property allotted to the Church. But the present sale he understood to be for the improvement of the remainder of the lands in Canada given to the Church.126 As such, the bill had his approval. Yet he did not dispel all suspicion of inconsistency. Nor did he persuade many colleagues of the distinction he drew in his own mind between the legal status of Protestant property in Canada and ecclesiastical property in Ireland. On 1 March, Canning introduced resolutions to the Commons revising the Corn Laws. He declared that the inflexible prohibition of foreign corn as a measure of protection could no longer be defended. The trade in corn should be kept on a sober regular course and not subjected to ‘the perpetual jerks and impulses’ experienced of late, producing alternate ‘drought’ and ‘deluge’.127 To this end he proposed a sliding scale of duties which would steady the supply of corn, while protecting the domestic agricultural interest. Stanley supported Canning’s measure as introducing a degree of liberality into the regulation of corn imports. But after the bill was approved in the Commons, Wellington, in the Lords, successfully scuttled the measure. Revision of the Corn Laws was deferred. It was Burdett’s much anticipated Catholic Emancipation proposal, discussed in early March, that excited the most bitter Commons debate, bringing into focus the shifting pattern of political feeling prompted by Liverpool’s illness. With Ireland bordering on rebellion because of O’Connell’s Emancipation campaign, the question stirred a feverish anxiety. Stanley noted that it caused much violence of language within a deeply divided cabinet.128 Furious Commons debate on Burdett’s motion produced powerful speeches on both sides and a division called at five o’clock in the morning. In the event, it was the first Catholic Emancipation bill to fail in the Commons since 1821. Both Stanley and his father voted for the measure, which was defeated by a slim margin of 276 to 272 votes. The failure of Burdett’s Emancipation Bill, Liverpool’s failing health, and Canning’s claim as heir-presumptive emphasized the


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uncertainty of parliamentary prospects. When the dying Liverpool finally relinquished the premiership, on 30 March, the Whig leader in the Commons, George Tierney, opposed a vote on supplies until the character of any administration Canning might form was clear.

But short his term of glory. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 105)

Canning’s attempt to form a government in April 1827 inevitably hinged on the Catholic question. The anti-Catholics of Liverpool’s ministry, Wellington, Peel, Eldon, Bathurst, and Westmorland, declined to serve in his cabinet. Canning’s willingness to keep the issue an ‘open question’ could not offset his own well-known preference for Emancipation. Yet, on such a basis, some Whigs, represented by Lansdowne, might participate in a Canning coalition; particularly as the increasingly reclusive Grey, who personally detested Canning, had told Lansdowne the previous year that he now regarded Stanley’s mentor as the effective leader of the Whig party. Eventually Canning formed a coalition that included a good number of leading Whigs, Tierney, Brougham, the Earl of Carlisle, William Lamb (later Lord Melbourne), and Thomas Spring Rice. But a significant number declined partnership with Canning, including, predictably, Lord Grey, the Duke of Bedford, Lord Althorp, and Lord John Russell. They attacked Lansdowne for surrendering his integrity for the prospect of place without power. Brougham believed the Whigs had ‘ceased to act as a party’.129 Since February, Lansdowne had played a key role in Whig negotiations with Canning. Lansdowne supported Canning’s recognition of newly independent South American states and his arguments for the liberalization of commerce and imports. Doubts about Canning’s ability to act on Emancipation, however, made Lansdowne cautious. Continuing symptoms of Irish unrest emphasized the importance of the issue. By late April, Lansdowne, under pressure from Brougham, decided to relax his insistence upon a pro-Catholic Lord Lieutenant and Chief Secretary in Ireland as a precondition to his joining Canning. His acceptance of office, as Minister without Portfolio in early May and then, in July, as Home Secretary, pointed the way for Stanley, as the Whig Commons leader Tierney also finally accepted office under Canning. The purity of opposition, Lansdowne insisted, was a refuge of impotence.

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In early July 1827, on Lansdowne’s prompting, Canning offered Stanley a Lordship of the Treasury. Three months earlier Stanley’s close Eton and Oxford friend the Whig Lord Leveson-Gower had accepted the same post under Canning. Stanley, however, hesitated on two grounds. First, he anticipated difficulties in his re-election at Preston. Secondly, he could only regard such an appointment as a form of probation. On the understanding of higher office to follow, Stanley declined to take a position he considered too humble an initiation into official business.130 But within a month the 56-year-old Canning was dead. Once again, with the keystone of the ministry removed, the framework of parliamentary politics shifted. Lord Goderich, the government leader in the Lords since April, succeeded as prime minister in August, hoping to keep Canning’s coalition intact. Huskisson, after being recalled from convalescence in the Austrian Tyrol, became the linchpin of the coalition in the Commons, bringing centrist Whigs such as Tierney and Spring Rice together with ministerial Tories. But the dithering and henpecked Goderich lacked the authority to shoulder Canning’s legacy. Lansdowne did, however, secure an office for his protégé. Stanley’s entry into the administration, accompanied by a personal plea from the King, persuaded Lansdowne not to resign.131 On 15 October 1827 Stanley became Under-Secretary for the Colonies. By 19 October he was at work with Huskisson as Secretary of State in the Colonial Office at 13 and 14 Downing Street. His father-in-law welcomed the news: ‘I am glad of his appointment more on private grounds than public ones, because it will give Stanley habits of business, and break the habit of shooting, eternal shooting—the only pursuit, besides reading, that he can follow at a place [like Knowsley] where he is only third in command and generation.’132 Earlier in the year Stanley had made his debut as a racehorse owner, entering two mounts in a meeting at Heaton Park just north of Manchester, the country seat of his uncle by marriage Lord Wilton. Thus began his lifelong devotion to the turf under the Knowsley colours of black and white. But these private diversions were now overtaken by the labour of government business. During November and December he found himself preoccupied with colonial patronage and the pleas of widows for pensions. His most important item of business was a review of colonial governors’ salaries, in response to a Treasury demand for the reduction of estimates.133 Yet such employment could only be temporary given Goderich’s obvious weakness. In January 1828 Goderich’s unconvincing attempt to preserve Canning’s ministry collapsed. It was due, Stanley privately observed, to Goderich’s


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imbecility.134 Young Whigs, such as Russell, Althorp, Tavistock, and Milton, had, during the previous autumn, made clear their opposition to Goderich’s coalition, parading their independence as proof of their virtue. Lansdowne’s participation in the coalition eroded his authority. He stood accused of being dilatory and lacking firmness. Collusion with Canning and complicity in Goderich’s failure had not appeared to bring Emancipation any closer. Wellington’s succession as prime minister in January 1828 heaped further ignominy upon the enterprise. But Grey’s torpor, Brougham’s illness, and Althorp’s reluctance to step forward left a void in the Whig leadership following Lansdowne’s demise. Whig divisions mirrored the split between High and liberal Tories on the other side of the House. As the diarist Greville observed: ‘parties were split to pieces, there was no Opposition, and no man could tell what were the politics of his neighbour, scarcely what his own’.135 This was a spur to the ambitious as, during 1828, Stanley looked to become the principal mourner at Canning’s shrine. At the beginning of 1828 Wellington attempted a revival of Liverpool’s government. Ultra Tories, such as lords Eldon, Westmorland, and Bexley, were omitted from his new ministry, while some Canningites, Huskisson, Palmerston, Dudley, Leveson-Gower, and Grant, agreed to remain. Henry Goulburn replaced John Herries as Chancellor of the Exchequer. But the arrangement was never a comfortable one, Canning’s widow alleging that Huskisson had sacrificed her late husband’s principles for the retention of power. Lansdowne declined to be a member of Wellington’s cabinet from the beginning. Stanley also resigned from office on 28 January 1828.136 His friend Leveson-Gower was appointed as his successor. Stanley now looked to pick up the legacy of Canning. Stepping out from Lansdowne’s shadow, he prepared to pursue a more ambitious line of his own. On 18 February he made a major statement to the Commons explaining his position.137 He felt unable to support the new government, he declared, because they were not a united ministry, only a strange medley of men and principles. Indeed, so ludicrously painful were the differences among the cabinet that they made a mockery of each other’s convictions. The ministry would, he predicted, abandon the policy of Canning, whom at least one minister, Lord Ellenborough, had described as a dangerous innovator. The significant difference between Canning and Wellington’s governments, Stanley asserted, existed over Catholic claims in Ireland. While the Irish had looked with confidence to Canning, no such hopes existed of the new government. With the important exception of Huskisson, Emancipation was regarded by ministers with either indifference or bigotry. He concluded

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with a memorial to the dead Canning, whose principles, he believed, still survived and whose policy of support for the liberal spirit of the age he hoped parliament would embrace.

Wherewith we honour’d him above the rest. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 299)

Canning’s memory provided a template for Stanley’s ambition. The selfassured young man who, aged 23, had made public life his vocation, now, aged 29, prepared to play a pivotal role in national politics. From being Lansdowne’s most promising protégé, he looked to become Canning’s political executor. During the summer of 1828, as Catholic Emancipation assumed an increasing prominence, relaxation of the Corn Laws, measured parliamentary Reform, and retrenchment gave tangible shape to his centrist aspirations. He looked to head a Commons alignment of moderate progressivism, embracing responsible Whigs and Canningite Tories. This was an ambitious aspiration for a young, if promising and self-confident, politician. Success was dependent upon two considerations. Most importantly, would Wellington’s government be willing to act as a reactionary foil? Secondly, would rival young Whigs such as Russell and Althorp allow other issues to be held in abeyance? In the event, such hopes were dashed. Russell acted quickly. On 26 February 1828 the Commons debated a motion pressed by Russell for the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts. The Acts barred Dissenters from holding civic office, though by 1828 the legislation was more symbolic than real. Nonetheless, the Acts were seen to perpetuate social prejudice against non-Anglican Protestants. Russell’s motion passed the Lower House with surprising ease, despite the argument of Ultra Tories that it would open the door to Catholic Emancipation. Both Stanley and his father voted in the majority of 237 to 193 votes approving Russell’s motion. As government leader in the Commons, Peel, Stanley noted, was furious.138 Recognizing the broad support existing within Westminster, subsequently Peel saw through parliament a measure repealing the Test and Corporation Acts, though he mollified Anglican susceptibilities with the requirement of a declaration from those holding corporate and civil offices not to injure the Established Church. During March parliamentary Reform, in the form of the East Retford disfranchisement bill, also became a live political issue. Again,


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both Stanley and his father voted in the minority alongside Russell, Althorp, Brougham, Graham, and Hume, supporting the measure. But it was the Corn Law debate on 22 April that offered Stanley his opportunity to raise Canning’s standard. Goulburn, struggling to reconcile Wellington’s protectionism with Huskisson’s liberality, supported by Charles Grant, President of the Board of Trade, proposed a more modest revision of the Corn Laws than advocated by Canning the previous year. In response Stanley declared the existing Corn Laws to be palpably deficient.139 Corn should be had at a low rate. But it should be had at a fixed and definite rate, and not exposed to rapid fluctuations, which were equally ruinous to consumer and producer. Canning had recommended a sliding scale and had proceeded on an ad capitandum principle. John Calcraft (MP for Wareham) moved Canning’s resolutions of the previous year as an amendment, the duty to operate at a pivot price of 62s. 4d. and rise or diminish by 2d. for every 1d. in price. For a second time that evening Stanley rose to speak. A sliding scale of duties, he declared, would keep corn prices as low as possible, while giving the agriculturists a fair profit. Calcraft’s amendment was defeated, however, by fifty-eight to 202 votes. Thus Goulburn’s revision of the Corn Laws—cruder and more protectionist than that envisaged by Canning the previous year—was approved. Three weeks later the question of a pension for Canning’s family provided Stanley with another opportunity to eulogize Canning. The dead statesman, he pronounced, had for years, though in a minority, advocated liberal measures.140 Thus he had endeavoured to keep pace with the spirit of the age, not going in advance of it, while judiciously ensuring that parliament did not lag behind it. Stanley hoped that the same liberal policy would continue to be acted upon. By 1828 Stanley was blending the Canningite ingredients of liberal Toryism with his moderate Whig principles in the porous doctrinal vessel shaped by Lansdowne. Whiggish constitutionalism and maternal evangelicalism were merged with elements of liberal Toryism. Stanley saw parliament, particularly the Commons, as the authoritative national forum mediating that social change wrought by progress. It was the Commons that arbitrated between potentially antagonistic social ‘interests’. To do nothing would encourage revolution, to do too much would destroy those foundations, such as the sanctity of property, upon which progress was built. Here lay the constitutional framework for Stanley’s exaltation of Canning’s liberalism. The polity did not define society; rather it judiciously mediated between those various dynamic ‘interests’ comprising society. Judicious Reform of parliament and careful regulation of import tariffs would enable Westminster to adjust

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the balance of ‘interests’ in response to social and economic advancement. Thereby moderate political progress and social stability could be safeguarded. Stanley elaborated his constitutional views on 19 May, during continued debate on the East Retford disfranchisement bill. In opposing the transfer of the two East Retford seats to Birmingham, ministers talked of a collision between the agricultural and manufacturing sections of society. Stanley deeply regretted such language.141 The Commons had to represent the interests of the whole nation, mixed and varied as they were. It was in the Commons that the relative merits of different interests were considered and weighed. MPs were not instructed delegates for particular interests. Rather, it was through calm collective deliberation in the Commons that the ‘national interest’ was discerned. As Burke declared, MPs owed the electorate their judgement, which was betrayed if sacrificed to the voter’s opinion. Burkean notions of ‘virtual representation’, MPs looking to the interests of society as a whole, were central to Stanley’s constitutional views. Ministerial language, by implying that MPs were direct representatives of specific interests, threatened the sovereignty of the Commons. Stanley opposed extensive parliamentary Reform. But he supported careful piecemeal Reform as represented by the East Retford bill. Particular cases of gross abuse should be remedied as they occurred. Thus evils could be cured, not by sweeping change, but by gradual adjustment. In considering the case of East Retford the Commons had three options before it. The franchise could be transferred either to Birmingham, to Manchester, or else to the adjoining hundred of Bassetlaw. Despite his Lancastrian connection with Manchester, Stanley felt, in recognition of the broader ‘national interest’, that the franchise should go to Birmingham. He spoke in reply to Peel, who, he noted, was very angry at his speech.142 The government’s front bench split. Huskisson, Palmerston, Wynn, Sturges Bourne, and Sandon voted with Stanley. Wellington seized upon this vote as the opportunity to end his alliance with the Huskissonites, forestalling a more embarrassing ministerial split over Emancipation. The Retford measure prompted Huskisson’s third offer of resignation within four months. By June the Huskissonites were sitting in opposition, alongside Stanley, the Whigs, and radicals, confronting a Tory ministry headed by Wellington and led in the Commons by Peel. The Liverpool ministerial alliance, fractured by Liverpool’s death in 1827, was now fatally splintered. With Canning’s memory as his lodestar, in June 1828 Stanley embarked on an aggressive opposition to Wellington and Peel. The conditions he had


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prescribed in February for an outspoken Canningite policy, against a government no longer enjoying the support of Huskisson and others, offered themselves. Retrenchment, moderate Reform, and Catholic Emancipation defined his agenda. The well-informed Harriet Arbuthnot, wife of the Tory anti-Canningite Charles Arbuthnot, noticed how very active Stanley was in organizing hostile strategies, despite Grey’s wish to allow the government a period of peace.143 Stanley’s appointment to the newly formed Public Income and Expenditure Committee of the Commons affirmed his rising status. It also provided an opportunity to champion the demand for economy as part of a Canningite opposition. Alongside Lord Althorp and Lord Howick as other Whig members of the Committee, Stanley sought to restrain the executive authority of ministers such as Peel. On 23 June he accused the government of being mean, shuffling, and underhanded in their handling of Treasury surpluses.144 It was, he privately noted, a gross job.145 He acted as a teller in the subsequent division, though the motion accusing the government of a misappropriation of public monies failed. Four days later, during continuing debate on the disfranchisement of East Retford, he declared it to be quite apparent that the country could hope for little advantage from the government as presently constituted.146 The evangelical Whig Sir James Graham, for one, saw in young Stanley a new leader for an alliance of moderate Whigs, Canningites, and liberal Tories. A Cumberland landowner, a Christ Church man, and 34-year-old MP for Carlisle, Graham quickly became a loyal supporter of Stanley’s aspirations. Graham was a strong proponent of economy and parliamentary Reform, earning him the sobriquet among Tories of ‘the radical baronet’. On 15 July he informed Stanley that in the next session ‘you will find a strong and respectable body willing to act under you’.147 There existed a ‘golden opportunity of forming a party in the House of Commons on some broad and intelligible principle, without any reference to leaders in the House of Lords and without any direct compact with Brougham’. He hoped Stanley would ‘take the field in force’. Graham fired Stanley’s resolve: ‘You are the person on whom I rest my hopes; you contain all the great requisites; you may unite a scattered force which it is the interest of the country to see consolidated; and by concert and judicious management I really am disposed to believe that the road to power is … yours.’ Stanley and Graham, the Reform MP for Westminster John Hobhouse noted, ‘are foremost of the youngsters’.148 But much depended on the events of the recess and the actions of others. While portraying the government in as reactionary terms as possible, it was necessary to prevent other young, more advanced, Whigs, such as Russell and Althorp, from polarizing

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parliamentary opinion and undercutting the centre ground. With this in mind, Stanley responded warily to an invitation from Russell, in October 1828, to join a committee for the promotion of religious liberty. From Knowsley, he warned Russell that, while he supported equal political rights for Dissenters and Catholics, he could not support their exemption from the Church rates.149 He did emphasize to Russell, however, the advantage of making Emancipation the leading party question upon which to base a steady opposition to the government. Lansdowne pressed the same point on Spring Rice, Brougham, Althorp, and Denison, as well as Russell. But such a prospect, Graham warned, remained clouded by difficulties. Much depended upon the actions of the government, on one side of the House, Russell, Althorp, and others on the opposite side of the chamber, and the preferences of Grey as communicated from the Lords. Arguably, Stanley’s self-confidence and ambition had carried him too far too fast. While correspondence with Graham and Charles Wynn (formerly President of the Board of Control) encouraged Stanley in his plans, others were sceptical about Stanley attempting to act as a leader in the Commons. Despite his obvious energy and talents, he was, at 29, seen as not yet ripe for so exalted a position. Critically, Wellington and Peel declined to act as a reactionary foil in opposing Catholic Emancipation. On 5 July 1828 Daniel O’Connell, backed by his Catholic Association, won a by-election victory in Co. Clare. By September there was a growing threat of disorder in Ireland. Around Stanley’s own estate in Tipperary increasing popular support for O’Connell was encouraged by mass marchings, bringing together Catholic crowds organized with quasi-military precision. Lord Leveson-Gower, as Chief Secretary for Ireland since June, supported by the pro-Catholic Lord Lieutenant for Ireland Lord Anglesey, warned of imminent rebellion and the urgent need for a Catholic Emancipation measure. Wellington sounded out Peel on proposing Emancipation which, if conceded, might deflect the demand for parliamentary Reform. Following Peel’s agreement, the cabinet framed an Emancipation measure for inclusion in the King’s speech for 1829. Thus events outside Westminster gave Wellington and Peel justification for a concession within parliament that forcefully disrupted opposition expectations. The plea of necessity provided a counter to the outrage of Ultra Tories, dismayed by their leaders’ capitulation. In short, during the 1828 recess, Stanley’s strategic expectations were decisively dashed, in part at the urgings of his friend Leveson-Gower as Irish Chief Secretary. At the end of December, Stanley sounded out Spring Rice as to whether foreign policy, in particular relations with Portugal and


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Greece, might provide alternative ground upon which to rally a party. But Spring Rice replied that the Whigs cared ‘not a fig’ about such matters.150 In the King’s Speech opening parliament on 5 February 1829 Catholic Emancipation was, in effect, announced. Accompanying Emancipation, Peel, on 11 February 1829, brought in a bill to suppress the Catholic Association and disfranchise Irish 40s. freehold voters. This was an attempt to appease Ultra Tories, deflect accusations of apostasy, and eradicate the electoral base of O’Connell’s campaign. Seizing the opportunity to speak before the Emancipation debate, Stanley denounced the Ultras as illiberal and seditious, so helping to stoke the fires of controversy.151 He would have opposed the putting down of the Association as an isolated act, but supported it in the company of Emancipation. It was an act of temporary coercion accompanied by a measure of permanent conciliation. Thereafter, he argued a delicate line, both praising Peel for his conversion and disparaging the hopes Peel held of the measure. Though disapproving of the Catholic Association’s conduct, often injurious to their own cause, and believing the existence of the populist Association, in its apparently successful intimidation of the executive, to be inconsistent with the spirit of the constitution, Stanley would not stigmatize the Association as the government had done in the King’s Speech. Nor could he share in Peel’s hope that Emancipation would solve all problems in Ireland. Those used to regarding the law as arbitrary would not suddenly become obedient. It remained absolutely necessary, once Irish grievances were removed, to make the people feel there was a power, strengthened by justice, able to maintain the law. This challenged the government’s presentation of Emancipation as an ultimate cure, while also stirring up Ultra anger. ‘All would have gone off quietly’, Harriet Arbuthnot complained, ‘but for Mr. Stanley who, as usual, was violent and personal and talked of the Protestant party as illiberal and seditious and all sorts of names he applied to them.’152 Denying the government the comfort of finality ensured that Peel suffered the full isolation of his position, cut adrift from his Ultras and finding only a very temporary alliance with those across the floor of the House. Wellington and Peel’s conversion to Emancipation checked Stanley’s own immediate hopes, but it also split the natural support upon which the government depended. Tory fury was vented during February, when Peel quixotically subjected himself to a by-election contest and was unseated by the electors of Oxford University. As the young Oriel don Henry Newman declared: ‘It is not pro dignitate nostra to have a rat as our Member.’153

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During March 1829 the government’s Emancipation measure rapidly passed through the Commons. On 6 March, Stanley and his father voted for the first reading, which passed with a large majority. The Commons, meanwhile, was flooded with petitions protesting against the measure. On 26 March, Stanley spoke in response to a petition from a congregation of Welsh Dissenters. The petition, he observed, showed how sectarian feeling had been excited and how the measure was perceived as a specifically Irish measure which, in some indistinct way, was to favour the lower-class Irishman.154 All this he regretted, as it agitated unnecessarily dangerous prejudices. On 30 March, Stanley and his father voted for the third reading of the bill, which passed, with a majority of 178, by 320 to 142 votes. In April, after being accepted by the Lords, Catholic Emancipation passed into law.

Chafing with rage repress’d. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 27)

The passage of Catholic Emancipation in April 1829 caused a seismic shift in parliamentary politics. As one Stanleyite observed, ‘the pack of cards has been … completely shuffled’.155 Tory division, less Whig success, threw open new possibilities. But for Stanley personally it removed the very issue upon which he looked to form a centrist alliance. With the main reference point of his strategy erased, he looked to an uncertain future in which the landmarks of action stood in unfamiliar relations with each other. Since 1826 the current of events had apparently been favouring a centrist coalition, carried along by the cry for Emancipation. Yet the manner in which Emancipation actually passed, and in particular the identity of its authors, scuttled such hopes. Wellington and Peel’s delivery of Emancipation also threw attention onto the question of parliamentary Reform, which diverted the political momentum towards an increasing polarization of sentiment. This dangerous undertow was to swell into the violent rip tide of November 1830. During the anticlimactic remainder of the 1829 session Stanley spoke on ecclesiastical corporations in Ireland and the problems of Upper Canada. But his speeches lacked clear strategic purpose in a situation of new-found flux. On 2 April he proposed an amendment to the leasing of property held by Irish bishops which would, he argued, give additional security to tenants and additional income to the bishops.156 This was legislation he had


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discussed with the Bishop of Limerick, hoping that it would be a means of the Church of Ireland showing ‘moderate and conciliatory views, while fixing their property upon a permanent and unalterable foundation’.157 With the consent of their tenants, the Church could commute their present leases for a corn rent, chargeable in perpetuity upon the same estates. Though leave was given to introduce his bill, it came to nothing in the 1829 session. At the end of April he returned to Knowsley to attend the funeral of the Countess of Derby, the bereaved 12th Earl’s devoted partner. Knowsley without Lady Derby, Creevey observed, was like a house with all the candles and fires put out. Immediately travelling back to London, Stanley then, on 14 May, introduced a petition to the Commons from the inhabitants of Upper Canada, complaining of high salaries, placemen, and lack of responsible government in the administration of the province.158 The government’s statements on the issue, in a subsequent debate on 12 June, he found evasive.159 They left vague the ineffectiveness of the Council of Upper Canada and the undue influence of the Crown in the Council. But such discussions did little to clarify the political confusion which the passage of Emancipation, at the hands of Wellington and Peel, had created. Parliamentary Reform now acquired a new prominence. Local Reform organizations in the industrial towns drew inspiration from the success of Emancipation, which seemed to show the vulnerability of the prerogative to populist pressure. Meanwhile, outraged Ultras within Westminster began to look to parliamentary Reform with a twofold purpose. First, it offered a way of preserving what remained of a constitution exposed to what they saw as the shabby duplicity of Wellington’s government. Secondly, it offered a welcome opportunity to embarrass the apostates Wellington and Peel. Ultras sought to befriend the opposition benches. By October 1829 the rumour was circulating that some Ultras, after forcing out Wellington, were planning a mixed administration under Lord Mansfield, containing Tories like Eldon and Newcastle, and Whigs such as Stanley and Brougham. Moreover, younger Whigs, such as Russell and Althorp, came to see in substantial parliamentary Reform a rallying cry for a revitalized opposition. What had to be overcome was the reluctance of those, like Stanley, who were for large-scale Reform, and the hesitancy of those, like Grey, who, having secured Emancipation, felt it would be unfair to exploit the government’s weaknesses. In this, as Brougham called it, ‘strange state’ of affairs, Huskisson anticipated his own return to office accompanied by Stanley, whose salving centrism might heal the painful wounds of the 1829 session.160 ‘All seems

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at sea,’ Brougham informed Stanley. ‘How Peel is to go on baffles all conjecture.’ In November, though it was treated with wry amusement by Creevey and Lord Derby, Huskisson called Stanley ‘the hope of the nation’.161 For elderly Whigs such as Grey, looking to the next generation, and capable administrators such as Huskisson, looking for influential young support, Stanley had, as well as intelligence and ability, one particularly valuable qualification: he was an aristocrat. During the 1820s many rising MPs showed talent, capability for business, and political acumen. What many of them lacked, however, was aristocratic credentials. Canning, Croker, Henry Dundas, Henry Goulburn, Herries, Hobhouse, Huskisson himself, and Robert Peel represented an impressive array of talent across the spectrum of Commons opinion. All that was missing was impeccable breeding. This Stanley provided. He might corroborate the Whig claim that an enlightened aristocracy could provide leadership of talent, youth, and conviction, giving social tone to the diligence of men of business. After visiting Ballykisteen in September, Stanley joined the highspirited party from Knowsley who, at his aunt Lady Wilton’s invitation, on 14 November travelled on the ‘new Loco Motive machine’ George Stephenson’s Rocket.162 Four weeks earlier the Rainhill Trials, held on the completed stretch of track just 2 miles south of Knowsley Park, demonstrated the technological power of Stephenson’s conveyance to a mixed response of wonder, exhilaration, and alarm. As impressive in their own way were the major engineering feats under way in the construction of the rest of the line between Liverpool and Manchester, the excavation of the 70-foot-deep Mount Cutting just outside Liverpool, the grand nine-arch Sankey Viaduct 5 miles east of Knowsley, and the crossing of the large boggy expanse of Chat Moss beyond it. In a hail of sparks and smoke the Knowsley party covered a 5-mile distance across the Lancashire countryside at a startling speed of 23 miles per hour. The velocity of the new technology mirrored the accelerating pace of political events. It seemed unclear how Peel could go on, despite Wellington’s determination to keep office. Whig dislike of the Ultras offered some comfort to the ministry, though the unpalatable prospect of requesting a further concession from the King over Reform, as with Emancipation the previous year, affirmed their plight. Some wished to apply the brakes. Brougham advised Stanley that, ‘after the dreadful sacrifices Peel has made to the Catholic question, it would be extremely painful to oppose [Peel] with any factiousness’.163 Grey and Holland also talked of ‘friendly neutrality’ towards the government, in the hope that the ministry would themselves bring forward moderate measures. In February 1830, with the government


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indicating some sympathy for the Whig cause of retrenchment, Stanley’s friend and fellow Canningite John Stuart Wortley accepted the office of Secretary to the Board of Control under Wellington’s premiership. The Whig lords Rosslyn and Abercromby also joined the ministry. But the derailment of Tory government now threatened an imminent collision. Ultra Tories immediately vented their profound anger at Peel’s treachery on 4 February 1830, when parliament reassembled. The Tory Sir Edward Knatchbull’s amendment to the Address, claiming that ministers were not giving due regard to the growing landed and commercial distress in the country, Ultras argued, confirmed the need for Reform. Stanley voted for Knatchbull’s amendment, which was defeated by a majority of fifty-three votes, fifty-six Whigs supporting Knatchbull, while twenty-six Whigs voted with the government. The amendment stood, however, as a clear signal of Ultra hostility. On 18 February the Ultra Marquess of Blandford proposed a plan of Reform embracing almost all earlier schemes, in an attempt, he argued, to protect the Church of England. If Reform did not occur, Blandford warned, the Catholic forces unleashed by Emancipation would quickly plunder the Established Church. Fidelity to the Church overrode loyalty to the electoral system. Even so, Blandford’s scheme appeared an astonishing proposal, revealing the depth of Ultra anger. Stanley declared his opposition to the bill, and in the subsequent division voted in the majority that defeated the scheme by 160 to fifty-seven votes.164 Less sweeping Reform proposals, moved from the Whig benches, Stanley did favour. Russell’s unsuccessful motion for transferring the franchises of corrupt boroughs to Manchester, Birmingham, and Leeds, introduced just five days after Blandford’s scheme, was supported by both Stanley and his father. Stanley also voted for two unsuccessful Reform motions proposed by Poulett Thomson, regarding Newark and East Retford, moved on 1 March and 5 March respectively. Yet, at the same time, he preserved his distance from Russell and Althorp by declining to attend Whig party meetings during March, claiming a prior commitment to other business. Graham also absented himself. O’Connell’s subsequent radical proposal for voting by ballot Stanley forcefully opposed. The ballot, Stanley argued, would deprive the higher orders of their legitimate influence, the influence of rank and property recognized by the constitution being woven into its representative system.165 O’Connell withdrew his proposition. When, in May, Russell moved a more extensive Reform scheme than he had proposed in February, it was decisively defeated, though again Stanley voted in the minority for Russell’s plan.

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The various different groups in the Commons identified by the Morning Chronicle, at the beginning of the 1830 session, were still evident. On one side sat the government’s supporters, while on the other side there existed a High Tory opposition, the old Whig opposition, those Liberals and Reformers who looked to Russell and Althorp, and then Huskisson’s party. In March 1830 Althorp began organizing a more concerted opposition, on taxation and retrenchment as well as Reform as pushed by Russell. Meanwhile, Graham hoisted the flag of economy as the standard around which to gather a new party.166 Stanley actively supported Graham’s efforts to preserve a distinct Canningite presence, in the aftermath of Catholic Emancipation, around the call for retrenchment. Grey was reluctantly drawn into their efforts, finally coming to London and forsaking his line that popular support for Reform was unreliable and a neutral support for the government appropriate. Stanley encouraged this shifting opposition mood by supporting a motion against injudicious taxation on 25 March. Assisted by Althorp, on 29 March and 14 May Graham also proposed motions calling for further government economy. With great effect Graham described the allowances totalling £650,000 enjoyed by 113 office holders and the £378,000 distributed among forty-seven peers. Stanley endorsed Graham’s call, Althorp, Brougham, Francis Baring, and Thomas Macaulay, as well as the Canningites Huskisson, Palmerston, Grant, and Stratford Canning, also supporting Graham’s demand for retrenchment. As well as advocating retrenchment and Whig Reform plans, when not tainted by O’Connellite radicalism, Stanley criticized the government’s handling of foreign and colonial affairs. On 10 March he voted for Palmerston’s motion censuring government policy over Portugal. The following month he attacked the official line regarding Portuguese refugees, accusing the government of being the dupes of Spanish policy.167 In February he presented a petition from Manchester merchants calling for a modification in the charter of the East India Company.168 On 13 May he presented another petition attacking the monopoly of the East India Company, and drawing attention to the fact that some of the sugar imported into Britain as Mauritius sugar was, in truth, from Java and thus the product of slave labour.169 At the end of May he supported his friend Henry Labouchere’s unsuccessful motion criticizing the civil government of Canada. And in June he backed Lord Howick’s objections to voting money to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts for its work in Canada, a vote of money helping the Church where marked dissatisfaction with the Established Church existed. At the same time,


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Stanley reintroduced his bill reforming ecclesiastical leases in Ireland, with the endorsement, he claimed, of the most enlightened Irish clergy.170 Parliamentary debate was then suddenly curtailed when, at 3 a.m. on 26 June, the unpopular, corpulent, and little-lamented George IV died. A general election, the constitutional requirement of the succession of his brother, the eccentric, affable, and respectably married William IV, was called. Immediately prior to the dissolution there occurred, on 30 June, ‘the first ebullition of a settled party spirit’.171 Meeting at Brooks’s in St James’s Street, Stanley, Howick, Wood, and Althorp decided on a unified offensive, which Stanley affirmed Grey would support. That morning Stanley, along with Althorp, Lansdowne, and Holland, had met with Grey, who agreed to moving an adjournment in both Houses. Grey was alarmed at growing popular unrest and the reluctance of Wellington’s ministry to introduce measures of Reform. The death of his old adversary George IV also prompted him to think that this was the moment to be more assertive. Both Stanley and Graham privately urged Grey towards an active opposition. In the Commons that evening, Russell, Graham, Althorp, and Brougham attacked the government. In the Lords, Grey denounced the character of the ministry. The elections, held during July, further weakened the government’s position. Though Reform was not a dominant issue on the hustings, some campaigns, such as that in Yorkshire, demonstrated increasing hostility to aristocratic control in the constituencies. Opposition groups attacked the general illiberality of the ministry. But The Times believed the main election contests were between government supporters and Ultra Tories. Stanley was re-elected for Preston, notwithstanding radical rumblings in the borough. During the nomination of the candidates, on 30 July, his speech was interrupted by the loud cheering accompanying the arrival of the radical Henry Hunt, who subsequently addressed his supporters from the window of a nearby inn. But over the four days of polling the violence of the Preston contest of 1826 did not reoccur, and Stanley was returned top of the poll. Despite his absence because of ill health, Huskisson was also re-elected for Liverpool. Elsewhere in the country control of the English counties began to slip away from the ministry. Clearly Wellington’s ministry could not survive without additional strength. The pace of political events quickened. In July, Wellington invited Lord Melbourne (formerly William Lamb and since February 1829 sitting in the Lords) to join the government. This was an attempt to secure Canningite support, while isolating the Ultras. But Melbourne refused to join without Grey, whom Wellington thought an unacceptable

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colleague. Prospects of a merger were then dealt a fatal blow by the sudden death of the accident-prone Huskisson during the ceremonial opening of the Liverpool to Manchester railway on 15 September. Before the eyes of his wife and a horrified assembly of dignitaries, including Wellington, Huskisson was run over by the passing Rocket during a stop at Parkside Station just 8 miles east of Knowsley. Wellington’s party, who witnessed the awful scene, included Stanley’s father, his two sisters Lady Charlotte and Lady Ellinor, and his aunt Lady Wilton and her husband. Lord Wilton helped to convey the fatally injured Huskisson to a nearby vicarage where, in great pain nine hours later, he died. Stanley and his father, as well as John Gladstone, were among the pall-bearers who carried Huskisson’s coffin into the new St James’s cemetery in Liverpool on 24 September. Tens of thousands lined the processional route from the town centre to pay their last respects to the popular Liverpool MP. Stanley then left the funereal scenes at Liverpool to return to a London alive with political speculation. At the beginning of October, Wellington opened talks with Palmerston. But Palmerston made it clear that the Canningites would not join Wellington’s ministry without being accompanied by Whigs. Negotiations came to an abrupt end. On Monday 31 October, Stanley dined at Althorp’s house with Brougham and the Reformer Thomas Denman, where the outline of a Reform measure was drawn up. Grey and, after some hesitation, Lord Durham agreed to the measure, which, it was made clear, could be tailored to secure the support of the Canningites, with Graham to act as an intermediary. With the ‘Swing Riots’ disrupting rural areas in England and a revolution having just occurred in France, however, there was still the thought that Wellington might yet propose a last-minute Reform measure of his own. On 1 November, Stanley and Graham secretly sounded out Peel (via Wellington’s ‘tame cat’ Arbuthnot) as to a moderate Reform measure similar to Russell’s scheme of February, giving representation to Leeds, Manchester, and Birmingham with seats from constituencies disfranchised for corruption.172 But Wellington’s implacable opposition dashed negotiation. Stanley now committed himself to Whig Reform as discussed over Althorp’s dinner table. Wellington met parliament on Wednesday 2 November with an emphatic rejection of any need for parliamentary Reform. He declared the British constitution incapable of improvement. Not only would the government not propose a measure, but it would heartily oppose any Reform measure brought forward. This drove the final nail into the coffin of Tory governance. The statement galvanized a determined opposition made up


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of Whigs, radicals, Ultras, and Canningites. Violent popular reaction to Wellington’s speech, as well as diatribes in the press and mob violence, followed. Stanley, joined by Morpeth, Denman, Althorp, Hobhouse, Graham, and Howick, attended a dinner hosted by Brougham on Thursday 10 November at which it was agreed to support a Whig motion on Reform, as long as it remained vague in nature. Brougham took the opportunity of flattering Stanley and remonstrating against his silence in parliament.173 A further meeting of more than ninety opposition MPs at Althorp’s house, on Sunday 13 November, confirmed the agreement arrived at three days before. Brougham’s Reform motion, set for 16 November, was pre-empted, however, by a division the previous evening on Sir Henry Parnell’s motion to refer the Civil List to a Select Committee. The government was defeated by 233 to 204 votes. Humiliation over the Civil List struck at the heart of ministerial authority, with nearly forty Ultra Tories, led by Knatchbull, as well as a consolidated Whig opposition, voting for Parnell’s motion. It was, Durham reported, ‘a good licking’.174 Wellington promptly resigned, Peel being much relieved at not having to face a debate on Reform. On Wednesday 16 November, William IV sent for Grey. But it was upon the ruins of Tory failure, rather than the solid foundation of Whig success, that Grey now stood. Emerging from semi-retirement he agreed to form a government from a coalition of Whigs, Canningites, and Ultras. Canning’s friends Goderich, Palmerston, Grant (as President of the Board of Trade), and Graham (as First Lord of the Admiralty) joined Grey’s cabinet, alongside the Whigs Lansdowne, Holland, Durham, and Althorp. Reform was the issue on which they were all agreed. From being in 1828 a peripheral question, by late 1830 Tory division had transformed parliamentary Reform into an imperative commitment, in part because it offered incensed Ultras ground upon which to avenge themselves for Catholic Emancipation. Only Reform, Whigs, Canningites, and Ultras believed, could now preserve the influence of territorial magnates and the legitimate status of property. Grey’s coalition cabinet was the most aristocratic of the century. Just two ministers were not family of peers or baronets. The Canningites Melbourne, Palmerston, and Goderich took all three Secretaryships of State, as well as the Board of Control, while the Ultra Tory Duke of Richmond became Postmaster General. The remaining leading posts were taken by Whigs. Lansdowne took the Presidency of the Council, Holland the Duchy of Lancaster, and Brougham was finally given the Lord Chancellorship. Lord Althorp, at Grey’s insistence, was chosen to lead the Commons, Althorp’s job being made easier by Brougham’s elevation to the Lords. Disappointed

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at not being given either a cabinet post or the Undersecretaryship of the Foreign Office, Russell accepted the Paymastership of the Forces, on the understanding he would be given charge of the government’s Reform Bill. Without hesitation Stanley accepted the post of Chief Secretary for Ireland from Grey. On Tuesday 22 November, at St James’s Palace, he was admitted to the Privy Council.175 Though it did not bring a seat in the cabinet, the appointment emphasized Stanley’s importance. Ireland was, next to Reform, Grey’s greatest concern. He admitted to Holland that he was thinking of nothing but Ireland day and night. Grey told Stanley that the progress of the anti-Union spirit in Ireland was very alarming, with O’Connell declaring open war.176 The threat to aristocratic influence in England itself was immediately demonstrated when Stanley failed to be re-elected for Preston, being defeated, despite his family’s strong influence in the borough, by the radical Henry Hunt. Despite not arriving in the borough until after voting had begun, Hunt headed the poll from the beginning of the election. Some Tory voters in the borough gave their support to Hunt in order to unseat Stanley. Certainly irregular practice occurred, as the total votes cast exceeded the supposed number of resident males entitled to the franchise. Stanley’s initial refusal to ‘treat’ voters, a position which he had subsequently to abandon, further alienated sections of support. Rumours circulated around Westminster that he had been defeated because he refused to pledge himself to vote against the Corn Laws and for the ballot.177 Stanley accused Hunt of enticing labourers to come out from Manchester to intimidate the Preston electors. He considered calling for an electoral inquiry, but upon further reflection decided not to do so. But a furious 78-year-old Earl of Derby closed down Patten House, his Preston residence, and discontinued the race meetings he had sponsored in the town since succeeding to the title. The radical press, meanwhile, celebrated the result as a first blow against the usurped influence of the nobility. Local radicals struck a silver medal celebrating their great victory, which they presented to each of Hunt’s supporters. Grey was dismayed; ‘you must go to Ireland and you must come into parliament’, he told Stanley.178 Stanley agreed that his defeat was ‘a very bad symptom’.179 William IV had already, on 10 December, offered Stanley the constituency of Windsor. It was a significant gesture of the King’s support for Grey, as well as an early indication of royal approval of Stanley’s moderate views. At a cost of £1,500 Stanley was returned for Windsor on 10 February unopposed, despite local rumours of a possible contest. The position of Grey’s government was not secure. Stanley himself let slip that they might not be in office long, while Tories, such as


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Lord Ellenborough, advised that Stanley be treated with civility as a possible future ally.180 The fate of the ministry clearly depended, in the first instance, upon success over Reform. But the question of Ireland was scarcely less important. Reports of disturbances in Tyrone, Armagh, and Down promised little good news from Ireland in the coming weeks. After parliament was prorogued, on Saturday 24 December, Stanley enjoyed a brief Christmas at Knowsley, arriving in Dublin on Wednesday 28 December. For the next three years Irish affairs were to dominate his thoughts and sap his strength. The Act of Union had brought Irish representation directly into Westminster, Irish grievances now being refracted through the prism of British politics. As a historical warning Ireland had already driven Pitt from office in 1801, as well as the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ in 1806, and, in the form of Catholic Emancipation, had fractured government support in 1829, ending nearly thirty years of Tory hegemony. The intractable difficulties of Ireland were to have no less a profound impact on Stanley’s career.

chapter 2

Coercion and Concession: 1830–1834 I think we have got O’Connell down and I don’t mean to let him up again, if I can help it. (Stanley to Anglesey, 28 March 1831)

The Irish members were very factious last night … A stony reprobation from the English members fell on them. I think the lesson will do them good, but I am persuaded that nothing is gained by giving way to their caprices and I will not do it. They may succeed, in throwing me out … but they shall not bear me down. (Stanley to Anglesey, 18 February 1832)

By [the English Reform] bill will be upheld the influence of the aristocracy as it was before. He meant that legitimate influence which they ought to possess; the influence which it was always within their power to secure; the natural influence of property; the influence arising from that respect to high rank which was nowhere greater than in this country; the influence of affection generated by kindness and good offices to those around them. (Stanley to the Commons, 4 March 1831)

dward Stanley’s appointment, aged 31, as Chief Secretary for Ireland in November 1830 thrust him into the cauldron of Irish politics, confronting him with challenges both alarmingly novel and wearingly familiar. Following the Act of Union in 1801 Irish politics remained defined by the confessional divide between Protestant and Catholic. Daniel O’Connell’s populist Catholic Association mobilized the Irish masses, supported by clerical influence, in the cause of anti-Unionism. In contrast to the reactionary orientation it possessed in continental Europe, popular rural Catholicism in Ireland assumed a radical complexion. Under the resourceful O’Connell the rural dispossessed found common cause with the Catholic gentry and liberal Catholic commercial interests. This powerful mobilization of mass Irish public opinion generated, as O’Connell called it, ‘a moral electricity’, carrying with it the implicit threat of widespread civil disobedience.1 In 1830 Stanley’s

E

coercion and concession: 1830–1834

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Whiggism collided with these historic grievances, deep religious enmities, outbreaks of rural violence, and startling new methods of political agitation. Ireland tested the very foundation of Whig doctrine. It was ‘an immense maze of embarrassment’.2 Whigs were committed to responsible reform within a setting of social stability, progress being secured through timely political recognition of advancing social interests, standing on the bedrock of established legal authority and property rights. In England, by December 1830, they had little problem in arguing that responsible concession was embodied in the legitimate cry for parliamentary Reform. But Ireland, where legal authority and property rights were contested, exposed sharp differences among Whigs themselves. They ‘will fail’, O’Connell predicted, ‘by attempting to conciliate things that are irreconcilable—the popular sentiments with the interests of the ruling party’.3 Ireland was an overwhelmingly agrarian society, without a substantial middle class, the religious divide between Catholic and Protestant exacerbating the social gulf between landowner and peasant. As Grey took office these grievances found an explosive focus in the question of the tithe. Although only one-eighth of the Irish population were members of the Anglican Church of Ireland, all, the vast majority Catholic, were required to pay tithe to the Anglican Establishment. By November 1830 a widespread ‘tithe war’ and escalating violence in the countryside were increasing contempt for the law. This raised the political dilemma which cut to the very root of Whig principles. What degree of respect for civil authority was necessary for concessionary reforms to be appropriate? As Lord Althorp formulated it in August 1832, was Ireland ‘fit for free government?’4 Prior to becoming Chief Secretary, Stanley laid out his own diagnosis of Ireland’s ills; the absence of a resident gentry, want of capital, shortage of employment, and lack of adequate education. This secular analysis complemented Grey’s view that, more than anything else, Ireland’s difficulties would be solved by ‘a good system of government’.5 Stanley was aware of the tensions created by an Anglican Establishment among a predominantly Catholic population. He wished to avoid re-creating that situation in Canada. But the status of the Established Church in Ireland rested on the authority of pre-existing law. Respect for the law, and the civil authority it represented, must be secured before reform was possible, particularly given that issues like the tithe touched on fundamental rights of property. The ‘tithe war’ was most violent in the neighbouring counties of Clare, Limerick, and Tipperary, the region surrounding Stanley’s own Ballykisteen estate. As he warned Melbourne in December 1830, resistance

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to the tithe should be considered as a prelude to resistance to the payment of rents, an ominous infringement of property rights.6 Stanley’s understanding of Ireland’s problems stood in direct line with Sir John Davies’s diagnosis of over 200 years earlier, an analysis which Stanley had studied eight years before. The establishment of English legal institutions had to supersede atavistic native notions of land ownership. It was upon the foundation of English principles of property that proper commercial policies and common, widely sanctioned moral values, safeguarded by an Established Church, should be upheld. Only then might mutually beneficent relations between landowners, their tenants, and agricultural workers be preserved. His policy in Ireland as Chief Secretary from 1830 to 1833 cannot, therefore, be neatly arranged around landmarks of legislative relief. Enforcement of the law, not concession, was his first priority. This stripped his beliefs down to their prescriptive essentials. Ireland became the anvil on which his commitment to the fundamental rule of law and property rights hardened under the hammer blows of populist outcry and rural violence.

Conflict keen of angry speech. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 17)

The administrative structure Stanley inherited in Dublin was ill-defined. As Chief Secretary, he was nominally subordinate to the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland residing in Dublin Castle. But after 1801 the balance of power between the two offices was largely determined by the personalities involved. Grey appointed the 62-year-old one-legged veteran of Waterloo the Marquess of Anglesey as Lord Lieutenant. But Anglesey, who had been Lord Lieutenant during Catholic Emancipation, favoured more extensive reforms than Stanley believed prudent. Stanley and Anglesey immediately found themselves at odds. The placatory Anglesey and combative Stanley came to represent separate strands of English Whiggery. But unlike the Lord Lieutenant, who remained in Dublin, as Chief Secretary Stanley spent the parliamentary session at Westminster as the government spokesman on Irish affairs. Supported by a staff of two clerks and three messengers, Stanley was based at the Irish Office in Queen Street, Westminster. Grey believed his presence in London was crucial to the debating strength of the ministry. This gave Stanley significant political leverage. He had no intention of being a mere cipher to Dublin Castle.


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The demagogue O’Connell was Stanley’s immediate concern. On 7 October 1830 O’Connell launched a new campaign for Repeal of the Union. On 29 October the Duke of Leinster chaired a meeting denouncing the Repeal campaign, the subsequent Leinster Declaration being signed by nearly a hundred peers and MPs. As popular support for O’Connell’s agitation gathered strength, Protestant sentiment stiffened. Anglesey held a number of private interviews with O’Connell seeking conciliation. But O’Connell rejected Anglesey’s pleas and, at their last meeting on 15 December, made it clear that he would not abandon his agitation for Repeal. O’Connell’s intransigence left Anglesey no alternative to Stanley’s more hard-headed response to Irish affairs. Upon his arrival in Dublin on Tuesday 28 December 1830, Stanley immediately reported to the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne, that Ireland was on the verge of rebellion. The mass meetings held by O’Connell and his Society for the Repeal of the Union he deemed deliberately provocative. ‘I am not one who easily takes alarm,’ Stanley declared, ‘but I confess that the accounts we hear are anything but satisfactory.’7 He wished ‘to show all parties we are not to be trifled with’. He welcomed the appointment of Francis Blackburne as Irish Attorney General. Blackburne, of whom he thought highly, had administered the Insurrection Act in Limerick in the early 1820s and was active in the suppression of tithe agitation. Stanley also requested from Melbourne additional police to report on O’Connell’s meetings and to act as undercover agents within the Repeal Society. By the beginning of January 1831, with intelligence reports from informants within the Repeal Society coming in, Stanley felt the situation was beginning to improve.8 He suspected O’Connell of feeling he had gone too far in exciting so much disturbance by his agitation.9 Equally importantly, he thought magistrates were now encouraged to act vigorously, as they were certain of government support. Respectable Catholics, he believed, only followed O’Connell from intimidation. He began considering ex officio prosecutions against those newspapers reporting O’Connell’s speeches for the seditious libel contained in O’Connell’s statements. These speeches, he declared to Melbourne, brought the ministry, the law, and all government into contempt.10 From London, Melbourne pressed Stanley on reform measures for Ireland, aimed at removing the more egregious civil and religious grievances. But Stanley’s prompt reply, on Tuesday 4 January 1831, was a clear indication of his priorities. ‘I am sure we had better incur the censure of being slow in our proceedings however unjustly, than bring forward hastily

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ill-digested measures.’11 Stanley’s predecessor, Sir Henry Hardinge, had left the plan of a Vestry Act which, with some alterations, Stanley was prepared to propose. It revised the system whereby Catholics were taxed for the building and repair of Anglican churches. Stanley also acknowledged that education would have to be considered. He favoured the gradual withdrawal of government grants for religiously exclusive education and the establishing of a system of combined education in some way. But the Kildare Place Society, a Protestant organization providing education for the poor, which Catholics correctly suspected of proselytizing for the Church of Ireland, he maintained, did good as well as evil. Education was also linked with the Maynooth grant, an annual grant made by the British government to the Catholic seminary at Maynooth. Stanley suggested the grant might be got rid of, or merged with a larger grant for the payment, during good behaviour, of the Catholic clergy. But such measures were contingent upon the restoration of law and order. Stanley was encouraged by reports that even the Catholic clergy were becoming alarmed at the state of the country. The news that the Yeomanry, a volunteer force recruited by members of the gentry, was in a satisfactory condition, though requiring more arms, was reassuring,12 although his friend Thomas Spring Rice (Whig MP for Limerick) warned him against using the Yeomanry, a largely Protestant force, to enforce order. ‘You may form your Frankenstein but who will control the fiend when he is called forth?’13 Between 26 December 1830 and 13 January 1831 four proclamations from Dublin Castle suppressed Repeal meetings. An O’Connell supporter privately declared Stanley’s ‘flippancy and aristocratic conceit’ to be ‘insupportable, and how an honest gallant soldier such as Anglesey should allow himself to be influenced by such an insolent stripling is to me inconceivable’.14 But on 14 January a comprehensive proclamation was issued authorizing magistrates to disperse any assembly held under whatever name by ‘O’Connell and his gang for the purposes of agitation’.15 Anti-tithe meetings were being called under the guise of hurling matches, the Irish form of hockey. On 15 January, Stanley persuaded Anglesey to institute proceedings against violent language in the press. Then, on 18 January, he reported the dramatic news to Melbourne that, under the terms of their proclamation, O’Connell had been arrested.16 The Protestants, he noted, were in high glee and much pleased at the line he had taken.17 It would, he anticipated, give the government a firm hand in controlling events in Ireland and Irish MPs in Westminster. Following his arrest O’Connell approached Whig friends to canvass the government on his behalf. Secret negotiations were begun with the


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Earl of Meath and Lord Cloncurry. The Protestant Cloncurry had, as a young man, joined the United Irishmen, been imprisoned, and following the Union had supported Emancipation. He was also close to Anglesey. O’Connell applied his legal ingenuity to finding a course of action that would avoid the government losing face, while enabling him to escape prosecution. But Stanley remained adamant that the government could not be party to any sort of private deal. The prosecution of O’Connell need not take place until Easter. This would give the government the opportunity to watch O’Connell’s conduct in parliament and see whether he cut himself off from his seditious friends. O’Connell, he reported to Melbourne, ‘is showing the white feather most completely, but no more that I expected he would when fairly collared’.18 Ireland, he informed Graham, was ‘on the mend’ and O’Connell ‘frightened and trying to bluster’.19 Some saw in Stanley’s priorities an indication of his belief that Grey’s ministry would be short-lived. During January he kept only a temporary residence in Dublin Castle and delayed paying Hardinge for the accruements he assumed from his predecessor. Not until May 1831 did Stanley occupy his official Dublin residence at Phoenix Park. The unpredictable course of the parliamentary Reform question gave cause for wariness. On Sunday 23 January he left Dublin for England, arriving in London seven days later. During the recess a cabinet committee, made up of Russell, Graham, Lord Duncannon, and headed by Lord Durham (Grey’s son-inlaw), drew up a Representation of the People Bill for England and Wales. At the end of January, Stanley found the scheme settled, but the details not yet known. By putting Durham in charge of the committee Grey seemed to anticipate a quick and extensive measure that would overwhelm opposition and pre-empt a general election on the issue. The formation of Political Unions in British towns, based upon that formed by the banker Thomas Attwood in Birmingham, already threatened a dangerous alliance of middle-class and working-class Reform activists. Meanwhile, Althorp, as Chancellor of the Exchequer and leader of the Commons, looked to making a popular budget statement as a consolidation of the government’s position. Spring Rice, now Althorp’s Financial Secretary, informed Stanley that the Chancellor had allocated half a million pounds for public works in Ireland. One would imagine, Stanley responded, that Althorp had found an overflowing Treasury.20 Stanley believed that most in London welcomed the prosecution of O’Connell. At his meeting with Stanley on 2 February, Grey seemed disinclined to concede ground to O’Connell, despite the Irish leader’s having ‘his feelers out’.21 What the prime minister did press on Stanley was

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Althorp’s proposal for public works in Ireland. Grey agreed to Stanley’s plan for the payment of Catholic clergy, provided it was raised by a tax on Ireland. Stanley saw considerable difficulties with this idea, but recognized that it would secure the support of English MPs. By 8 February it was known that the government planned to apply a large sum of money to public works in Ireland and, with assurances of the security of repayment, Stanley pushed Althorp to expedite the scheme.22 Following the opening of parliament on Thursday 3 February, Stanley reported to Anglesey that the temper of the Commons on Irish matters was excellent.23

In the contentious fight the larger part of the toil is mine. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 10)

Dealing decisively with O’Connell significantly enhanced Stanley’s standing in Westminster. This was, in part, an achievement born out of Althorp’s failure. Althorp was a complex blend of personal insecurity, intellectual ability, reforming zeal, religious fatalism, and quiet ambition, whose genuine talents were concealed by an awkward, hesitant manner. His budget statement on Friday 11 February proved a disaster. Stanley, by contrast, impressed the House with his statements on Irish affairs, even receiving congratulations from Peel. The Canningite Edward Littleton observed, at the end of February, that he had thrown over the bungling Althorp and set up Stanley as his new idol.24 As Lord John Russell recollected, during the 1831 session Stanley won ‘the palm of eloquence’.25 By March, Greville was speculating on Stanley’s pitting himself against Peel, the two acting as the future leaders of two rival parties.26 As the session began, Stanley feared Peel’s being quiet, but mischievous. He anticipated furious opposition from the Ultra Tories and, on nonIrish matters, little zealous support from other parties. If the ministry could only succeed with Reform, ‘we cover all former mistakes and are very strong. If we fail! I cannot conceive such a state of things.’27 With Palmerston, he discussed the dangerous expectations excited by ministerial newspapers of a radical Reform bill. Palmerston feared the government becoming identified with the radicals and the threat of ‘breaking down all our established institutions’.28 Indeed, when Stanley learnt from Althorp of the details of the government’s intended Reforms, he laughed aloud with incredulity. Althorp was pleased, however, that he quickly ‘recovered himself by degrees and agreed to do as he was bid’.29


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The ballot and quinquennial parliaments, which Durham had originally proposed, were dropped. But a borough suffrage qualification of £10 and a county qualification for 40s. freeholders, £10 copyholders, and £50 leaseholders remained. Redistribution in England and Wales removed all representation from boroughs of under 2,000 inhabitants (Schedule A), and one member from boroughs of under 4,000 inhabitants (Schedule B), with about three-fifths of the 167 seats abolished being given to counties and MPs given to thirty-two unrepresented boroughs (Schedules C and D). Two MPs were allocated to each Riding of Yorkshire, with another twenty-six counties being divided into double-Member constituencies. It was, as Stanley described it to Anglesey, a large measure which, though it might satisfy the country, would probably fail in the House.30 He noted that Hardinge talked of the opposition’s turning out the government when they pleased and forming an administration on anti-Reform principles. Yet, in the event, when Russell introduced the English and Welsh Representation of the People Bill in the Commons on 14 March 1831, despite much surprise at the extent of the scheme, Peel declined to oppose the bill, choosing to wait until the second reading. Peel’s reluctance to align himself with his Ultras rendered him silent. There remained only the hollow laughter of the Tory benches. This encouraged Stanley’s hopes of success, even though their proposals would have to survive tremendous opposition and angry debate. ‘The country will be with us breast high, and the opposition, tho’ very angry and very numerous and very loud, are sorely puzzled. The cry of revolution may do in the House, but it has no terrors out of it.’31 On Friday 4 March, Stanley delivered a major speech in support of Reform. The ministry did not contemplate revolutionary measures, he declared, but responsible concessions to genuine grievances.32 Procrastination would only disappoint legitimate expectations and intensify anger. He denied that this was carrying Reform by intimidation, as opponents claimed. Rather, tardy political concessions were like the old Sybilline books: the longer you delayed the purchase, the higher the price you paid. Stanley challenged the opposition to characterize the government as mere adventurers, men of fortune, who had everything to gain and nothing to lose by a revolution. In fact, the authors were men with large stakes in the country, committed to the peace and security of the State. It was, Greville concluded, ‘an excellent speech’.33 From the opposition Ellenborough believed Stanley had spoken ‘very much like a gentleman’.34 Stanley felt the government to be gaining ground daily. ‘The opposition to [Reform] is most violent, but the country is coming forward in a way

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not to be mistaken, and if we give them time I think we shall certainly pull through.’35 Peel’s belated contribution to debate left a confused opposition in disarray. O’Connell warmly supported the English bill, thereby helping to repair his relations with the Whigs. On Wednesday 23 March, in the largest House in living memory, the English Reform Bill passed its second reading by a bare majority of one vote. When the count was announced the chamber erupted into a cacophony of shouts and cheers. Stanley’s contribution to the Reform debate brought immediate reward. Grey tested his reaction to entering the cabinet as Secretary for War and the Colonies, an office currently held by the former premier Viscount Goderich. Stanley declined the invitation, preferring to stay as Chief Secretary for Ireland. But, he suggested, the Irish Office might be made into a fourth Secretaryship of State carrying a position in cabinet.36 This would allow the office of Lord Lieutenant to be abolished. Grey deferred acting on Stanley’s suggestion. But the proposal demonstrated Stanley’s growing confidence and his early desire to rid himself of Anglesey as a burdensome partner in Irish policy. Grey, for his part, revealed his wish to have Stanley in the cabinet, while Stanley came to admire Grey’s oratorical skill and mastery of detail. Among Conservatives the rumour circulated that Stanley was to replace the discredited Althorp at the Exchequer.37 Though ill-founded, it was telling testimony to Stanley’s rising fortunes. On Friday 25 March he scored debating points off the radical Joseph Hume.38 In objecting to the cost of the Civil List, Hume stated that, in choosing between republican and monarchical forms of government, the former, being cheaper, was better. This gave Stanley the opportunity to lecture Hume publicly on the blessings enjoyed under a limited monarchy, benefits far beyond the consideration of pounds, shillings, and pence. While debate over English Reform enhanced Stanley’s personal standing, the hairline majority achieved on the second reading was a clear warning of the Reform Bill’s vulnerability in committee. A dissolution and a subsequent short session seemed likely. In mid-April, Stanley found ‘Reform engulfs all our thoughts, that is all the world except those who are compelled to look to Ireland.’39 On Tuesday 19 April, in the peroration of the ministry’s case for Reform, he spoke against the hostile motion of the Ultra Tory General Gascoyne, MP for Liverpool.40 On Gascoyne’s motion, addressing the relative proportion of English, Scottish, and Irish representatives, Stanley threw a torrent of abuse. It was, he pronounced, just a flimsy pretext to rally together the opponents of the measure. Yet, in the event, Gascoyne’s motion passed by 299 to 291 votes. Grey’s hopes of a swift resolution of the Reform question were dashed. Reluctantly the


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King agreed to a dissolution. On Friday 22 April parliament was dissolved and preparations for a general election began.

Then fiercer grew, and more intense the strain of furious fight. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 65)

Concurrent with debate over English Reform during March and April 1831, Stanley began preparing a Reform Bill for Ireland. He brought the Irish Office lawyer Richard Greene over from Dublin at the end of February to assist him.41 An outline Irish Reform Bill drawn up by Duncannon was laid aside as too sweeping in its proposals. In three weeks an alternative bill was quickly drafted, although no reliable statistics on the Irish electorate were to hand. The 50s. leaseholder was added to the county electorate and the borough suffrage was lowered to include the £10 householder. Additional representation was given to Belfast, Waterford, Galway, and Limerick. Stanley showed the scheme to Cloncurry, who approved of it.42 This encouraged him to hope that all Reformers in Ireland might unite for this common good. Yet, the fact remained that parliamentary Reform was applied in Ireland on a more restrictive basis than elsewhere in the United Kingdom. In 1829 the Irish county electorate had been drastically reduced from about 216,000 to 37,000 voters to compensate for Catholic Emancipation. Stanley’s proposed Reform increased the Irish county electorate to just over 60,000 voters. This enfranchised one in every 116 inhabitants in the Irish counties, compared to the one in every twenty-four county inhabitants enfranchised under the government’s proposed Reform measure for England and Wales. In a reverse of the situation in England and Wales, the great majority of Irish MPs, almost two-thirds of the total, represented county constituencies. A number of Irish boroughs such as Lisburn, New Ross, and Portarlington, with electorates below the minimum number applied in Britain, were retained. Moreover, the much abused registration system existing in Ireland since 1727 was not revised in line with proposed British changes. Stanley hoped his Irish measure would create a more respectable, if more restricted, electorate than that in England. But the lack of hard statistics, hasty drafting, and the vagaries of the registration system rendered legislative precision impossible. At the last minute he extended the vote and a Commons seat to the scholars of Trinity College, Dublin.43 This was a sop to the Protestants, intended to counteract fears of a preponderant influence being given to

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the O’Connellites by the enfranchisement of £10 householders in towns. Stanley introduced his Irish Reform Bill to the Commons on Thursday 24 March.44 O’Connell initially welcomed the bill, though objecting to the clause enfranchising the Trinity College scholars. Stanley saw this as proof that O’Connell had, indeed, been humbled. O’Connell, for his part, justified his support by celebrating that the principle of Reform for Ireland, whatever its details, had now been established. Repeatedly Stanley assured the House that there would be no secret bargains with O’Connell. On Friday 11 February 1831 he informed the Commons that, with regard to the charges against O’Connell, the law must take its course.45 All England was frightened with our rash actions, he reported to Anglesey, but they are now all persuaded we were right.46 With O’Connell humbled, he anticipated ‘plain sailing’ in the Commons with regard to Irish matters. In response to reports of famine in Co. Mayo, he gave on 16 February a general, if brief, assurance of measures to remedy the suffering of the people.47 In such circumstances, he declared, private charity was legitimate, but relief was not within the proper sphere of government, a sentiment which Peel endorsed. On Friday 18 February, Stanley asserted that some reports of distress were exaggerated and that where suffering was occurring it was attributable to neglect by landlords.48 It was not incumbent on the government to provide contributions for the relief of local distress and law and order must be maintained. He informed the House, three days later, that it might be necessary to call out the Yeomanry, despite their being a largely Protestant force.49 He had no desire to excite religious animosity but order had to be preserved. At the same time, he opposed exempting potato gardens from the tithe. This would be a violation of private property. Such a proposal, he argued, also ran against the principle of reducing the number of Irish smallholdings, a policy upon which parliament had been acting for the last two or three years. As he warned Melbourne, any spoliation of church property would alienate Irish Protestants and undermine the force of law.50 It was his humbling of O’Connell in the Commons, however, that won him most accolades. Discussion of Irish issues was accompanied by constant skirmishing with O’Connell. But, by the end of February, Stanley saw Ireland as the only bright spot in the government’s prospects.51 During March, Stanley continued to repudiate suggestions of a secret bargain being struck with O’Connell, dropping the charges against him. Though O’Connell was ‘playing a good boy’, he reported to Anglesey, ‘I would not trust him for an hour.’52 Stanley asserted that there were, in effect, two O’Connells. First, the O’Connell of Westminster, who spoke


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in careful constitutional terms. Secondly, the O’Connell of the platform, whose violent demagoguery courted the rabble. Parliament should not be seduced by the sweeter face O’Connell presented to the Commons. The real threat O’Connell posed, he maintained, was in his guise as a radical firebrand inciting criminal unrest. O’Connell, for his part, deeply resented what he saw as Stanley’s arrogance, feeling it to be meagre reward for his dutiful support of the government’s Reform bills. By April, Stanley was sensing that some ministers wished to let O’Connell off the charges of January. They were beginning to feel that, in loyally supporting Reform, O’Connell had atoned for his earlier excesses. This prompted Stanley, in private, to talk in momentary exasperation of giving up all responsibility for Ireland. During April he pressed Anglesey for increased coercive measures.53 Since early March, Stanley had been advising Anglesey of demands from Irish magistrates for an Insurrection Act.54 He was seriously alarmed by reports of disturbances in Co. Clare. The Lord Lieutenant, he urged, must apply for an Insurrection Act.55 The country was approaching a state of open rebellion. The likelihood of a dissolution of parliament, called over the English Reform question, he insisted, only increased the urgency. On Tuesday 12 April he informed Anglesey that the draft of an Insurrection Bill was in Grey’s hands.56 The measure prohibited all public assemblies above fifty persons without six days’ notice being given to magistrates. Moreover, any persons attending such a meeting, not being freeholders, householders, or inhabitants of the location of the meeting, were liable to imprisonment. This, Stanley hoped, would allow O’Connell to hold meetings, but deny him his mass audiences. There were also, Stanley advised Anglesey, two regiments of cavalry and some infantry regiments in England ready to be transferred to Ireland if necessary. On 13 April he faced enquiries in the Commons into the apparent collapse of order in Clare. He assured the House that measures to maintain the law were prepared, but he declined making modifications to the Poor Law.57 Disturbances arose, he declared, from the poverty caused by want of employment. This would not be relieved by changes to the Poor Law. Finally, on 15 April, Anglesey requested further powers from Grey to suppress disturbances in Co. Clare.58 Stanley believed Anglesey had been irresponsible in dragging his feet. Anglesey, for his part, was coming to believe that Stanley was ‘a little tainted’ on Irish affairs. You could not, Anglesey exclaimed to Holland, ‘expect a whole population to lie down and starve patiently’.59 On 20 April, Stanley suggested to Grey that a declaration of martial law was now preferable to an Insurrection Act.60 Martial law would be

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more effective, he argued, and less liable to be drawn into discussions of constitutional precedence. Otherwise, he threatened darkly, the issue might break up the government. His veiled threat of resignation was a trump card played in a moment of intense frustration. He knew he held a strong hand. The government’s difficulties over English Reform made him indispensable. Forced to decide between his placatory Lord Lieutenant and his stern Chief Secretary, Grey would have no choice. The following day Stanley informed Anglesey that Grey would be immediately submitting to parliament a bill investing Anglesey with the power of martial law.61 Under the circumstances, Stanley suggested, the Proclamation Act might be allowed to expire. But on 22 April parliament was dissolved. For Stanley the rapidity with which parliament dissolved created problems. There had not been time to introduce a martial law measure. Should martial law be necessary it would have to be invoked and a bill of indemnity secured retrospectively from the new parliament. This was, Stanley admitted, ‘a fearful risk!’62 Moreover, anxiety was growing among some Irish MPs that the proposed borough suffrage in the Irish Reform Bill was too low. Stanley had no reliable figures to hand on the proportion of £10 houses to others in the boroughs with which to reassure waverers. William IV’s initial reluctance to grant a dissolution was mainly due to his fear of electoral disorder in Ireland. O’Connell’s intentions were crucial. O’Connell’s plans, in turn, were dependent upon the government’s handling of the charges against him. Since 3 April, Grey had, indirectly through Sir Francis Burdett, been indicating to O’Connell that a suspension of judgement was possible. As the days passed, Stanley was forced to accept such a possibility. To secure O’Connell’s goodwill during the election, on the day of the division on Gascoyne’s motion, the government announced a postponement of judgement. Forced to relax his grip, Stanley consoled himself that O’Connell seemed to be well disposed and that a ‘judgement must be executed ultimately’.63 Staying in London until 28 April 1831, Stanley first attended to his successful re-election in Windsor. On the hustings he gave a lengthy defence of the government’s abortive English Reform Bill and pointed to the local interests of his fellow MP for Windsor, the Whig John Ramsbottom, as an example of that legitimate influence which their Reform measure was intended to strengthen. He then travelled to Dublin. On 13 May he finally took up residence in Phoenix Park. From there, with the assistance of his Under-Secretary Colonel William Gosset, he closely monitored government candidates, receiving a fund of £2,000 from Edward Ellice and Grey with which to support official nominees.64 Money


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was also dispersed through the London-based Loyal and Patriotic Fund Committee and daily reports were sent to Ellice. As the elections drew to a close Stanley reported to Grey and Melbourne a gain of about twenty seats in Ireland. This was despite the anti-Reformers, being, as Stanley noted early in the election, ‘perfectly frantic’.65 The return of two Reformers for Dublin he considered a prodigious triumph.66 He opposed the candidacy of the Whig James Grattan, eldest son of Henry Grattan, in Wicklow because Grattan was unpopular and injudicious. Grattan was, nevertheless, re-elected. Similarly, Stanley was unsuccessful in his attempt to defeat the recently declared Repealer Daniel Callaghan in Cork. The government candidate, Sir John Byng, was defeated in Londonderry. But Byng assured Stanley that there had been established an interest that would secure him success in the future. There were disturbing accounts of the influence exerted by Catholic priests in Mayo, an area from which reports of appalling famine continued to arrive. Stanley organized a special commission, which revealed much misconduct by the gentry in the neighbouring counties of Clare, Limerick, and Tipperary. But, as he reassured Grey, government convictions had, even at the eleventh hour, restored order. He received reports of dissension among the insurgents in Clare and that members of the local gentry were coming forward to the Assizes. ‘I would they had all done earlier!’ he observed. ‘I think the people seem heartily sick of the present reign of terror, but when peace is restored something must be done to remedy real grievances. What it is to be is a very difficult problem.’67 To alleviate local distress, caused by failure of the potato crop, he organized the purchase of potatoes in areas of plentiful supply for transportation to districts suffering from shortages. By 25 May he was able to report that Tipperary and Limerick were now tranquil, with unrest persisting only in parts of Galway and Roscommon. Yet, it was a disappointment, he observed with heavy irony, that, as the result of a bitter dispute between the Irish Reformer James Mahon (unseated in the electoral contest in Co. Clare) and O’Connell, ‘neither [would] shoot, nor hang each other of which latter result [he] had entertained some hopes’.68 O’Connell’s own election address in Co. Kerry was limited to parliamentary Reform and the abolition of black slavery. Neither publicly nor privately did O’Connell mention Repeal, Irish questions being conspicuously absent from his platform statements. The government did well electorally in the rest of the United Kingdom, securing a majority of 136 MPs with which to ensure safe passage of an English Reform Bill through the Commons. Stanley feared that the government’s more excited supporters would force contests in unwinnable

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constituencies and produce radical hustings speeches. In Liverpool he recommended a restrained Reform strategy and no attempt to oust the sitting Tory member, Gascoyne. Nonetheless, the defeated Gascoyne, though reputedly paying up to £100 per vote, was unable to overcome the Reformers’ advantage. After staying a month at Phoenix Park, on Monday 13 June, Stanley returned to London to face the new parliament. He estimated 360 confirmed government votes, an opposition of about 240, and fifty loose votes in the new Commons. It promised to be a stormy session. But Peel, to the fury of the Ultras, was reportedly throwing cold water on suggestions of a forthright opposition to all government proposals.69 Stanley hoped that, if the King’s Speech was moderate on Reform, the opposition would not move an amendment. He was pleased that the Speech was very cautious. It gave, he informed Anglesey, a vague hint about the Poor Laws, or something of the sort, for Ireland, while Althorp remained keen to sanction a liberal amount of money for public works.70

… and each, with eyes of mutual hate, Regarded each. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 99)

What was awaiting Stanley in London in June 1831 was a seat in cabinet, suggesting that Grey saw him as a future replacement for Althorp as leader of the Commons. Certainly, the 32-year-old Stanley had established a reputation as the only minister in the Lower House worth anything in debate. Just four, out of thirteen, members of the cabinet Grey appointed in December 1830 sat in the Commons. By the summer of 1831 it was clear that additional cabinet debating strength was needed. Stanley might also be a counterweight to the other new entrant to the cabinet, Lord John Russell. If Russell, enthusiastic for a broad range of Whig reforms, was to be given prominence, then Grey wanted Stanley in the cabinet as a restraint on Russellite ardour. Stanley’s personal good fortune, however, was not reflected in developments in Ireland. The most exasperating event was the news that, judgement having been postponed, it would not now be possible to bring charges against O’Connell. In a difficult meeting Grey explained to Stanley on 29 May that, in light of the elections and O’Connell’s general conduct, he welcomed this outcome. A sneering Stanley was then forced to explain


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to the Commons, on Tuesday 21 June, that the dissolution had put an end to O’Connell’s prosecution. This, he declared, was the advice received from the government’s law officers.71 Privately he felt it would only make O’Connell impossible to deal with in the future. Further troubles followed. As the session began, Stanley received reports of an affray on 18 June in Newtownbarry, Co. Wexford. A local magistrate had ordered out 250 Yeomanry at a sale of cattle seized for non-payment of tithes. In the resulting violence thirty-four people (including three women) were killed and some twenty others wounded. The Chief Secretary resorted to defensive understatement. The incident was, he conceded to Anglesey, ‘very unfortunate’.72 A furious Anglesey reported that the deaths at Newtownbarry were on ‘the first occasion of their appearance since [the Yeomanry] were re-armed’.73 Spring Rice’s warning that this Frankenstein’s monster would prove uncontrollable appeared vindicated. On 27 June an outraged O’Connell attacked Stanley for using the Yeomanry as a Protestant force with which to suppress Catholics. Three days later a defiant Stanley was forced to explain to an alarmed Commons the events at Newtownbarry.74 It was regrettable, he began, that so many in Ireland regarded the law as a heavy yoke imposed upon them. The government was anxious to show this was not so. Yet any further discussion, he insisted, would be premature, as an investigation of the incident would have to go through legal channels. But this exercise in damage limitation failed. The ‘Newtownbarry Massacre’ gave the O’Connellites ready ammunition against their most reviled ministerial target and seriously compromised Stanley’s plans for further coercive measures. A strained meeting with Stanley in June only confirmed O’Connell’s ‘worst fears’. The Irish Office ‘plan nothing but English domination’ and ‘as the control of Ireland must be obtained as the primary object, everything Irish is looked at through that medium’.75 Embittered relations turned increasingly sour. Stanley’s motion for leave to introduce an Arms Bill, regulating the importation of weapons into Ireland, on 2 July, proved a discrediting blunder.76 The measure proposed increased penalties for possessing arms without a licence. As he admitted to Anglesey, my ‘friends have taken fright and I fear we shall be obliged to retract’.77 O’Connell denounced the measure as ‘an atrocious act’.78 On 8 July, Stanley was forced to abandon the clause rendering possession of unregistered arms a transportable offence. Not until 25 September 1831 was a milder Arms Bill introduced. Forced to revert to the law as it stood, he was exposed to Peel’s accusations of irresponsibility. The measure also alienated

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some of his cabinet colleagues. Althorp viewed it as ‘one of the most tyrannical measures I ever heard proposed’.79 In this poisoned atmosphere even Stanley’s announcement of £500,000 for public works in Ireland, on 30 June, fared badly. O’Connell immediately attacked the proposal. Its only effect, he claimed, would be to check private charity subscriptions. Moreover, Stanley was obliged to explain that the proposed monies were loans, for which security for repayment with interest would be required.80 The political situation now became toxic. Stanley’s reintroduction of his Irish Reform Bill on 30 June further angered Irish MPs. O’Connell had privately canvassed for amendments to the original measure of March. His restrained behaviour during the general election, he believed, warranted favourable modifications. In the event, Stanley presented the bill with only minor amendments. The vote was to be granted to holders of leases of nineteen rather than twenty-one years’ duration, the rental qualification being lowered from £50 to £20 per annum. O’Connell angrily dismissed Stanley’s ‘humbug improvements’.81 On 5 July, Stanley faced a ferocious blast from the O’Connellites. James Browne (MP for Co. Mayo) raised the issue of continuing distress along the west coast in Mayo, Galway, Sligo, and Clare. Stanley replied that no assistance could be given until it was shown that all means of private charity were exhausted and that lives depended upon timely relief. An incensed O’Connell immediately attacked Stanley for allowing, after a discontinuance of twenty-five years, the revival of Orange processions. The government discouraged such processions, Stanley explained, and, since the Newtownbarry affair, the issue of arms to the Yeomanry had been suspended. Then, on 18 July, he was forced to give a formal pledge that no further arms would be given to the Yeomanry until further notice. For the government to arm the Yeomanry while introducing an arms measure, O’Connell declared, was to deprive the Irish people ‘of all means of preventing their throats from being cut with impunity’.82 By the end of July the intense pressure on Stanley was beginning to tell. His statements to the Commons became increasingly intemperate. O’Connell prided himself that Stanley was ‘less self-conceited’ since he had ‘knocked up’ his arms measure.83 Their bitter enmity assumed a new ferocity. Stanley retaliated with increased vehemence to O’Connell’s constant attacks on the corruption and incompetence of the Irish administration. Personal contempt compounded their political differences. Stanley regarded O’Connell’s refusal to accept the challenge to a duel issued by Hardinge in October 1830 (O’Connell having described Hardinge as ‘a paltry, contemptible little English soldier’ and ‘a wretched English


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scribe’) as the abandonment of any claim by O’Connell to be regarded as a gentleman. Repeated heated parliamentary clashes between Stanley and O’Connell during July exposed the tensions twisted around the Whig view of Ireland. Stanley saw himself as the beleaguered ministerial champion of law and order. Grey, sharing a loathing for O’Connell, supported him. But other ministers, such as Russell, Holland, and Althorp, believed Stanley’s tenacity was dangerously destabilizing a volatile situation. Stanley was becoming the personification of English repression. During the fraught month of July 1831 Stanley’s relations with Anglesey also deteriorated. The Lord Lieutenant was outraged by Stanley’s Arms Bill. Stanley could have no idea, Anglesey admonished him, of what a bad effect it had created in Ireland.84 Anglesey admitted himself more nervous of the arms of the Yeomanry than the weapons of the Catholic populace. What particularly angered Anglesey was that Stanley had proposed the bill without prior consultation, the Lord Lieutenant learning of the measure from the morning papers. He voiced deep disgust that the first Irish bill brought forward by the government in the new parliament should be a penal measure. Since June he had been urging the immediate consideration of the tithe question. Forcing Catholics to pay tithe to the Church of Ireland, he believed, was ‘odious, oppressive, and positively obnoxious’.85 Without tithe reform, he warned, Ireland would explode into open rebellion. He pleaded with Graham that the cabinet ‘legislate for Ireland with the rapidity of lightning’.86 Stanley’s response was that a tithe measure was impossible in the present parliament. It would supply the Tories with the cry of revolution in the Church following revolution in the State. Anglesey implored Stanley to establish better relations with the Irish Members.87 But in the acrimonious atmosphere of July 1831 Stanley deemed it impossible to adopt such a course. Stanley’s difficulties soured his relations with his new cabinet colleagues. What increasingly disturbed Holland and Russell was Stanley’s dragging of his feet over remedial measures. Stanley recognized that the tithe question demanded attention, but recommended leaving any measure until the next session. He held the property of the Church to be as inviolable as the property of any corporation. Yet, while the State could not under any pretext appropriate such property, the legislature could, from time to time, he thought, take measures to increase the security of that property. On such grounds he believed some careful future modification of the tithe might be undertaken. He saw great difficulties in drawing up a new Poor Law for Ireland. On 23 July he proposed to the cabinet a plan for remodelling the Yeomanry. But, though he acknowledged their bad

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behaviour at Newtownbarry, he seemed to Holland to dwell with much complacency on the Yeomanry’s cheapness and utility. By the beginning of August both the cabinet and Anglesey were deeply alarmed at the state of Irish affairs. Anglesey pleaded that swift legislative action was necessary, or else O’Connell would have ‘the advantage of the initiative in all healing measures’.88 Anglesey was far from reassured, however, by Stanley’s judgement, on 4 August, that there could be little prospect of any Irish reforms in the present session. The Commons, Stanley argued, were wholly preoccupied with English Reform, while Melbourne would not bring anything on in the Lords for fear of being beaten.89 Graham advised the Lord Lieutenant that the cabinet was ‘distracted with the daily cares around us, and I am sorry to own that ‘‘the rapidity of lightning’’ is not our characteristic’.90 On 7 August 1831 a tense cabinet met to review Irish matters. Holland believed they were ‘on the brink of a precipice’.91 During the previous weeks Church of Ireland clergy in Tipperary had reported increasingly violent resistance to tithe collection in the neighbourhood of Stanley’s Ballykisteen estate. This culminated in the dispersal of a stone-throwing crowd on 11 August by police serving indictments for non-payment. When the police fired at the crowd one woman was killed and others injured. Stanley had been considering disbanding the Yeomanry in the regions of Munster, Leinster, and Connaught, but he now feared this would be neither practical nor just.92 During the cabinet an inconclusive discussion aired the mounting difficulties of Irish affairs. Anxious ministers acknowledged that disbanding the Yeomanry would create great discontent among the Protestants and materially weaken the strength of the government. But the mere existence of the corps, it was observed, was peculiarly offensive to the majority of the population outside Ulster. With regard to education, Stanley proposed discontinuing the grant to the Kildare Place Society and requiring that other bodies receiving state grants for education should impose no denominational religious instruction. This proposal had its origins in his reading of the pamphlet Thoughts and Suggestions on the Education of the Peasantry in Ireland in 1822, as well as drawing on discussion with Anglesey, Cloncurry, Plunket, and A. R. Blake, Chief Remembrancer of Ireland. A Commons Select Committee of 1828, chaired by Spring Rice, had proposed a similar approach. The moderate Whig Thomas Wyse (MP for Co. Tipperary from 1830 to 1832) also argued for the establishment of non-denominational state schools. A bill for the alteration of the Subletting Act, to prevent the further subdivision of land, was agreed upon by the cabinet. But the major issue of the tithe was not discussed.


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Over the following weeks violent Commons attacks by O’Connell intensified the pressure on Stanley. On Tuesday 9 August, O’Connell alleged outrages by Orangemen and judicial rigging in subsequent inquiries, accusations which Stanley forcefully denied.93 Two days later Stanley again tried to defer discussion of the Newtownbarry affair.94 Nevertheless, O’Connell repeatedly pressed the question of the Yeomanry. Irish MPs expressed their intense anger at the government’s tardiness with reform measures. Then, in a cabinet meeting on Monday 15 August, Charles Grant, President of the Board of Control, declared the inadequacy of all the proposed measures regarding the Yeomanry. Following a heated discussion it was demanded that Stanley must have some consultation with ‘the most rational and leading Irishmen’ in the Commons.95 The Chief Secretary was forced to concede. On 18 August, Stanley and Althorp met privately with fifty Irish MPs.96 The Irish Members made clear their fervent opposition to any measure giving permanence to the Yeomanry. Stanley thought the temper of the meeting, in the circumstances, was good.97 It was agreed to let the Yeomanry gradually abate and, in the future, substitute some other force. Yet his fierce resistance to any semblance of capitulation remained. The aim of Irish MPs, he felt, was to force the adoption of their measures on the ministry. But this, he combatively declared to his ministerial colleagues, he would not allow them to do. A position of defiant inflexibility, however, was no longer tenable. Under intense pressure from the O’Connellites and his ministerial colleagues, during August and September Stanley laid before the Commons some Irish remedial measures, though they were not the extensive package of reforms, large-scale public works, a labour rate upon land for general employment, and the introduction of poor laws, being pressed upon Grey by Anglesey. In order to prevent corruption in the appointment of magistrates, on 15 August, Stanley introduced the Lord Lieutenants for Ireland Bill.98 It proposed the appointment of Lord Lieutenants to the Irish counties, with the power to supervise the work of magistrates. O’Connell attacked the plan as another government patronage scheme, which would deny Catholics any influence, and labelled it the ‘Thirty Tyrants’ bill. By 20 August, however, the bill had passed its third reading in the Commons. Stanley saw it as an important substantiation of his claim that the government, in the aftermath of the Newtownbarry affair, desired an impartial judiciary in Ireland. More importantly, on Friday 9 September, Stanley introduced his Irish education scheme, a question he had long regarded as part of the real root

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of Irish grievances.99 He privately acknowledged two major motives for reorganizing education in Ireland. First, he wished to diminish sectarian animosity by establishing a system of education in which Protestant and Catholic children might come together. Secondly, he wanted to give the bulk of the Catholic population as extensive a knowledge of scriptural truth as they could be induced to receive.100 His Irish National Education Bill recommended withdrawing the grant given to the Protestant Kildare Place Society, the money being given to the Lord Lieutenant. A Commission Board, composed of Protestants and Catholics, would then allocate the money, superintend model schools, and produce textbooks for literary instruction. In these schools there would be combined literary instruction, but separate religious instruction. Thus a national system of education might be established acceptable to all denominations. But the bill became redundant before its second reading, when Stanley set up a Board of Commission for National Education in Ireland under the authority of the Irish Office. The Duke of Leinster, a Whig who had supported Emancipation and was Grand Master of the Freemasons in Ireland, became president of the Commission Board. Three members of the Church of Ireland, two members of the Catholic Church, and two representatives of the Presbyterian Church made up the Commission. The government grant to the Kildare Place Society was withdrawn. But, by the time of Leinster’s appointment, under intense Presbyterian pressure, Stanley modified his education plan so as to introduce common scriptural readings of a non-denominational character into the schools’ instruction. Protestant petitions and large protest meetings held in Dublin and London had loudly condemned the original scheme; although this significant concession excited Catholic suspicions. Nonetheless, the adoption of non-sectarian Christian teaching became a central aspiration of the Irish National School system overseen by Leinster and his fellow Commissioners. On Thursday 29 September, Stanley also introduced a Grand Jury Bill reforming the procedure by which contracts for public works were considered, deliberations to occur in open court and contracts being given to the lowest tender.101 The proposal came to nothing, but was a subject to which he was to return in 1833. He also proposed a modification to the Whiteboys Act of 1775, substituting transportation for the death penalty for acts of malicious injury to property.102 And on 26 September he delivered an extended statement in support of the Maynooth grant.103 Withdrawal of the grant would threaten the peace of Ireland and, by alienating the Catholic population, would endanger the Protestant Establishment. These


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considerations, he argued, without engaging in matters of conscience and faith, required the continuation of the grant. Yet for Irish MPs, as well as Anglesey and some of the cabinet, such measures were a belated and inadequate response to an urgent need. The government chief whip Edward Ellice complained of Stanley and reported the Chief Secretary’s comment ‘that the Irish hated him as much as he hated the Irish’. Ellice’s reaction was sharp: ‘Here is a pretty fellow to govern a country!’104 O’Connell denounced Stanley’s inclinations as ‘anti-Irish, his entire turn of mind is bent to the protection of all existing abuses’.105 Yet Stanley’s own plea, that a preoccupation with English parliamentary Reform deferred more extensive measures for Ireland, was not without substance. Indeed, while the increasing ill temper of his speeches on Ireland betrayed the intense pressure bearing down on him, during the same weeks he was immersed in fierce debate on English Reform.

So, rank on rank, the Trojans closely mass’d, In arms all glitt’ring, with their chiefs advanced. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 42)

On 24 June 1831 Russell introduced the government’s slightly modified second English Representation of the People Bill. On the whole, Stanley observed, matters went well.106 By 367 to 231 votes the measure passed its second Commons reading on 7 July. Six days later, with the bill in committee, Stanley delivered a major defence of the measure as a prudent change.107 Thereafter, throughout July and August, he was embroiled in detailed discussion. On 6 August the Tory Alexander Baring maliciously cited Stanley’s representation of the ’rotten borough’ of Windsor as an illustration of the value of such places in providing seats for men of talent. Stanley’s fellow MP the normally silent Ramsbottom immediately replied that Stanley would never have been returned if he had not been a convinced Reformer. With debates suffered in stifling summer heat, lasting from five o’clock until two or three in the morning every night, MPs must, Stanley observed to Anglesey, soon start dying off fast.108 In the event, no amendments, with the exception of the Chandos clause (which increased the county electorate by about a third by enfranchising £50 tenants-at-will), were successful. Stanley’s display of sustained debating skill during these prolonged debates helped to offset censures over Irish affairs. When, in late July, the ill health of Lord Spencer suggested

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that Althorp might soon have to go to the House of Lords, speculation had it that Stanley remained his obvious successor as leader of the Commons.109 Yet, by the end of August, severe strain was draining Stanley’s optimism regarding the English Reform Bill. Powerful opposition was marshalling itself in the Lords. On 2 September he urged Grey to hold a cabinet to discuss what the government would do if their Reform measure were defeated in the Upper House.110 He was alarmed by Grey’s considering the creation of fourteen or fifteen peers to guarantee the bill’s passage. In turn, other cabinet members were disconcerted by Stanley’s ‘timid counsel’.111 In a cabinet meeting on Monday 5 September, Stanley, along with Lansdowne, Goderich, and Palmerston, concurred with Richmond’s forceful statement that it would be wrong to create peers simply in order to overrule the will of the Lords.112 The rest of the cabinet, including Grey, clearly favoured a creation of peers, the dangers resulting from the bill’s rejection being a far greater evil. Finally, it was agreed that William IV’s forthcoming coronation would provide the occasion for the creation of fifteen new peers. Two days later, after forty nights of exhausting debate, the English Reform Bill finally passed its committee stage in the Commons. There followed one final attack against the English Reform Bill by Tories in the Commons. During the third reading, on Tuesday 20 September, John Croker accused the ministry of resorting to blood and plunder, exciting the mob to violence, and of destroying a constitution which, since 1688, had secured the nation’s prosperity, all in enthusiasm for reckless innovation. Stanley immediately rose as the government respondent to this impassioned assault. He loftily dismissed Croker’s statement as full of indignation, contempt, and ridicule.113 The deep-rooted conviction of public opinion throughout the country, Stanley asserted, was for the Reform Bill. But this support was not actuated by a republican spirit. The people of England, he insisted, revered their aristocracy, because there was no line of demarcation between the aristocratic classes of society and the people themselves. None were invested with special privileges to the prejudice of others. But if the Lords rejected the bill then, instead of being venerated, the aristocracy would be regarded with aversion. No longer esteemed as the patrons and benefactors of the poor, they would be looked upon as oppressive taskmasters. Two days later the English Reform Bill passed the Commons. The measure was sent up to the Lords where, after five days’ intense debate, at 6 a.m. on 8 October, it was rejected by 199 to 158 votes. Twenty


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bishops and the Archbishop of Canterbury voted against it, while the evangelical High Churchman John Sumner, now Bishop of Chester, abstained. This threw all into flux. Popular outrage prompted violent rioting in Derby, Nottingham, and Bristol. The windows of Wellington’s London residence were smashed by a stone-throwing crowd. The Lords majority against the bill was so large that the creation of peers was, as Grey and the cabinet recognized, out of the question. On the other hand, the majority was far from united. While some, like Wellington, looked to the obstruction of any Reform, others, such as lords Wharncliffe and Harrowby, hoped to win agreement to a modified Reform measure. This opened the way to private negotiation as, on 20 October, parliament was prorogued. Stanley was a natural intermediary between the ministry and ‘the waverers’, as Wharncliffe and Harrowby became known. Lord Wharncliffe’s heir, John Wortley, had been a close friend of Stanley at Christ Church and one of his travelling companions to North America. Harrowby’s eldest son, recently elected MP for Liverpool, Viscount Sandon, was also a friend. Sandon’s moderation on Reform made him an obvious channel through which to negotiate a compromise. Following a conversation with Palmerston on 12 October, Sandon opened up a correspondence with Stanley on possible modifications to the Reform Bill. ‘I am as sincere a reformer as yourself,’ Sandon declared, believing ‘that Reform was in many respects desirable in itself, as well as irresistibly called for by public feeling’.114 But it was Grey’s uncompromising tone during the Lords debate that many peers, especially the bishops, had disliked, Sandon suggested. There had to be, Sandon urged, more private communication between all sides.115 Stanley listed five objects which must be fulfilled by any English Reform Bill: the abolition of nomination boroughs; the real representation of property; the enfranchisement of large communities; the extension of the vote; and, most importantly, the end to which all the above were the means, the contentment of the people at large. Sandon believed Stanley would find few peers objecting to such general aims. But it was Schedule B of the proposed measure (the list of boroughs to lose one Member) that was obnoxious to moderate men, Sandon maintained, because it involved a system of representation proportionate to population. This was, he argued, a dangerous precedent alien to the existing constitution. There seemed, moreover, an inconsistency between Schedule B (removing one member from medium-sized boroughs) and Schedule D (giving an MP to formerly unrepresented boroughs). The former proposed that representation should be proportionate to population; the latter suggested it

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should not. With such a principle on one hand and such a practice on the other, Sandon warned, it would be impossible for the smaller towns to retain their double representation. He was anxious that Stanley be aware that both Harrowby and Wharncliffe were keen to arrive at an agreement with the government. They were, Sandon assured him, confident of a similar disposition among a good many of their compeers, both lay and ecclesiastical. On Wednesday 2 November, with Grey’s blessing, Stanley left London for Ireland, visiting en route Harrowby’s country seat, Sandon Hall, Stafford. As a result Harrowby was brought into direct communication with the cabinet. Further conversations with Sandon then prompted Wharncliffe to go to London. On 16 November, Wharncliffe presented Grey and Palmerston with the concessions ‘the waverers’ wished for, the virtual abandonment of Schedule B and the raising of the £10 franchise.116 The meeting, Grey felt, went well. But it was crucial to the success of future negotiations that parliament not be recalled until after Christmas. Only then would there be sufficient time for a compromise to be agreed and the opportunity given to Wharncliffe and Harrowby to exert their influence. Stanley arrived in Dublin, from Sandon Hall, on Friday 18 November. The following day a cabinet was held in London at which all Stanley and Palmerston’s efforts were scotched. Brougham and Holland condemned the negotiations with ‘the waverers’ as treachery. A cabinet decision was taken, Grey, Palmerston, and Richmond being in a minority, to recall parliament in early December, pre-empting any further talks. Althorp declared to Stanley: ‘We must look more to keeping the support of our friends than to conciliating our enemies, the first is possible, the second is not.’117 Stanley was dismayed when Richmond informed him of the decision. He immediately made his displeasure known to Grey.118 It would create a damaging impression, Stanley complained, of the cabinet being rushed into action by their more radical supporters, when the ministry should, in fact, be trying to separate themselves from such groups. It would, moreover, be impossible to have a Reform Bill sufficiently ready for parliamentary discussion at such short notice. But such pleas were too late. An alarmed Stanley immediately left Phoenix Park for London, Althorp warning him that, given the disagreeable state of affairs in the cabinet, Stanley ‘should not be surprised if [he] found the door of the Irish Office shut against [him] when he arrived’.119 But Stanley’s hasty return to London could not recover the situation. The English Reform issue now lurched towards confrontation.


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… with haughty words to overbear. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 84)

Stanley drew solace from what appeared to be an improvement in Irish affairs. By late September 1831 he felt Irish MPs to be in better humour. This seemed confirmed when O’Connell avoided the mob waiting to greet him when he returned to Dublin.120 Stanley received a report from Sir William Gosset of the vendors of speeches calling in the streets: ‘Terrible riots in England, and Ireland quiet!’121 At the same time, Stanley quashed a proposal to give O’Connell the Attorney Generalship for Ireland. Brougham and Holland advocated the appointment, so as to cement O’Connell’s support for the government over English Reform. Lord Duncannon, a minister outside the cabinet, acted as intermediary. Melbourne’s brother-in-law and Althorp’s first cousin the popular and well-connected Duncannon (MP for Co. Kilkenny) enjoyed friendly relations with O’Connell. Through Brougham and Holland, Duncannon introduced into ministerial thinking the idea of giving the Irish Attorney Generalship to O’Connell. Duncannon also suggested it directly to Grey, who raised it in cabinet on 13 October. Without an official connection with the government, Grey feared, O’Connell might revert to agitation on both Reform and Repeal of the Union. Anglesey and Lord Plunket, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, who unusually were both present at the cabinet meeting on 13 October, supported the plan. But Stanley, supported by Richmond, strongly objected.122 Giving such an office to a man so recently himself the subject of prosecution would, he maintained, undermine the credibility of the government and estrange supporters. Brougham, Holland, Althorp, Lansdowne, Carlisle, and Palmerston favoured the proposal. But, in the face of Stanley’s firm objections, a half measure was adopted. O’Connell was to be thanked for his support of the government which, if continued, might in the future enable an offer of office to be made. As Stanley pressed upon Anglesey, ‘O’Connell must earn anything he gets from the government by a line of conduct which leaves him no retreat.’123 This compromise was seen as a victory for Stanley and confirmation of his indispensability to Grey. By mid-November, Stanley was reporting to Grey that all seemed quiet in Ireland. O’Connell’s influence, though still vast, was apparently diminished.124 It was in these propitious circumstances that, on 22 November, Stanley proposed a settlement of the tithe issue. It was, he acknowledged, a

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question of the most frightful magnitude becoming daily more urgent.125 A tithe measure, he explained privately to Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London, had become a necessity in order to protect the Church of Ireland.126 In a few short years, he predicted, payment of the tithe might cease altogether. Something must be done to save the Church from impending ruin. Gangs, calling themselves Hurlers, intimidated clergy, the sale of property for arrears of tithes being accompanied by bloodshed, while in Liverpool it had been resolved not to buy any cattle branded as seized for tithe arrears. Anti-tithe agitation, starting in Kilkenny, had spread to Carlow, Wexford, Kildare, and Tipperary. In order to save the Church, Stanley concluded, it was necessary to do something immediately, rather than allow the crisis to worsen. He favoured a commutation of the tithe for land. Though a sacrifice of nominal revenues, this would not, he thought, result in a loss of real receipts. His thinking drew on his unsuccessful private Irish Ecclesiastical Corporation bills of 1829 and 1830. Moreover, the question of reforming the tithe bore on two closely related issues, the existing Vestry Cess (which taxed Catholics for the repair of Anglican churches) and the state of the First Fruits Fund (tax collected on the value of Irish benefices). The first produced as much ill blood as any question in Ireland. Many vestries, the Catholic majority being excluded, consisted of a small number of Protestant tradesmen, who employed each other in all the works they voted necessary. The collection of first fruits, meanwhile, required a fresh valuation. As always, what made these dangers to the Church of Ireland the more alarming was that the property of the Irish Church stood upon exactly the same inviolable principle of law as the property of the English Church. The danger which threatened the one, Stanley argued, would certainly lead to the overthrow of the other. Tithe reform would be an act of kindness, protecting the Church from hostile plunder. At a cabinet meeting, on 30 November, Stanley persuaded Grey to include tithe reform in the forthcoming King’s Speech.127 Though, as he admitted, he did not have a bill drawn up, the principles of a measure might be considered by a Select Committee. At the next cabinet, on 2 December, however, Stanley’s advocacy of tithe reform, so as to provide more effectual protection for the Established Church, was strongly criticized. Reform announced in such terms, Althorp observed, would sound menacing to the Irish people.128 Stanley was persuaded to soften his language and describe any measure as being intended to satisfy both Catholics and Protestants. But cabinet discussion also touched on Stanley’s conviction regarding the inviolability of ecclesiastical property. When the question of


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lay appropriation, the use of surplus Church revenue for secular purposes, had first arisen in cabinet in August 1831, Grey had adopted a very broad interpretation of the term ‘ecclesiastical objects’. This had allowed him to appease, temporarily, Russell, who strongly supported lay appropriation, and Stanley, who firmly opposed it. In December, during further cabinet discussion of the Irish tithe, Stanley again voiced his strong objection to lay appropriation as a violation of property rights. But he reassured his colleagues that tithe legislation would be presented as a significant measure of reform. In the debate on the King’s Speech, on Tuesday 6 December, Stanley addressed the questions of the Irish tithe and parliamentary Reform.129 There existed, he disingenuously assured the Commons, not the slightest difference of opinion within the cabinet regarding the Church of Ireland. Attention would be given to the tithe question as soon as possible. Defending the government’s English Reform policy he declared that ‘seasonable concession’ was the only means of addressing just, or preventing unjust, claims. A slightly modified English Reform Bill would be introduced, once more, into parliament. Stanley thought the House looked well.130 Irish MPs seemed pleased at the mention of the tithe. Peel was bitter about Reform, but the government side of the House seemed in good spirits. Looking to defer contentious Commons debate, Stanley hoped to appoint a Select Committee of the House of Lords to examine the tithe question, the procedure least likely to alarm the Church.131 But in cabinet on 7 December it was decided to appoint Committees in both Houses. Stanley, supported by Palmerston, objected to any Catholics being appointed to the Committees.132 Althorp, Durham, Holland, Goderich, and Grant strongly disagreed. This issue disrupted another cabinet on 14 December, but Stanley finally won the day.133 Notice that the radical Hume intended to move for an inquiry into the whole state of the Irish Church (the same motion he had made in 1824) helped to push the cabinet to agreement. In the Commons on 15 December, Stanley moved for the appointment of a Select Committee to examine the law relating to the tithe in Ireland.134 The Committee offered a safe harbour in which to shelter from the stormy waters of Commons debate. The tranquillity of Ireland was dependent, he urged, on a measure being formulated which combined security for the property of the Established Church with the removal of grievances. He proposed such a measure, moreover, as a sincere Protestant and as an ardent supporter of the Anglican Church, anxious for the Church’s safety. The key object of reform should be the removal of irritants in the collecting of tithes. Stanley rejected Peel’s accusation

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that a Select Committee, by prolonging consideration of the issue, would cause further disorder in Ireland. Nor had the government, as Peel also suggested, abdicated its responsibilities by not proposing a bill. Proceeding by Committee would allow the complex question of the tithe to be given careful consideration. Following Stanley giving a detailed account of the anti-tithe agitation and the destitution of some Anglican clergy, Peel rose to declare that he would not oppose the motion, but he still regretted that the ministry had not proposed a measure. Subsequently, both Stanley, as chairman, and Peel were appointed to the Commons Tithe Committee and a secure anchorage from which to devise reform of the Irish tithe was reached. Having successfully steered tithe reform into calm waters, two days later, on 17 December, Stanley delivered his most important contribution to the English Reform debate of 1831.135 Five days earlier Russell had introduced a third English Reform Bill to the Commons, redistribution being amended in light of the objections of ‘the waverers’. Greville considered Stanley’s speech the best he had yet made and ‘so good as to raise him immeasurably in the House’. More importantly, Grey thought it placed Stanley ‘at the very top of the House of Commons, without a rival’.136 Once again, it was a blistering response to ‘a very clever speech’ by Croker. Stanley dismissed Croker’s unworthy taunts that the government had encouraged popular agitation over the Reform question. Rather, Stanley retorted, popular violence was the result of the policy of previous governments. With regard to the principles of the government’s measure, Schedule A was based upon a combined assessment for taxes and population. It was decidedly not, therefore, a dangerous proposal basing claims to representation upon population. The £10 franchise, meanwhile, extended the vote to as low a scale of property as was consistent with the safety of the State. Such proposals were responsible concessions to genuine grievances. Further delay would only aggravate the crisis. Stanley devoted much preparation to his statement and friends feared ‘his being stranded in a studied speech’, without the spontaneous fire that characterized his most powerful performances. But older members of the House declared it ‘one of the most effective speeches they recollected’.137 He ‘lashed’ Croker ‘so soundly as he has never been lashed before. He exposed his false history about Charles I, and his parliaments, and told him: ‘‘Inaccurate reading was as dangerous as a little reading’’ .’138 As Littleton observed, ‘he literally shivered [Croker’s] statements to atoms—showed how utterly baseless, how impudently false they were’.139 Croker, while Stanley spoke, ‘turned very pale and pulled his hat over his brows and bent his head over his


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breast. Lord Althorp thought [Croker] was going to faint.’140 Tremendous cheering from the government benches followed Stanley’s speech, while Peel gave his crestfallen Tory colleague scant support. At the following day’s cabinet, Holland noted, Stanley’s eyes were sparkling with success.141 The English Representation of the People Bill passed its second reading, on 18 December, by 324 to 162 votes. That same evening parliament was prorogued.

The foam was on his lips; bright flash’d his eyes. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 105)

Stanley’s Commons triumph was a gratifying conclusion to an exhausting year. Upon assuming office Stanley, his wife, and their 6-year-old son had acquired a house in Tunbridge Wells as a welcome retreat from London, the Kent and Sussex countryside offering a more accessible rural refuge than Knowsley. It quickly became a favourite retreat, situated on the Kentish Weald, convenient for Epsom and the South Downs, and for visits to Richmond’s country residence at Goodwood, near Chichester. Certainly Tunbridge Wells provided Stanley with a healthier sanctuary than the damp remoteness of Knowsley, where the rapidly expanding alkali works of neighbouring St Helens were spewing noxious vapours containing hydrochloric acid into the atmosphere. Ireland and Reform had made enormous demands on his stamina and energy. He had resolutely upheld the firm rule of law in Ireland, introduced an Irish parliamentary Reform Bill, established a Commission for Education in Ireland, and announced tithe reform for the forthcoming session. A seat in Grey’s cabinet affirmed his status as the strongest ministerial spokesman in the Commons. That O’Connell furiously denounced Stanley’s control over Althorp was hostile corroboration of Stanley’s growing authority. But O’Connell had escaped legal judgement, Stanley’s Arms Bill had proved a blunder, and the Yeomanry had become a cause of bitter contention. Against a background of growing distress in western Ireland, Stanley’s relations with Anglesey had deteriorated, criticism from ministerial colleagues had intensified, and Commons clashes with O’Connell had become viciously personal. The unrelenting pressures of fierce debate, detailed administration, turbulent cabinet discussion, and constant confrontation with O’Connell had been huge. For a few days before Christmas, Stanley went down to Goodwood for some shooting where he, Palmerston, Melbourne, and Graham (who had

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been the Duke’s fag at Westminster School) were hosted by Richmond. Events had identified them as the ‘moderates’ within the cabinet, their ministerial presence constraining the reform enthusiasms of Holland, Brougham, Durham, Althorp, and Russell. Their major defeat, within the cabinet, had been the scuttling of negotiations with ‘the waverers’ in November. Their comfort was that Stanley, despite his difficulties with O’Connell, had elevated his reputation in the eyes of many, including Grey. The government claim that ‘seasonable concession’ must be based upon the defence of law and property had been powerfully upheld by Stanley. There was good reason for enjoying the Christmas season in the Knowsley household. Emma Stanley’s third pregnancy gave further cause for celebration. Yet the New Year brought no respite. Irish news took a turn for the worse. Before Christmas reports were coming in of increasing rural violence and the revival of political associations for Repeal of the Union. At Carrickshock in Co. Kilkenny on 14 December armed local inhabitants ambushed police sent to collect the tithe and killed thirteen constables. Away from Westminster, O’Connell devoted his energies to building up a National Political Union in Ireland as a base for renewed popular campaigning for Repeal. What O’Connell meant by Repeal was never specified, beyond the general call for a Dublin legislature to determine Irish business. This suited his purposes. His strategic aim was to force the cabinet to offer a package of reforms and to negotiate from there. What helped to clarify his position was his fierce animosity to Stanley. It enabled him to indicate to what, or rather to whom, he was opposed. Stanley gave a face to the enemy. O’Connell fulminated that Stanley had ‘rendered himself more odious than any other man who ever assisted in the misgovernment of Ireland—Mr Stanley, the snappish, impertinent, overbearing, High Church Mr Stanley … Mr Stanley must be put out of the government of Ireland.’142 At the same time alarmed Orangemen, with the cry of protecting the Protestant Church, were busy organizing. On 1 January 1832 Stanley informed Anglesey that nothing could be more unsatisfactory than the state of Ireland.143 He hoped O’Connell might hang himself if given enough rope, as all moderate men in England were turning against him. Even the conciliatory Holland was forced to admit that the extreme factions in Ireland seemed to be vying with each other in intemperance.144 While the Orangemen talked sedition and treason, the O’Connellites encouraged disobedience to the law and expressed hostility to the government and their Reform Bill. With the support of Blackburne and Plunket, Stanley pushed for prosecutions of sedition in the press. At


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a cabinet meeting on 11 January he agreed to Lansdowne’s proposal of possible payment for Catholic bishops and clergy. Such measures might, Stanley hoped, restrain the extremism of all parties. But in cabinet, on 18 January, it became clear that the financial prospects for Ireland were bad, with the forecast of a deficit of revenues over expenditure. Stanley faced an impossible dilemma. Ireland appeared in open rebellion; coercion seemed necessary. But, without a fresh Act of parliament, there was only the Yeomanry in reserve. Yet, to call out the Yeomanry would inflame Orange vehemence and Catholic outrage. ‘We have’, Holland plaintively observed, ‘neither authority to keep peace nor resources to prevent war. Lord Grey is manifestly depressed and nettled at this state of things.’145 Following the reconvening of parliament, on Tuesday 17 January 1832, the government’s mounting difficulties became apparent. On 26 January the ministry was surprised by a cleverly timed motion of censure, proposed by Herries, on an issue, the Russian Dutch loan, which threatened to bring Tories and Irish MPs together. In pursuing his policy of establishing an independent and neutral Belgium, free of interference from either France or Holland, Palmerston had undertaken to pay the interest on an old Russian debt to the Dutch, which Russia had assumed in 1814 in return for agreeing to the Union of the Netherlands. Only an eleventh-hour speech by Palmerston saved the day. During the debate Stanley made it known that, if the censure succeeded, he would resign.146 The ministry’s last-minute success, he believed, was partly due to Peel’s wish to avoid having to form a government. While preparing the cabinet for a tithe committee report recommending a transference of the charge from a tithe to a land tax, Stanley then faced virulent attacks from Irish Members in the Commons. It became clear that O’Connell was looking to form an independent Irish party in parliament, as a means of wresting reforms from the government. The power of such a group would stand on the renewed popular agitation for Repeal that O’Connell was assiduously organizing. In the face of these dangers Stanley’s composure won him further accolades. After listening to an Irish debate on 7 February, Holland noted that Stanley showed ‘his acuteness, self possession, judgement and authority in the House, and proved to me he was or soon will be the leading man in that assembly’.147 Crisis, however, highlighted the tensions between Stanley and Anglesey. On 12 February the cabinet received reports from Anglesey on the state of Ireland differing materially from the accounts presented by Stanley, who stressed the urgent need for a coercive measure to enforce the collection of tithes in arrears. Anglesey, however, predicted the impossibility of

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preserving order without some measures of conciliation.148 He advocated the incorporation of tithe reform with the reduction and sale of bishop’s lands, the abolition of church cess, and the payment of Catholic clergy. Any coercive measure for the collection of tithes in arrears, he argued, had to follow, not precede, ecclesiastical reform. Otherwise, he concluded dramatically, he would need at least an additional 40,000 soldiers in Ireland to secure peace and good order. Stanley strongly objected to the Lord Lieutenant’s package of reforms. In particular, he opposed Anglesey’s recommendation that any surplus Church of Ireland revenues be appropriated for secular purposes, as well as the putting of concession before coercion. Stanley expressed his intention to resign, rather than allow any spoliation of the Irish Church. His threat of resignation scuttled Anglesey’s recommendations. This left the Lord Lieutenant in high indignation. Stanley’s coercive enforcement of tithe collection, Anglesey protested, was ‘like hanging a man for forgery upon the eve of taking away the capital punishment’.149 Anglesey’s sensational reports exacerbated cabinet divisions. These became public when, on Tuesday 14 February, Althorp told the Commons that any measure enforcing the collection of tithes would have to be accompanied by a measure reforming the tithe. Stanley, arriving in the House later, stated that a measure of enforcement would be accompanied by a pledge to abate grievances, while a tithe reform measure would require further time to prepare.150 Seizing on this discrepancy Peel declared that a pledge could not be given if a measure was not in readiness. Then, on Friday 17 February, Irish MPs tried to force a discussion on the Commons Tithe Committee report. Stanley remained determined to prevent them from doing so. As a result, Irish Members obstructed Stanley’s attempt to discuss a proposed Subletting Bill. In response, Stanley pronounced that on them, not the government, rested the responsibility for impeding remedial measures for Ireland.151 He was pleased to note ‘a stony reprobation’ fell on the O’Connellites from the English Members. The episode left him in a defiant mood. ‘I think the lesson will do them good, but I am persuaded that nothing is gained by giving way to their caprices and I will not do it.’ As he declared to Anglesey the following day, ‘They may succeed in throwing me out … but they shall not bear me down.’ On 17 February, Stanley presented a memorandum on the Commons Tithe Committee report to the cabinet. The King had already privately informed Stanley, via his secretary Sir Herbert Taylor, of his strong approval of the report.152 The Commons report and the accompanying Lords


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Committee report were similar in outline. This was no accident. Stanley had busily presided over the Commons Committee during the previous weeks, selecting witnesses, conducting interviews, and, significantly, with Peel’s assistance, drafting the report, while Lansdowne performed the same function in the Lords Committee. Both reports were a fulfilment of Stanley’s prior wishes. They asserted the existence of an organized nationwide resistance to payment of the tithe which had thrown many Church of Ireland clergy into destitution. They recommended that arrears be collected by the government as Crown debt. With regard to the tithe itself, it was proposed that the burden of payment should be transferred from the occupier of the soil to the owner-in-fee. Thus the tithe would be commuted into a charge upon the land, releasing clergy from direct confrontation with their tenants. Owners would then be given the option of honouring the tithe either with a fixed payment or by a voluntary appropriation of land to the clergy.153 What Stanley and the reports made quite clear, however, was that the collection of arrears was a necessary precondition for commutation of the tithe. Lansdowne, Graham, and Melbourne favoured this priority. Althorp, Durham, Brougham, Holland, and, from Dublin Castle, Anglesey opposed Stanley’s insistence that coercion (the collection of arrears by the government) had to precede concession (the commutation of the tithe into a charge upon the land). But Stanley persuaded Grey of the necessity of his policy. To do otherwise, Grey subsequently informed Anglesey, would be to confuse concession with extortion.154 The difficulty in parliament lay with the body of Irish, radical, and Whig MPs opposed to an arrears measure without an accompanying commutation measure. In the Lords, meanwhile, there was strong support for an arrears bill, but opposition to a commutation of the tithe. On Thursday 8 March the full force of splenetic Irish fury fell upon Stanley. Charles Brownlow (MP for Armagh) and Richard Sheil (MP for Louth) prevented Stanley from stating the intentions of the government with regard to the tithe, delivering impassioned attacks on the way in which the Commons Committee had conducted itself. Though denied the opportunity to speak, Stanley remained calm in the face of this ‘little Irish insurrection’.155 It was, he declared, a demonstration meant for public consumption in Ireland, with an eye to the hustings. The vast majority of Irish Members when it came to votes, he predicted, would go with the government. On Tuesday 13 March a deferred tithe debate took place, during which Stanley introduced five resolutions, drawing on the coercive recommendations in the Select Committee reports, the commutation of

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the tithe, the establishment of ecclesiastical corporations in each diocese, and proposals for the compulsory composition of the tithe being deferred until the presentation of the Select Committee reports to parliament in June.156 Stanley proposed financial aid to Anglican clergy suffering because of non-payment of tithes and requested the government be empowered to levy tithes in arrears. Three resolutions passed without a division. Hostile amendments against the others failed. Stanley’s composure appeared vindicated. During April he secured the passage of a Clergy Relief or Arrears of Tithes Bill based on his resolutions, and took the opportunity to reply to his detractors.157 He denounced the inflammatory language of O’Connell in his extra-parliamentary speeches. During March, O’Connell had undertaken an extensive popular campaign in Ireland calling for Repeal and an end to the tithe, his speeches being laced with diatribes on the malignancy of Stanley’s administration. The Arrears Bill was a measure to vindicate the law and was, in the circumstances, Stanley asserted, the most lenient measure of coercion possible. The people of Ireland had to give up their resistance to the law. The subsequent successful passage of the bill only left Anglesey protesting that he found himself ‘carrying, at the point of a bayonet, an odious measure’.158 O’Connell complained that Stanley’s Arrears of Tithes Act ‘riveted and completed the iron bond of law’.159 A major speech on Irish education further consolidated Stanley’s authority in the Commons. In defending government plans for education in Ireland, on 6 March, he enthusiastically advocated bringing children of different denominations together.160 This, he hoped, would enable young Protestants and Catholics to understand how much common theology the Christian churches shared and encourage Catholic children to acquire as much knowledge of scriptural truth as they could be induced to receive. So, he believed, might the violence of sectarian animosity in Ireland be diminished. He gladly accepted the appellation of being a ‘liberal Protestant’. Liberality of mind was not, he declared, inconsistent with deep religious faith. This statement placated Protestant opposition and marginalized evangelical objections to the system.

Yet thus ’tis better, both for me and him, That, though indignant, to my will he yields. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 85)

English Reform and the crisis precipitated by the Lords’ rejection of the ministerial bill dominated parliamentary events during the spring of


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1832. On Thursday 22 March, Stanley followed Peel in the debate on the third Commons reading of the English Reform Bill.161 He skilfully played upon the divisions of the opposition. The measure would not, as they suggested, destroy the influence of property. On the contrary, the bill would bind together landlord and tenant by reciprocal acts of kindness, such influence, he believed, conforming with the best principles of human nature. Responsible concession to valid demands, consistent with the rule of law, was the proof of honest statesmanship. Upon this measure, Stanley majestically concluded, depended the future tranquillity of the realm and the safety and independence of the aristocracy, no less than the prerogatives of the Crown and the liberties of the subject. This powerful speech, a week before his thirty-third birthday, proved the peroration of the Commons Reform debates of 1831–2. As Brougham’s secretary, Sir Denis Le Marchant, noted, everyone praised it.162 All now hung on the English Reform Bill’s fate in the Lords. Over Christmas 1831 the ‘Goodwood set’ had found themselves at odds with the rest of the cabinet over their Reform strategy in the Lords. By January 1832 ‘changing the bill so that it might pass the Lords had not worked. There remained changing the Lords so that they would pass the bill.’163 But at a long cabinet meeting on 2 January, Stanley, Richmond, Palmerston, Melbourne, and Lansdowne objected to Durham’s suggestion of a large creation of peers.164 As a compromise the cabinet approved requesting ten or twelve immediate creations. This went further than Stanley believed to be safe. But he consoled himself that the wish of the cabinet seemed to be for a demonstration of power such as would preclude the necessity of exercising it.165 He reported to the absent Graham that Grey was ‘very desponding, Palmerston bored, Melbourne more hesitating than I ever saw him, Grant frightened out of his sense[s] and balancing which was the greatest danger till he came to no conclusion at all’.166 The ‘waverer’ Sandon renewed his correspondence with Stanley.167 Though inconclusive, their exchanges gave credibility to wider speculation about Harrowby and Wharncliffe’s forming a government without Wellington. In such an arrangement Stanley might lead the Commons and Peel be pushed aside. Yet, prior to the Lords debate on English Reform, Stanley maintained a prudent distance from such conjecture. The second reading of the English Reform Bill in the Upper House, begun on Monday 9 April, saw MPs and strangers crammed into the chamber. Stanley and Graham spent the whole of the second night lying on the floor, opposite the throne, listening to the debate.168 Also

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in attendance for the fourth and final night of debate, on Friday 13 April, they looked, the Reformer Hobhouse thought, more anxious than became cabinet ministers.169 In the event the division, taken at 6.30 a.m., produced a majority of nine for the bill. Seventeen ‘waverers’ changed their votes and twelve peers, who had not voted the previous October, supported the measure. Twelve bishops voted for the bill in person or by proxy. The majority, however, was too small to guarantee the bill’s passage through committee without the creation of peers. The ‘Days of May’ crisis followed. In the Lords, Lyndhurst carried a hostile motion postponing disfranchisement changes until the rest of the Reform Bill was settled. In response, Grey asked the King to create fifty peers; William IV adamantly refused. On Tuesday 8 May, Stanley told Hardinge that Phoenix Park was ready for him.170 The next day the ministry resigned. Private grief had already thrown events into dark relief as, six days earlier, Stanley’s first daughter, like their second son three years before, had died within hours of birth. Lyndhurst’s motion had been, Stanley gloomily deduced, the result of intrigue between ‘the waverers’ on the one hand, and Ellenborough and Lyndhurst on the other. But they had, he judged, been too cunning.171 By not letting sincere anti-Reformers into their game they had outmanoeuvred themselves. Ellenborough’s subsequent announcement of a more modest Reform scheme came upon the Ultra Tories like a clap of thunder, who felt exceedingly angry at being duped. All this, Stanley ruefully observed, would not help the formation of a new government. The King sent for Harrowby. But the elderly Harrowby, approaching his seventies, declined to head a coalition ministry. On Wednesday 9 May, Lyndhurst twice visited the Palace. Finally, on Saturday 12 May, Wellington undertook to form a government. Stanley watched the ensuing activity confident that Wellington would fail. Meanwhile, the former cabinet remained determined to stand together, the unpopularity of any alternative ministry carrying them back into power.172 Stanley felt ambivalence at such a prospect. The fatigue of eighteen exhausting months in office and his bereaved wife’s illness led him to think of the recuperative powers of country air. But the pace of rapidly unfolding events denied any respite. The probability of Wellington’s failure made it imperative, Stanley believed, that Reformers avoid any precipitous move. On 10 May, Lord Ebrington, supported by Hume and others, announced a motion opposing any Reform Bill proposed by a Wellington ministry. At a crowded meeting of Whigs at Brooks’s, on Sunday 13 May, Stanley and Althorp both denounced this manoeuvre. Stanley


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startled his audience by mounting a table in order to deliver a passionate plea for restraint. He urged those present to resist proposing a hostile resolution. To do so would expose them to accusations of factiousness. If Wellington succeeded in forming a government and brought forward a Reform measure, he argued, they should set aside personal considerations, support the ministry, and so retire without reproach, leaving Wellington to office and infamy. After heated discussion Stanley and Althorp won their case.173 Ebrington’s proposal was abandoned. Palmerston was delighted with this outcome. ‘It is infinitely wise, because it is perfectly honest, and will place our conduct and motives in a most honourable contrast with those of our opponents.’174 Two days later, on Tuesday 15 May, Grey, a week after his resignation, was recalled to power, Wellington, Peel having declined to join him in office, reluctantly admitting his inability to form a government. Grey required, as a condition of resuming office, an assurance from William IV of a sufficient creation of peers as to guarantee the passage of the Reform Bill in the Lords. This request was communicated to the monarch on 15 May. The following day Stanley told the Duke of Buccleuch that all was settled ‘and they had not been too hard upon the King’.175 On Thursday 17 May the cabinet received word, via Stanley and the King’s secretary, Sir Herbert Taylor, that no less than twelve peers intended to waive their opposition to the bill.176 That evening violent statements were made in the Lords by those determined to persevere with their opposition. As a result, on Friday 18 May, Grey’s reconstituted cabinet, after four hours’ anxious deliberation, decided it must have a written sanction from the King for the creation of peers.177 William IV reluctantly acquiesced. Called out of the chamber to be informed of this news at 5.30 that evening, Stanley rapidly returned to the Commons to tell Althorp the news. Passing Hobhouse on the way Stanley simply remarked: ‘All right!’178 Deafening cheers then followed Althorp’s announcement. In the event, the royal sanction itself proved sufficient for the government’s purposes. Lords opposition to Reform finally collapsed. On Monday 4 June only twenty-two peers, none of them prelates, opposed the third reading of the Reform Bill. On Thursday 7 June it was given the royal assent, though the King refused to do so in person. After fifteen months of intense debate a Parliamentary Reform Bill for England and Wales became law. Stanley attended the celebratory dinner held at the Guildhall in July where Grey and Althorp were both given the freedom of the City. For Stanley, the Reform Act’s significance, beyond the details of enfranchisement and registration, lay in the affirmation of parliament’s

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central place in the life of the nation. The Reform Act would help bind the people to their institutions.

Arose contention fierce, and discord dire, Their warring passions rous’d on either side. With fearful crash they met: the broad Earth groan’d. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 30)

Stanley expected Grey’s government to be turned out as soon as their English Reform Bill passed. Reform had bonded the coalition cabinet in November 1830. With English Reform secured, government differences would come to the fore. Irish MPs, Stanley noted, were in a bitter mood. This prompted doubts about carrying his Irish Reform Bill, an outcome that would provide ‘a fine grievance’ for O’Connell.179 In introducing the second Commons reading of the Irish Reform Bill, on Friday 25 May, Stanley declared his expectation of an uncompromising opposition from those who thought the bill would give a dangerous preponderance to the Catholic interest.180 But such objections he considered inconsistent with the whole spirit of legislation since Emancipation. His Irish Reform Bill removed all distinctions between Protestants and Catholics, while he believed that it would not add seven Members to the Catholic interest. Cloncurry immediately wrote to Stanley urging further concessions. The recently passed Reform Act, Cloncurry observed, ‘had saved England from revolution and from ruin’. Now it was Ireland’s turn: ‘For God’s sake stand by this poor country now, give half-a-dozen more members for counties and cities and nothing to [Trinity] College. I know your feelings and the difficulties you have to encounter, but as the great measure as to England is now carried difficulty or even defeat is nothing … But do, oh do, justice to Ireland.’181 Also under pressure from Irish MPs and Anglesey, Stanley agreed to an extension of the county franchise, giving leaseholders having a beneficial interest of £10 for twenty-one years the vote. This alteration, confirmed by Althorp’s private meeting with them on 25 June, appeased the Irish Members. At a similar gathering the following day, Stanley directly answered their concerns regarding the registration clauses of the bill.182 O’Connell was not invited to the meeting. In the Commons on Monday 18 June a combative Stanley accused O’Connell of not being a gentleman because he insulted opponents with abusive language and then refused to fight duels when


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challenged. At the end of June, Stanley informed Anglesey that at least the Commons had come to be in better humour over Irish parliamentary Reform.183 But Stanley recognized the inflammatory issue of tithe reform as his real difficulty.184 Cloncurry warned him that Ireland, though presently quiet, was determined to a man against the tithe.185 By mid-June, Stanley admitted to Anglesey he was in despair.186 There seemed, he confessed, little prospect of resolving the tithe issue in any reasonable amount of time. The cabinet had yet to agree to any reform based upon the Select Committee reports presented to parliament during June. But if no measure was secured then the clergy would be left without hope of help, only with the certainty of future disturbances. In cabinet Stanley pressed for the arrest of some of the leading recusants of the tithe. This, he argued, would bring other defaulters into line. But ministers temporized. In cabinet on Thursday 21 June, Stanley requested clear instructions as to how to proceed with tithe reform. He must, he declared, announce that a measure was in readiness.187 They subsequently approved Stanley’s provisions for the permanent and compulsory composition of the tithe.188 The proposal to commute the tithe into a land tax, recommended in the Select Committee reports, was laid aside. In a long Commons speech on Thursday 5 July, Stanley introduced his bill for the revised composition of the Irish tithe.189 The value of the new composition was to be determined every seven years on the basis of the average selling price of produce (a form of ‘sliding scale’ of tithe composition), to be collected as part of the rent charge. In response James Grattan moved an amendment to abolish tithes totally, property in Ireland to be levied for a fund promoting religion and charity. Acrimonious debate continued on 10 and 13 July, during which O’Connell delivered a scathing review of Stanley’s career in Ireland. While accusing Stanley of sneering at him, O’Connell denounced the Chief Secretary for offering paltry reforms, while never making the smallest concession on the Irish Establishment. Stanley’s grand principle, O’Connell asserted, ‘is to keep up the present Protestant Church Establishment in Ireland—the most monstrous establishment that ever existed in any Christian country’.190 But it was observed by government ministers that Irish MPs were not being entirely honest in their violent attacks on the Chief Secretary. Looking to a forthcoming election, many Irish Members spoke in the House as if they were already on the hustings. Holland thought them bullied by O’Connell and their constituents. Denis Le Marchant believed many Irish MPs to be

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‘perfect swindlers’.191 Privately, when out of the Commons, they were warm admirers of the government; in the House they were publicly against it. Once again, during July 1832, Stanley became the despised focus of intense Irish anger. O’Connellite attacks, however, had little effect. A despondent O’Connell left London for Ireland before the end of the session, having failed to pass any substantial modifications to Stanley’s Irish Reform and tithe legislation. Before parliament prorogued on 16 August, Stanley secured the passage of his Irish Reform Bill, his Tithes Arrears Bill, and his Compulsory Composition of Tithes measure. During the course of the session he also reconciled Presbyterians to the non-sectarian religious instruction being established under his Irish National School system. This restored Stanley’s authority within Westminster. O’Connell left London determined to revive popular Irish agitation, galvanized by the cry for Repeal, as a means of restoring his power in parliament. As his position in Westminster strengthened, so Stanley’s relations with Anglesey deteriorated. During June 1832 Stanley pressed Grey to replace Anglesey as Lord Lieutenant with Lansdowne, Anglesey to be sent to India as Governor General. Goderich might then replace Lansdowne as Lord President of the Council.192 This, Stanley argued, would allow him to take the Colonial Office. While Grey deferred acting on Stanley’s suggestion, Anglesey bombarded Stanley with criticisms of the tithe composition measure. In the final analysis, Anglesey declared, the measure would excite insurrection in return for a small increase of revenue. The amount of money collected, Stanley retorted fiercely, was secondary to the main principle of the bill, to show the government’s determination to uphold the law. Undeterred, Anglesey continued to express his strong disapproval. During July he sent Grey further dramatic reports of imminent rebellion in Ireland, which, if reforms were not urgently undertaken, would require martial law. While both Grey and Melbourne attempted to calm Anglesey, Stanley’s view remained characteristically adamant. ‘With a little firmness’, he observed, ‘I do not think Ireland is in any situation to create alarm.’193 By early August, Stanley was declaring the impossibility of his continuing to work with Anglesey. Their views, he advised Grey, were so in conflict that continued correspondence between the Lord Lieutenant and himself could only cause greater embarrassment to the government.194 In this situation, Stanley told Grey, he could not undertake Irish affairs for another session; either Anglesey or he himself would have to go. In conversation with Hobhouse, Stanley indicated that Hobhouse would probably shortly be replacing him at Phoenix Park.195 For his part, Anglesey despairingly declared that the ‘attempt


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to keep peace in Ireland, whilst Stanley’s Church prejudices are acted upon, is utterly hopeless’.196 But Grey advised Stanley that on one point he was decided, that it was absolutely essential that Stanley return to Ireland.197 The rift between Stanley and Anglesey mirrored those ministerial differences compounded by mutual suspicion. Opposed sections within the cabinet saw the Tithe Composition Bill as the basis for two contrary policies regarding the Church of Ireland. For some, like Holland, Russell, Durham, and Althorp, it was a foundation for reducing the Church to a stipendiary institution, while Stanley saw it as a means of preserving the Established and endowed character of the Church. As a result, the cabinet postponed consideration of a tithe commutation measure. This prompted Holland to reflect privately on Stanley’s unpopularity, despite his talents, as the obstacle to a conciliatory Irish policy. Stanley ‘hates and is hated by all parties’ in Ireland, Holland judged, ‘and no proposal coming from him is considered on its own merits either by the High Protestant faction on one side or the body of the Catholic people on the other’.198 Over the next turbulent weeks acrimonious cabinet opposition and wearying disputes with Anglesey prompted Stanley, at several points, to threaten resignation. Grey, while backing Stanley, averted ministerial rupture. Grey needed Stanley as a restraint on Durham and Russell. But supporting Stanley tested ministerial relations and Grey’s personal skills to their limits. By August 1832 Grey’s government uncomfortably straddled two differing Irish policies. One was based at Phoenix Park, the other at Dublin Castle. Increasingly, Anglesey looked to Holland as his main ally in the cabinet, the Lord Lieutenant communicating less with Melbourne as Home Secretary, whom he suspected of favouring Stanley’s coercive priorities. While visiting Anglesey, Duncannon was scandalized by the Lord Lieutenant’s comment that ‘Mr Stanley and I do very well together as companions, but we differ so totally about Ireland that I never mention the subject to him!’199 Following the proroguing of parliament and a brief visit to Knowsley, on 25 August Stanley returned to Dublin. Once at Phoenix Park he was then angered to find Anglesey had been indiscreet in criticisms of his Tithe Composition legislation. Graham wrote to Stanley denouncing Anglesey’s ‘free and easy discussions with agitators’, which were ‘full of danger’. A ‘horrified’ Richmond, Graham reported from Goodwood, was declaring that Anglesey ‘ought not to remain’.200 After a fortnight in Dublin, Stanley admitted to having seen very little of Anglesey.201 By the end of September he was again urging Grey to abolish the office of Lord

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Lieutenant. This would, he believed, be a clear indication that Westminster would never consent to Repeal of the Union.202 Grey felt that it was desirable, for the moment, to maintain the office.203 After discussing the matter with Althorp and Brougham, Grey thought it difficult to take any action if Anglesey had no wish to resign. To Melbourne, Stanley remained insistent that he must soon resign from the Irish Office.204 Stanley acknowledged that reform of the Church of Ireland was necessary if Protestantism was to survive in Ireland. He assured Grey that he was ready to propose a relatively extensive reform of the Irish Church, as long as the property of the Church was not used for other than Protestant Church purposes. I am ready … to give fair latitude to that expression [of Protestant Church purposes] and am not only ready, but anxious, to reduce the number of bishoprics and sinecure dignities, to dissolve unions, to abolish church cess, providing for it by making the First Fruits a real tax on benefices; and still further to augment that Fund by the suspension, or vacancies, of preferments without cure of souls. But I am not prepared, and I cannot agree, to admit the doctrine of a surplus, disposable for lay or Roman Catholic purposes.205

During August he drew up an Irish Church Temporalities measure, which reduced the number of Irish bishoprics from twenty-two to twelve; proposed a graduated tax on benefices, ranging from 15 per cent on the larger benefices to 5 per cent on the smaller; reduced the salaries of Irish bishops; and recommended that deans and chapters without duties should receive new assignments or their offices be abolished. He also proposed an ingenious compromise on appropriation. Long usage, he contended, made the Irish bishops’ lands more the property of the lessees than of the Church. Allowing the lessees to convert twenty-one-year leases into leases in perpetuity might square the circle of allowing some appropriation to be secured, without violating the Church’s property rights. The purchase money which the tenant might pay for the exchange of a 21 year lease for a perpetuity, would be, it is conceived, applicable to any purpose, unconnected with the Church, in as much as it would be the price of a new value which would be created by an act of the legislature and which does not at present attach to Church property.206

This was a subtle resolution of the appropriation issue. In late September, Grey, Brougham, and Althorp approved Stanley’s proposal. Grey, in particular, warmly welcomed it as affording a hope of doing something effectual for the Protestant Establishment, while not making dangerous concessions to the Catholics.


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On Saturday 6 October 1832 Stanley left Dublin for London. Anglesey warned that only extensive reform could preserve the Church of Ireland. But Stanley’s ‘views upon Church matters’, he darkly predicted, ‘are not sound and will not be tolerated even a day’.207 After attending church on Sunday 18 October, Stanley met Graham and Richmond. He anticipated that his remaining in the government was probably out of the question if, as he expected, Russell, Althorp, and other ministers attacked his Irish Church Temporalities measure for not going far enough. Richmond, he believed, would resign with him; Graham, though in a state of painful embarrassment, would probably remain in the cabinet. Yet Graham feared Stanley’s departure would break up the government and that Grey’s resignation would shortly follow. On Monday 19 October the cabinet discussed Stanley’s proposed Irish Church Temporalities Bill. The first point of controversy arose over whether the Churches of England and Ireland should be considered as indivisible or separate. Stanley believed the status of one was intimately linked with the other. Clause V of the Act of Union declared the respective Establishments of England and Ireland to be one Protestant Episcopal Church, whose ‘doctrine, discipline and government’ were to be merged and to ‘remain in full force for ever’.208 Althorp objected strongly that fact and reason showed that the churches should be regarded as separate. Under the threat of Althorp’s resignation, Grey conceded the point and accepted that the fate of the Irish Church was not directly prejudicial to the position of the English Church. As Spring Rice observed to Sir Richard Musgrave: ‘To defend York and Canterbury a battle ought to be fought in a better position than Connemara.’209 The fact that Stanley’s plan left untouched those parishes where no Protestant congregation existed excited cabinet opposition. Russell, supported by Althorp, Howick, and Durham, called for a more drastic reduction of the Irish Establishment to include the suppression of all parishes with few or no Protestants. Althorp decried Stanley’s proposal as the plan of a High Churchman which none but High Churchmen would support.210 But the most disruptive issue remained the appropriation of Church revenues for secular purposes. In cabinet Stanley and Graham objected violently to any form of direct appropriation, maintaining that Stanley’s proposal in effect, if indirectly, resolved the matter. Durham, Althorp, and Russell insisted on direct appropriation. But Stanley’s proposal, allowing those surplus revenues raised by Irish bishops selling their leases to be used for purposes not connected with the Church, became the basis of clause 147 of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill. As a result, Stanley stepped back from resignation. Grey confirmed in writing to Stanley that

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the cabinet did not contemplate any direct alienation of Church property and, moreover, were agreed not to press the abstract principle.211 Russell then composed a letter of resignation, rejecting Stanley’s compromise. But Grey’s arbitration and Althorp’s intercession prevented a ministerial split.212 Thereafter, Grey became increasingly irritated by Russell and Althorp’s carping on the appropriation issue. This was not just born of his desire to preserve cabinet unity and his personal support for the compromise in Stanley’s measure. Grey also feared an Anglican backlash, should direct lay appropriation be pushed through in Ireland. Stanley’s plan, he believed, was the most extensive reform possible. To move beyond this would mobilize the full force of Anglican anger in both Ireland and England. At this point Grey adroitly isolated his son-in-law Durham, whose petulance was becoming an increasing irritant to his ministerial colleagues. This further strengthened Stanley’s position. Durham, nicknamed ‘Radical Jack’, violently objected, in early November, to what he argued was the piecemeal nature of Stanley’s Irish Church Temporalities measure. The fatal illness of his daughter, following the deaths of two of his other children during the previous fourteen months, heightened Durham’s volatility. The distraught Durham drew up a long memorandum detailing his complaints against Stanley’s scheme. Stanley immediately informed Grey he was surprised at such criticism, as he believed the main principle of the bill had already been agreed by the cabinet.213 Richmond was blunt in his comments on Durham’s behaviour: ‘One who wishes to blow up a government and to be at the head of a Radical party must, I conclude, abandon those feelings which in general ought to be found in a gentleman.’214 Grey’s unflinching support for Stanley ostracized Durham, Stanley insisting that Durham must ‘yield or go’.215 Stanley’s subsequent softening of his position drew from Grey heartfelt expressions of gratitude for delivering him from great distress.216 In response to Russell’s continued opposition, Stanley argued for a distinction to which, Grey maintained, the whole cabinet had already agreed. The measure did not contemplate direct alienation of Church property, therefore there was no reason to discuss the abstract principle. By concentrating on the details of the specific measure before them, it would be better, Stanley suggested, that acrimonious discussion of any general principle be avoided. Only on this understanding, he warned, could he bring forward Irish Church reform.217 Stanley returned to Dublin on Thursday 29 October, where he had an interview with an ill Anglesey. A conciliatory Anglesey expressed his support for the government’s measures and promised his discretion in


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future. Stanley found the interview acutely embarrassing. As he confessed to Grey, Anglesey apparently was unaware of any plan to replace him,218 and his openness put Stanley in an unpleasant position. From this predicament Stanley requested Grey relieve him as soon as possible. But the prime minister still believed that ‘nothing could be more fatal to the government than [Stanley] retiring from his situation at this moment’.219 Grey promptly asked Anglesey if he would be interested in the Governor Generalship of India, but the Lord Lieutenant’s delicate health prevented him from accepting the offer. Anglesey had always acted most kindly towards him, Grey informed Stanley, and the prime minister was reluctant simply to dismiss the Lord Lieutenant. Moreover, it seemed as though Anglesey’s conciliatory mood removed the immediate cause of Stanley’s complaint. Both Graham and Richmond urged Stanley not to resign.220 A few days later, Anglesey offered to resign if Grey thought it desirable. But, for the moment, the prime minister chose to leave things as they were. The impending general election recommended deferring any further discussion until after the New Year. On 8 November a relieved Grey received from Stanley ‘a very handsome letter’ which, while, ‘not disguising his extreme dislike of his situation’, conveyed his willingness to stay in post.221 ‘No other man’, O’Connell bitingly commented, ‘can be found to undertake Stanley’s dirty work.’222 What did please Stanley on his return to Dublin was his impression that O’Connell was losing ground. He believed progress was being made in the re-establishment of the law regarding resistance to the tithe, private entreaties being received from persons willing to pay, but requesting proceedings be taken against them because they dare not comply except under the appearance of compulsion.223 O’Connell privately acknowledged Stanley’s achievement. ‘Stanley has had considerable success in enforcing the tithes. He has overawed many, very many parishes, and there was an adequate force for that purpose.’224 In December 1832 the first general election held under the terms of the Reform Act provided the government with what appeared to be a great victory. Surrendering his seat for Windsor, Stanley stood for the large constituency of North Lancashire, which now had over 6,500 electors. The county had previously been represented by his father, prior to his elevation to the Lords, as Lord Stanley of Bickerstaffe, earlier in the year. On Monday 17 December, following his hustings speech at Lancaster Castle, Stanley was successfully elected at the top of the poll, sharing representation of the constituency with the Tory John Wilson Patten. The family also achieved revenge on Henry Hunt at the contested Preston election. Stanley’s younger brother Henry, recently returned from a trip

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to the Middle East, defeated Hunt at Preston, thereby securing partial atonement for Stanley’s humiliating defeat in the borough at the hands of Hunt in 1830. Stanley’s uncle Edmund Hornby won the borough of Warrington for the Whigs by defeating the elderly Conservative manufacturer John Blackburne. In Ireland, O’Connell pushed Repeal to the forefront of the hustings. In almost every constituency outside Ulster candidates pledged to Repeal of the Union stood for election. Around this national ‘platform’ O’Connell organized his mass following and a total of thirty-eight Irish Repealers were elected to the new parliament. This encouraged O’Connell’s hope of establishing an independent Irish party at Westminster able to wrest extensive reforms from the government. Stanley reassured the King’s secretary, Sir Herbert Taylor, that at least forty moderate Whig and Liberal Members were returned for Ireland.225 But only in the borough of Dunraven, Co. Limerick, and Co. Mayo did Whigs or Liberals defeat Repeal candidates. An embittered Durham sharply remarked to Hobhouse that ‘the ‘‘fortunate youth’’ [Stanley] had managed to lose every election in Ireland’.226 Duncannon declined to contest Co. Kilkenny against a Repeal candidate. Duncannon’s support for Stanley’s Tithe Composition Act, he was warned, would result in an inevitable defeat. O’Connell sought to comfort his friend: ‘What a pity it is that you should be the victim of Lord Anglesey’s want of intellect and of Mr Stanley’s insane presumption.’227 Following the general election the recently appointed government chief whip Charles Wood (MP for Halifax and Grey’s son-in-law) saw reason for genuine concern over differences within the ranks of nominal government supporters. There was a reduced Tory opposition of only 137 MPs. In Ireland, despite the well-funded efforts of the Irish Protestant Conservative Society established the previous year, Conservative candidates fared badly. But alongside 303 steady supporters of the ministry in the new parliament sat thirty-four English and Scottish Radical MPs, thirty-eight Irish Repealers, twenty-two ‘waverers’ such as Sandon and Lord George Bentinck, and 123 Reformers of ‘different shades’.228 This last group, headed by Lord Ebrington and Henry Warburton, looked to Althorp as their representative in the cabinet, but were only loosely associated with the government. A coming together of Tories, ‘waverers’, Radicals, Repealers, and Reformers of ‘different shades’ would put the ministry in a minority. Wood feared the Irish Church Temporalities Bill might create such a combination. On Saturday 5 January 1833 he warned Stanley of considerable backbench support for lay appropriation, led by Lord Ebrington, the evangelical eldest son of Earl Fortescue and a close


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friend of Russell. Wood estimated that between 200 and 250 Reformers might vote against an Irish Church measure that did not concede direct appropriation. By early 1833 Russell, Althorp, and Ebrington were doggedly pressing direct appropriation as the litmus test of genuine reform. Althorp advised Hobhouse that he would soon be succeeding Stanley as Irish Chief Secretary.229 The ‘rock we will be split on will be Ireland’, Althorp portentously warned.230 Returning to London in the New Year, after spending Christmas at Knowsley, Stanley was encouraged by a number of events. First, Anglesey acknowledged to Stanley the difficulties created by them both remaining at their posts. Not only did their conflicting views cause problems, but knowledge of those differences prompted ‘petty jealousies’ and divisive ‘little knots of partisans’ among the government’s supporters.231 This exchange was partly the result of Grey informing Anglesey, on 13 January, that relations between Stanley and the Lord Lieutenant were now a threat to the government. In response Anglesey, in constant physical pain, declared his willingness to accept whatever solution of this difficulty Grey thought best. Secondly, Stanley was encouraged by O’Connell’s seeming intent upon adopting an extreme course. This he welcomed. It would provoke a reaction in parliament, he anticipated, making it easier to carry stringent measures of coercion. O’Connell’s campaign was inspiring rural incendiarism, robbery, cattle maiming, and murder. Even Anglesey admitted, in early January, that a coercive measure now seemed necessary. Thirdly, at the King’s request, Stanley communicated confidentially with Ebrington regarding his proposed Irish Church Temporalities Bill.232 Ebrington, who influenced about 100 Commons votes, reluctantly conceded his satisfaction with the plan. At the same time, Stanley had confidential communications with the Archbishop of Armagh, the Primate of Ireland, who also approved his scheme. This rare concurrence of opinion promised well, Stanley believed, for the success of his measure. The draft of the Royal Address prepared during January duly promised reform of the Irish Church, as well as a commutation of the tithe and, in conclusion, a request for additional powers to punish violators of the public peace in Ireland. But the opening of the session on Tuesday 5 February went badly. The anxiously awaited King’s Speech was received with little enthusiasm. Strong denunciation of Irish disorder and the request for additional powers alarmed ministerial supporters. In the Commons library, on hearing the Speech, O’Connell declared: ‘This is the most bloody and brutal Speech ever delivered by a King—and it’s Stanley’s writing!’233 His rage in

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pronouncing these words, Littleton noted, was dreadful. Buoyed up by his electoral success, O’Connell immediately sought to discredit Stanley. In an ‘artful and persuasive’ Commons speech O’Connell labelled Stanley the worst enemy of Ireland.234 Instead of measures answering the profound grievances of the peasantry, Stanley merely called for more bayonets and more guns, in order to crush the people of Ireland. Stanley’s response to O’Connell’s attack failed. His forceful personal invective against O’Connell seemed to many devoid of any substantive refutation of the Irish leader’s charges.235 The hostile Holland felt Stanley’s repudiation to be ‘a philippic rather than a minister’s exposé, which breathed a haughty spirit of defiance in defence of our coercive measure, without any counteracting sympathy with the feelings of the people in describing those of a conciliatory nature’.236 Colonel Thomas Davies (MP for Worcester) characterized Stanley’s speech as an insult to Ireland, proving how unfit Stanley was for his office. The radical John Roebuck (MP for Bath) denounced the Chief Secretary’s policy as likely to produce civil war in Ireland. In conclusion, Althorp sought to retrieve the situation by arguing that, in removing Irish grievances, the threat to life and property was but one further grievance that demanded relief. This dispiriting spectacle confirmed the wisdom of Peel’s chosen opposition strategy, as he described it to Goulburn, of ‘neutrality’, by which differences among government supporters would be emphasized.237 The Tory Ellenborough saw the King’s Speech as ‘decidedly Conservative’.238 It must, he thought, deprive the government of their radical support. Thus Stanley might become increasingly dependent upon Tory help, while radicals continued to attack him. In his own statement to the House, Peel praised Stanley. Littleton noted how Peel ‘complimented Stanley exceedingly, and without any air of vengeance threw his shield over him’.239 Through Sir Herbert Taylor and Princess Lieven, Peel had already privately communicated to the Whig front bench his support for moderate Irish Church reform. On Tuesday 12 February, Althorp introduced the Irish Church Temporalities Bill. Clearly votes on this measure would register the pattern of party allegiance in this first Reformed parliament, Irish Church reform replacing parliamentary Reform as the touchstone of party differences. Althorp explained that the bill substituted a tax on clerical incomes for church cess, the abolition of nearly half the Church of Ireland bishoprics, and the sale of episcopal estates to build up a surplus fund which might be drawn on inter alia for the support of Catholic clergy. Government


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supporters, nervously watching the reaction to Althorp’s speech, were relieved when, at its conclusion, O’Connell cheered. O’Connell immediately declared his support for the measure, as did other Irish members. The Whig MP for County Waterford, Sir Richard Keane, characterized the bill as ‘a measure of a healing and wholesome nature’.240 Peel expressed a lukewarm vacillation.241 In closing the debate, Stanley welcomed the general agreement of the Commons to the principles of the bill.242 It was a large measure of reform, but it did not, he asserted, injure the Protestant Church in Ireland. In responding to the charge of being an enemy of Ireland, Stanley affirmed his commitment to the bill as a real measure of conciliation. Nor, he concluded, did he bear any ill will towards those with whom he had differed over Irish affairs. This statement, Le Marchant noted, was ‘followed by the most tumultuous cheering I ever heard in the House. It was an appeal to the gentlemanly feelings of the Members that was irresistible. Even O’Connell touched his hat, bowed, and joined in the general applause.’243 Profound relief washed over the government’s supporters. Stanley believed he had recovered the upper hand in the Commons.244 By promptly introducing their Irish Church Temporalities Bill, the government had seized the initiative. At a meeting of forty-five Irish MPs, called by O’Connell on Wednesday 13 February, it was agreed to avoid factious opposition. Reasonable men of all parties, Stanley predicted, would now support their Irish Church measure.245 Anglesey was delighted with the bill. O’Connell was further disarmed when, on Thursday 14 February, the government announced the setting up of a Select Committee to inquire into the workings of Irish municipal corporations, O’Connell being appointed a member of the Committee. This prepared the way for the introduction of a Coercion Bill. Both the government and the Commons, Stanley believed, were now ready ‘to bridle O’Connell’.246 In cabinet Stanley had already won the battle to dissociate the Irish Church Temporalities Bill from a Coercion measure. He had no wish to jeopardize coercive legislation by tying it to the fate of Irish Church reform. His Coercion measure empowered the Lord Lieutenant to suppress all meetings and to declare disturbed districts under martial law, with offenders in these districts being subject to trial by court martial. Stanley was alarmed at O’Connell’s encouragement of the establishment of unofficial arbitration tribunals to settle local disputes, when there was dissatisfaction with the decisions of magistrates. This subversion of civil authority was compounded by the involvement of Catholic priests in settling disputes through these tribunals. Such illegal tribunals were, Stanley maintained, infinitely more objectionable than the courts martial

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proposed by the Coercion Bill. Grey introduced the measure in the Lords on Friday 15 February where it rapidly passed. The campaign against the tithe was directly linked to agrarian outrages, Grey argued, and O’Connell’s Repeal Association must be put down. Althorp’s lack of commitment to the Coercion Bill, however, nearly scuttled the measure upon its launch in the Commons. Introducing the bill on Wednesday 27 February, Althorp spoke like ‘a man who thinks himself already beaten’. He appeared ‘confused and feeble, and convinced nobody’.247 The ministerial majority, Russell remembered, ‘were disappointed, sullen and ready to break out into mutiny against their chief’.248 Though not originally intending to speak that evening, Stanley immediately withdrew from the chamber to study the official papers in quiet. What followed remained vivid in Russell’s memory. After the debate had proceeded for two or three hours longer, with no change of temper in the House, Stanley rose. He explained with admirable clearness the insecure and alarming state of Ireland. He then went over, case by case, the more dreadful of the outrages which had been committed. He detailed, with striking effect, the circumstances attending the murder of a clergyman, and the agony of his widow, who, after seeing her husband murdered, had to fear the terror of running knocks at the door, kept on all night by the miscreants who had committed the crime. The House became appalled and agitated at the dreadful picture which he placed before their eyes; they felt for the sorrows of the innocent; they were shocked at the dominion of assassins and robbers. When he had produced a thrilling effect by these descriptions, he turned upon O’Connell, who led the opposition to the measure, and who seemed a short time before about to achieve a triumph in favour of sedition and anarchy. He recalled to the recollection of the House of Commons, that at a recent public meeting, O’Connell had spoken of the House of Commons as 658 scoundrels. In a tempest of scorn and indignation, he excited the anger of the men thus designated against the author of the calumny. The House, which two hours before seemed about to yield to the great agitator, was now almost ready to tear him to pieces. In the midst of the storm which his eloquence had raised, Stanley sat down, having achieved one of the greatest triumphs ever won in a popular assembly by the powers of oratory.249

In the extraordinary scene that followed, Le Marchant noted, ‘O’Connell looked like a convicted felon. He shrunk from the explanation that was so loudly called for by the House and nothing but the shouts that rang around him would have raised him. His explanation was wretched and completed his defeat.’250 Littleton observed that ‘Stanley made one of the


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most masterly and effective appeals to the House ever heard … O’Connell was quite subdued … The Mob King seemed completely humiliated.’251 Following this triumph Stanley’s Coercion Bill passed its Commons first reading with a large majority. Between 13 and 27 March, Stanley was engaged in steering the measure through committee. While O’Connell lashed the proposal, as a ‘project of ministerial despotism’, and Hume denounced it, for placing Ireland outside ‘the pale of the constitution’, Russell, Althorp, Macaulay, and Ebrington declared liberty to be meaningless without the protection of property. O’Connell’s attempts to obstruct the measure by resort to various ingenious procedural forms were to no avail. On Friday 29 March, Stanley’s thirty-fourth birthday, the bill, amended in committee, passed the Commons. On Monday 1 April it was approved by the Lords. ‘So much’, Palmerston celebrated, ‘for the prediction that Reform was Revolution.’252 At the end of that week the county and city of Kilkenny were placed under martial law and strict curfew. Appropriately, the very day that the Coercion Bill passed the Lords, Stanley stepped down as Chief Secretary for Ireland. On 1 April 1833 he accepted Grey’s offer of the Colonial Office. It was a fitting moment to vacate Phoenix Park. His last official act was to strengthen the force of law in a society he saw as lacking respect for the legal basis of civil society. In October 1832 and again in February 1833 he pressed to be removed from the Irish Office, looking for promotion within the cabinet. Finally, in March 1833, Grey deemed the moment right for a reshuffle. Pleading ill health, Durham, alienated by Stanley’s Irish policy and following a violent row with the premier at a cabinet dinner, during which he angrily blamed Grey for the death of his son (who was also Grey’s grandson), resigned from the government. This freed Grey’s hand. Palmerston welcomed Durham’s departure as a great gain. The Privy Seal, vacated by Durham, however, Grey judged an insufficiently important office to which to move Stanley. To make the Colonial Office available Grey persuaded a reluctant Goderich to resign. To force matters Stanley threatened his own resignation from the government if he was not promoted. Grey hoped this ministerial adjustment might end rumours of an impending cabinet split. The opposition eagerly anticipated a ministerial crisis over the Church of Ireland. The King lent further substance to speculation during March by talking of a ministry headed by Stanley and Peel. Indeed, after November 1832 Stanley’s increasing private communication with William IV brought an intriguing dimension to his political activity, contact being facilitated by the fact that Emma Stanley was the

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niece of the King’s secretary, Sir Herbert Taylor. The King saw Stanley as a figurehead for a centrist ministry in the aftermath of the Reform crisis. Peel’s opposition strategy of ‘neutrality’ lent credibility to such royal hopes. The diarist Greville noted: ‘It must end in Peel and Stanley, unless everything ends.’253 Lord Londonderry’s emphatic statement to the Duke of Buckingham, in March 1833, was telling. ‘This is the main question. Is Peel’s star of power or Stanley’s to have the ascendant?’254 Three months earlier Richmond had forecast to Graham that ‘the day will arrive when [Stanley] will be prime minister, and a very good one he will make’.255 Looking back on his tenure as Chief Secretary for Ireland thirty years later, in August 1864, Stanley remembered the ‘most laborious and disagreeable business’ he had had to deal with was reform of the Irish Civil List. ‘Every job too gross to be sanctioned by an English parliament in the worst times was done by putting the object of it on the Irish pension list.’256 As a consequence sinecures had flourished. ‘He once passed fifteen or sixteen hours without leaving his room, having his meals brought there, engaged on a single set of papers.’ He had found the Dublin offices corrupt, no secret could be kept, and the clerks had their own friends and interests to serve. In retrospect, he judged his most important measures had been his Tithe Arrears and Tithe Compulsory Composition legislation, which had ended a near state of civil war. He had thereby, he believed, saved the Church of Ireland. Next in importance, he estimated, was his proposed reform, continued by his successors, of the Grand Jury system. Third in significance had been his Irish education scheme. Building new schools, commissioning school textbooks, appointing school inspectors, and establishing a teacher training school in Dublin, the National Education Board had, by 1835, 1,106 schools with 145,521 pupils under its aegis, although the ecumenical nature of the school system Stanley envisaged subsequently succumbed to sectarian modification. Still vivid in his memory thirty years later, however, was the recollection that no one had appreciated the repugnant difficulties he had encountered in dealing with O’Connell. Stanley’s experience as Irish Chief Secretary was a bitter demonstration of the political truth that, while friends come and go, enemies accumulate. During a long walk in St James’s Park, on Thursday 28 March, Stanley briefed his successor as Irish Chief Secretary, John Hobhouse. Stanley ‘spoke unequivocally well of only one man—Blackburne, the AttorneyGeneral’. He described Anglesey as ‘a good man, but vain and easily flattered’.257 This left the Lord Lieutenant vulnerable to the calculated


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blandishments of O’Connell. Anglesey’s weakness was exacerbated by the Irish Lord Chancellor, Plunket, who was ‘timid and wavering’. Stanley’s final advice to Hobhouse was to follow his own rule: ‘to hear everything, say nothing, and believe nothing’.

Breathing firm courage, bent on mutual aid. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 81)

The Colonial Office had particular attractions for Stanley in April 1833. Since August 1832 Abolitionists had been mounting an intense campaign calling for slave emancipation. In November, Grey’s cabinet agreed to propose the immediate abolition of slavery within the British Empire. The following month Lord Howick, Grey’s son, as Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office, drew up an abolition measure. But it was laid aside by the cabinet. As a result, Howick resigned and there was no mention of the issue in the King’s Speech of February 1833. Angered Abolitionist MPs, on 19 March, extracted from Althorp a pledge that the government would introduce an emancipation measure forthwith. To drive home their message they launched a public campaign on 27 March, led by the London anti-slavery bodies. Stanley’s arrival at the Colonial Office, based in 12 and 13 Downing Street, with a new Under-Secretary, Charles Shaw-Lefevre, presented him with the opportunity to see through a major humanitarian measure, arguably second only to parliamentary Reform and Irish Church reform in legislative significance. Many Whig candidates had given pledges to Abolition in the election of 1830 and again in December 1832, Brougham being a notable proponent. By February 1833, 126 ministerial MPs were pledged to Abolition, the strongholds of the movement being in English and Welsh urban constituencies, particularly industrial towns and ports and areas of Nonconformist affiliation. By contrast, only thirty-five MPs in 1833 declared themselves to be representing the West Indian planters’ interest, many ‘West Indian’ MPs having their constituencies abolished by the Reform Act.258 The success of an Abolition Bill would do much to restore Stanley’s standing as a sincere reformer, refuting the charges raised by his draconian measures in Ireland. His personal moral abhorrence of slavery, reinforced by his experiences in North America, was strongly felt. It was, moreover, an issue upon which he could acknowledge an explicit debt to Canning, who had also been committed to Abolition.

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Upon assuming his new office Stanley dissuaded Grey of any thoughts of resigning the premiership.259 He needed Grey to stay if a government collapse was to be avoided. Acute exhaustion and illness also emphasized the wisdom for Stanley of leaving the Irish Office. During early April 1833, aged barely 34, he suffered his first serious attack of gout. It was with difficulty that he travelled to North Lancashire to secure his re-election on 12 April upon taking up the Colonial Secretaryship. By the spring of 1833 he was drained by unrelieved exertion. Prolonged strain rendered him vulnerable to a vicious attack of influenza, the virus bringing on fever, muscular pains, and chills. This triggered his genetic predisposition to acute gout, the build-up of uric acid crystals in his joints leading to swelling and excruciating pain. This left him depressed, irritable, weak, and nauseous. It was an alarming sign of the intense physical and mental stress the Irish Office had imposed on him. Violent Irish abuse, the wearying anxiety of colleagues, and the relentless demand of business, both Irish and Reform, proved an unrelieved burden. Partially recovered by May, he succumbed to another painful attack of gout in June. For the rest of his life chronic gout rendered him an invalid for prolonged periods of time. Littleton, Stanley’s eventual successor as Chief Secretary, observed, on assuming the office, that the difficulties of the business to be dealt with, divisions within the cabinet, and the character of the leading parties in Ireland made the Irish Office incomparably the most arduous position in the government. During 1833 Stanley and his family gave up their house in Whitehall, which had become too small for their purposes, and took up residence in 5 Carlton Gardens, the impressive range of large town houses designed by John Nash in the late 1820s on the site of the recently demolished royal residence of Carlton House. Stanley’s immediate neighbours in Carlton Gardens included Lord Goderich, Huskisson’s widow, and the liberal Tory Henry Baring (MP for Marlborough), as well as Wellington’s confidant Charles Arbuthnot and the Reformer James Abercromby (MP for Edinburgh). While providing comfortable family accommodation, 5 Carlton Gardens placed Stanley at the centre of political society in St James’s, though illness imposed upon him a reclusive regime and the family sought regular refuge in the quieter rural surroundings of Tunbridge Wells. With characteristic self-assurance, once partially recovered from his illness, during late April Stanley immediately began drawing up a slavery abolition scheme, without consulting either his predecessor or the officials under him. Two prominent Colonial Office officials who had advised Howick closely on his plan, the head of the West India division, Henry


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Taylor, and the legal counsel James Stephen, saw this behaviour as particularly high-handed. Stanley, Le Marchant noted, clearly showed them ‘that their reign was over’.260 Henry Taylor especially resented what he saw as Stanley’s arrogant disregard for his own and Stephen’s views. The Colonial Under-Secretary, the capable, courteous, but diffident Shaw-Lefevre, it was observed, was too much in awe of Stanley to express either protest or advice. Neither did Stanley feel any need to consult the Anti-Slavery Society. His plan was embodied in five resolutions. He proposed the entire abolition of slavery in the West Indies, Mauritius, Canada, and Cape Colony; all children born after the Act, or under 6 years of age at its implementation, to be immediately declared free; adult slaves to be registered as apprenticed labourers for a period to be fixed by parliament, before enjoying complete liberty; planters to receive loans from the government totalling up to £15 million, as compensation for the loss of their slaves; and, finally, the government was to establish a stipendiary magistracy in the colonies and aid local legislatures in providing religious and moral education for the emancipated slaves. In early May he laid his plan before the cabinet and the proposals were published in The Times on 11 May. His slavery abolition plan, Stanley admitted to Lord Mulgrave, Governor of Jamaica, was received with ‘extreme disapprobation’.261 The immediate reaction of the West Indian interest was that they were entirely ruined. They portrayed the measure as ‘an unmixed confiscation of property’.262 During the previous weeks they had indicated their unwillingness to concede to any proposal for an early end to slavery. Howick and Mulgrave had been wary of overruling the wishes of colonial assemblies. But Canning had always insisted on the overarching authority of the imperial parliament, while stressing that the power should remain veiled. Stanley upheld Canning’s principle, while removing the veil. Colonial assemblies must accept the superior jurisdiction of Westminster. Abolitionists, on the other hand, felt Stanley’s plan did not go nearly far enough and petitions flooded into parliament. By 14 May the influx of Abolitionist petitions had reached its peak, with 500 petitions submitted to the Commons and 600 petitions received by the Lords. On 18 April 330 Abolition delegates from all over the country met Stanley and Althorp, Stanley declining to be drawn on any specific commitments beyond a promise not to postpone further legislation on the question. Abolitionists particularly objected to the proposal that former slaves serve a period as apprenticed labourers, before being given their freedom. Criticisms were also raised against the large size of the loan being granted to planters.

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This last objection Stanley did not regard as entirely honest. Some of the anti-slavers were pledged to Abolition by their constituents, but they were also determined that the country should not pay for it.263 Stanley saw his plan as a compromise attempting to conciliate both ‘West Indian’ MPs and Abolitionists. It had, he believed, the compelling merit of being practicable. Moreover, the defeat of his measure, he predicted, would break up the government. At a meeting of the government’s supporters on Saturday 11 May, Stanley ‘made an excellent speech’.264 This, he observed, helped to improve the mood.265 But the following days remained fraught with rumour. Finally consulting James Stephen, Stanley proposed detailed modifications to the plan. Breaking his strict observance of the sabbath for the first time in his career, Stephen diligently worked throughout the weekend redrafting the twenty-six pages of legislation. Stanley’s submission of his amended resolutions to the Commons, on Tuesday 14 May, helped to consolidate support, though again much speculation awaited the adjourned debate on 30 May.266 At government expense Stanley’s Commons speech was printed and circulated throughout the country. In cabinet on 29 May two further modifications to the scheme were approved so as to appease the West Indian interest; the £15 million loan was converted into a grant and the sum increased to £20 million.267 These changes, Stanley reported to the King following the resumed debate on 30 May, seemed to reconcile the West Indian lobby to his plan.268 Howick and Thomas Buxton MP, the Abolitionist leader in the Commons, meanwhile, attacked the apprenticeship arrangements proposed by Stanley. On 9 June the cabinet authorized Stanley to reduce the period of apprenticeship from twelve years to seven years. Former slaves were also exempted from any obligation to contribute towards the cost of their emancipation.269 As a result, the resolutions made better progress than Stanley, as he reported to the King, had dared hope.270 On Tuesday 11 June the amended resolutions were carried by a large majority, with the cooperation of the West Indian interest now secured.271 An Abolition Bill, based upon the resolutions, was then immediately introduced. This success was all the more welcome as, at the beginning of June, Stanley suffered a renewed attack of gout. While steering his Abolition resolutions through the Commons, Stanley also retained a leading part in debate on the Irish Church Temporalities Bill, during the second reading on Monday 6 May and the committee stage on Monday 13 May. Despite Peel’s restraint, Tories such as Sir Robert Inglis (MP for Oxford University) denounced the bill as an attack on the Established Church. Ecclesiastics, such as Van Mildert, Bishop


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of Durham, decried the measure as an atrocious evil. To defenders of the Church of Ireland Stanley declared himself to be a friend of the Church. Against radical-Irish attack, he upheld the bill as a substantial, though safe, measure of reform. At the same time, he maintained a private correspondence with Peel. As Stanley reported to the King, his own fear was that the bill, regarded by many in the Commons as not going far enough, would be rejected by the Lords. In that event, another bill, much more sweeping in nature, would swiftly follow.272 The government, moreover, had staked its existence on the measure. The Lords, an ailing Stanley warned Lord Mulgrave on 4 June, could depose the government by throwing out either the Abolition or Irish Church bills. They clearly had the votes to do so.273 The question remained, how would they use that power? It was to the infirm Stanley on 5 June that Sir Herbert Taylor wrote of William IV’s strong wish that a union of moderate Whigs and Tories should occur.274 The King hoped that Stanley and those acting with him might form the nucleus of a new administration should Grey fall. Stanley’s eventual reply from his sickbed, marked ‘most strictly secret’ and on no account to be made known to his colleagues, warned that the Lords’ rejection of his Irish Church Temporalities Bill would make such a union as William IV hoped for impossible.275 The King immediately urged Wellington to relax Tory opposition. Taylor informed Stanley that the King looked forward to a government bringing Peel and Stanley together.276 For his part, Stanley responded that he saw no dissimilarity in point of principle over Irish Church reform between himself and Peel.277 He talked to the King of the ‘infusion’ of the respectable portion of parties in both the Commons and the Lords. Irish Church reform, the King hoped, would shortly provide the ground upon which a moderate ministry under Stanley, including Peel and moderate Whigs, might be formed. So might Russell, Howick, and Althorp be removed from office and the Ultra Tories isolated. Stanley privately encouraged these royal hopes, while betraying none of the substance of his confidential correspondence to his cabinet colleagues. These secret royal communications were the crucial context for Stanley’s sudden volte-face over clause 147 of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill. The clause allowed parliament to use the purchase money acquired by the Church of Ireland, from converting its twenty-one-year leases into leases in perpetuity, for such purposes as parliament should later decide. Conceivably such funds might be used for non-Anglican purposes. The clause was Stanley’s ingenious resolution of the appropriation difficulty. It

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allowed for appropriation indirectly; with the money created by the sale of leases constituting new additional funds, the direct appropriation of existing legal assets was avoided. But following discussion with the Tory Archbishop of Canterbury William Howley, Stanley became convinced that Lords’ opposition to the bill, if it included clause 147, was implacable. The Bishop of Durham dubbed the measure ‘the Irish Spoliation bill’.278 A rejection of the measure, Stanley feared, would only whip up the cry for disestablishment to a new intensity, just as the Lords’ initial rejection of Reform had instigated ferocious popular protest. As a result, on Friday 21 June, during the committee stage of the bill, to the surprise of the cabinet, but with Grey’s concurrence, Stanley announced that clause 147 would be dropped from the measure, a step which, for some weeks, he had confidentially known was desired by the King.279 English MPs were stunned. Irish MPs were outraged. ‘The pith, substance, the marrow and essence of the bill’, Richard Sheil (MP for Tipperary) exploded, ‘is plucked out of it, and the husk, the rind, the void, the valueless shell, the shrivelled and empty skin, is left behind.’280 At a cabinet meeting three days earlier Russell, Melbourne, Holland, and Brougham had suggested splitting the Irish Church Temporalities Bill, with clause 147 forming a separate measure. Grey and Althorp agreed to the alternative course of modifying the language of clause 147. But there had been no cabinet consideration given to dropping it altogether. Ellice, Duncannon, Ebrington, and Irish MPs were furious at Stanley’s announcement. In the Commons, O’Connell berated Stanley for sacrificing his principles to keep his place. But Grey, who had been canvassing the Tories at the Queen’s Ball quite as assiduously as the Whigs, had already received the King’s sanction for such a move.281 In return for dropping clause 147 William IV guaranteed safe passage of the measure through the Lords. In the division approving withdrawal of clause 147, on 21 June, Stanley was supported by most Whigs and ninety-six Conservative MPs. Reform MPs were evenly split by the vote. Only the radicals and Irish were united in their opposition.282 The following day William IV wrote personally to Stanley congratulating him on acting ‘most wisely and judiciously in abandoning the 147th clause’.283 The King saw it as an important step towards realizing a centrist ministry under Stanley’s leadership. But the rest of the cabinet, apart from Grey, Graham, and Richmond, were left infuriated. They had agreed to the amendment of clause 147, but not its abandonment. Althorp had not been in the Commons on 21 June because of gout. Holland placed responsibility for the crisis squarely on Stanley. As a result, Holland complained, everything was in confusion and there was no confidence in


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ministerial counsels. On Wednesday 3 July the cabinet, with difficulty, persuaded Althorp, Brougham, and Russell not to resign.284 By the beginning of July 1833 it seemed that, before long, Althorp would resign as leader of the Commons. Althorp, Stanley recounted to Gladstone a number of years later, felt the anxieties of his position so acutely that ‘he thanked God he did not on waking in the morning find loaded pistols by his bedside or he believed he should be tempted in the half stupefaction of that peculiar moment to blow his brains out’.285 Stanley remained his obvious successor. While Althorp was liked, Stanley was admired.286 Yet, at the same time, relations between the government and their more liberal supporters, especially Ebrington, Sir John Wrottesley, and Duncannon, were now seriously strained. Embittered O’Connellite MPs were incandescent with fury. The government, Greville observed, ‘conciliate no attachment, command no esteem and respect, and have no following’.287 On Monday 15 July, Stanley, along with Russell and Althorp, defeated a motion brought forward by Wrottesley anticipating the rejection of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill by the Lords. While doing so, Stanley took the opportunity of attacking O’Connell, a move Holland condemned as mortifying their friends and alienating the government’s radical support.288 On Sunday 21 July, Grey angrily attacked a cowed Althorp in cabinet for giving an unauthorized assurance to the Commons that no more arrears of tithes would be collected. The vain and unpopular Littleton (who had replaced Hobhouse as Irish Chief Secretary in May) saw Stanley as ‘the clog or dead weight’ against any far-reaching reform of the Irish Church.289 On Tuesday 30 July, Durham wrote to Grey objecting to the withdrawal of clause 147, that clause being the only basis on which he was prepared to support the Irish Church Temporalities Bill.290 To Greville it seemed that the government was rapidly falling apart. William IV believed, as he privately indicated to Stanley, that the government, as presently constituted, could not survive another session.291 At the same time, Peel continued to speak highly of Stanley. By the beginning of August, Grey was advising Holland and Althorp of his own wish to resign, while Althorp himself seemed determined not to remain leader of the Commons for another session. ‘With these prospects of changes’, a dejected Holland confessed, ‘it is I am afraid impossible to shut one’s eyes to the necessity of a new arrangement or to disguise from oneself the many embarrassments that will beset it.’292 The prorogation of parliament on Thursday 29 August rescued Grey’s government from imminent fracture. Between 22 July and 7 August the

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Abolition of Slavery Bill underwent detailed Commons discussion, after which two weeks of debate on the measure followed in the Lords. The day before the end of the session, Stanley’s Abolition of Slavery Bill received the royal assent, the operation of the legislation to begin on 1 August 1834, although his officials in the Colonial Office, such as James Stephen, remained despairing of the indifference with which Stanley continued to treat them. ‘I sit down to my daily business with feelings approaching disgust,’ Stephen privately confessed.293 The Irish Church Temporalities Bill, stripped of clause 147, despite bitter debate in the Lords, also, on 14 August, passed into statute. By jettisoning his resolution of the appropriation issue Stanley had saved the bill. But the price paid, in terms of cabinet acrimony and resentment among the government’s supporters, had been high. On 28 August, Anglesey, for reasons of health, finally resigned as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, to be succeeded by the wearied Lord Wellesley, an unlikely appointment desired by the King. In the days immediately after the session, Stanley, with advice from the economist Nassau Senior, helped Le Marchant write a pamphlet extolling the successes of the Grey ministry. The Reform Ministry and the Reform of Parliament quickly ran through nine editions. It span a gossamer web of celebratory generalities around the government’s agenda of Reform. The dark reality of bitter ministerial discord was glossed over. Le Marchant regarded ‘the real merit’ of the pamphlet to be the contributions of Stanley, as well as Althorp, Palmerston, and Graham, on the proceedings of their respective departments.294 Government unity was temporarily patched together, while the recess provided a welcome lull during which to consider the sombre implications of the 1833 session. What was clear was that Stanley had achieved a remarkable success in personally driving through the major measures of the session. Moreover, confidential communications had affirmed the King’s strong desire to see Stanley head a moderate centrist administration, embracing progressive Conservatives such as Peel and conservative Whigs, as a bulwark against Ultra Tory intransigence and English and Irish radicalism. A wearied Grey hoped the recess might lay balm on the painful ministerial lesions of the session. The first session of the Reformed parliament had given no clear indication of the future pattern of party alignment. With Peel adopting a passive strategy in opposition, lacerations within the ministry’s majority had, as Wood feared, opened up. In all this Stanley figured prominently. William IV’s confidential communications gave Stanley confidence to engage in a greater freedom of action, strikingly exhibited in his sudden withdrawal of clause 147 of the Irish Church


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Temporalities Bill. Immediately prior to his dropping of clause 147, Stanley had been in communication with Sir George Grey (MP for Devonport and Lord Grey’s cousin), who had close contact with the ‘waverers’ lords Harrowby and Wharncliffe. At the same time the King, via his secretary, was advising Stanley that the formation of a centrist government was an absolute necessity, that the salvation of the country depended upon it, and that he was devoting himself to this object.295 The impending fracture of reforming ranks, now seeming imminent, highlighted Stanley’s pivotal position. Having proved himself a forceful debater, could Stanley emerge as an effective leader commanding loyalty and respect? Such speculation formed the backdrop to preparations for the 1834 session. Yet precisely how party sentiment might eventually arrange itself was difficult to foresee.

Depart we now; for this way our discourse Can lead to no result. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 299)

Following the end of the 1833 session Stanley stayed in London until late November. He suffered further serious illness. Attacks, vaguely described as fainting fits, were traced to his stomach. But, by late October, he was sufficiently recovered to visit Lord Sefton at Stoke Farm where, Lady Louisa Molyneux reported, he ‘made himself tolerably agreeable, except in his extreme flippancy to Lord Melbourne’.296 A fortnight later he was commissioning bets with Greville for the Derby ‘and talked of racing after dinner with as much zest as if he was on the turf’. Greville was struck by Stanley’s boisterous informality: ‘Who (to see him and hear him thus) would take [Stanley] for the greatest orator and statesman of the day?’297 The previous May, Greville, accompanied by Grey, Richmond, Althorp, Graham, Uxbridge, and Lichfield, had been Stanley’s guest at the Oaks. Despite the political crises erupting around them, Greville observed of his host: There he was, as if he had no thoughts but for the turf, full of the horses, interest in the lottery, eager, blunt, noisy, good-humoured, ‘has meditans nugas et totus in illis’; at night equally devoted to the play, as if his fortune depended on it. Thus can a man relax whose existence is devoted to great objects and serious thoughts.298

This revealed a striking aspect to the man, Greville noted, upon whom the destiny of the country might depend. So Stanley appeared to shed

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his political concerns, while immersed in diversionary pleasures. At the end of November he left London for Knowsley, although he joined Richmond, Graham, and Ripon at Goodwood in early December for shooting and political discussion. It was not until Thursday 2 January 1834, after spending Christmas at Knowsley, that he returned to London to attend cabinet meetings. It concerned him that, with Irish matters on the agenda, Graham and Richmond had not yet returned to town. To Richmond he presciently observed that it was the Irish tithe question which was more likely than any other issue to break up the government, particularly if Russell and Duncannon pushed for extensive reform.299 Stanley had good reason for missing his ministerial allies. By the beginning of 1834 it appeared that he had captured the high ground, with a tired and conciliatory prime minister standing behind him. Yet resentful cabinet colleagues, such as Russell, looked to drive Stanley from his commanding position. During the winter the campaign by English Nonconformists for disestablishment of the Anglican Church, on the grounds that the union of Church and State was unjust and unscriptural, acquired a new intensity. Holland and Russell privately offered Dissenting leaders a sympathetic ear. More importantly, after October 1833, there were renewed efforts by some government backbenchers, associated with Ebrington and supported by Russell, for further reform of the Irish Church. In late October, Ebrington warned Grey that further reform of the Irish tithe, dealing directly with the appropriation of surplus revenue, was necessary. Ebrington pressed for the appointment of a committee of inquiry to determine the state of parishes in Ireland, the number of Protestants in each, and the number attending services of the Church of Ireland. During November, Ebrington and Duncannon canvassed Wellesley and Littleton.300 Grey, in response, stalled cabinet consideration of tithe reform for as long as possible. He was finding it difficult to sleep, had lost his appetite, and found himself moving into depression. Alarmed at the spread of radical opinion, Graham and Stanley sought to keep Grey up to the mark. 301 Firmness and union on the part of ministerial moderates, they urged, were never more necessary to avert serious evils. Eventually, in February 1834, Ebrington and Duncannon’s proposal for an inquiry, championed in the cabinet by Russell, was discussed by ministers, only to be dropped. But ‘a final adjustment’ of the tithe, ‘as may extinguish all just causes of complaint, without injury to the rights and property of any class … or any institution in Church or State’, was promised in the King’s Speech on 4 February.302 This deliberately vague statement carried


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no specific commitment and was, therefore, a promise with which all ministers might concur. But while Grey temporarily held off Irish difficulties, foreign crises, in particular the question of Portugal, rushed in to fill the void. Dom Pedro, formerly Emperor of Brazil, had landed troops in Portugal to overthrow the absolutist regime of his younger brother Dom Miguel, and to instate his daughter Doña Maria as a constitutional queen. The question arose whether Britain should demonstrate support for the constitutionalist forces by sending troops to Portugal. Palmerston and Grey favoured a joint intervention by Britain and Spain. With Grey’s knowledge, Stanley, Graham, and Richmond now met as a sub-cabinet, usually at Goodwood, to coordinate their response to what they saw as the radical demands of ministerial colleagues. Stanley hoped the Portuguese question could be settled in conjunction with Spain, without ground being given for interference by France. Prompt action by Britain might settle the crisis without involving other powers. This would, he thought, give Britain a strong influence in Madrid and Lisbon. But there were difficulties with such a course. Never, he confessed to Sir Herbert Taylor, had he gone into a cabinet in so much doubt and perplexity.303 By 16 January, after two cabinet meetings discussing Portugal, Stanley admitted he was becoming less inclined to interference.304 Waning enthusiasm for intervention, also expressed by Richmond, Melbourne, and Althorp, took Palmerston and Grey aback. Again Grey threatened to resign. Finally, a compromise was agreed in which Grey reluctantly consented to stay in office, plans for an immediate Iberian expedition were dropped, and words of general support for Doña Maria were inserted in the King’s Speech. By 29 January, Stanley was advising Grey simply to elicit an opinion from parliament on the question, a course to which he thought Althorp would agree.305 For the first time, Grey declared he had been forced to act contrary to what he considered right. During the first weeks of the 1834 session a deceptive calm prevailed. Stanley attended a convivial ministerial dinner hosted by Althorp in Downing Street, with Duncannon, Palmerston, Ellice, Graham, and others, on 3 February. Privately, Grey reassured the Tory Archbishop of York that the views of the cabinet ‘are purely of a conservative character and tend to the support of the Church Establishment by the removal of some causes of complaint’.306 But the violent undertow of Irish affairs lay just below the momentarily smooth surface of events. On 20 February, Littleton initiated Commons discussion of Irish tithe reform, insisting that the vexed issue of appropriation should not be drawn

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into their debate. The government wished, however, to commute the tithe into a land tax (the deferred reform proposed in Stanley’s Select Committee reports) and would, Littleton indicated, bring forward a bill immediately to that effect. ‘O’Connell and his tail’, Greville noted, appeared content to ‘sit by and chuckle at the … mutual jealousies and antipathies’ fermenting within the cabinet.307 On 15 April, Althorp introduced an Irish Tithe measure commuting the tithe into a land tax, but any suggestion of appropriation was carefully avoided. In private Russell, meanwhile, continued to push forward the issue of appropriation, while denying personal responsibility for any subsequent government crisis: ‘if the ministry is broken up, it is not my fault, but that of those who forget their principles in their fear of venturing to ask Stanley to reverse from the speech he made when he was one and twenty’.308 But, as Grey feared, indications of a powerful Anglican backlash grew. Profound anxiety among staunch defenders of the Protestant Establishment, first stirred by repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts and Catholic Emancipation, reached a pitch of outrage at the prospect of further reform to the Church of Ireland. Against the background of the Irish Church Temporalities Bill, in July 1833 John Keble delivered his famous Assize sermon at St Mary’s Church, Oxford, which served as a clarion call to conservative High Churchmen. Following Keble’s cry to resist ‘national apostasy’ John Henry Newman and other members of the emergent Oxford Movement produced their Tracts for the Times, denouncing Erastian principles and affirming the Church’s episcopal authority. During February 1834 the Archbishop of Canterbury received an address signed by 7,000 clergy objecting to the appropriation for secular purposes of church property. In May an address signed by 230,000 heads of families followed. Stanley, meanwhile, continued his confidential discussion with Peel on Irish issues, private communications which, when Greville learnt of them, struck him forcibly as proof of the good relations between the two men.309 On 22 April the Commons listened impassively to O’Connell’s five-hour speech calling for an inquiry into the Act of Union. Seven days later they overwhelmingly rejected the motion by 523 to thirty-eight votes. Even a minority of Irish MPs declined to follow O’Connell’s call for Repeal. Althorp’s limited reform of English church rates, abolishing the rates and making the repair of Anglican churches a charge upon the Treasury, was received initially with approval. Althorp’s proposal was supported by Peel, though it split Whig, Reform, and radical votes. Support for Althorp, as a further sign of fracturing ministerial votes, came from 77


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Whigs, 60 Reformers, and 6 radicals, while 39 Whigs, 53 Reformers, and 14 radicals opposed the measure.310 It was subsequently abandoned. During April, when not at Newmarket, Stanley spoke in opposition to a motion introduced by the radical Roebuck regarding Canada and secured Roebuck’s withdrawal of his resolution.311 On 26 April, Stanley privately speculated on the ministry getting through the session with little trouble. ‘Though furiously economical, parliament, otherwise, seemed manageable and well disposed enough.’312 Yet, within ten days, the issue of the appropriation of Irish Church revenues spectacularly burst upon the scene, finally severing Stanley’s relations with Grey’s cabinet. One possibility of a Commons eruption over appropriation was smothered at the beginning of May, when the cabinet instructed Littleton to be evasive in debate of Henry Barron’s motion for a Select Committee on Irish Catholic education. On Tuesday 6 May, however, during the second reading of the Irish Tithe Bill, the explosive issue of appropriation detonated, violently scattering fragments of the government front bench. As Richard Sheil pointedly declared to the Commons, appropriation is ‘a question that touches men’s interests, men’s feelings—that searches the very heart of the cabinet to its very core’.313 On Friday 2 May, the first night of debate on the Irish Tithe Bill, More O’Ferrall (MP for Kildare) moved a motion for a postponement of the debate, so that further concessions to Catholics could be brought forward. In a stormy cabinet meeting it was decided to oppose O’Ferrall’s motion. Grey urged Russell not to make public his personal objections to the government line. Stanley had replied to Richard Sheil in the Commons that differences between ministers regarding the appropriation of church property were irrelevant to the merits of the Tithe Bill, for they were all agreed on one point, that it was the first duty of the government and of parliament to maintain the existence of the Church’s property.314 This was the public line behind which Grey sought to maintain cabinet unity. During the second night of debate, on Tuesday 6 May, Stanley had a fierce skirmish with O’Connell, scathingly referring to the Irish leader’s ‘usual disregard of veracity’.315 In turn, the Repeal MP for Clonmel, Dominick Ronayne, O’Connell’s cousin, accused Stanley of insolence and disrespect for the House. While smiling contemptuously at his opponents, Ronayne declared, Stanley threw his legs up on the dispatch box table ‘like a man in a North American Coffee-House’.316 Unperturbed, Stanley stated that the proposed Tithe measure and O’Connell’s expressed wishes differed very little in principle and substantially only in detail. At this Russell, fresh from a six-week tour of Ireland, interpreting Stanley’s statement as a pledge not to diminish the Church’s revenue, declared that

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‘the revenues of the Church of Ireland were larger than necessary for the religious and moral instruction of the persons belonging to that Church’. If ever, Russell stated, ‘there were a just ground of complaint on the part of any people against any grievance, it was the complaint of the people of Ireland against the present appropriation of tithes’.317 Loud cheering erupted from the radical benches. Stanley scribbled a note and handed it along the front bench to Graham: ‘John Russell has upset the coach. We cannot go on after his declaration …’.318 At an angry cabinet meeting on Wednesday 7 May, Russell was fiercely criticized for his speech. Although Althorp reported that Russell’s statement had been received with hearty cheering from all sections of the government’s supporters, Holland believed that Russell had spoken unnecessarily warmly on the necessity for appropriation. Brougham expressed profound indignation at Russell’s effusion of ‘mere senseless vanity’.319 The outraged Stanley, Graham, and Richmond, in part because they had recently been urging Grey to remain in office, were eventually persuaded not to resign themselves. Richmond dryly remarked to Holland: ‘You must acknowledge we are good humoured fellows to remain to the end of the session with a knowledge that the majority of our colleagues will have us out soon after, by preparing and suggesting measures in which we never can concur.’320 Graham, who had contemplated resigning earlier in the session, favoured giving a strong public declaration of his position. Stanley believed that some in the cabinet, most notably Brougham, hoped to defer indefinitely awkward discussion, in a repeat of the previous year when cabinet differences were postponed from July to October and again from October to February.321 Certainly Brougham was active in drawing up memorandums arguing that any alternative government that might be formed would be weaker than the present one. Privately, he urged Stanley not to resign because to do so would inevitably break up the government.322 He and Holland, Brougham added, did not take Grey’s own talk of resignation seriously. In a similar vein Palmerston urged Stanley and Graham not to resign, but to wait until the recess, when Grey had indicated that a reconstruction of the government would take place. But desperate attempts to keep the cabinet patched together after 6 May foundered. Henry Ward (MP for St Albans) gave notice of a Commons motion stating that the Anglican Establishment in Ireland exceeded the spiritual wants of the Protestant population. As the day for debate of Ward’s motion, Tuesday 27 May, approached, furious ministerial disputes broke out. During the morning the cabinet were still not decided on their course of action. Lansdowne, Palmerston, and Goderich were for


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postponing Ward’s motion.323 Yet Stanley and Graham saw no alternative to their own resignation if the government did not promptly oppose it. Postponement, they stated, was not a satisfactory course.324 Brougham, Holland, and the chief whip, Edward Ellice, accepted that the moment had now come for Stanley to leave the cabinet. Althorp braced himself for the break-up of the ministry, while Lansdowne and Palmerston continued to plead with Stanley and Graham to remain. During the day Grey, Brougham, Lansdowne, Richmond, Ripon, and Palmerston all had audiences with the King, Stanley also spending two hours at Buckingham Palace.325 William IV urged Stanley to make his statement of resignation conditional, but Stanley insisted he must go. Members of the cabinet then met in Grey’s room at Westminster early in the evening. An exhausted prime minister finally, with reluctance, accepted Stanley’s and Graham’s resignations. But he wished Althorp, nevertheless, to postpone Ward’s motion. Althorp protested; Lansdowne immediately threatened his own resignation.326 Eventually, later that evening, Althorp moved in the Commons for an adjournment of Ward’s motion, while proposing an inquiry into the Irish Church in the interim. The broad coalition ministry Grey formed in November 1830, bound together by a commitment to parliamentary Reform, was now falling apart. During Wednesday 28 May it became public that Stanley and Graham, as well as Richmond, had resigned. Lansdowne, it was rumoured, was also considering going. Stanley saw Grey being forced to commit to a measure of which the premier disapproved, while reluctantly accepting the resignations of colleagues with whom he privately agreed. Both Lord Derby and Stanley’s father approved of his resignation upon the ground, as Graham described it, of ‘genuine Whig principles’. These were ‘the firm maintenance of the Established Protestant religion, that religion of perfect freedom, which the Revolution of 1688 saw triumph over Popery and regal tyranny’.327 Stanley’s old Christ Church tutor Goodenough, now Dean of Wells, applauded his actions.328 Stanley and Graham, ministerial backbenchers surmised, were now aiming at a junction with Peel and coming back into office leading a moderate mixed party. Reports that tears had run down William IV’s cheeks while accepting Stanley’s resignation added vividness to such speculation. Predictably, a delighted O’Connell celebrated Stanley’s departure, the former Chief Secretary being ‘the worst of the bad in everything which related to Ireland’.329 Stanley’s explanation of his resignation to the Commons on Monday 2 June dwelt on the status of the Irish Church.330 This, Graham informed Greville, was now the great question upon which a tremendous contest

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must ensue.331 As Graham advised the Whig Lord William Bentinck, he was anxious to reform the Irish Church, but could not consent to measures calculated to overthrow it.332 That same evening Ward’s deferred motion, pronouncing that the Anglican Establishment in Ireland exceeded the spiritual wants of the Protestant population, was decisively defeated by 396 to 120 votes. Nearly all Whigs, a majority of Reformers, and even a number of radicals, alongside the Conservatives, opposed the motion.333 That parliament had a right to dispense the property of the Protestant Church for other than Protestant religious purposes, Stanley told the Commons on 2 June, was the contentious claim which had forced him to resign from the government.334 He would never consent to a clergyman’s being degraded to a stipendiary of the State. Nor could support for the Established Church be based upon the numbers of Protestants in each parish, which would probably be the result of the inquiry announced by Althorp. This would destroy the permanence of the Church, subvert the reverence paid to its ministers, and incite violence in the attempt by Catholics to drive Protestants out of their parishes. Such a doctrine, Stanley continued, was scarcely less pregnant with danger to England than to Ireland, where Dissenters could use the same dangerous arguments against the Anglican Church. If it was once admitted that the religion of the majority in each parish should be considered the religion of the State, he warned, then the United Kingdom could no longer be considered a Protestant State. He acknowledged that reforms were necessary, regarding plurality, non-residence, internal discipline, and the better distribution of revenue for church purposes. But Althorp’s inquiry would only encourage the notion that the maintenance of a Protestant clergyman in any parish was dependent on the fluctuating test of the numbers resident within it. Stanley’s speech, Greville concluded, clearly demonstrated that the breach between his former colleagues and himself was irreparable.335 Le Marchant, as one of Stanley’s former colleagues, thought the statement ‘worthy of a royalist divine in the days of the Stuarts’.336 ’A fearful struggle, I am afraid, is at hand,’ Graham apprehended, which would require Stanley and himself to ‘stand by the Church and those settled institutions of this once happy country’, that they were willing to reform, but which they were not prepared to see overthrown.337 The Commons votes on the withdrawal of clause 147 in June 1833 and Ward’s motion in June 1834 suggested that the majority of Whigs and Reformers, as well as a handful of radicals, agreed, to the extent of not wishing for appropriation of the Church of Ireland’s revenues. When Althorp called a party meeting at Downing Street, on 2 June, ‘some of the usual supporters of the government


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stayed away as followers of Stanley’.338 Privately Stanley forcefully drove home his point that, by appointing an inquiry into the proportion between Protestants and Catholics throughout Ireland with a view to the reduction of the income of the Irish Church, the government had chosen the worst possible course.339 It countenanced the doctrine of proportion of population as a means of regulating a clergyman’s income, a doctrine in itself destructive to the principle of an Establishment. This would increase the persecution of Protestants in the Catholic counties of Ireland, while Catholics would remain outraged by the government’s declarations that not a farthing of Irish Church property would be appropriated for Catholic purposes. Any measure based upon the report of such an inquiry could only, Stanley warned, be carried by a complete revolution. The ministry, he believed, were navigating themselves towards a catastrophe. From the second bench below the gangway, on the ministerial side of the House, he positioned himself to observe this calamity. What new alignment of party sentiment would emerge après le déluge was now the pressing question of the day.

chapter 3

‘Visions of the Helm’: 1834–1835 His will be a glorious destiny who knows how to direct and turn into the proper channels the energies of the people, and to conduct with propriety, at this period, the government of this great nation; but if he shall imagine himself capable of stemming and abruptly resisting its force onwards, he will be swept along with the torrent. (Stanley at his installation as Lord Rector of Glasgow University, 21 December 1834)

I think the time is now arrived when those who entertain principles of sound and conservative Reform, and who may be called upon to stand in the gap between two extreme parties, ought to act avowedly and systematically together. (Stanley to Vernon, 10 January 1835)

The great Whig party which formed, for so many years, a consolidated opposition, has been split by government into a thousand fragments, capable perhaps, by union, of overthrowing an administration, but, in my mind, incapable of forming one which could act with unity of object and principle, or possess the confidence of the country. (Stanley to Spring Rice, 4 February 1835)

I

t is deceptively easy, in retrospect, to portray Edward Stanley’s departure from Lord Grey’s coalition cabinet in May 1834 as one critical phase in the emergence of a clear two-party alignment in the House of Commons. But what, with hindsight, is easy is, nevertheless, deceptive and obscures Stanley’s pivotal role in events. Received historical opinion describes Peel during 1834–5 aligning a revived Conservative party against a consolidated Whig–Liberal–radical opposition led by Russell, a process signalled by Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto of December 1834 and Russell’s ‘Lichfield House Compact’ of March 1835. Yet the Tamworth Manifesto was, in fact, born of Peel’s need to pre-empt Stanley’s ‘Knowsley Creed’. The Lichfield House Compact was, in truth, Russell’s hostile response to Stanley’s moderate centrism. That Peel and Russell, in the event, successfully

‘visions of the helm’: 1834–1835

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polarized parliamentary sentiment, without becoming hostages to their respective extreme supporters, undercut Stanley’s standing on the centre ground. Their success eclipsed Stanley’s potential role. Yet Stanley’s ‘visions of the helm’1 supply a vital missing element in our view of those eventful months. What almost occurs in politics can be as important to historical understanding, if more easily disregarded, than what actually transpires. In private conversation during 1834 Lord Melbourne earnestly declared: ‘Stanley will be the next prime minister, you will see.’2 Stanley’s ‘visions of the helm’, though ultimately fugitive, were nonetheless real. In 1834 the pattern of post-Reform Westminster politics remained unclear. During 1830 parliamentary Reform had defined party alignment. But by July 1832 Reform no longer held Grey’s coalition front bench together. Growing tensions between the ministry, advanced radicals, Irish MPs, and those English Reformers who looked to Ebrington for leadership amplified cabinet differences. The rupture of May 1834 exposed the bitter rivalry between Stanley and Russell. Peel, meanwhile, deliberately obscured matters in an opposition pose of passivity, often voting with the government against the radicals. The test measure of the 1833 session, the Irish Church Temporalities Act, failed to divide the Commons into two distinct bodies of opinion. Rather, it suggested divisions within Reform and radical ranks and, because of Peel’s vacillation, tensions within Tory circles. The withdrawal of clause 147 split Whigs and Reformers, only the radicals and Irish being unanimous in their condemnation of Stanley’s action. Similarly, Stanley’s Abolition of Slavery Act did not divide Whigs from Tories. In short, parliamentary sentiment in 1834 remained fluid. This was strikingly evident over Althorp’s proposed reform of the church rates in April 1834, which evenly divided the government’s Whig, Reform, and radical support. Over Ward’s Irish appropriation motion in June, Whig, Reform, and radical votes were again split. In July 1834 Grey resigned as prime minister. An unenthusiastic Melbourne succeeded him. The spectacular fire that then destroyed the medieval Palace of Westminster, during the night of 16 October 1834, reducing the Lords chamber and most parliamentary buildings to smoking ruins, appeared emblematic of a prevailing sense of uncertainty. It presaged the turbulent political events of November 1834 to April 1835. A month after the devastating Westminster fire the King dismissed Melbourne as his prime minister. As Disraeli described it in Coningsby, ‘It was a lively season, that winter of 1834! What hopes, what fears and what bets!’3

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… with haughty mien and bitter speech. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 2)

Where no distinct party alignment existed centrism might flourish. This was Stanley’s opportunity, delineated by his references to Canning. He hoped to forge an alignment of progressive moderates, untainted by English and Irish radicalism and aloof from Ultra Toryism. This was the distinction, in Stanley’s mind, between conservative, as opposed to destructive, reform. It was a project encouraged by William IV’s private communications. William IV regarded the Reform Act as a final destination, not as a departure point for further change. In Stanley he saw an embodiment of that hope. But Stanley remained faithful to his Whig conviction that executive authority could not be reliant upon the prerogative. Westminster was the authoritative arena of national politics. It was the shifting pattern of parliamentary sentiment that defined his opportunity. Immediately after May 1834 Stanley favoured ‘keeping everything as quiet as possible during this session in the certainty that the next session must produce the occasion of standing up strongly and decidedly against some very violent measure’.4 He wished that ‘matters could rest till then just as they are’, especially as it was important ‘that Lord Grey should not be driven from the helm, and how little would drive him’. During debate on the Irish tithe he would ‘not take any part unless forced to do so’. He resisted the private promptings of the Ultra Tories Sir Richard Vyvyan, Sir Edward Knatchbull, and Lord Chandos, who ‘were unwilling to take any step without [his] concurrence, tho’ they were anxious not to allow ‘‘the iron to cool’’ ’.5 In June, following Ascot week, Stanley made his customary visit to the Epsom Downs. But the accelerating pace of political events in London gave his behaviour and words an increasing vehemence. While debate on the Irish tithe continued, he saw an enfeebled government unable to resist external pressure, the imminent danger being executive vulnerability to radical demands. ‘If the Tories are not insane’, he commented to Graham, ‘here is the opportunity for raising their question.’6 Though not intending harm to the Anglican Church, the ministry’s policy on the Irish Church, he feared, acknowledged a principle exposing the Church of England to immediate attack from Dissenters. On 20 June, Stanley, Graham, and twenty-four other ‘Moderate’ MPs joined 129 Conservative MPs, led by


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Peel, in opposing the second reading of a bill admitting Dissenters to the ancient universities. By early July the moment seemed to be approaching for a frontal assault on the Whig citadel of power. On 3 July, Graham reported a discussion with Peel, Goulburn, and Shaw on the Irish Church. Peel ‘was very easy in his manner with me’, Graham recounted to Stanley, ‘quite communicative, and most anxious to impress me with the conviction that he desired to act on this occasion in the strictest union with you’.7 With Peel’s endorsement, Graham urged Stanley to return immediately to London and forcefully denounce the government’s Irish Church policy. Stanley travelled up to Westminster from Tunbridge Wells fired by Graham’s fervent appeal. On Friday 4 July 1834, in what became known as his notorious ‘Thimblerig’ speech, Stanley launched a fierce Commons attack against his former colleagues. Earlier in the day Russell encountered Stanley, fresh from Tunbridge Wells, alighting from his coach, who, he noticed, had a blackened eye. On Russell commenting on this Stanley combatively replied: ‘Ay, I shall give you a black eye before the evening is over.’8 Speaking during the committee stage of the Irish Tithe Bill that evening, Stanley accused the government of engaging in a shabby act of plunder,9 not even a policy of straightforward pillage as performed by bold offenders, but one marked by timidity and displaying that want of dexterity that led to the failure of the unpractised shoplifter. Taking up another analogy, he compared the government to certain men found at country fairs and races. Their instruments of theft comprised a small deal board and four or five thimbles. Their act consisted in dexterously shifting a pea from one thimble to another, while the party who guessed under what thimble the pea was deposited found the result of his speculation was the loss of his property. Stanley’s portrayal of government policy as a trick of legislative legerdemain stung. The Tithe Bill had become, he proposed, the victim of the self-interested convenience of ministers, who were engaged in temporizing duplicity. The Tories loudly cheered his bravura performance. The government, Greville observed, were ‘disgusted, ashamed and vexed’.10 Widespread comment on the virulent coarseness of Stanley’s speech followed. This was an attack, it was noted, targeted against those from whom, shortly before, he had expressed his regret at being separated. Grey, in particular, was deeply offended by the tone of Stanley’s onslaught. On Thursday 10 July an aggrieved Grey wrote to Stanley conveying the deep personal offence he felt at Stanley’s accusations. Grey’s anger was exacerbated by Stanley’s communications with ‘the enemy’, Peel, Goulburn, and Shaw.11 Stanley immediately wrote to Grey apologizing

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for any displeasure his speech had caused. But he still believed the government’s course on the Irish Tithe was ‘most mischievous’.12 The following day he called on Grey to clear the air. But the very necessity for a penitential letter appeared an admission of folly. Russell believed that Stanley ‘was much disappointed to find his attack on ministers so ill-received in the House, and has been since ashamed of it’.13 Richmond, Graham, and Ripon, Greville noted, were ‘as much annoyed’ by Stanley’s speech as anybody.14 The Duchess of Richmond confessed that her husband regretted it bitterly. Greville’s comment on Stanley’s Thimblerig speech was incisive: these are the sort of events in a man’s life which influence his destiny ever after; it is not that his political career will be marred, or that anything can prevent his talents rendering it on the whole important, and probably successful, but there is a revulsion in men’s minds about him which cannot fail to produce a silent, but, in the end a sensible effect upon his fortunes.15

Stanley’s statement proved a grave miscalculation. It raised questions about his political judgement. The verdict of Thomas Creevey, a regular visitor to Knowsley during the old Earl’s day, was sharp: Stanley would make an excellent Commons leader, ‘if only he had common sense and common manners’.16 Stanley had played the opening moves of his career, since entering parliament in 1822 as Lansdowne’s protégé, with an assurance giving almost a sense of inevitability to his success. In retrospect, the tone of his Thimblerig speech was a deeply damaging move in the critical early middle game of his career. His apparent impetuosity, framed by his characteristic self-assurance, suggested an Achilles heel long remembered by others. That subsequent events confirmed his strategic expectations emphasized the gravity of this tactical misjudgement. Political passions were now running high. It became known in early July that the maladroit Littleton had met O’Connell and privately indicated that the Irish Coercion Bill might be amended and the clauses prohibiting political agitation dropped. In cabinet an infuriated Grey blocked such a move. A rattled Littleton was forced into a humiliating retraction and Grey, outraged by his Irish Chief Secretary’s conduct, promptly resigned on Tuesday 8 July. Littleton’s behaviour, Stanley observed, was ‘monstrous’.17 To much incredulity Melbourne succeeded Grey as prime minister on Friday 11 July, shouldering the burden of conciliating Whig caution with radical enthusiasm. This was a brokership, Stanley believed, doomed to fail.18 At the King’s bidding Melbourne attempted, with little real appetite, to form a coalition ministry including Peel, Wellington, and


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Stanley. But Stanley promptly informed Melbourne that such a ministerial combination was impossible.19 Wellington was completely unacceptable as a colleague to those looking to represent moderate progress. Stanley expected Melbourne to fail in his commission. Peel would then be sent for, only to fail as well. Following this, Stanley anticipated, Althorp would probably patch together the existing ministry and seek to close the session as soon as possible.20 This, Stanley thought, would be the best result. Graham, anticipating that fear of radicalism would lead to a merger between Stanley and Peel, agreed with Stanley that the present moment was premature for decided commitment.21 A caretaker Althorp ministry could not last long. But it would postpone a dissolution and put off any critical political struggle until the beginning of the 1835 session. ‘The country must pass thro’ the fiery furnace and endure [Althorp] and a Movement government’, Graham agreed, ‘before any good can be effected.’ Yet, improbably, Melbourne did cobble together a Whig ministry. The inclusion of Duncannon and Mulgrave in the cabinet Stanley saw as proof that the government was becoming more radical. O’Connell, Stanley observed, must be very satisfied.22 Claiming credit for turning out Grey, a triumphant O’Connell posed as the arbiter of parliamentary sentiment. That, on 30 July, O’Connell carried two vital amendments to the government’s Tithe Bill seemed to corroborate the Irish leader’s claim. All this increased the parliamentary obstacles the new ministry faced, as Stanley again left London for the South Downs. ‘The Coercion bill and Tithe bill must still hang about their necks,’ Stanley commented to Graham and Richmond.23 Melbourne’s beleaguered government staggered through the remainder of the session, while Stanley immersed himself in racing and billiards at Goodwood, parliament being prorogued on 15 August. The Coercion Bill passed into law, both Althorp and Littleton being publicly committed to it. But, as Stanley had anticipated, in July their Tithe Bill fell victim to Lords opposition. This involved the Melbourne ministry in what Stanley judged to be a curious debut. One half of the government (in the Commons) declared the Irish Tithe measure indispensable to the peace of the empire, the other half of the government (in the Lords) were encouraging the Commons to throw it out.24 Ministers appeared to be courting O’Connell, but in repayment O’Connell merely responded to every submission with increased insults.25 Graham agreed that the government seemed ‘at their wits’ end’ about Ireland. ‘They have disgusted the Protestants; they cannot gull the Catholics; they have lost Lord Grey by preferring O’Connell; and yet having preferred him they cannot catch him, much less hold him. They look to me bedevilled.’26

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Following the end of the session Stanley left London for Lancashire. Much of the summer was spent at his father-in-law’s estate, Lathom House. The familiar grounds of Lathom remained the favourite residence of his wife. Their son remembered it as the only place where his mother seemed really at home, ‘and in my youngest years I was often and long there with her’.27 In late September, Eddy, after a bout of illness, accompanied by Emma Stanley, was dispatched to the seaside for recuperation. At the beginning of October, Stanley left Lathom House alone for Ballykisteen, stopping for one day in Dublin. What he saw encouraged him to believe that there need not be much difficulty over the tithe if landlords did their duty. Certainly he found little problem in collecting the tithe on his Ballykisteen estate.28 But it was the grave illness of his grandfather, who never fully recovered from the death of the second Countess, that quickly summoned him back to England in mid-October. In June the Earl of Derby sponsored his last cockfight, or ‘main’, held during the Chester Races. By July his health was failing, although this did not prevent him from attending the races at Aintree, accompanied by his youngest daughter, Stanley’s aunt Mary, Countess Wilton. Since the Countess of Derby’s death in 1829, Lady Wilton had devotedly nursed the elderly Earl. Yet by August, Derby was in a weakened physical condition, saying and communicating little. On Sunday 12 October, Stanley left Tipperary, arriving at Knowsley on Friday 17 October to find his grandfather in a state of semi-consciousness.29 The dying Earl failed to recognize him on his arrival and Stanley could only helplessly watch his grandfather’s prolonged suffering. Four days later, on Tuesday 21 October, the 83-year-old Lord Derby finally passed away a little before mid-day. The dominating spirit of the Knowsley household, who had held the title of Earl of Derby for nearly sixty years, was now gone. He had embraced Whig politics and cockfighting with equal passion, dedicating himself to the service of his country and his racing stud in equal measure. Graham comforted Stanley with the thought that the old Earl had ‘lived to see your triumphs, and the bright promise of future greatness founded on sound principles of virtue and of religion’. All this the Earl had ‘rejoiced to see’.30 A richly feudal funeral was held in Ormskirk church on Sunday 2 November. Derby had requested that his interment be held with as much privacy as possible. Nonetheless, upwards of sixty carriages formed the cortège accompanying the coffin from Knowsley to Ormskirk. Approximately 280 tenants from the Knowsley estate, riding on black horses and wearing black hatbands and scarves, headed the procession, followed by the household servants walking two abreast. His lordship’s coronet and cushion on a


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state horse preceded the hearse, which was followed by Stanley, his father, and other members of the family in three closed carriages. A large crowd, mainly travelling out from Liverpool, lined the route. Outside Ormskirk the procession was joined by the Mayor of Liverpool and others, who witnessed the lowering of the coffin, covered with rich crimson silk velvet and ornamented with massive silver handles chased like coronets, into the vault at Ormskirk church. The ceremony closed with the placing of Derby’s coronet and cushion on the lid of the coffin. Stanley’s father now succeeded as 13th Earl of Derby. Stanley himself assumed the title of Lord Stanley. While attending his grandfather’s deathbed Stanley learnt from Graham of the destruction of the Palace of Westminster, dramatically captured by the painter J. M. W. Turner in some of his most evocative watercolour sketches as he rushed to witness the spectacular conflagration. Graham reported that all the records and books from the libraries of both Houses had been saved. But the two Houses themselves, half the Speaker’s House, all the Committee Rooms of the Commons, the Painted Chamber, and the Long Chamber were reduced to smoking ruins. Stanley confessed to a superstitious veneration for the old building, despite its inconvenience.31 They had indeed, Graham observed, lost a ‘sacred edifice’.32

Could I unite them by persuasive words And to their former intercourse restore. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 55)

Yet it was another aristocratic death, just one week later, which dramatically transformed the political situation. On Monday 10 November 1834 the second Earl Spencer died. His eldest son, Lord Althorp, succeeded to the title and was immediately elevated to the Lords. As Spring Rice warned Stanley, this was ‘an event likely to lead to more important results’.33 During September, Stanley had noted Melbourne’s reluctance to continue as premier with Althorp as his leader in the Commons. Any leader, other than Althorp, would be much more easily governed, Stanley surmised.34 Following Althorp’s elevation two months later, Melbourne immediately considered the advantages of Stanley as his leader in the Lower House. After dining at Grosvenor Place with Richmond and Ripon, during the evening of Sunday 9 November, Graham reported to Stanley that ‘nothing could be more easy and confidential than [Melbourne’s] manner

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and communication with us’.35 But differences over the Irish Church and the tone of the Thimblerig speech prevented a reunion. Regretting the unavailability of Stanley, Melbourne was left with a choice between Abercromby, Spring Rice, and Russell. The prime minister had equally strong objections to all three, not least because the appointment of any one of them ‘would shut the door on Stanley’.36 Privately Stanley wrote to Spring Rice warning him of the dangers of accepting the leadership of the Commons, even though, Stanley assured his friend, Spring Rice was ‘Althorp’s natural successor’.37 The jealousies among the government’s supporters, Stanley cautioned, made the post an unenviable one. To Melbourne’s surprise, Lansdowne did not push Spring Rice’s candidacy. This left Russell as the unavoidable choice. But Melbourne suspected Russell to be more radical than Durham and the King believed Russell would throw the government into the arms of O’Connell. Adamantly refusing to contemplate a ministry with Russell as leader of the Commons, on Friday 14 November William IV summarily dismissed Melbourne’s government. For the last time a British monarch removed a government enjoying the support of a majority of MPs. If the King’s peremptory decision surprised few, what he did next outraged many. William IV sent immediately for Wellington. On Saturday 15 November, Wellington travelled to Brighton to advise the King to entrust the premiership to Peel. But, as Peel was abroad in Italy, Wellington agreed to carry on public business until Peel’s return. The King expressed his strong desire to see Stanley in the new government. On Thursday 21 November, Wellington was sworn in as temporary First Lord of the Treasury and Foreign Secretary. Lord Lyndhurst was appointed Lord Chancellor. All else awaited Peel’s arrival from Rome. In hindsight, the King’s precipitous resort to Wellington erected a fatal obstacle to royal wishes for a moderate government bringing Stanley and Peel together. It proved an unwise, though not unconstitutional, act. Sir Herbert Taylor explained to Stanley that the King dreaded the embarrassment of seeming indecisive. He responded hastily, without fully appreciating the implications of his invitation to Wellington.38 As it was, being unable to send for Peel directly and by giving Wellington power of commission in the interim, the King inadvertently placed an insurmountable barrier in the path of a moderate Stanley–Peel ministry. It was, Graham warned Stanley, a dangerous turn of events. Graham feared that the King had ‘made his rush at the wrong moment. I think also he has put up the wrong man to ride the second heat. Bob was the lad who had the best chance of winning.’39 Given the King’s precipitous action, Stanley informed Ripon that his own


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course was now clear. He must stand aloof from any administration of which Wellington formed a part, while refusing to join in any opposition until the new ministry’s measures were brought forward.40 He suspected Wellington might try and drag his Tory followers through some measures of reform, or at least declare a readiness to convert abuses. But this would not change Stanley’s opinion of a man forced to act in defiance of his own principles. Yet many MPs were uncertain of re-election and, from fear of a dissolution, would not press an adverse vote on the new ministry. On Saturday 15 November, Richmond passed on to Stanley Lord Grey’s comment that, if he awaited the inevitable collapse of a Peel government, Stanley would be prime minister within a year.41 Graham and Richmond agreed to join Stanley at Knowsley on Thursday 27 November, visiting the Duke of Sutherland at Trentham House, Staffordshire, on the way. From Trentham, on Friday 21 November, Graham sent further encouragement, reporting comments about the strength of Stanley’s position and his power to form a ministry. Graham also conveyed Richmond’s observation that if Stanley ‘is to have a party the sooner it is formed the better’.42 The King, Graham predicted, would ask Peel to form a coalition government. But, by declining to join him, the Stanleyites would subsequently force Peel to join them. Lord Carlisle, who had resigned his office as Lord Privy Seal under Grey, affirmed his support for Stanley. Further advice flowed in. On Sunday 23 November, Sir James Tennent, elected as a Reform MP for Belfast in 1832, informed Stanley of ‘the extraordinary anxiety which prevails in all quarters relative to your acceptance or rejection of office under the new government’.43 The Tories, Tennent believed, thought ‘it would be utter madness for the Duke of Wellington to attempt a rigid Tory administration’. They accepted the necessity for ‘salutary reform, civil, ecclesiastical and corporate’. The Whigs, meanwhile, would consider Stanley joining the cabinet as ‘a sufficient and satisfactory test’ of the government’s intentions. If Stanley joined the ministry, Tennent assured him, ‘you will at once bring along with you the entire of the moderate Whig party of the House of Commons’. The Anglican Tennent, who had supported Catholic Emancipation, the Reform Act, and the Abolition of Slavery, but was a vehement anti-O’Connellite, represented an emergent progressive strand of Ulster Unionism that saw in Stanley an enlightened alternative to bigoted Orangeism and radical agitation. A non-parliamentary electoral success further bolstered Stanley’s hopes. During November he was elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University, the rival nominee, Lord Durham, being defeated. Initially Stanley hesitated to have his name put forward. Former honorands, such as

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Brougham and Sir James Mackintosh, had been strongly liberal. Through faculty such as Francis Hutcheson and Adam Smith during the 1730s to 1750s, Glasgow University had been the intellectual cradle of the Scottish Enlightenment. Yet the 1834 Rectorial contest, Stanley recognized, would afford a fair test of the feeling of the educated class in Scotland and reports from Glasgow promised certainty of success. Stanley’s subsequent successful election, on the grounds of conservative, not destructive, reform, indicated, he believed, a firm reaction against the putative radicalism of Melbourne’s cabinet. It suggested that a popular wish for moderation, as opposed to extreme reform or Ultra Toryism, prevailed.44 His installation also provided Stanley with a public opportunity to mark out his differences with Wellington’s party. In these circumstances, Stanley predicted, Peel would try and shake himself loose from his Tory tail.45 During late November, with Peel not due to arrive back in London until early December, Stanley undertook extensive discussion with Graham and Richmond at Knowsley. They immediately agreed to act in union, ‘our numbers being at present so limited, but having the fairest prospect, if we play our game properly, of forming the nucleus and rallying point of no inconsiderable party’.46 On ‘the most material point’ they were unanimous: ‘that it will be necessary for us steadily to decline any overtures which may, and probably will, be made to us by the Duke of Wellington and Peel’. Joining a Conservative government would deprive them of any influence over their late colleagues, who would be thrown into increased virulence against the government. Not accepting office, but occupying an independent position, Stanley anticipated, would conciliate their former friends. Moreover, from such a position they could launch a centrist party, standing as a check against both the radical threat and Tory recalcitrance. Yet this advantage would only be gained, Stanley warned Ripon, if office was publicly offered by Peel, so that it could be openly rejected. It was crucial, therefore, that there be no premature leak that an offer would be declined. Meanwhile, it was necessary to insinuate a distinction between Wellington and Peel, as well as between Peel and those whom he halfled and by whom he was half-driven. They could not, Stanley declared, associate with Goulburn, Croker, Chandos, and Charles Ross in the Commons, or the Duke of Cumberland, Londonderry, Aberdeen, and the Bishop of Exeter in the Lords. Stanleyite aloofness would condemn Peel to a short-lived possession of power. Upon Peel’s relinquishing office the King, Graham anticipated, would be able ‘to admit whom he, as well as we, may desire and to exclude those whom we could consider obnoxious.


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This would come to Peel joining us, not we him, which [is] the object to be kept in view.’47 During November, Wellington talked of forming a government on a broad basis, hoping that Stanley would come in under Peel. In private letters to Peel in Italy, Wellington included Stanley, Graham, Richmond, and Ripon in his list of potential ministers. Four cabinet posts, it was hoped, would be an irresistible inducement to join Peel’s front bench. At a dinner held by the Tory Lord Lyndhurst, on Monday 1 December, attended by the Stanleyite Lord George Bentinck, Charles Greville, Thomas Barnes, editor of The Times, Sir Henry Hardinge, and Sir William Follet, the conversation dwelt on Stanley’s intentions. As Canning’s nephew by marriage and former private secretary, Bentinck (MP for King’s Lynn since 1828) was a representative of Stanley’s views with strong credentials, enhanced by his reputation as a keen devotee of the turf. Lyndhurst believed the new government could not stand without Stanley. Hardinge was convinced that, immediately upon his return, Peel would make a cordial overture to Stanley. The question remained whether Stanley would insist upon Richmond and Ripon’s coming in with him. Greville believed the Tories wished to secure Stanley and Graham, while washing their hands of Ripon and Richmond. But, with the King clearly anxious to have Stanley in the government, it was supposed that the Tories would accept almost any terms upon which Stanley might insist. Hardinge believed that four cabinet seats would be seen by the Tories as a large share, but that the best men among them would be willing to make such a sacrifice in order to secure the Stanleyites, such an arrangement enabling Peel’s friends to cut their connection with the Ultras. All this cheering news Bentinck, in amusingly characteristic style, communicated, via Richmond, to Stanley at Knowsley.48 Nothing could be better, Stanley responded, than Bentinck’s refusal to be drawn into detailed discussions. When they did finally decline office the Stanleyites would face ‘an awful battery’.49 Amid much bustle, on Monday 9 December, Peel arrived back in London. Immediately he wrote inviting Stanley, who remained at Knowsley, to join his government.50 Peel did not see any present differences of policy existing between them. He did not offer Stanley a particular office, the only existing appointments being Wellington as Foreign Secretary and Lyndhurst as Lord Chancellor. But Peel invited private discussion on all future arrangements. The next day Lord Sandon followed up Peel’s offer with a long plea to Stanley to accept office; ‘you and your friends hold in your hands the balance, in which the best interests of the country and those which you hold most dear, are now weighing’.51 A refusal to serve

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under Peel would, Sandon warned Stanley, bring back the late government, weak, unstable, and prey to every influence except the right one. Stanley and Peel’s views on the Irish Church were, Sandon suggested, largely in agreement. Peace and retrenchment were ‘a matter of course with any administration’. Peel had never objected to the relief of the genuine grievances of Dissenters. The only possible source of conflict between them, Sandon felt, might be over corporation reform. Peel could never assent to a systematic and democratic reform of all corporations. But Stanley, he observed, was not pledged on this issue. Therefore, the way was open to unite in a common defence of the monarchy, the Church, and a balanced constitution. Otherwise, Sandon warned, conservative reform would be overwhelmed in the general torrent of the Destructives. Stanley, however, stuck to the strategy agreed with Graham and Richmond two weeks before. On Thursday 11 December he dealt Peel the body blow of refusing to join his cabinet.52 His response had been drafted in consultation with Graham and Richmond before Peel’s return, during discussions at Knowsley on 27 November. He found it hardly necessary to alter a single word. Admitting that he and Peel agreed on the Church of Ireland and the issue of ecclesiastical Establishments, Stanley pointed out that he had supported all the other reforms of Grey’s government. Peel, however, had opposed them, even though his opposition had often been moderate in nature. Stanley then went on to highlight Peel’s differences with his Ultra Tory supporters. As evidence of implacably reactionary sentiment within Peel’s party he cited Wellington’s bitter attack in July 1833 on the whole record of Grey’s government, including the abolition of slavery for which Stanley had been personally responsible. Thus, while Peel was close in opinion to Stanley, the differences between Stanley and Peel’s supporters were large. The implication was clear. It would be easier for Peel to join Stanley than for Stanley to join the Conservatives. In these circumstances, Stanley continued, he could only promise Peel ‘an independent support’. Nothing, Stanley triumphantly reported to Richmond, ‘could more completely hit the letter from Peel than our anticipated reply’.53 A dissolution of parliament was now, he thought, inevitable. But the Conservative party were grossly miscalculating, he believed, if they were hoping an election was going to increase their numbers by very much. Stanley had an encouraging interview with Melbourne at Trentham. The former premier abused Brougham, declared himself sick of his radical associates, and admitted that he had been very relieved by the break-up of his administration. Grey, Stanley heard, was also very conservative in his language


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and much annoyed with Durham. In short, Stanley informed Richmond, ‘I think that our present position is likely to bring us back to a very cordial footing with the best of our late colleagues.’ Stanley deliberately avoided going to London. To do so, he believed, would imply that he was willing to join Peel if only some, as yet, unspecified terms could be complied with.54 After writing to Peel on Thursday 11 December he set off for Glasgow from Knowsley, early on Monday 15 December, for his installation as Lord Rector, leaving Peel to construct a cabinet out of restricted Tory resources. Graham did have a private interview with Peel at Whitehall Gardens on Saturday 13 December. But, as agreed, Graham confirmed the Stanleyites’ collective refusal of office.55 Their preliminary objections were, Graham informed Peel, insuperable. Graham then left London to accompany Stanley to Scotland. The accession of the ‘waverer’ Wharncliffe to the new cabinet did something to leaven the Tory character of Peel’s front bench. But the cabinet Peel completed, by Saturday 20 December, including Ellenborough, Herries, Hardinge, and Aberdeen, along with Wellington and Lyndhurst, was not the broad-based ministry for which he hoped. Nor was it the mixed government, including Stanley, which William IV earnestly desired. Relieved Whigs appeared ‘triumphant’ at Stanley standing off from Peel.56 Stanley’s speech at his installation as Lord Rector of Glasgow University on Sunday 21 December was now imbued with extraordinary significance. It provided the authoritative statement of the Knowsley Creed, as the basis upon which a centrist party might be formed. Unusually, Stanley took considerable pains to ensure it appeared in The Times, the Morning Post, the Morning Chronicle, and the Morning Herald in an accurate form.57 His election as Lord Rector, he declared to his Scottish audience, was positive proof of the spirit of moderation prevailing in the country.58 It publicly endorsed those principles to which he strictly adhered, a readiness to remove the blemishes of the great institutions of the country, balanced by an energetic opposition to those who intended not to reform but destroy. In the circumstances of late 1834 he believed moderation was to be defined primarily by reference to religious issues. He declared scriptural principle must guide one’s conduct through the world. As Protestants, the study of scripture had to be their rule of faith, their rule of practice, and imperative on all. He could not be indifferent to the maintenance, as a national object, of those institutions by which religious instruction was secured. Rather, it was the first duty of any government to extend religious knowledge and to see that the people, by means of establishments, had the power of obtaining instruction and religious comfort. He was not blind to existing

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defects. But the careful removal of those blemishes must serve to disarm enemies, conciliate opponents, and increase popular support. Having established the religious foundation of political moderation, Stanley then extolled responsible reform more broadly. Civic institutions should be improved, but not altered for the purposes of destruction. In this spirit, he pronounced, he had participated in Grey’s ministry, giving greater power and privilege to intelligence and new wealth, thereby securing middle-class attachment to the institutions of the country. It was, he asserted, impossible, whichever hand was on the helm of state, to check the spirit of improvement, inquiry, and investigation characteristic of the age in which they lived. ‘The machine must move forward for good or evil—for it cannot be stopped; like the fire it may purify, if properly kindled by a skilful hand, but if it should be impetuously and recklessly accelerated, destruction and overwhelming wreck must be the inevitable consequences.’59 He declared that government must, at this critical time, amend and purify. But, equally, he was determined to transmit to posterity, in all their splendour, the institutions of the country. The Knowsley Creed celebrated moderation in a defence of existing institutions adapted to the spirit of the age. The preservation of the Church Establishment he projected as the true test of conservative, as opposed to destructive, reform, serving a faith in which scriptural truth was buttressed by the legal authority of the State. His vivid description of the inexorable march of progress was a clear denunciation of that Toryism associated with Wellington. His grave warnings of the recklessness of extreme Reformers was a repudiation of the radicalism associated with Russell, Durham, Ebrington, O’Connell, and others. Evoking the twin spectres of Tory and radical extremism was the strategic necessity of Stanley’s position. Peel must be prised away from Wellington; Grey and Melbourne rescued from Russell and O’Connell. As Stanley shared with Richmond, ‘I intend to shake myself clear of both parties, and set up for myself.’60 The requirements for success were clear. Peel must fail in establishing a Conservatism accommodating the need for reform. Russell must fail in defining a broad progressive alliance reconciling Whig caution with radical enthusiasms and Irish grievances. In December 1834 both Peel and Russell faced onerous brokerships with little certainty of success. Stanley’s hope of establishing a centre party of responsible reform, based upon the Knowsley Creed, was directly dependent upon their failure. Graham lauded Stanley’s Glasgow statement. ‘Nothing can have been more effective than Stanley’s speech … and the declaration of our policy,’


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he reported to Stanley’s uncle Edmund Hornby.61 The Duke of Hamilton was delighted with Stanley’s visit. The Duke ‘and the best part of the Whigs in Scotland will’, Graham was sure, ‘be anxious to join a Third Party occupying the middle ground between the radicals and Ultra Tories’. Stanley did not believe Peel’s government could last long. Peel’s best chance, he maintained, was the premier’s taking the first opportunity of quarrelling with the High Tories.62 Moreover, Peel was throwing away his prospects by appointing Tories such as Viscount Stormont, Lord Roden, Lord Lincoln, and Charles Ross to the government, and then declaring that the Stanleyites must look to men not measures. By doing so, Stanley informed Graham, ‘he cuts our ground of support from under our feet’.63 Yet the preparations for an election in early January 1835, were, Stanley feared, premature. There was little time to put a good number of Stanleyite candidates on the hustings. In the circumstances, he advised Ripon, it was better to give as short addresses as possible, while avoiding a decided opposition to Peel’s government before they had seen their measures.64 But Stanley’s announcement of his Knowsley Creed was dramatically forestalled by Peel. As Stanley travelled north to Glasgow, Peel delivered a pre-emptive strike. Three days before Stanley’s installation at Glasgow, on Thursday 18 December, The Times printed Peel’s address to his constituents at Tamworth.65 With his Tamworth Manifesto Peel sought to snatch from Stanley’s grasp the standard of responsible reform. Peel directed his address ‘to that class which is much less interested in the contentions of party, than in the maintenance of order and the course of good government’. The address answered the urgent need for his new ministry to establish its credentials. It was, therefore, as a tactical pronouncement that the Tamworth Manifesto acquired its greatest immediate importance. Peel rebutted, in anticipation, Stanley’s caricature of Toryism as an immovable obstacle to progress, as personified by Wellington. Peel indicated his intention to tame his Ultras. He talked of ‘a careful review of institutions, civil and ecclesiastical, undertaken in a friendly temper, combining, with the firm maintenance of established rights, the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances’.66 Specifically, this meant the reform of municipal corporations and church rates, and allowing Dissenters entry into the legal and medical professions on equal terms with Anglicans. Peel opposed any alienation of church property, but favoured the reform of church revenues, tithes, and an inquiry into the general structure of the Establishment, complemented by retrenchment at home and a peaceful policy abroad. On Tuesday 23 December, two days after Stanley’s speech

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at Glasgow, Peel carefully amplified these themes at a Mansion House dinner, promising the avoidance of precipitous action, combined with the application of efficacious remedies. With the Knowsley Creed, Stanley believed he had played a winning card. But Peel, producing the Tamworth Manifesto from up his sleeve, trumped him. Initially, a shaken Stanley comforted himself with the thought that Peel’s policy, if he carried it out, would cause some wry faces among his followers.67 But there existed a possibility that the Tories might swallow anything to keep office. Certainly, if Peel managed to keep his supporters united behind the Tamworth policy, one of the essential conditions for Stanley’s success would be lost. As Graham admitted, in the light of Peel’s statement, ‘it is hard to say where an old Tory is to be found’.68 Peel’s Mansion House speech was ‘embarrassing’.69 It raised the question of the basis upon which the Stanleyites stood aloof from Peel. The answer to this question, Graham acknowledged, was not easy. Promptly, Greville began to doubt ‘the vast utility of Stanley’.70 Peel believed he had created a situation in which, as he stated to Croker on 10 January 1835, it would be impossible for Stanley not to commit to either Russell or himself.71 Peel pressed home the point on the King. Given the premier’s own stated intentions, Stanley did not have any credible ground of public principle upon which to oppose his government.72 As elections began in early January 1835 Stanley fired his supporters, such as Granville Vernon (MP for East Retford), with the Knowsley line. The time had arrived, he urged, when those entertaining ‘principles of sound and conservative Reform, being called upon to stand in the gap between two extreme parties, had to act avowedly and systematically together’.73 He repeated the cry in his own North Lancashire electoral address and ensured it was printed fully in both The Globe and the Morning Chronicle. Although a Reformer, Stanley declared, he had always also been the protector of Church and State from hazardous innovations. He was not pledged either to support or to oppose Peel’s administration. If the government gave free scope to the principles of Reform, he would give them his cordial aid. Should they endanger the institutions of the country, he would oppose them, while seeking to advance the steady progress of constitutional Reform. ‘This’, The Times applauded, ‘is the language of an honest man—this is the determination of an independent mind.’74 At his election, on 12 January, Stanley pronounced Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto to be ‘full of good sound Whig doctrine’. He would not be part of a factious coalition to turn Peel out, but would support the prime minister if he proposed judicious measures. ‘There can be no end to real


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reforms,’ he concluded, ‘the only ultimate limit being that beyond which change precipitates destruction’.75 He was returned top of the poll. Greville found the Whigs disappointed at Stanley’s ‘able and eloquent’ speech, they having cherished a hope that Stanley might shortly rejoin them.76 Stanley’s younger brother Henry retained his seat at Preston, despite their father having demolished Patten House, the family residence in the borough. At Carlisle, Graham declared his opposition to any government committed to radical and destructive principles. He suspected Brougham of stirring up fierce radical opposition to his candidature. But Graham’s successful election, Stanley observed, confirmed Grey’s belief that ‘we could beat those d— —d radicals if we would but face them’.77 Graham reported to Stanley that he was returned ‘almost without a dissentient voice in an audience of some thousands, after a full profession of faith founded on the Knowsley Creed’.78 Encouragingly, Palmerston was defeated in his election for a supposedly safe Hampshire seat by the ‘cry of the church in danger’, while Abercromby, Campbell, and Fox Maule reported popular alarm in Scotland at the appropriation of church revenues for Catholic purposes.79 In many constituencies the mobilization of Dissenters in support of advanced Reform candidates and the rallying of Anglican clergy behind Conservative and moderate Reform candidates brought an increasingly sectarian intensity to local contests. Through Graham the moderate Reformers Sir Richard Bulkeley (MP for Anglesey) and Colonel Love Parry (MP for Carnarvon) indicated their support for Stanley, as did the Duke of Hamilton in the Upper House, who believed all rational men regarded Stanley’s prospect of power as ‘the bright side of the picture’.80 Lord Francis Egerton (Stanley’s close Christ Church friend Lord Francis Leveson-Gower, who, upon inheriting the vast estates of the Duke of Bridgewater in 1833, had assumed the surname and arms of Egerton), with Stanley’s support, was triumphantly elected as MP for South Lancashire, displacing the advanced Reformer George Wood. Enthusiasm for Egerton, it was noted, prevailed even in Manchester.81 The younger brother of the Duke of Sutherland and Charles Greville’s brother-in-law, Egerton was to prove a loyal supporter of Stanley’s interests in Lancashire. Stanley’s brother-in-law the Hon. Richard Wilbraham, Lord Skelmersdale’s heir, was returned as a Conservative as the second member for South Lancashire. Tennent, espousing the Knowsley Creed, was returned top of the poll in Belfast. While in Scotland, Sir George Sinclair, who had declared himself to Stanley as ‘a very warm … supporter’, was returned for Caithness.82 At the close of the election, on Monday 9 February 1835, Richmond calculated the number of radicals and ‘furious opposition’ in the new

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parliament at 163 MPs, government supporters and Stanleyites at 157 MPs. Edmund Hornby (former MP for Warrington) listed 133 Tories, 23 half Tories, 174 Liberals, and 86 Stanleyites.83 Bentinck estimated a similar large number of Stanleyites.84 If Whigs and Liberals held aloof from O’Connell’s Repeal MPs, then the parliamentary arithmetic was close. Stanley would hold the balance of power in the Commons. He could either supply a majority for Peel’s ministry, or affirm an opposition majority without reliance on O’Connell. But he remained cautious. He correctly believed Richmond was over-optimistic regarding their own support and underestimated those he labelled the furious opposition. Graham urged Stanley ‘to make arrangements for the mustering of your troops now you have raised your standard’.85 But Stanley advised against an open meeting of their supporters at the start of the session. Their numbers were, as yet, so small that he feared a formal meeting would only reveal their weakness. Better to proceed more cautiously, he advised, leaving it to be understood that they were prepared to receive adhesions and giving every encouragement to those who wished to join. They had to wait, he urged Graham, and see where their strength might lie. ‘In the present dislocation of parties we may meet it where we little expect it, and may be disappointed where we do.’86 Yet the pressure on the Stanleyites to declare their position was growing. A ‘Goodwood cabinet’ was planned for Thursday 12 February. ‘We shall have’, Stanley advised Graham, ‘much to discuss, not only as to our plan of campaign, but as to the persons whom we should call into our counsels.’ Clearly, ‘the time was come when a third party was desirable for the country’.87 He informed Richmond that we ‘must look over our lists, and decide who, in the first instance, should be summoned to discuss with us individual questions as they arise, in the course of the session. I think it is essential that we should have some such meetings, composed of both peers and Commons.’88 In the interim, the Stanleyites’ general strategy remained unchanged. As Stanley informed John Evelyn Denison, his close Christ Church friend and MP for South Nottinghamshire, on 20 January: I think it not undesirable for the country that when there is likely to be much violence on both sides, there should be an avowed intermediate party, acting with no factious views, but sufficiently strong, and if possible, sufficiently compact, to act as a check upon the other two, to aid the government in their resistance to mere party motions and to dangerous measures, but also to keep them up to the collar in measures of sound reform, and lastly, to be a corps de reserve upon which, in the case of accidents, the King might be able to fall back.89


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The probability of an accident seemed strong. He asked Denison to draw up a list of possible adherents. The rumour, recorded by Greville, was that should Peel fail, then the King would immediately turn to Stanley as his long-standing preference.90 Following the election Peel recognized that ‘our main hope must be in the adhesion of moderate men not professing adherence to our politics’.91 Therefore, he would not discourage the Stanleyites by needless attacks, or allow their leaders to throw scruples of honour in the way of their withdrawal from old connections. At the same time, Graham was receiving reports from Tories who, dissatisfied with Peel, ‘thought they would more honourably and more safely be administered by [Stanley] than by the ‘‘Fag End’’ of the Duke [of Wellington’s] government of 1830 which was convicted of incompetency and had forfeited public confidence … [by] granting Catholic Emancipation’.92 Ripon, through his elder brother the Tory Earl de Grey, offered a link to these Conservative malcontents. ‘I am certain’, Graham concluded, ‘if we make a waiting race and ride it with patience and a steady hand, the Plate is ours.’ Both Grey and Holland, meanwhile, advised Melbourne against doing anything that might shut the door on Stanley, who, Grey advised, would be ‘a necessary card in the formation of a new administration’.93 Only the accession of Stanley, Holland added, would enable Melbourne to form a ministry with any prospect of stability.94 Lansdowne wrote to Stanley expressing an ardent desire that they should again come together. To this extent, events seemed to support Stanley’s hope of holding the balance of power in the new parliament. As Graham concluded: ‘The ministers will be weak and you [Stanley] will be strong; they must lean on you, and stand or fall at your pleasure; but, together we shall be able to battle the Destructives.’95 The mood at the Goodwood cabinet on Thursday 12 February was buoyant. The Whig–radical opposition clearly intended to test Peel’s government at the earliest possible opportunity over the election of the Speaker of the Commons. The incumbent, Sir Charles Manners Sutton, was the government nominee. From the beginning, Stanley felt he must vote for Manners Sutton if he stood, despite reports of Manners Sutton’s encouragement to the King to act precipitously in dismissing Melbourne the previous November. Stanley had been among those who had proposed Manners Sutton as Speaker in 1833. More importantly, to vote against him would be an immediate hostile move at the opening of the session. Graham saw the attempt to oust Manners Sutton as ‘the first factious effort to expel Peel from power without a trial, and to express a decided opinion against the dismissal of Melbourne’.96 Stanley quashed the proposal

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that Graham himself stand as a candidate. ‘We must have you in a much more prominent and important position than that of Speaker,’ he urged his principal supporter.97 He was also anxious to dissuade the moderate Spring Rice from standing as the opposition candidate, so that a more radical replacement would have to be found. This would enable him to portray the Whigs and Russell as being under the sway of O’Connell and the extremists. He successfully dissuaded Spring Rice from putting himself forward, despite Spring Rice’s being very keen to do so. He suggested that Spring Rice would not have the entire support of his own party, Russell being opposed to his candidacy. Lord Spencer (formerly Althorp) also advised Spring Rice not to stand. In early February, Grey, his son Lord Howick, and his son-in-law Charles Wood belatedly tried to revive Spring Rice’s candidacy, combined with plans for a coalition government of Whigs, moderate Tories, and Stanleyites. But their negotiations ran into the sand. At the end of January, Russell proposed to Stanley the tough, but dull, James Abercromby, formerly Master of the Mint in Melbourne’s administration, as a candidate for the Speakership. But Stanley refused to endorse Russell’s nominee.98 Nonetheless, Abercromby’s candidature served Stanley’s purposes as he now began to publicize Abercromby’s extreme principles. Before becoming a cabinet minister Abercromby had, Stanley declared, all but professed voluntary principles.99 Graham concurred that Abercromby was friendly to the voluntary principle; had voted for triennial parliaments; hesitated about opposing the ballot; and was the ‘creature’ of Lord Brougham.100 Grey thought Abercromby a pious fraud, but Melbourne favoured his candidature as retribution for Manners Sutton’s encouragement of his dismissal from office in November. No less importantly, Abercromby had been implicated in the expulsion of Stanley, and later Grey, from office. It was a bonus that Spring Rice, annoyed at being dropped by Russell, now communicated his friendly feelings towards Stanley. For his part, Stanley did not discount the possibility, at some time in the future, of Spring Rice’s joining the Stanleyites, despite differences over the Irish Church.101 The rebuff of Howick and Russell’s overtures was proof of Stanley’s confidence in his own independent position. The imperative tactical need remained to make Russell appear as radical as possible, while prising Peel away from Wellington and the Ultras. Prior to the meeting of parliament on Thursday 19 February, Graham calculated a larger number of Stanleyite adherents than Stanley had expected. Graham also affirmed the disgust that old Tories were feeling towards Peel’s ministry. The Ultras saw ‘no reason why they should sacrifice their principles to support men who


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appear to have none’.102 Analysis at Holland House supported Stanley’s optimism. Whigs agreed that the great danger to the government arose from divisions among their own friends. To keep their places the ministry must reform the Church. But if ministers proposed extensive reforms the Tories would revolt. This would result in a ‘mixed government’ under either Stanley or Peel.103 It was with continued assurance, therefore, that Stanley kept up pressure on Peel’s government, while stemming the force of a revolutionary party, all the while, he declared to Spring Rice, ‘keeping an eye upon the steady progress of our common reform principles’.104 The critical factor in the parliamentary equation of February 1835 was now the alignment of non-Conservative sentiment in the Commons. Anxious ‘to prevent the opposition being a rope of sand’, Joseph Parkes was actively rallying advanced Reformers, a group of seventy to eighty MPs, with the hope of combining with the Whigs and Irish.105 But Parkes confessed to Durham that he could not see any individual capable of drawing Whigs, Reformers, radicals, and Irish together: ‘what Whig has the power or public confidence to be the general leader?’106 For his part, Stanley aimed to lure Whigs and moderate Reformers away from the radicals and Irish. Russell, meanwhile, sought to isolate the Stanleyites by bringing together Whigs, Reformers, radicals, and O’Connell’s Irish MPs, a combination that might secure Russell the leadership of progressive Commons opinion. While supporting Stanley’s manly and honest course, The Times denounced the attempt to merge Whigs and radicals under the ‘meaningless’ label of Reformers as ‘a pitiable chimera’. Stanley ‘sees the whole fight on both sides, and buckles on his armour, while the Whigs know not that the foe is in the garrison with them’.107 Russell feared being squeezed by Stanley’s centrism on one side and radical impatience on the other. It was clear that advanced Reformers were planning a meeting, with or without Whig direction. If radicals and advanced Reformers took up an organized independent existence and Stanley attracted more cautious Reformers and Whigs, then Russell’s support would be fatally eroded. To pre-empt this imminent danger Russell volunteered himself for the vacant role of ‘general leader’, offering Whig guidance to radicals and advanced Reformers already in the process of coalescing. Lobbied by Hobhouse and Charles Thomson (Reform MP for Manchester), Melbourne was reluctantly drawn by Russell into calling a joint meeting of Whigs, Reformers, radicals, and O’Connell’s Irish at Lichfield House, on Wednesday 18 February, to declare support for Abercromby as Speaker. Russell reassured Melbourne that no formal union with O’Connell was intended. But, on 5 February, Melbourne reminded

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Russell of his deep anxiety over communication with O’Connell: some of their supporters ‘worship [O’Connell] as the Savages do the Evil Demon’.108 Lansdowne, likewise, objected to any communication which might ‘in any degree assume the character of party concert and alliance’.109 Melbourne’s brother-in-law the well-connected Duncannon, however, favoured combining with O’Connell. Together, Duncannon and the more ambivalent Russell carefully led Melbourne towards a Lichfield House meeting. On Saturday 14 February a delighted O’Connell accepted the invitation to attend a Lichfield House gathering and readily threw his support behind Abercromby’s candidature.110 The Lichfield House meeting of Wednesday 18 February, which was attended by about 130 MPs, has been celebrated by some historians as marking the formal union of a Liberal party embracing Whigs, Reformers, radicals, and Irish. But most at the time, notably Russell, stressed the temporary nature of the arrangement. Any commitment to common action, Russell emphasized, was strictly limited to Abercromby’s election as Speaker. At the Lichfield House meeting he avoided any discussion of future cooperation. Certainly Melbourne, Grey, and many other Whigs much preferred, if the opportunity arose, an alliance with Stanley and Graham to ‘that evil demon’ O’Connell. Prior to the meeting, Howick insisted to the Stanleyite MP Sir Matthew Ridley that, despite his support for Abercromby, he was not prepared ‘to go into headlong and factious opposition, and to make common cause with Hume, O’Connell and Co. I will do no such thing.’111 Russell subsequently admitted to Greville that it was decided, after 18 February, that no more such meetings should be held.112 Yet, the meeting did secure the failure of Manners Sutton’s reelection as Speaker. It also indicated, however conditionally the agreement to united action on 18 February was portrayed, the possibility of Whig, Reform, radical, and Irish MPs’ combining under Russell’s leadership, with the excluded Stanleyites thrown into the company of the Conservatives. On Thursday 19 February the Commons met in temporary accommodation, amid the fire-damaged buildings of Westminster. Narrowly, Abercromby defeated Manners Sutton by 316 to 306 votes, becoming the first Scot to be elected Speaker. Allegedly, O’Connell delivered sixty-one Irish votes for Abercromby to outweigh Tory and Stanleyite support for Manners Sutton. Intense speculation prior to the vote culminated in what many considered a dull debate. Stanley’s own speech Greville judged indiscreet in its reference to Abercromby’s radical views, such as support for the ballot. One Tory labelled Stanley’s statement ‘a second edition of the Thimblerig speech’.113 But, for Stanley, it remained essential


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to cast Abercromby and his supporters in as radical a light as possible. O’Connell found it hard to conceal his joy. Stanley, O’Connell believed, had ‘shot his bolt and shot it in vain’.114 Stanley’s speech had been ‘in his true thimblerig style of bitter but pointless sarcasm … there could not well be seen a countenance with less of the milk of human kindness about it than his visage did, I am told, display’. Opening the session with a defeat was a damaging blow to Peel’s government. But Stanley drew forty-three Whigs and Reformers, as well as one radical, with him in voting against Abercromby’s candidature.115 Intense centrist speculation, amid much uncertainty, survived. Stanley now found himself being courted by the Grey camp, via Howick, who were deeply disturbed by the association with O’Connell; by Russell, via Wood, looking for rapprochement over Irish Church reform; and by Peel directly, hoping to convert Stanley’s ‘independent support’ into a Commons majority. Immediately following Abercromby’s election as Speaker, a succession of mostly Whig visitors tested Stanley’s reaction to a variety of party alignments. Yet, Stanley remained non-committal, judging his price in the market as still high. On Thursday 19 February, Howick, Spring Rice, and Wood breakfasted together and agreed that Stanley and Graham must be brought back into the Whig–Reform fold, so as to relieve them from reliance on the radicals, particularly the Irish. Howick immediately visited Stanley at Carlton Gardens on Friday 20 February and was pleased to find Stanley not ‘quite so impracticable’ on the Irish Church as he had feared.116 In a discussion with Russell that same day, Wood found Lord John believing that the prospect of forming a government was contingent upon Stanley’s joining it, ‘as soon as the single question of the Irish Church was disposed of’.117 This, Wood welcomed, made the inclusion of Brougham, Durham, and O’Connell in any ministry unnecessary. On Monday 23 February, Wood visited Stanley with a compromise proposal on the Irish Church question. Stanley did not dismiss it out of hand, but affirmed that the difference between them was that, while Wood would apply surplus revenues from the Irish Church to general education, he would apply it to Protestant education only.118 Wood suggested that, if part of the tithes given to landlords was to be given to a new education board, then all difficulty would be avoided. Stanley replied that he would be interested in seeing the question fairly tried in the Commons. Wood was struck by Stanley’s apparent goodwill. On Sunday 22 February, Peel sent Stanley, via Graham, a copy of the King’s Speech prior to the debate on the Address, a clear indication

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of Peel’s wish to secure Stanleyite support. A few days earlier Peel had offered both Stanley and Graham Directorships of the National Gallery, which they had declined because of the political obligation it might entail. Stanley and Graham also promptly returned the package containing the King’s Speech to the prime minister unopened. Wishing to offer Peel an independent, and therefore, they suggested, more effective support, Graham professed to Peel that it would be of great advantage to say with truth that they had no prior knowledge of the Speech.119 Nonetheless, Graham reassured Peel that recent events had affirmed the importance Stanley and he attached to their presumption of support for Peel. With both Whig and Conservative suitors calling, on Monday 23 February, Stanley held a meeting of his friends at 5 Carlton Gardens. Stanley hoped forty MPs would be present. Prior to the meeting, Graham sent him a catalogue raisonné, annotating a list drawn up by Vernon, of forty-seven possible adherents, some of whom it was known could not come to the gathering.120 Thirty-six MPs, including Graham, actually attended.121 The difficulty of estimating their true support was underlined by the fact that only fourteen MPs on Graham’s list came to Carlton Gardens. While this suggested a broader penumbra of support, they comprised, as Graham acknowledged, ‘a motley crew’.122 Alongside Conservatives such as Sir Philip Durham (MP for Devizes), John Fector (MP for Dover), John Knox (MP for Dungannon), Major Thomas Marsland (MP for Stockport), and Sir Stratford Canning (MP for King’s Lynn) were Reformers such as Alderman Copeland (MP for Coleraine), Robert Ingham (MP for South Shields), Sir Oswald Mosley (MP for Staffordshire North), Sir James Tennent (MP for Belfast), Sir Harry Verney (MP for Buckingham), Richard Walker (MP for Bury), Major Richard Weyland (MP for Oxfordshire), Henry Wilson (MP for West Suffolk), and George Young (MP for Tynemouth). That attendance was much smaller than the earlier optimistic numbers of Stanleyites calculated by Bentinck and Hornby confirmed Stanley’s wisdom in maintaining a cautious line. Moreover, the great majority of those attending were members of the opposition. Alongside five Conservative MPs were gathered thirty-two Reformers and Whigs. That few Conservatives came to the meeting indicated Peel might yet succeed in consolidating the Conservatives around him, persuading the Ultras to accept moderate reform and avoiding a split among his back benches. Certainly the weight of Reform sentiment at the Carlton Gardens gathering put pressure on Stanley’s presumption of support for Peel. Stanley’s immediate difficulty was that most Reformers at the meeting wished for an active opposition to Peel, a strategy into which Stanley was


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reluctant to be pushed. At least thirteen of the MPs attending, such as David Barclay (MP for Sunderland), Edward Buller, Colonel Love Parry, Sir Ralph Lopes (MP for Westbury), Sir Oswald Mosley, Mark Philips (MP for Manchester), Richard Walker, had voted for Abercromby’s candidature for the Speakership.123 Securing unity among those present at Carlton Gardens was clearly not going to be easy. In the powerful cross-currents of February 1835 maintaining a neutral position now required exceptionally skilful handling of backbench support. The most dangerous undertow was Russell’s adept leadership of the Lichfield House forces. Russell headed an unwieldy heterogeneous body of radicals and Irish, as well as Whigs and Reformers. But he took great care, during late February, to ensure that his public pronouncements were restrained. This denied Stanley easy reference to imminent destructive reform. Peel, meanwhile, framed a King’s Speech he hoped would be satisfactory to Stanley, merging elements of the Tamworth Manifesto with the Knowsley Creed. As confirmation of his moderate intention, Peel appointed an Ecclesiastical Commission during January to review the Church of England’s episcopal patronage. The Archbishop of Canterbury, William Howley, was forced by the prime minister to concede that a reform of Church revenues was necessary. On Tuesday 24 February debate on the King’s Speech began. Feebly moved for the government by the former ‘waverer’ Sandon, the Address was immediately challenged by an opposition amendment proposed by Viscount Morpeth regretting the dissolution of parliament. Russell avoided a direct attack suggesting lack of confidence in the government. While calling for legislation dealing with the Irish Church, Protestant Dissenters, and English corporations, Morpeth’s amendment avoided any reference to appropriation or further constitutional change. This omission was intended to ensure that thoroughbred Whigs, nervous at associating with radicals and O’Connell, did not bolt out of the Lichfield House stable towards Stanley. During the afternoon of Wednesday 25 February, Stanley held a second meeting of his followers at Carlton Gardens attended by about fifty MPs. The larger attendance than that at the meeting held two days earlier was encouraging. Some of those MPs on Graham’s list who had been absent from the first gathering now swelled their ranks. But the pressure on Stanley to oppose Peel more actively than he preferred mounted. As Graham warned, some of their adherents ‘will be found red hot and quite unmanageable’.124 Following the meeting, Stanley decided to make a speech in the Commons that evening more hostile to the government than he had originally intended, while still denouncing Morpeth’s amendment.

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Thus, although opposing Morpeth’s motion, Stanley angered ministers with his ‘twitting’ or taunting of Wellington, his sarcasms and attacks on certain measures or omissions in the ministerial plan, and his reproaches against other members of the government.125 As Greville observed: ‘the duke is, after all, the idol of the Tories, and they will not endure that a youth like Stanley shall avail himself of his accidental advantages to treat their great man with levity and disrespect’.126 Stanley declared that the composition of Peel’s ministry was such that he could not place confidence in it. He decried the extraordinary concentration of power placed in the hands of Wellington the previous November and lamented the vagueness of the references to municipal reform in the Address. Stanley declared nothing should now obstruct the course of rational reform. Such statements were, he recognized, necessary to placate his own backbench support. Yet, at the same time, he argued that to condemn the recent dissolution would be premature and that the call in Morpeth’s amendment for reform of the Irish Church was ambiguous, perhaps calling for disestablishment. By firing his rhetorical artillery on both flanks his hastily modified speech accurately reflected the contrary expectations bearing on him. Stanley chose his speech that evening as the occasion to announce publicly the existence of the Stanleyites as a distinct parliamentary group. They were, he declared, a body of gentlemen, not insignificant in either point of numbers or station in the Commons, ‘bent upon the sure but steady attainment of certain measures of Reform’.127 This was a clarion call to all moderate Reformers. O’Connell, observing that Stanley’s smile resembled ‘a silver plate on a coffin’, responded by speculating sarcastically on what to call the Stanleyite band. It was neither a party, nor a faction, O’Connell ridiculed, but a tail.128 He then went on to adapt lines from George Canning’s poem ‘The Loves of the Triangles’, published in The Anti-Jacobin in 1798: Down thy hill, romantic Ashbourne glides The Derby dilly, with his six insides.

The label Derby Dilly (‘dilly’ being a familiar term for the diligence, or public stagecoach) quickly passed into common usage, the title never quite shedding the mocking tones of its proposer. The association of Canning’s pen with the tag added piquancy to the taunt. Many in the chamber recalled Tom Moore’s satirical pastiche composed in 1818: Beginning gay, desperate, dashing down-hilly; And ending as dull as a six-inside Dilly!


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The Times, however, welcomed Stanley’s announcement. ‘A new relationship between parties was proclaimed if not founded by the noble lord’s speech.’129 John Richards (MP for Knaresborough), Sir James Tennent, Sir Matthew Ridley (MP for Newcastle upon Tyne), and George Young took the opportunity, during subsequent debate, to declare their adherence to Stanley. Privately, as debate on the Address continued, Stanley, through his friend Lord Francis Egerton, urged Peel to put up a strong government speaker able to end the ‘balderdash’ of the opposition. This conduct, in light of his own speech, Greville judged ‘queer’.130 Greville also shrewdly noted: ‘Stanley’s object at present is to gather to himself the largest party he can; but though he may lead them, he can only lead them the way they are minded to go.’ Many of Stanley’s supporters wished to mount a strong attack on the ministry. Meanwhile, Howick supported Morpeth’s amendment in the hope that it would not force the ministry to resign, but lead to a reconstruction of the cabinet. This confirmed suspicions that the ‘Grey camp’ looked to Peel and Stanley coming together, while jettisoning the Ultra Tories. The habitués of Holland House noted that both the government and the opposition were ‘composed of discordant materials’ and the future depended upon which party would be the first to break up.131 O’Connell confessed, ‘every political event is in such obscurity that it is in vain to prophesy’.132 At half past one in the morning of Friday 27 February, Morpeth’s amendment to the Address was carried by the narrow majority of 309 to 302 votes. Despite this defeat Peel declined to resign. The premier took his cue from those like Howick who, although supporting Morpeth’s amendment, stated their wish for Peel to stay in office. Peel defied the opposition to bring on a motion of no confidence and brazened out subsequent opposition threats. At the same time, the success of Morpeth’s amendment showed that the opposition, embracing radicals and Irish, could unite behind a moderate motion, seemingly refuting Stanley’s imputations of extremism. Just under fifty Stanleyite MPs followed Stanley’s lead in opposing Morpeth’s amendment. Another seventeen MPs, all Reformers, whom Stanley and Graham had identified as possible adherents, supported Russell and Morpeth. Russell prepared to wait for Peel to bring forward legislation and then launch another attack on carefully chosen ground. All this, during the first days of the session, made Stanley’s position increasingly difficult. As Lord William Russell observed to his younger brother Lord John, ‘with one eye on the hills and the other one on the plains’ Stanley was now ‘undecided where and how to fight’.133 With neither

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Peel nor Russell relinquishing the centre ground, or allowing themselves to be portrayed as the pawns of their extreme supporters, Stanley’s claim to represent judicious moderation came under ever greater pressure. It was against his own preferences that Russell then found himself forced to call a second general meeting of the opposition at Lichfield House in order to prevent the radical Joseph Hume from moving that naval supplies be granted for only three months. Russell feared Hume’s motion might split the opposition, driving some Whigs towards Stanley and establishing the independence of the radicals. The inconvenience of another formal opposition meeting, suggesting a permanence to his alliance of Whigs, Reformers, radicals, and Irish, Russell now judged to be less than the danger of the Whigs’ apparently being wagged by their radical tail. Far worse, he believed, would be an opposition rupture encouraging moderates to look to Stanley for leadership. Russell again invited all shades of the opposition to Lichfield House on Thursday 12 March where, with great difficulty, Hume was persuaded to drop his motion. Once again Russell adeptly preserved a broad progressive opposition under his leadership in the Commons, while stifling a radical initiative. A telling indication of Stanley’s subsequent loss of ground came during the debate, on Friday 13 March, of Lord Londonderry’s appointment as ambassador to St Petersburg. Renowned for his support of Russian policy against Turkey and the rebellious Poles, Londonderry offered an easy target for opposition attack. Stanley joined opposition denunciation of the appointment.134 But it was telling that in replying to opposition accusations Peel took no notice of Stanley’s speech.135 In short, by midMarch both Peel and Russell felt able to ignore Stanley—neglect, rather than abuse, being the worse political obloquy. A meeting in Carlton Gardens on Wednesday 11 March did little to avert the impending collapse of Stanley’s support under increasing centrifugal pressure. At the gathering Stanley was pressed by George Young to declare in strong terms his want of confidence in the government. Patrick Stewart (MP for Lancaster) declared his support for the motion Hume was contemplating. Stanley shrugged off these strong pronouncements. Other Stanleyites, such as the moderate Reformer Edmund Charlton (MP for Ludlow), were deeply disquieted by the hostility to the ministry voiced at the meeting. A debilitating uncertainty descended on the Stanleyite pack. This confusion played directly into Peel and Russell’s hands. The same day as Russell’s second Lichfield House meeting, on 12 March, Stanley wrote a long memorandum analysing the political situation.136 The most desirable administration, he maintained, would be composed


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of Peel, a few of his immediate adherents, some of the moderates from Melbourne’s late cabinet, and the Stanleyites. The question remained, how was this to be achieved safely and honourably? In their neutral position Stanley believed his followers should approach discussion with possible allies without partisanship; otherwise they would scatter the moderates of both parties. Yet, he now acknowledged that those who stood centre had to attach themselves to whichever party was least likely to be carried away by the violence of its extreme supporters. In his own mind, by mid-March, despite the views of many of his supporters, this pointed to the Conservatives. On the government side, the Ultras were weakened and knew it. Peel had momentarily tamed them. On the opposition side the radicals were strong and were aware of it. Russell would obey his extremists. These calculations prompted Stanley’s rejection of the proposal submitted by Howick to Graham on Monday 9 March calling for a compromise on Irish Church Establishment, so that the Whigs would have cause to abandon Hume, O’Connell, and Co. Once again the ‘Grey camp’ sought reconciliation. But Stanley recorded a forcible denial of Howick’s proposition that the Protestant Church Establishment in Ireland impeded, rather than promoted, the moral and spiritual improvement of the people.137 He also rejected Howick’s latitudinarian claim that no one set of men had a right to declare their religion true and that of others false. This, he observed, was an argument against Establishment in any circumstances. The State supported a Protestant Church because the State, he insisted, believed in the truth of the doctrines of that Church and deemed that, for the good of the whole community, these doctrines should be promulgated by the authority of the State. Howick claimed that the removal of the privileges enjoyed by the Church of Ireland was the natural sequel to Catholic Emancipation and the Reform Act of 1832. Stanley countered that the intention of both measures was not to initiate additional reforms, but to establish a foundation upon which the demand for further change could be resisted. The first report of the Ecclesiastical Commission, published on Tuesday 17 March, meanwhile, affirmed Peel’s intention to introduce judicious reform of the Anglican Church’s revenues. On Friday 27 March, Russell then dealt the coup de grâce to Stanley’s ambitions by declaring Irish appropriation as the issue with which he would force Peel’s ministry out of office. ‘It is a great question of principle,’ Russell impressed upon Grey, ‘and must be decided in one way or the other.’138 By March 1835 appropriation no longer divided Whigs and Reformers, as it had done in June 1833 and June 1834. An important

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shift had occurred, reflecting an increasing polarization of parliamentary opinion on religious issues, in particular over the status of the Established Church. Since 1833 a mounting wave of pamphlets, sermons, addresses, and articles, propounding the views of radical anti-Anglicanism, militant Nonconformism, and an intensifying Anglican reaction, embracing Oxford Tractarianism and evangelical calls for reform, had sharpened sectarian asperities. The impact of this on MPs gave Russell the opportunity to take up Irish appropriation as the defining issue for a combined Whig, Reform, and radical opposition. Russell, moreover, skilfully presented appropriation as capable of serving diverse opposition aims. For Whigs it might represent a prudent concession, safeguarding the future position of the Protestant Church in Ireland. For English radicals it might signal a significant loosening of Anglican exclusivity, with important implications for Nonconformism. For Irish radicals it might embody a critical adjustment to the terms of British Protestant rule. Equally importantly, by taking up Irish appropriation, Russell acquired the means of polarizing Commons opinion. A succession of minor, if persistent, government defeats, over a wide range of questions, during March exposed the increasing vulnerability of Peel’s minority government. The narrow defeat by the government on Friday 20 March of a hostile amendment moved by Spring Rice, referring to appropriation, foreshadowed impending debate. Despite Stanley’s declaring his support for Peel, ten MPs, whose votes Stanley had hoped to secure, followed Russell, Ellice, and Spring Rice into the opposition lobby. Four weeks earlier Wood had noted that Graham talked of maintaining the connection with Ireland by a Protestant garrison and the sword, apparently willing to raise the cry of ‘no Popery’.139 At the same time, Graham denounced the doctrine of what he called ‘proportion’, implied in the establishment of an Irish Church Commission the previous spring, as a direct danger to the Church of England. ‘The only thing that seemed never to have entered his head’, Wood concluded, ‘was any practical mode of settling the question in dispute.’ Like the Greek god Eris tossing the apple of discord into the wedding feast, Russell took up appropriation as an issue guaranteed to scatter the Derby Dilly. Ejected from the middle ground, Stanley would be forced to choose sides. On Friday 27 March, Russell announced his intention to propose a motion, three days hence, to consider the application of the Church of Ireland’s surplus revenues to the religious and moral instruction of all classes in Ireland. While this affirmed the alliance between O’Connell, radicals, and Reformers, Russell ensured that the motion would not drive


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cautious Whigs into the opposing lobby. On Saturday 28 March he called a third Lichfield House meeting. His hesitancy of February in bringing Whigs, Reformers, radicals, and Irish together was now gone. What had changed over the intervening five weeks was that his fear of Stanley leading off those Whigs alarmed by radical company had abated. Moreover, he had demonstrated that radical and Irish MPs would dutifully support the Whigs over moderate initiatives. It was only left to Conservatives to sneer at what they scathingly dubbed ‘the Lichfield House Compact’, a term intended to embarrass Whigs and moderate Reformers over their dubious association with radical and Irish extremists. As Stanley privately acknowledged on Sunday 29 March (the occasion of his thirty-sixth birthday), all this placed ‘matters on a new footing’.140 The power of the appropriation issue to dissolve Stanley’s support, once taken up unequivocally by Russell, was evident at a meeting of the Derby Dilly that same evening. Nine of the MPs present declared their intention to vote with Russell and one former Stanleyite stayed away from the meeting. As Greville observed, these were ‘queer partisans and soi disant followers, who oppose [Stanley] on his own vital question’.141 The large division on Russell’s motion, on Thursday 2 April, involving the whole House with the exception of thirteen or fourteen MPs, produced a crucial opposition victory with a majority of thirty-three, Russell’s motion passing by 322 to 289 votes. According to Ellice’s calculations a mere eighteen Stanleyites stood by Peel at the final hour.142 In fact, thirty-four MPs, who had consistently supported Stanley in the division lobby since February, followed Stanley and Graham in opposing Russell’s motion. But eight of those MPs were declared Conservatives who, on this issue, saw no distinction between Peel and Stanley. Only twenty-six Reform or Whig MPs, such as Sir Richard Bulkeley, Edmund Charlton, George Harcourt, Sir John Johnstone, Sir Charles Lemon, Sir Ralph Lopes, Sir Oswald Mosley, Sir Matthew Ridley, and Major Richard Weyland, and the Irish MPs Sir Robert Ferguson, John Martin, and Sir James Tennent, followed Stanley into the government lobby; nineteen Reform or Whig MPs associated with the Derby Dilly during the previous weeks, such as David Barclay, Alderman Copeland, and Sir George Pechell, gave their vote to Russell. A few Dilly MPs, such as Robert Ingham and Sir Harry Verney, stayed away. The Stanleyites were irreparably split. The division not only brought Peel’s minority government to an end; it also sounded the death knell of Stanley’s aspirations. During the debate Stanley delivered a scathing speech that decisively ended any possibility of reuniting with the Whigs if led by Russell. He attacked Russell and

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accused the opposition of inconsistency.143 He ‘poured forth a torrent of sarcasm and ridicule upon the prospective government that he concludes they meditate’.144 He described the Commons majority supporting Russell as a ‘miscellaneous multitude’, whose cross-grained elements, if they came into office, would not be able to hold together for a single week. If Whigs were not going to repudiate Russell, Stanley’s future now lay with Peel. The point was forced home when, on Tuesday 7 April, the opposition passed, with a majority of twenty-seven votes, an amendment stating appropriation must form part of the government’s Irish Tithe measure. Both Stanley and Graham were angry that Peel had not resigned immediately after the vote on 2 April. Stanley conjured up a colourful sporting analogy. Peel was like ‘a hunted fox, who, instead of dying gallantly before the hounds in the open, skulks along the hedgerows, and at last turns up his legs in the ditch’.145 The vote of 7 April put the fate of Peel’s ministry beyond doubt. But Stanley’s own pack was now scattered and no longer responding to his call. Not only did some of his former supporters vote with Russell on 7 April, but eight loyal Stanleyite MPs absented themselves from the division. During the weeks since early February, Stanley had received consistent support from thirty-nine MPs, eleven Conservatives and twenty-eight Whigs and Reformers. By mid-April only sixteen of those Whig and Reform MPs were prepared to follow him towards closer union with Peel. When Peel announced the resignation of his ministry, on Wednesday 8 April, the King immediately sent for Grey. William IV, urging a union of parties, hoped that Grey might bring Stanley and other moderates with him into office. But Grey told the King that such a union, however desirable, was no longer practicable. A note from Grey to Stanley the following day quickly confirmed that the recent appropriation vote made it impossible for them to come together.146 In conversation with Greville, Graham confirmed that the Stanleyites now looked solely to a junction with Peel.147 On the evening of Sunday 12 April the Dilly dined together at Stafford House, the London residence of the Duke of Sutherland, and agreed that appropriation presented an absolute bar to sharing office with Russell. The next day Taylor communicated to Stanley the King’s lingering hope that a moderate union might yet be achieved in the not too distant future. ‘Rome was not built in a day,’ Taylor observed.148 Over the next few days the King continued to meet with Grey, Lansdowne, and Melbourne, fulminating against the incendiaries in the Commons. Then, as an irritated William IV reluctantly accepted the logic dictated by the appropriation


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debate, Melbourne was given carte blanche to form a Whig government. Nonetheless, difficult negotiations with Melbourne followed as the King objected to any radical presence in the new administration. Melbourne, for his part, wished for powers respecting the peerage, household, and other matters as a public sign of the King’s confidence in his new ministers. Stanley had welcomed the possibility of a Grey ministry. On Monday 13 April, with Melbourne now having the commission, he reassured Taylor that the longer difficulties persisted in the formation of a new cabinet, the more likely it was that Whigs would join a conservative government.149 Grey refused to join Melbourne unless appropriation, the obstacle to Stanley’s accepting office, was dropped. But this was a request with which Melbourne could not comply. Wood’s detailed record of the intense negotiation that occurred during the following week reveals that Stanley’s name was never mentioned in the discussion of cabinet posts. Stanley was now marginalized. He spent the rest of April away from London on the south coast at Brighton. Finally, on Easter Sunday, 19 April, Melbourne’s new ministry was sworn in. Prominent radicals or their sympathizers, in particular Brougham, Durham, and O’Connell, were not given office. As Ellice observed to Hume, moderate men would be alarmed if the union of parties in opposition to Peel led to an acceptance ‘of the extreme opinions of the côte gauche’. The country wanted ‘a steady, middle government, having the left and the right equally opposed to it’.150 But by April 1835 Stanley no longer had a prominent role in the alignment of moderate reforming opinion. This was Russell’s achievement. The faithful Graham maintained as favourable a Stanleyite gloss on events as possible. He talked of acting with Peel with as much zeal as if he had been a member of the cabinet which had just fallen.151 The King had to be advised never to admit O’Connell to office, while Graham vehemently denied that the Stanleyites’ aloofness had prevented Peel from continuing in office. Nevertheless, Stanley’s moment had clearly passed. His ability, energy, and readiness in debate were universally recognized. But the rashness of his Thimblerig speech and his twitting of Wellington had raised doubts about his judgement. Brilliance, dash, and boldness, it was suggested, were dangerously marred by misguided impetuosity. Graham defended his leader against Greville’s accusations of levity, but candidly acknowledged Stanley’s fondness for the exhilaration of spirited contest. Nonetheless, Stanley was actuated, Graham insisted, by honourable and consistent principles.152 His appetite for the political fray served higher honourable purposes, even if he often seemed not to regard political life

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with the high seriousness which Greville felt it deserved. During the critical months of late 1834 and early 1835, as Stanley sought the leadership of intelligent moderation, opportunity heightened his resolve and hardened his combative sense of purpose. Yet, the skill of Russell and the intelligence of Peel rendered Stanley’s ambitious assertions as arrogance and depicted his determination as impetuosity.

chapter 4

Conservative Consolation: 1835–1841 The time is gone by when it could be hoped that a third party could be useful on particular measures. (Stanley to Vernon, 2 January 1836)

It seems to me that while we keep, as I hope we shall do, an unreserved private communication among ourselves, it would be very inexpedient to convert the ‘Dilly’ into an ‘Omnibus’, as it was during the last session, by any attempt to organise a regular formal party. Our numbers are too small to produce any real effect, parties not being so balanced as to give us, if we wished it, a power of turning the scales. (Stanley to Ridley, 12 January 1836)

It had been truly observed, by one who well knew what he spoke of, that there was a vast difference between the Whigs of 1835 and the Whigs of 1832 (hear, hear); but if gentlemen would refer to history, he thought they would find, when they compared the Whigs of 1838 with the Whigs of 1688 (cheers), that there was indeed a wide difference between the political principles which actuated the great men of the former period, and the principles which were professed by those who call themselves the Whigs of the present day. (Cheers.) (Stanley at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall, 12 May 1838)

he years from 1835 to 1838 formed a muted coda to those fast-fading ‘visions of the helm’ that once seemed to Stanley so tangible. If not for his resignation from office in late May 1834, because of his insistence that Grey’s cabinet oppose, rather than postpone, Ward’s motion; if not for the misjudgement of his Thimblerig speech; if not for William IV’s precipitancy in sending immediately for Wellington in November; if not for the sensation of Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto; if not for Russell’s skill in bringing Whigs and Irish and English radicals together, then events might have unfolded differently. As it was, the powerful crescendo of Stanleyite hopes, prior to February 1835, lapsed into a prolonged diminuendo of disappointment. The intensity of Stanley’s public life ebbed away as others

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conservative consolation: 1835 –1841

more influential than himself secured their prominence. In the Commons, Russell and Peel became the focus of new allegiances. In the Lords a gloomy Melbourne resumed the premiership. Like Icarus, carried towards the sun by soaring ambition, Stanley rapidly fell away from the object of his aspiration.

We too must bear our load of toil, on whom This deep humiliation Jove hath laid. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 307)

Stanley deemed Melbourne’s new cabinet of April 1835 less radical than might have been feared.1 Reassuringly, Brougham, Durham, and O’Connell were not given office, nor were Abercromby or Ellice on the front bench. But he still regarded the ministry with great suspicion. He believed O’Connell exercised a powerful covert influence in government circles. O’Connell’s Irish party abandoned their opposition seats in the Commons to sit alongside Melbourne’s ministry on the government side of the House. Graham urged a despondent Stanley to give his supporters a lead. ‘Many of the Dilly are, of course, anxious to know whether the party still exists, what line is to be taken, what places to be occupied, what language to be held, and all this, in the present state of affairs, requires caution and deliberation.’2 But by April 1835 it was clear that no more than twenty MPs looked to Stanley for leadership. Sir Harry Verney, who thought favourably of the new administration, represented those Dilly MPs who wished to retain a link with Melbourne’s ministry. Stanley’s own preference was not to do anything in haste to overthrow the ministry. ‘For us’, he told Graham, ‘I see more than ever the necessity of remaining quite quiet.’3 Melbourne was reportedly very unhappy with his lot, critical of his colleagues and in low spirits. He offered both Richmond and Graham the Governor-Generalship of India, which both refused. After visiting Brighton, Stanley returned to Carlton Gardens for a meeting with Graham, Ripon, and Richmond, at which it was agreed to await events. ‘We doubt and mistrust the men; but we watch their measures,’ Stanley observed of Melbourne’s new cabinet.4 Accompanied by the Earl and Countess of Wilton and Lord George Bentinck, he then spent the first days of May, with parliament adjourned, at Newmarket in a welcome retreat from Westminster. It was left to Graham, through conversations with Hardinge, to foster relations with Peel and


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to seek a common understanding over forthcoming debate on municipal corporation reform.5 Upon the resumption of the session on Tuesday 12 May, Stanley and Graham took their usual seats in the Commons, below the gangway on the government side, unless ousted by the radicals. ‘We will then cross over to the other side, having shown by our first choice, that it was not our intention to offer a decided opposition, if [the government’s] measures should not be violently radical.’6 Graham agreed that their best course was not to take a prominent role in organizing any opposition to the government, and especially to avoid identification with the more violent Tories. ‘We must hold our own in point of principle and [the Conservatives] must come to us.’7 That Peel declined to attend a dinner of Conservative MPs prior to the session, ‘thinking it too much a` la mode John Russell and O’Connell’, confirmed ‘he was unwilling to bind himself too closely to Chandos and Co.’8 Stanley and Graham retained their seats below the gangway on the ministerial side of the House until the debate on the government’s Municipal Corporation Bill in July. Rubbing shoulders with Irish and English radicals, however, proved acutely uncomfortable. They were surrounded, Graham observed, ‘by strange company’.9 While allowing Stanley and Graham to retain their seats, radical and Irish MPs prevented any of Stanley’s remaining supporters, such as Lord George Bentinck, John Davenport (MP for Stoke on Trent), George Harcourt (MP for Oxfordshire), Robert Ingham, John Johnstone (MP for Dumfriesshire), John Plumptre (MP for East Kent), Thomas Sheppard (MP for Frome), George Sinclair, Sir James Tennent, and Richard Weyland, sitting by him. In this ‘unpleasant situation’, sitting in proximity to O’Connell, Stanley was surrounded by remarks both offensive and provoking. Peel, by contrast, made frequent reference to agreement with points raised by Stanley during debate on the Municipal Corporation Bill. Russell’s reform provided for local councils elected by ratepayers resident for three years in the borough, doing away with the old closed and oligarchic corporations dominated by aristocratic patrons. Like Peel, Stanley objected to annual corporation elections, fearing (correctly as it proved) that frequent contests would produce a constant state of electioneering fever, intensifying partisan divisions within local communities. But Russell and the radicals defeated Stanley’s proposal for triennial or biennial elections and loud taunts erupted from the radicals sitting by him. After voting against the bill, during the evening of Wednesday 1 July, Graham was greeted, on returning to his seat, with further derisive cheers and abuse from his radical neighbours. He straight away got up and walked over to the

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opposition benches. The evening newspaper, The Globe, followed this up with a scathing article attacking the Stanleyites. ‘Such an article,’ Stanley observed, ‘in so long a leading article of the acknowledged government paper, left me no choice of interpretation.’10 The following evening, while returning to his usual seat after a division, he too was assailed by jeers from the radicals, with one hostile voice crying out: ‘Why don’t you stay where you are?’ At this he bowed in acquiescence and retreated to the other side of the House to sit alongside Graham.11 An undignified wrangle followed as O’Connell taunted him with his change of position. O’Connell’s ‘coarse attack’ lashed Stanley ‘into a fury and a series of retorts followed between them, without any result. O’Connell half shuffled out of his expressions, but refused to apologise.’12 In private, Stanley remained bitterly defiant; ‘if I was driven by ‘‘the wasps’’ it was because I prefer walking out of the way of a hive, to crushing a dozen with my foot, and being ingloriously stung by fifty more’.13 This unseemly episode did little to repair Stanley’s damaged prestige, despite The Times, which during the session repeatedly applauded Stanley’s statements, observing that the movement of ‘two such powerful allies’ as Stanley and Graham over to the Conservative side of the House would ‘add not a little to the consciousness of inferiority which ministers already betray in the presence of Sir R. Peel’.14 Greville commented that ‘Lord Stanley is certainly fallen from his high estate, and is in a very different position from that which he aspired to occupy at the beginning of the session. He is without a party, and without any authority in the House except what he derives from his own talents for debate.’ A half-dozen MPs now followed Stanley, including the faithful Lord George Bentinck, Gally Knight (MP for North Nottinghamshire), Stratford Canning, and Sir Matthew Ridley. Greville believed the Stanleyite party ‘was finally extinguished by this act’.15 In the scathing private explanation that Stanley wrote to Russell on Friday 3 July deep bitterness burned through: ‘you have had greatness thrust upon you. I have declined it. Which is the most truly great man? Comparisons are odious.’16 Russell sought to demonstrate after May 1835 that Melbourne’s government was not in thrall to its radical supporters. In early June he quashed George Grote’s ballot motion and rejected the need for shorter parliaments or further extension of the franchise. Likewise, he accepted some of the Lords’ amendments to his Municipal Corporation Bill, on the property qualification for town councillors for example, so as to reach a compromise with Peel. In turn, wishing to avoid a dissolution prior to the 1836 session, Peel was compliant. Russell sought to show that the Lichfield House


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alliance did not produce extreme government, a policy Holland described as one of ‘great caution, temper and circumspection’.17 Equally, Peel in a major City speech on 11 May reaffirmed Conservative policy in terms of the Tamworth Manifesto; the safe remedy of proven abuses; the abolition of patronage and sinecures; and the defence of the Establishment, property, and just privileges; combined with a steady refusal to allow specious reforms to transform the constitution into a democratic republic. With both Russell and Peel espousing moderation Stanley had no distinctive role to play. An exhausted calm followed the violent storms of the early part of the session. For the remainder of 1835 a disconsolate Stanley withdrew from politics. A mood of chastened introspection descended as, like the great warrior Achilles, he retired to his tent. His only major speech was in support of Peel’s unsuccessful attempt to amend the government’s Irish Church Tithe Bill, which embraced appropriation. Stanley echoed Peel’s argument that the wealth of the Irish Church was exaggerated by its opponents, and that, in fact, there were no surplus revenues to be appropriated.18 Staunch opposition to appropriation in the Lords subsequently killed off the government measure. Meanwhile, both Stanley and Graham, alongside Peel, Russell, Hobhouse, Howick, O’Connell, and others, served as members of the Commons Select Committee drawing up a brief for the competition to design the new Houses of Parliament. The Committee agreed that the new buildings should be in the ‘national’ style of Gothic, as an architectural expression of Britain’s historic parliamentary government, as opposed to the more cosmopolitan and republican aesthetic of classicism. In June, Stanley attended the marriage of his sister Lady Ellinor to the Revd Frank Hopwood, future Canon of Chester Cathedral. By the beginning of August he was back at Knowsley where, apart from a short visit to Ballykisteen, he stayed until mid-November. As a consequence, the Dilly MPs Bentinck and Stratford Canning were left to navigate the closing debate on Corporation reform without guidance from their leader. On Tuesday 1 September, Stanley attended the marriage of his wayward brother Henry Stanley to Ann Woolhouse. Henry Stanley’s brief military career, as a captain in the Scots’ Fusilier Guards, had already been cut short in 1835 because of drunkenness, after he became MP for Preston in 1832. But his parliamentary career was no more successful and in 1837 he retired his seat. Henry Stanley’s considerable personal charm was more than offset by his weakness for drink, love of gambling, and predilection for bad company. Repeatedly he disappeared for long periods, to the alarm of his family. His marriage to Ann Woolhouse, ‘whom he

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had literally picked up in the streets, and whose attachment to him was certainly not exclusive’, marked his ostracism from respectable society.19 Thereafter, permanently in debt and often living abroad, he became a constant supplicant to his elder brother for funds. During Henry’s lifetime Stanley passed over nearly £100,000 to his younger brother, which was dissipated on drink and gambling. The family’s verdict on Henry was succinct: ‘few men have had more chances in life, and very few have so thoroughly muddled them away’. But during the autumn of 1835 it was the illness of Stanley’s 9-year-old son and Lady Stanley’s fourth pregnancy that preoccupied Stanley’s thoughts. Battue shooting on the Knowsley estate occupied his time. Over three days, in the company of Lord Wilton, 485 head of game were bagged. In seclusion at Knowsley, Stanley’s contempt for the government intensified. He believed, contrary to Russell’s statements, that the ministry had ‘sold themselves, body and soul, to the radicals, who have them completely in their power’.20 Ripon concurred that ‘Mephistopheles did not acquire more entire possession of Dr. Faustus than O’Connell has of the government.’21 Stanley was deeply shocked to learn that the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Lord Mulgrave, was inviting O’Connell, ‘whom I should have thought no gentleman would willingly associate with’, to dine at the Vice-Regal Lodge.22 With his feet literally under the government table, Stanley detected O’Connell’s sedition in the report that some of his Irish tenants had met on an ‘isolated part’ of the Ballykisteen estate and agreed to resist the tithe. When their leases came up for renewal he saw little difficulty in simply adding the charge to their rent.23 Indeed, while visiting Ballykisteen during September, he encountered a formidable resistance to the paying of the tithe by his tenants to the local Anglican incumbent the Revd Coote. His response was to express an unflinching determination to have the claims of the incumbent satisfied. In the forthcoming session he expected the radicals, frustrated over the Irish tithe and municipal reform, to bring forward a plan for the reform of the Lords. In the meantime, he allowed his membership of Brooks’s to lapse. The loyal Graham concurred that ‘the cabinet must either be divided and go to pieces from disunion or advance under the impulse of O’Connell at railroad pace to a Republic’.24 Peel echoed Stanley and Graham’s own fears when, during a speech at Tamworth in early September, he spoke of the dangerous drift towards ‘an uncontrolled popular assembly’.25 On 26 September, Stanley left Tipperary for Knowsley and, in October, he addressed the Liverpool Agricultural Society. With Irish social conflict fresh in his mind, he took as his theme the mutual interdependence of


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all classes; the duties, as well as the privileges, of the aristocracy; and ‘the great truth that in the concord and welfare of each class consist the prosperity, the glory, and the happiness of the whole’.26 His words were received with enthusiastic cheering. His subsequent re-election as Lord Rector of Glasgow University was gratifying. But it now lacked the political significance which it had held just twelve months before. On 17 November, Stanley and his family travelled to 25 Grosvenor Square, his father’s London residence, where they spent the Christmas season. Eddy was now recovered from his illness and Lady Stanley was brought under the close care of their London physician, the eminent Dr Locock, for the final weeks of her pregnancy. During December, Stanley visited Melbourne. This excited speculation in the press about Stanley’s joining the government. But, as a discouraged Stanley was the first to observe, such a thing was now impossible.27 Seclusion offered some domestic joy with the birth of a healthy daughter, named Emma after her mother, at 11 p.m. on Christmas Day 1835. After ten hours of labour, during which Lady Stanley ‘suffered dreadfully’ and the baby seemed ‘in great danger’, their ‘very fine little girl’ was born.28 Because Locock missed his Christmas dinner while attending to the birth, Stanley sent him each Christmas thereafter a turkey from the Knowsley estate. The withdrawal from politics also gave time for reflection. With the wisdom of hindsight, Stanley now thought that his attempt to form a moderate anti-radical party in November 1834 had been premature, allowing Russell to preserve a Whig–radical alliance. It was a lesson he never forgot. He would not assume power before the debilitating divisions of his opponents were clearly affirmed. In 1851 and 1855 his caution would infuriate Disraeli. But the error of haste was a moral Stanley drew from his failure of 1834–5 and it informed his thinking whenever, thereafter, the prospect of power presented itself. The object of the Whigs, ‘the nominal leaders of the government’, he predicted, would now be to do as little as possible in the forthcoming 1836 session.29 On the English Church they would propose a measure emanating from the Church Commission which would therefore have the sanction of the bishops. But he was curious to see how they might get through the difficulty of church rates. He anticipated ministers’ making considerable modifications to their Irish Church Bill, but retaining their main principle of appropriation. Nonetheless, he did not think a change of government either likely or desirable. ‘The repetition of the blunder of last November would be fatal. [The ministry] must be left to stagger on, till they either quarrel with their radical friends, or by inordinate concessions disgust the country.’30 Yet they had so small a Commons

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majority that they dare not quarrel with any of the subordinate parties that composed their majority, ‘least of all with the great autocrat O’Connell’.31 Stanley expected the government to be driven publicly into much of which they privately disapproved. What was to be avoided was another premature attempt to form an alternative ministry, only to fail. That O’Connell, when he visited Liverpool in January 1836, was enthusiastically received by the borough’s Irish immigrant population highlighted the dangers of resurgent radicalism. All this, Stanley concluded, ‘craves wary walking’.32 For politicians success is usually a constantly receding mirage, as the unforeseen and the contingent confound expectation, leaving frustration and disappointment in their wake. In January 1836 Stanley acknowledged the futility of his ambitions. The time is gone by when it could be hoped that a third party could be useful on particular measures. The formation of ‘the Dilly’ depended upon the balance of parties being such that a section comparatively trifling in numbers, could exercise a powerful influence over a weak government, to which it should give a general support against a factious opposition. But no calculations can lead us to flatter ourselves that one can exercise any such influence now.33

This comprised the obituary of Dillyite hopes. Reluctant to restrict his freedom of action by binding himself to Peel, the best he could hope for was the actions of the government creating a sense of imminent danger rendering necessary a union of all that was ‘in the best, not the vulgar, sense, Conservative’.34 Graham ascribed their downfall to political differences becoming infused with religious dissensions, a compound that ‘has never failed to produce the bitterest potion’. As a result, the effort to induce men to lay aside their party differences in support of patriotic measures had become hopeless.35 During January 1836 Richmond indicated his preference for Melbourne and Spencer over Peel and the Tories. Assuming the parochial habits of a country gentleman it became doubtful whether Richmond would ever wish to accept office, ‘even if the present government were to be beat and Stanley’s party to form a prominent feature in the new administration’.36 During the following months Richmond’s letters to Stanley were ‘full of farming’ and repeated ‘declarations of never having anything to do with office again’.37 Graham confirmed that ‘the thin and slippery ice of neutrality … is fast melting away’.38 Nonetheless, a letter published in The Times on 6 February 1836, with the correspondent signing himself simply Runnymede, was full of hyperbolic praise for Stanley’s course since 1834. Noting that Stanley had


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been acclaimed as a future prime minister by Melbourne three years before, the letter lavished plaudits on the Derby heir, who had preferred to preserve his honour and the prosperity of the nation, rather than gratify his ambition. Escaping from the thrall of his chicaning Whig colleagues, Stanley had earned the admiration of an ancient and honourable nation by proving himself a pure, noble, and natural leader, personifying the virtue and glories of his race. The colourful language was characteristic of the anonymous author, the debt-ridden scandalous novelist Benjamin Disraeli, who the following year would enter the Commons as Conservative MP for Maidstone. But this embroidered eulogy from such a suspect pen could not disguise the fact that Stanley had became a marginal political force. The 1836 session proved comparatively quiet, providing further indications of Stanley’s gradual movement towards Peel. As anticipated, the Address on Thursday 4 February was ‘a very milk-and-water production’.39 That the Dilly MP Denison declined Howick’s invitation to move the Address indicated a residue of collective Stanleyite feeling. Such a course, Denison replied, would be incompatible with the position of a ‘juste milieu’ party.40 Notwithstanding the moderate character of the Address, some Conservatives, against Peel’s own judgement, moved an ill-advised amendment that, despite Conservative by-election victories during the recess, was decisively defeated. Stanley spoke out in support of both Peel and the amendment, opposing the government’s intention to reform Irish municipal corporations on the same principles as in England and Wales.41 Upon receiving ironic cheers from the government side of the House, Stanley’s anger immediately flared. It was a further painful display of his frustration. Peel was pleased that Stanley now took a seat alongside him on the opposition front bench by the Speaker, immediately across from the cabinet.42 Some Dillyite MPs, relinquishing their independence, now also gradually slid over the gangway to the Conservative benches. Lord George Bentinck, George Sinclair, Sir James Tennent, Sir Ralph Lopes, John Davenport, Charles Forster, Charles Russell (MP for Reading), and Richard Weyland followed Stanley’s migration to Peelite Conservatism. But others, such as Edward Buller, Sir Philip Fleetwood, Sir George Pechell (MP for Brighton), Mark Philips (MP for Manchester), Sir Harry Verney, Richard Walker, and William Turner (MP for Blackburn), accepted Russell’s leadership. The Stanleyite rump dissolved. The elderly Whig and former visitor to Knowsley Thomas Creevey commented, ‘What say you to our own Stanley? Was there ever such a case of suicide? I really think if I saw him in the street I should try to avoid him to save his blushes; yet perhaps such things are unknown to him.’43

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During February 1836 Graham continued to sound out Peel. Understanding Graham’s opinions to be Stanley’s own, Peel listened sympathetically to the argument that a dissolution should be avoided, and that any immediate attempt to form another government would inevitably fail, only bringing the country and the monarchy into serious danger. Graham expressed a strong wish to cooperate with Peel in order to check ‘the evil designs’ of those opposed to them.44 In turn, Peel shaped Conservative policy so as to secure Stanley’s support. Recognizing that Irish municipal reform was going to be the major issue of the session, Peel drafted a plan abolishing Irish corporations altogether and replacing them with the ordinary machinery of local government, rather than letting the corporations become nests of Catholic and O’Connellite power. Peel sent Stanley a copy of his memorandum. Stanley, in response, agreed to the principle of the plan.45 But Peel’s amendment to the government’s bill was defeated by 307 to 243 votes at the end of February, with Stanley and Graham supporting Peel both during the debate and in the division lobby.46 A humbled Stanley, marking his thirty-seventh birthday at the end of March, remained reluctant to indicate openly his formal union with Peel. In early April he declined an invitation to a Conservative party dinner. Yet, at the same time, he reaffirmed his broad agreement with Peel: My course in parliament must have made clear that events are daily alienating me politically from the great body of those who were my political friends, and diminishing the distance between me and many to whom I have been strongly opposed: and I have little hesitation in saying that I know of no subject under discussion or likely to arise, which would cause any difference of opinion between me and Sir Robert Peel.47

He also remained responsive to any opportunity to engage in cross-bench brokership. On 25 May he was a dinner guest of Lord Grey, along with Richmond and Ripon, in Berkeley Square. During June he attempted, through Grey, to negotiate a compromise settlement of the Irish corporation issue. The number of corporations, he believed, might be safely increased, on the condition that each burgess should only vote for one-half of the total of councillors to be returned. This avoided the danger of the corporations’ becoming ‘exclusive political engines, returned on political grounds, and for political purposes, by one party’.48 But, in the event, the government accepted the Lords’ rejection of their measure. During May, Stanley continued his correspondence with Peel over the revenues of the Irish Church, the government having brought forward an Irish Church Revenues Bill, once again embracing the principle of


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appropriation. Stanley accused the ministry of intending to grind down the incomes of the Irish Anglican clergy, who were discharging the laborious duties of extensive parishes, to the level of an exciseman’s salary.49 He supported the revival of Peel’s own Irish Church plan, the most difficult part of any settlement being effecting redistribution without the alienation of property.50 He drafted clauses for Peel, replacing any notion of alienation with the principle of redistribution, and suggesting payment be made on the first estate of inheritance, to be collected by the Land Revenue rather than the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Redemption clauses might be added. It became clear that he wished to propose a joint opposition response to the government’s bill himself. To this Peel agreed. Six days later The Times declared that ‘the subject could not be in better hands than in those of Lord Stanley, and we doubt not he will be decisively supported’.51 On Wednesday 1 June the ministry’s Irish Church Revenues Bill began its second reading. Stanley moved a motion for leave to introduce legislation in the spirit of Peel’s bill of the previous year. The government immediately portrayed Stanley’s motion as a hostile amendment. Stanley called for the conversion of the tithe into a rent charge.52 This fixed charge would then be paid by the landlord, not the occupying tenant, the landlord receiving a proportionate reduction in the amount of the tithe payment. This, he argued, would answer complaints about the tithe’s being a tax on industry, the income of the Church of Ireland clergy in urban parishes would be secured, an inquiry into the condition of the clergy by Ecclesiastical Commissioners could be undertaken, and surplus revenues might be used to supplement the income from small livings. Peel subsequently dwelt on the deep divisions between the government’s supporters over the question, which remained less about the reduction of the Church of Ireland’s income than about the threat to its property. A seemingly desperate Russell roundly denounced Stanley’s motion as neglecting the interests of 6 million Irish Catholics. The duty of the state, Russell declared, was not to support only that creed which the legislature considered founded on truth, but to provide means for inculcating morality among the great body of the people. These latitudinarian arguments safeguarded, for the moment, the ministry’s commitment to appropriation, although, during the sharp exchanges between Russell and Stanley, Greville noticed that Lord John ‘left off noble friending and took to noble lording him’.53 As ‘the champion of our monarchy and its most sacred institutions’, Stanley, The Times applauded, had ‘probed the rank ulcer of the present crisis to the bottom’, exposing the threat of ‘dismemberment of the empire,

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preceded by destitution of our unfortunate clergy, and utter annihilation to the United Church of Great Britain and Ireland’, represented by the ministry’s legislation.54 Stanley believed that Irish members were secretly willing to abandon appropriation. But Irish MPs, he told Sir Herbert Taylor, used a language in private very different from their language in public.55 At a large meeting in the Corn Exchange, Dublin, on 19 May, Richard Sheil and other Irish MPs fiercely denounced Stanley and Peel’s position on both corporation reform and the tithe. The government finally defeated Stanley’s motion by thirty-nine votes. On 23 June, Stanley entertained Peel at a dinner at his father’s Grosvenor Square residence, which Lord Lincoln, Lord Clanwilliam, Sir Henry Hardinge, and Lord Sandon also attended. Then, as Stanley left London for Lancashire shortly after, once again fierce opposition in the Lords to appropriation erupted. At the end of July the government bill, stripped of its appropriation clauses, was returned to the Commons. During the subsequent debate O’Connell threatened the future inefficacy of all legal process for the recovery of the tithe, declaring that not ‘another farthing should be paid to the clergy’.56 On Tuesday 2 August, Stanley returned to London to meet Peel and Graham. Together they discussed how best to oppose a reinstated ministerial bill. But, in the event, lack of parliamentary time forced the government to abandon their measure. With the government relinquishing their Irish Municipal Corporation and Irish Church Revenues legislation, the 1836 session drew to a subdued close. As Stanley predicted, the cabinet successfully saw through a moderate reform of the English Church based upon the recommendations of the Ecclesiastical Commission, including commutation of the English tithe and abolition of the compulsory Anglican marriage ceremony. A concession to Dissenters was granted with the civil registration of births, deaths, and marriages. The question of university tests, however, was avoided. The Whig front bench successfully restrained their radical supporters. Neither disestablishment nor reform of the House of Lords, despite a radical press campaign, comprised part of the government’s agenda. Peel, meanwhile, assisted the cabinet when he could, which allowed him to keep his own extreme supporters at arm’s length. All this, however, left Stanley precious little ground on which to stand. Fusion with the Conservatives now seemed inevitable. The recess saw a dispirited Stanley leave promptly for Knowsley, from where, in early September 1836, he travelled to Ballykisteen. Among his 4,000 Irish acres and Catholic tenants, Stanley remained secluded through the harvest. All seemed quiet in the region, although the clergy


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were abstaining from attempts to collect the tithe from the tenantry. In Tipperary crops were good, but he received reports that in other parts of Ireland the potato harvest had failed and widespread distress during the winter was likely. During their stay in Ballykisteen, Stanley and Lady Stanley engaged in numerous acts of beneficence, promoting the habits of industry among their tenantry and encouraging, by liberal premiums, improved husbandry. Rewards were given to those keeping the best-regulated cottage farms and, at a show of cattle on the estate, Stanley gave a large cash prize for the best specimen of breeding stock. Thus he sought to realize that ideal of Irish proprietorship which, as a young man, he had found depicted in Maria Edgeworth’s novel The Absentee. Indeed, the conclusion of the show day evoked a joyous scene from one of Edgeworth’s novels, as Stanley invited sixty of his tenant farmers to join him in a large barn on his farm, which was decorated with laurels and green boughs, where a dinner of roast beef and plum pudding was served to all. The convivial gathering then removed to another barn where ale, whiskey, and wine were served and, following a speech from Stanley in which he praised the cattle exhibited and promised his fullest support for any improvement fairly suggested, those present gave a toast and three cheers to their landlord.57 In late September the Limerick Chronicle observed that ‘the tenantry on Lord Stanley’s estate in Tipperary are among the happiest in the south of Ireland’.58 In November, Stanley and his family returned to England for the marriage of his youngest brother, Charles, to Frances Augusta Campbell, the daughter of Colonel Sir Henry Campbell, the battle-scarred veteran of the Peninsular campaign against Napoleon. Family celebrations over the Christmas season at Knowsley followed. Game shooting on the estate filled his time. Over two days his shooting party of five guns killed 176 pheasants, 7 partridges, 2 woodcocks, 203 hares, and 56 rabbits. During another two days shooting around Bickerstaffe Wood 315 game birds were bagged. It was while busily engaged in shooting fowl that he learnt of Peel’s succession as Lord Rector of Glasgow University. This seemed further confirmation of the conservative movement of public opinion, though the failure of Lyndhurst’s rival candidacy suggested a continuing distaste for Ultra Toryism. To Graham, Stanley confessed anticipating the resumption of parliament very much with ‘the feeling that a boy looks to the approaching termination of his holidays, and the bore of beginning another ‘‘half’’ ’.59 The government appeared intent on cajoling the radicals by any sacrifice of policy necessary, while the radicals sought to obtain as much as possible on any terms. ‘For the present I think our game is to

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play again, and with the same patient forbearance, that of last session … In the Commons we cannot be too quiet.’60 Despondency was compounded when, in the New Year, he suffered a debilitating attack of gout. Some comforting news was sent to Knowsley by Graham, visited by Peel on his way to his inauguration in Glasgow. Graham lent Peel a copy of Stanley’s Rectorial address of December 1834. Rereading the Knowsley Creed, Graham found there was ‘nothing to alter or to regret in that speech: it will stand the test of time, and is fresh and as appropriate today as when it was made’.61 Peel appeared willing to risk the displeasure of the Ultras in offering friendship to moderate Reformers. Moreover, as well as adopting a ‘liberalised tone’, Peel was sanguine about returning to office and declared himself willing to do so if joined by Stanley. Graham began pressing Stanley towards a formal union with Peel. To Peel, Graham talked of ‘making common cause against the tendency to a Republic’.62 To Stanley, by mid-January 1837, Graham portrayed Peel as ‘resolved to risk the displeasure of the High Tories and to hold out the hand of fellowship to all Reformers who with him are now willing to resist the democratic impulse’.63 Ripon was a guest of Peel at Drayton during December and likewise reported on his host’s moderation. On Wednesday 11 January 1837 Peel delivered his speech to Glasgow University professors and students, directly echoing many of the themes Stanley had presented in his own Rectorial address two years earlier. Peel’s speech appeared a reissue of the Knowsley Creed. The inspiration of classical education, the commands and consolation of religion, and the onward progress in knowledge, science, and technology were held up alongside the importance of personal diligence, hard work, economy, and sound habits. Peel’s address, Graham concluded, ‘only followed in the same track’ as Stanley’s earlier speech and ‘dilated without improving’.64 Visiting Graham at Netherby on his way south, Peel was elated and communicative. Peel was also, Graham reported to Knowsley, anxious to know Stanley’s immediate plans. On Sunday 22 January 1837 Stanley wrote directly to Peel arranging a meeting in London to discuss the forthcoming Royal Address.65 Stanley saw the government’s difficulties as very clear, particularly as Irish corporations, the Irish tithe, and Irish Poor Law were to be debated in the coming session. The ministry would try to constrain their radical supporters, Whig forbearance being stretched to its limits. The radicals, meanwhile, could put the ministry in a minority by simply abstaining. In these circumstances, he advised against dividing on the Address, but favoured allowing internal strains within the government majority to do the opposition’s work for them. The alliance of opinion embraced by the Lichfield House Compact,


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he believed, could not last. Radical enthusiasms would always be deeply offensive to Whig sensibilities. Sooner or later the Whigs would jettison their ultra-liberal personnel. A broad realignment of moderate progressive opinion might then follow. In the meantime, intelligent Conservatives had to hold Ultra Tories back and avoid bringing forward issues which would cement Whig–radical relations. It was a strategy with which Peel agreed, particularly given the complex Irish legislation awaiting consideration. Prior to the session Stanley attended a dinner hosted by Peel. For the first time he met the Duke of Wellington socially. The occasion was, Croker recorded, ‘very cordial’.66 Friendly association now began to strengthen new political affiliations, although Greville wondered how the chilly reserve of Peel would sit with Stanley’s boisterous revelry.67 That Peel, the grandson of a Lancashire yeoman farmer, had overtaken Stanley, heir to the pre-eminent Lancastrian peerage, in the political race added a sharp piquancy to their relationship. When Peel was born in 1788 the Stanleys had just celebrated at Knowsley the 300th anniversary of the Battle of Bosworth. Debate in the early part of the 1837 session followed Stanley’s expectations. When the radical MP for Tower Hamlets, Sir William Clay, moved for an inquiry into the Corn Laws on 16 March the majority of Whigs and Reformers aligned themselves with the Conservatives in defeating the motion. Cabinet Whigs and Peelite Conservatives, meanwhile, seemed anxious to allow moderate compromise to resolve intractable Irish issues. Russell concluded his introduction of a Corporation Bill in February with the suggestion that, if it were allowed to pass, appropriation might be dropped from the forthcoming Tithe measure. Stanley objected to reforming the corporations without first reforming the Irish Church, so as to secure its property from plunder. Nor, he maintained, should corporation reform be undertaken when it was demanded with threats and intimidation. Nevertheless, the opening for compromise over Irish affairs allowed Stanley and Graham to accept a postponement of the Lords’ rejection of the Corporation measure until the government’s Tithe Bill was considered. ‘It is clear that you have won the day’, Graham told Stanley ‘and I am persuaded a great national good has been obtained.’68 A compromise settlement more favourable to Protestant interests in Ireland appeared possible. On 1 May, Morpeth introduced the ministry’s Irish Tithe measure. Immediately, Stanley undertook, through sub rosa communications intended to secure agreement between Melbourne and Peel, a compromise settlement of the Irish tithe and municipal issues.69 To this end he hosted

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a dinner in Carlton Gardens on 6 May to which Lansdowne, Howick, Morpeth, Sir George Grey, and Henry Labouchere were invited. Stanley, accompanied by Graham, then attended a meeting of Conservative peers at Lyndhurst’s residence to discuss the Corporation Bill. In the following days Stanley took part in further meetings at Peel’s and Lord Aberdeen’s houses. He ascertained that Melbourne would accept any reasonable terms in order to pass the two bills.70 He was confident Melbourne could secure the acquiescence of his cabinet. Though Melbourne still hoped this might enable Stanley to rejoin the Whigs, Stanley made it clear he was now firmly aligned with Peel, to whom he sent copies of his correspondence with the prime minister. Stanley’s position subtly shifted, during February to June 1837, from being Peel’s ally to being Peel’s associate. But Stanley’s brokership was brought to an abrupt end when, on Tuesday 20 June, William IV died. The government’s Irish legislative programme foundered. Stanley’s confidential contact with the Crown, Sir Herbert Taylor, stepped down from his Secretaryship. A general election was immediately called upon the succession of Queen Victoria to the throne. On 20 June, Stanley attended the 18-year-old Queen’s first meeting with her Privy Council at Kensington Palace, where her simple poise marked a sharp contrast with the scandalous extravagance associated with her two uncles George IV and William IV. Following the royal funeral on Saturday 8 July, parliament dissolved on 17 July. Stanley immediately travelled to Knowsley to attend the Liverpool races and engage in rabbit shooting on the estate.71 During the ensuing general election, from 22 July to 18 August 1837, Melbourne’s government gained seats in English, Scottish, and Irish boroughs, but suffered severe losses in the English counties, producing an overall gain for Peel’s Conservatives of forty seats. The Whigs were dismayed by these results. Stanley, despite the cries of radical opponents that he was a renegade, an apostate, a changeling, and a turncoat, was returned top of the poll in North Lancashire. Speaking to a rowdy hustings meeting in Blackburn on 28 July, he encountered constant abuse from radical supporters, some of whom were parading around a thimblerig table. Nonetheless, he was returned unopposed, declaring his support for every wise and salutary measure conducive to the integrity of the British constitution and the interests of the people.72 But Graham, amid violent fights and stone throwing, lost his seat in East Cumberland. During the election Graham was dubbed by his opponents the ‘Netherby turncoat’. Lord Francis Egerton and Stanley’s brother-in-law Richard Wilbraham as Conservatives retained their seats for South Lancashire. But Dilly MPs fared badly on the hustings. Reformers who had followed Stanley


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over to the Conservatives after April 1835, such as Charles Forster, John Hardy, John Johnstone, Sir Ralph Lopes, Sir Oswald Mosley, and Sir James Tennent, were all defeated. Some Conservative Stanleyites, such as Charles Russell, also lost their seats. Other Dilly MPs, such as Sir Andrew Agnew, Sir Richard Bulkeley, Sir Edward Scott, and Major Richard Weyland, retired weary and disillusioned. The heavy electoral casualties suffered by Dilly MPs in 1837 revealed their vulnerability to increasingly partisan constituency politics. The registration clauses of the 1832 Reform Act, which required an annual revision of the register of voters, had become an electoral battleground, fiercely fought over by newly formed local Conservative and Reform associations. Before revising barristers local associations challenged the franchise entitlement of electors supporting their opponents and stoutly defended the claims of their own voters.73 But the Derby Dilly had remained a wholly parliamentary phenomenon. It never acquired an organizational presence in the constituencies. This reflected Stanley’s lofty disdain for extra-parliamentary politics. In June 1835 he wrote an open letter to Sir Thomas Hesketh objecting to the formation of a Conservative Association in North Lancashire. Such an organization, he feared, would incite urban voters, who were susceptible to radical blandishments, to even greater political impetuosity, by way of reaction. This would polarize political feeling and weaken the influences of moderation, as local communities became ever more deeply divided.74 But such pleas could not stem the proliferation of Conservative and Reform associations. This left Dilly MPs fatally exposed to the retribution of local activists. Graham in East Cumberland proved their most prominent victim. Likewise, in Bradford a local Reform Society, which since 1835 had assiduously been monitoring and contesting the official list of voters, opposed the Reformer turned Conservative John Hardy. As a result, the loyal Stanleyite Hardy was defeated and the Bradford Reform Society secured the election of both Reform candidates. Sir John Johnstone in Scarborough, Sir Ralph Lopes in Westbury, Charles Russell in Reading, Charles Foster in Walsall, and Sir James Tennent in Belfast were all defeated by Reform candidates backed by active local associations, although Tennent was returned to the Commons in March 1838 following a petition voiding the August 1837 election. Sir Richard Bulkeley in Anglesea and Sir Edward Scott in Lichfield, both Whig Reformers turned Conservatives, chose to retire rather than confront local Reform associations campaigning against them. Reform MPs succeeded both men. In North Staffordshire the former Reformer Sir Oswald Mosley, having followed Stanley across the floor of the House,

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was defeated by his Conservative rival, largely because of the exertions of the well-funded Staffordshire Conservative Club. A large number of both Conservative and Reform supporters ‘plumped’ their votes, rather than give their second vote to the Dillyite Mosley. In Oxfordshire the steadfast Dilly MP Major Richard Weyland and in Wigtonshire the loyal Sir Andrew Agnew, both formerly moderate Reformers, declined to face local Conservative partisans and were replaced by Conservative MPs. Just as in Westminster Stanley’s position had been eroded by Peel’s moderation and Russell’s restraint, so in 1837 Dilly MPs found little effective purchase on increasingly partisan constituency feeling. In all, seventeen of the thirty-eight MPs who had faithfully supported Stanley during February to April 1835, including Sir Matthew Ridley, who had died in 1836, were no longer at Westminster by August 1837. The fading shadow of the Derby Dilly had now all but vanished. The hard-fought 1837 election reduced Melbourne’s Commons majority from fifty-eight to about twenty-four MPs. In the constituencies local Conservative associations often proved more effective than their opponents. Significantly, in 1837 Peel and his supporters proudly stressed their party label as Conservatives. In the general election of 1835 Peel had avoided using the term in his public declarations. The ministry now became even more reliant on O’Connell’s Irish votes. Ministers drew some comfort from the fact that the young Queen clearly looked to them, particularly Melbourne, as her natural advisers. Moreover, while all major office holders had been safely returned, some radicals, such as Roebuck, Hume, Ewart, and William Hutt, lost their seats. Yet the vital question remained, for how long could the Whigs avoid radical entanglements and Peel sustain a Conservative momentum without selling out to his Ultras? By August 1837 Stanley’s role as arbiter had become secondary to these considerations. The dissolution again afforded Stanley the welcome refuge of Knowsley. In late July the visitor Greville was forcibly struck, as often before, by Stanley’s ability to shed his political burdens and immerse himself in the diversions of the moment. It is a strange thing to see Stanley here; he is certainly the most natural character I ever saw; he seems never to think of throwing a veil over any part of himself: it is this straightforward energy which makes him so considerable a person as he is. In London he is one of the great political leaders, and the second orator in the House of Commons, and here he is a lively rattling sportsman, apparently devoted to racing, rabbit-shooting, gay, boisterous, almost rustic in his manners, without refinement, and if one did not know


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what his powers are and what his position is, it would be next to impossible to believe that the Stanley of Knowsley could be the Stanley of the House of Commons.75

The success of his 3-year-old mare Miss Bowe at the Heaton Park races in the autumn brought much pleasure. Yet nothing could disguise the fact that his political career had lost its trajectory. After visiting Graham at Netherby, August was spent by Stanley and his family in Scotland, a visit to Glasgow being followed by some days spent with the Duke of Sutherland on his estate at Dunrobin Castle, and further travels around the Highlands. During October, Stanley found Grey, at Howick in Northumberland, in a mood of dark despondency, with weariness exacerbated by old age. A shared detestation of O’Connell survived and Stanley suspected Grey might not be opposed to a future Conservative government. But their conversation was largely devoted to bitter fulminations against the intrigues of the past, in which ardent Reformers had sabotaged the efforts of more moderate colleagues.76 The defeat of many of Stanley’s former supporters at the general election was a painful affirmation of failure. That ‘persecuted class the Dilly men’, Lord Lincoln observed to Graham, had slipped between ‘the two stools’ of the Conservatives and Reformers.77 Under Russell’s Commons leadership Irish and English radicals, Grey and Stanley agreed, had contaminated the historic Whig–Reform party from within. During their cheerless conversations a dispirited dejection prevailed. In 1836 the senior Colonial Office clerk Henry Taylor, still resentful of Stanley’s high-handed disregard for his advice when drawing up the 1833 Slavery Abolition Bill, published a sceptical set of essays on the arts of political success, under the title of The Statesman.78 Taylor’s aphoristic text, in which the bitterness of a snubbed subordinate broke through, was a scathing, if veiled, commentary on Stanley’s personal inadequacies. The essays deplored the impatience of headstrong ministers who forsook the careful consideration of legislation by surrendering to impetuosity. Such heedless politicians, Taylor asserted, were less concerned with the permanent public interest than preoccupied with ephemeral parliamentary popularity. Moreover, ‘among the arts of rising’, he observed, ‘it is needless to say that few are more important than that of holding fast by the skirts of party’.79 By nature statesmen should be the least quarrelsome of men, only reluctantly, with a stout heart and a cool head, entering into unavoidable conflict. While resisting unprovoked attack, the true statesman, he proposed, should only assault an enemy when certain of

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success. He also believed that the appropriate amusements of the genuine statesman were those quiet bookish pursuits that refrained from noisy exuberance. Taylor’s ideal drew directly on the character of his esteemed Colonial Office colleague James Stephen. The scholarly, shy, and reclusive Stephen had also been disgusted by Stanley’s dismissive behaviour towards his officials during 1833–4. After Stanley’s resignation in May 1834 Stephen was promoted to Assistant Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office, where ‘a great pacification’ followed Stanley’s departure.80 Stephen personified precisely those conscientious qualities Taylor portrayed as the essence of true statesmanship. The implied antithesis was a biting caricature of the reckless and arrogant man he took Stanley to be. By 1837 Stanley was cut adrift from party connection. By his unprovoked Thimblerig speech and provocative taunting of Wellington, he had shown himself easily incited to rash indiscretion. Such reckless impulsiveness Taylor saw as part of Stanley’s boisterous casual manner when devoted to the turf. By Taylor’s ironic measure the flawed Stanley fell far short of true statesmanship. Stanley’s humiliating failure, Taylor implied, was the consequence of his temperamental weaknesses. When the new parliament met at Westminster for four brief weeks on 21 November 1837 Peel reported to the unseated Graham further evidence of increasing hostility between the government and the radicals. The Queen’s Speech was ‘barren and meagre’, abusing ‘the privilege of saying nothing’.81 The question of church rates was to be left in abeyance, the ballot and extension of the suffrage resisted, and septennial parliaments maintained. The unfinished Irish business of earlier in the year—municipal reform, the tithe, and Poor Law—received only mild reference. For the first time Stanley attended the meeting of Conservative MPs held at Peel’s house in Whitehall Gardens immediately prior to the session.82 This signalled his formal junction with the Conservative party. The cautious character of the Queen’s speech, however, offered little opportunity for concerted attack. It was left to isolated radicals, such as Grote and Hume (recently returned for Kilkenny with O’Connell’s support), to criticize the government’s bill of fare. An angry squabble broke out between Russell and the radicals during the debate on the Address over the ballot, a measure Russell denounced. Further demonstrations of Stanley’s adhesion to the Conservatives then followed as the opposition sought to widen this breach. At a large Conservative party meeting at Whitehall Gardens, on Wednesday 6 December, both Stanley and Peel declared their entire agreement on all public issues. A small dinner party given by Peel three


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days later, with Stanley as guest of honour, was notable for its conviviality. However, Stanley finished the session and left for Christmas at Knowsley feeling it still inadvisable to make great exertions against the government. Another serious attack of gout, with inflammation and swelling causing excruciating pain, enforced his wish for inaction. Under treatment with leeches to relieve the swelling, he advocated, from his sickbed, opposition patience. News of a revolt in Canada, which reached England immediately prior to Christmas, failed to excite Stanley’s political spleen. Conflict between the crown executive and colonial legislature in Canada had been inflamed by religious and nationalist sentiment. The rebellion fizzled out quickly. But it demonstrated the deep grievances existing, particularly among the French Canadians, within the colony. Protest focused upon the constitutional arrangements of 1791. Stanley favoured the union of the Lower and Upper provinces, the protection of Catholic interests, and the dispersal of French Canadian settlers in the Upper Province. But he continued to advise Peel against an attack on the ministry, despite the government having laid themselves open to very heavy charges. The government’s vacillating conduct towards Canada for the past three years, Stanley believed, had caused the rebellion.83 It was a matter for serious reprehension that they had not strengthened the military in Canada before the start of winter. But he advised Peel not to move a direct vote of censure. It would be better to vote, ‘if there be any division, in support of their proceedings to put down the rebellion’.84 Peel agreed that the first priority must be the suppression of the revolt; any indecision would threaten the empire and Ireland. Only after this should reform of the 1791 constitution be undertaken. To this end Stanley, rising from his sickbed, acted as intermediary between Russell and Peel at the beginning of January, reassuring Russell that the Conservatives would defend the cabinet against attack over Canada from their radical supporters.85 The Canadian emergency forced an early meeting of parliament on Tuesday 16 January 1838, at which Russell announced the government’s reaction to the crisis; a response which, after acrimonious cabinet debate, was intended to avoid any concession to the radicals. The constitution of Lower Canada was to be suspended and, backed by a loyal address from the Commons, Durham was to be dispatched to the colony to investigate and recommend a solution. The quarrelsome Durham had been sent abroad by Melbourne in July 1835 as ambassador to St Petersburg. The Canadian crisis in late 1837 provided Melbourne with another opportunity to get him out of the country. While appointing Durham assuaged radical

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hopes, it also removed him as a potential radical leader from Westminster. Stanley attended a meeting of leading Conservatives, including Ripon, on Wednesday 10 January discussing the government’s Canada Bill, made up of Russell’s proposals. Stanley supported Peel’s criticism of the intention to call an advisory ‘convention’ in the colony and, during subsequent debate in the Commons, the government quickly amended its measure so as to meet opposition objections. Thus the government swiftly passed its Canadian Bill at the cost of abuse from the radical benches. During the last week of February, Ultra Tories pressed some further defeats on the government, while decrying O’Connell’s use of violent language, in particular O’Connell’s accusation in a speech at the Crown and Anchor Tavern in the Strand (a popular meeting place for radicals) that Tory election committees had committed foul perjury before parliament. Grote’s annual ballot motion, also discussed during February 1838, exposed the ministry’s increasing vulnerability to radical pressure. The unsuccessful ballot motion split the government and fractured Whig, Reform, and radical support. The cabinet carried only sixty-five votes against the ballot, while 200 of their rank and file supported it. This was immediately followed by another motion, proposed by the radical Sir William Molesworth, censuring the discredited Lord Glenelg, the Colonial Secretary, for his policy in Canada. As the difficulties of the ministry mounted, Stanley’s spirits began to revive, despite another attack of gout temporarily forcing him back to his bed. Rumours that he had injured himself while out shooting circulated in London, but his indisposition was a return of his familiar ailment. Molesworth’s motion, however, Stanley warned Peel, placed the Conservatives in a potential embarrassment. Absence from a vote on the motion could hardly be justified. But to support the motion would be to follow in the wake of the radical party. Peel favoured doing as little as possible, while discouraging any sort of communication with the radicals. Stanley agreed that neither support for Molesworth nor support for the government was possible. This left, he suggested to Peel, only one course, that of moving an amendment of their own, which would have to be opposed by the ministry, but which would unite Conservative votes. Yet Stanley abandoned their policy of ‘cautious abstinence’ with great reluctance.86 A premature attack, even if successful, would not lay the foundation for a stable alternative administration. If unsuccessful, the motion might give strength to a ministry that was all weakness and mutual jealousy.87 But, given the dilemma in which Molesworth’s motion placed the opposition, Stanley was prepared to see a Conservative motion proposed. He advised


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against a general motion of want of confidence. He feared the ‘Irish row’ such an act would prompt, ‘so certainly would our hot-brained Irish friends flourish their shillelaghs over their heads, rush into the fight, and not only get their own heads broken, but contribute to break those of their friends’. An amendment limited to denouncing the government’s hesitant policy in Canada would serve the Conservatives better than the ‘loose, rambling, ill-sustained fire, which would be the sure consequence of a general debate’. In early March, with debate of Molesworth’s motion fixed for 6 March and with Graham returned to the Commons as MP for Pembroke, Stanley’s plan was agreed by leading Conservatives. At a party meeting in Whitehall Gardens on Monday 5 March some 200 Conservative MPs were told of the amendment, to be moved by Sandon, expressing support for the repression of the Canadian revolt, but placing the blame for the crisis on the irresolute policy of the government. This prepared the way for a bravura performance by a recovered Stanley in the Commons the following evening that revived memories of his former debating triumphs.88 Early in the evening Palmerston taunted him with comments on the inconsistency of those who joined with persons of differing principles and opinion. Palmerston speculated on a Conservative–radical coalition government that, he archly supposed, was the intended result of Sandon’s motion. In a spirited reply, Stanley denied that such a coalition ministry was contemplated, but observed that, if one were formed, it would be the first administration of which Palmerston was not a member for a much longer period than his memory could recall. The Conservative benches dissolved into cheers and laughter. When, during Stanley’s speech, Palmerston threw up his hands in surprise at the charge of cynical opportunism from such a quarter, an angered Stanley launched into a further bitter attack, to the delight of Conservative MPs.89 An effective speech by Peel, in support of Sandon’s amendment and Molesworth’s subsequent withdrawal of his own motion, brought on a straight party fight. In the resulting division Sandon’s amendment was defeated by a government majority of twenty-nine votes, the result for which Stanley and Peel hoped. Conservative votes held together, the taint of radical collusion was avoided, and Ultra Tory spleen was vented, while the strong Conservative showing was short of a majority requiring a premature return to office. The government was damaged, but not destroyed. It put Peel and Stanley in a position from which to oversee the protracted disintegration of Melbourne’s ministry. The ‘heterogeneous materials’ of the ministerial majority, Whigs, radicals, and O’Connellites, clearly contained ‘in itself all the seeds of dissolution

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from the variety and incompatibility of its component elements’.90 When Lord Clarendon’s younger brother Charles Villiers (Reform MP for Wolverhampton) introduced on 15 March a motion calling for an inquiry into the Corn Laws, Whigs and Reformers were scattered into both division lobbies, while a firmly united Conservative opposition secured Villiers’s defeat. By the spring of 1838, as he approached his thirty-ninth birthday, Stanley’s colours were firmly nailed to the Conservative mast. On 28 April he attended the grand banquet at the Goldsmith’s Hall at which the Duke of Wellington and Peel were honoured. During his toast to Peel the chair, the former Dilly MP Alderman Copeland, declared that he did not think it would be long before Peel, together with Stanley and Graham, would be called on to replace the tottering Whig administration.

Patient of spirit, but deeply mov’d of heart. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 169)

The painful dissipation of his ‘visions of the helm’ weighed down Stanley’s spirits throughout 1836 and 1837. Prolonged depression compounded his seclusion, as comfort was sought outside politics. Recurrent illness and his marginalization in the Commons encouraged him to seek solace in his family, horse racing, and his passion for field sports. In his late thirties Stanley faced the profoundly depressing possibility that his greatest chance for political pre-eminence had passed. For a talented and ambitious man, in the prime of life, it was a deeply dispiriting prospect. Changes in his domestic life, new friendships, and writing on religion provided consolation. Leaving 5 Carlton Gardens and now receiving an annuity of £5,000 from the Derby estate each year, Stanley acquired number 8 (now 10) St James’s Square as his new London residence. St James’s Square, off Pall Mall, had long been the most fashionable and prestigious of London’s neo-classical urban spaces, recently planted with lime and laburnum trees framing an equestrian statue of William III as a memorial to the bloodless triumph of the 1688 Revolution. Built of pink brick in 1736 by Henry Flitcroft, 8 St James’s Square had been occupied during the 1820s by the notorious Earl of Blessington and, for a few months, by the Windham Club. More respectably, in the early 1760s it had also been the home of William Pitt, Earl of Chatham. Situated on the north side of the Square, the house faced towards Pall Mall and was within view of the Carlton and


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Reform clubs. The aspiring Conservative politician Benjamin Disraeli, who had been a habitué of the scandalous Lady Blessington’s salon and a close friend of her lover Count D’Orsay, was scathing about Stanley’s new London home. It ‘is furnished like a second-rate lodging house and in itself essentially mean: all this not from stinginess, but from sheer want of taste’. Lady Stanley ‘with a weakness for ‘‘great folks’’ seems never to catch anything of the taste and splendour of their lives’.91 Stanley, however, would have had nothing but contempt for this judgement from such a source. He held the roué Disraeli responsible for the temporary disappearance of his younger brother Henry Stanley in 1831. The 28-year-old Henry Stanley had become acquainted with Disraeli on board a ship returning from the Middle East in the autumn of 1831. On the basis of this new-found intimacy they travelled back to London together after landing at Falmouth, whereupon, to his family’s great alarm, Henry Stanley disappeared. Eventually he was found in the notorious gambling house known as ‘the Hell’, run by one Effie Bond, in St James’s Street. The discovery of Henry Stanley in such unsavoury lodgings, among highly disreputable company, was an occurrence Stanley attributed, perhaps unfairly, to Disraeli’s immoral influence. Disraeli’s widely reviewed third novel The Young Duke, which appeared in April 1831, was the colourful tale of a wealthy heir who squanders his inheritance on the hedonistic pleasures of high society, a story whose resonance with subsequent events may have further aroused Stanley’s suspicions. Stanley’s brother-in-law Lieutenant-Colonel Samuel Long believed Disraeli had done all in his power to help locate Stanley’s younger brother. But Stanley regarded Disraeli as complicit in a sordid intrigue to entangle Henry Stanley in dissolute society. Certainly, for such a proud man as Stanley, it was an acute discomfort to have a notorious social climber like Disraeli associated with an embarrassing family episode and cognizant of his brother’s misconduct. Undoubtedly, it raised a deep personal prejudice against the aspiring debt-ridden novelist in his mind. When Disraeli made his disastrous maiden speech in the Commons on 7 December 1837 Stanley simply observed to the chamber, with icy patronizing hauteur, that he ‘was aware how difficult it was at that hour to command the attention of the House’.92 But Stanley’s changing circumstances did introduce him to a man who quickly became a close confidant and respected friend. In September 1837 he made the acquaintance of the Conservative Lord Fitzharris, who shortly after became the Earl of Malmesbury, at Chillingham, Lord Tankerville’s castle in Northumberland. The 30-year-old Lord Fitzharris,

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Lord Tankerville’s son-in-law, noted of their first meeting, Stanley ‘is very amusing, and with his high spirits and cleverness kept a large party in roars of laughter’.93 They shared similar social status, Malmesbury (as he became in 1841) educated at Eton and Oxford being the third Earl of a title created in 1800, as well as a love for game shooting. Handsome, vain, affable, and an accomplished raconteur, Malmesbury’s agreeable fellowship brought Stanley much pleasure, although his inveterate weakness for female company and a series of extramarital affairs contrasted with the fidelity of Stanley’s own marriage. As a young man of fashion, Malmesbury combined pleasure and amorous escapades with extensive continental travel, befriending the future Napoleon III while in Rome. In 1830 he helped to put down the Swing Riots in Hampshire and in 1837 he published a pamphlet sharply critical of Palmerston’s policy in Spain. Subsequently, he edited his grandfather’s important diplomatic correspondence, although it was not until the Corn Law crisis of 1846 that he began to take an active part in politics. Both Stanley and Malmesbury came to spend much time away from Westminster in each other’s company. In November each year Malmesbury would join Stanley at Knowsley to share in their favourite sport of battue shooting. Malmesbury remembered Stanley on these occasions, surrounded by his beloved dogs, as the ‘keenest’ sportsman he had ever known. Two or three hundred men from the local community, tenants and estate workers, would act as beaters. Until physical infirmity denied him such pleasures, Stanley found in Malmesbury congenial and loyal company. As Stanley’s elder son later remarked, ‘my father has no intimates except the sharers of his amusements’.94 Their warm friendship helped to compensate for Graham’s growing closeness to Peel and a gradual cooling of relations with Stanley. By 1838 Graham had clearly shifted his loyalties to Peel. The private pleasures provided by Stanley’s growing family also made up for public disappointments. In May 1835 Stanley and Lady Emma celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary. At the end of the year the birth of their daughter Emma gave further cause for family celebration. The following year, aged 11 and bound for Eton, Edward Henry Stanley became invested with his father’s future hopes. ‘Believe me, my dearest boy, that you are now at a time in which especially the formation of your habits and character are the subject of our deepest anxiety,’ he informed his son in January 1840.95 Prior to leaving for Eton, Edward was privately tutored by a young Fellow of King’s College, Cambridge, Charles Abraham, an accomplished classicist and promising ordinand in the Anglican Church. Abraham was subsequently to become Edward’s housemaster at Eton and


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in 1858 was appointed the first Bishop of Wellington in New Zealand. Favourable reports of Edward’s progress at Eton, despite serious concerns about his eyesight, drew expressions of warm approbation from his father. Accounts of Edward’s early success gave his parents a ‘glow of pleasure’ and prompted further urgings to employ ‘those mental faculties, with which God has entrusted you’ and upon which would ‘depend, under His Providence, your future respectability and happiness in life’. Steady perseverance, Stanley advised his son, would ward off the temptation of evil and ‘earn a rich reward’.96 Then, in July 1840, Stanley transferred Edward to Rugby. This decision was prompted, in part, by anxieties about his son’s health, Edward’s physical frailty being ill suited to the spartan rigours of Eton. Equally importantly, Rugby, under its reforming headmaster Thomas Arnold, espoused those vigorous Christian values which promised to encourage that steady perseverance and avoidance of evil Stanley earnestly desired for his son. Arnold, who supported Catholic Emancipation, was a liberal Anglican who wished the Established Church of England to be a broad, inclusive, and undogmatic congregation, but he strongly opposed any separation between Church and State. Arnold’s liberal theocratic views, as well as his commitment to educating Christian gentlemen, matched Stanley’s own religious convictions. When Lord Ashley visited Rugby in 1844 he found the moral tone of the school contrasted sharply with the ethos prevailing at Eton. If Eton produced ‘admirable gentlemen’ endowed with ‘all the mysteries of social elegance’, which prepared them for the dining room, the club, and St James’s Street, Rugby looked to ‘nobler, deeper and sterner stuff; less of refinement and more of truth; more of the inward, not so much of the outward, gentleman’.97 Following Arnold’s death in 1842 Stanley was a member of the committee raising subscriptions for an Arnold scholarship and a monumental memorial at Rugby for the reforming headmaster.98 Edward’s academic success at Rugby, in a moral environment more acceptable to Stanley’s moderate evangelical beliefs, was only blighted by continued crises with Edward’s health, particularly attacks of the kidney disease that would afflict him for the rest of his life. A painful swelling of his legs associated with a ‘bilious derangement’ caused him much suffering in February 1843. Great concern for Stanley’s heir was expressed in the press.99 Then, in April 1844, Edward left Rugby to matriculate at Trinity College, Cambridge. Stanley advised his son to avoid the ‘fast set’ and take ‘a little taste of all sorts. Do not shut up, see various society, and choose your friends.’100 There ‘are few wishes dearer to my heart’, he told Edward in February 1846, ‘than that I should live to see you not only a distinguished,

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but a useful man; and I am strong in my opinion that a young man who does not exert himself at the University, is very little likely to make a figure in after life.’101 Edward fulfilled paternal expectations. In 1848 he secured a first class degree in Classics and a good pass in Mathematics. The award of college prizes and election to the select undergraduate society the Apostles were recognitions of that analytical intelligence obscured by his shyness of manner. Though lacking his father’s easy bonhomie, Edward possessed his father’s intellectual ability. Lady Stanley’s fifth pregnancy during 1838 ended as unhappily as two of her previous confinements. A son, named Charles, was born on 6 August 1838 and died within hours. It was not until January 1841 that Edward and Emma acquired a healthy brother, baptized Frederick Arthur Stanley. Freddy, as he was called within the family, became very close to his 5-yearold sister. As young children they shared their play and lessons. Between the children’s teatime and the adults’ dinner, whether at Knowsley, Tunbridge Wells, or St James’s Square, Stanley would read aloud to them Sir Walter Scott’s poems, the Waverley novels, Southey, and most of Shakespeare’s plays. His daughter fondly remembered her father’s being ‘very much a companion and play fellow to us children, indeed all his life he loved children and made friends with them’. ‘Uncle, you are a merry man!’ said a small nephew on one occasion.102 So his children’s company, during the dog days of Stanley’s political career, helped to ease public frustrations. The parliamentary recess was invariably spent by Stanley and his family at Knowsley, with visits to Ballykisteen and frequent visits by Lady Stanley to the familiar comforts of nearby Lathom House. By the late 1830s Stanley’s father was living in two rooms at one end of Knowsley Hall, attended by two faithful valets, and surrounded by his library and museum specimens. A taxidermist lived in the house attending to his collection, and a painter of animals, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, recorded the various species Derby gathered on the estate. Hawkins illustrated Charles Darwin’s The Zoology of the Voyage of HMS Beagle and went on to be an assistant superintendent and exhibitor at the 1851 Great Exhibition. Derby also surrounded himself with his art collection, many of his paintings having been purchased from the Liverpool banker and Whig MP William Roscoe (an important political ally of the 12th Earl). In 1842 Derby bought a valuable set of portrait miniatures by Nicholas Hilliard and Peter Oliver, acquired at the auction of Horace Walpole’s vast art collection from Strawberry Hill. A reclusive invalid, who was to become paralysed down one side and chronically deaf, conversing by use of an ear trumpet, Derby interacted little with the rest of the household.


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Stanley and his own immediate family stayed in the apartments at the majestic colonnade end of Knowsley Hall, while his youngest brother, Colonel Charles Stanley, following his marriage to Frances Augusta Campbell, occupied apartments at the other end of the house. Despite Charles and Frances Stanley’s having eight children between 1840 and 1853, the families kept largely to themselves, only coming together each morning for prayers in the Chapel. While staying at Knowsley, where the household was attended by forty-nine servants, during the recess Stanley found increasingly convivial companionship in the friendship of his wife’s elder brother Richard Wilbraham, who had married Jessy Brooke in 1832. In 1835 Wilbraham was elected Conservative MP for South Lancashire, the charming and outgoing Richard Wilbraham, heir to Lord Skelmersdale, living at Blythe House, near Lathom, 14 miles from Knowsley. Stanley’s daughter remembered Wilbraham’s being like a brother to her father. The Wilbraham family motto, ‘In the haven is repose’, reflected the relaxed enjoyment Stanley found during his visits to Blythe, the young Wilbraham daughters forming a close friendship with their cousin, Stanley’s daughter.103 The presence of the young, shy, bespectacled, and talented Edward Lear at Knowsley during these years also provided amusing company for both adults and the numerous children, although the air at Knowsley aggravated Lear’s asthma. First visiting Knowsley in 1831 and completing atmospheric watercolour landscapes of the park, Lear was commissioned by Lord Derby to undertake illustrations of his zoological collection. Returning regularly to Knowsley each year, by 1835 he was joining the Stanley family at meals, where he enthusiastically joined in the word games and riddles that entertained the household during the evenings. He fondly remembered Knowsley as a country house where children and mirth abounded. It was in the library at Knowsley that he came across the Anecdotes and Amusements of Fifteen Gentlemen, one of the first collections of limericks, published in 1821 and illustrated by George Cruikshank. Here he discovered that brief poetic form to which he gave a whimsical inspiration in what he called his nonsense verse. The presence in Derby’s menagerie of exotic animals with colourful names, such as the Whiskered Yarke, the Jungli-bukra, the Aequitoon, and the Ging-e-Jonga, also stimulated his fanciful poetic ear. In amusing cartoons he sketched domestic episodes in Knowsley life, with the tall Stanley Crane, representing the benign oversight of the 13th Earl, who was more than 6 feet in height, as a lofty commentator on household events. When, in 1846, Lear published his first collection of limericks, A Book of Nonsense, he dedicated it to the children at Knowsley, although

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he noted in parentheses that the ‘greater part’ of them ‘were made and composed for their parents!’ Lear’s visits to Knowsley came to an end, however, in 1837 when, with the financial support of Lord Derby, he left England for an extended artistic tour of Italy and the Mediterranean. It was during the 1838 recess that Stanley resumed his own writing on the Scriptures. He laid out his religious beliefs in the form of a correspondence between a mother and her daughter. This was not only a tribute to maternal memory, but also an affectionate acknowledgement of his wife’s loving care of their young children. Edward’s departure for Eton in 1837 was accompanied by Lady Stanley’s gentle reminder to attend church, like herself, twice every Sunday. Stanley’s The Miracles of Our Lord Explained was published in 1839 and, in epistolary form, confirmed that the moderate evangelicalism of his youth still informed his personal faith. His authorial purpose, he declared, was to open children to the impression of divine truth. Christ’s miracles, he believed, were not just proofs of Christ’s divinity. They were also intended to be read as parables illuminating key Christian truths. Thus, the turning of water into wine at the wedding feast symbolized the divine blessing bestowed upon marriage. The union of marriage, Stanley observed, should mirror the bond existing between Christ and his bride, the Church. Likewise, Christ’s miraculous healing of the nobleman’s son illuminated the duty of those possessed of wealth and power to influence others to the benefit of their immortal souls. The miraculous cure of the man possessed by demons in St Mark’s Gospel revealed the ascendancy of God’s power over evil. Though Satan might assail the children of God with manifold temptations, yet the Devil had no power to destroy them. Christ’s healing of the leper warned of the danger of that spiritual disease threatened by sin. Just as leprosy first appeared as a small spot and by degrees contaminated the whole body, so sin, initially trifling, could come to pollute the whole inner man. Unlike his Conversations on the Parables of ten years earlier, however, Stanley emphasized in The Miracles of Our Lord Explained the dangers of Catholicism. The rise of Tractarianism within the Anglican Church, led by John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Pusey during the 1830s, posed a new threat to Stanley’s evangelical beliefs, which were based upon personal faith, rather than apostolic authority, the sacraments, or priests, as the true means of salvation. Dangerous Tractarian tendencies, he believed, inevitably led to the full-blown errors of the Catholic Church. ‘The more we study the Holy Scriptures’, he wrote, ‘the deeper will be our conviction of the fallacy—the falsehood—of that miserable system under whose dominion so many of our fellow creatures are enslaved in bondage.’104 The


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doctrines of the Catholic Church, he warned, were contrary both to reason and to revelation. Many, even in enlightened England, have latterly been brought within her pale; but few, very few, among them are acquainted with her real doctrines. All her more disgusting tenets and requirements are kept out of sight. There is usually a show of piety ill-directed; the senses are delighted with fine music; painting too called to her aid, and the pageantry of false worship, till the poor deluded victim is caught in the wily snare that has been laid for him. Then, and not till then, is he aware of the thraldom under which he lies.105

Thus might ‘vital religion’, a personal faith in the redemptive power of Christ’s Atonement, be smothered by ritual, false doctrine, and priestly power. The moderate evangelical foundations of Stanley’s faith remained firm. Man’s fallen nature left humanity spiritually maimed, incapable unaided of coming to Christ. Therefore, God had set his son Jesus Christ apart for the work of redemption. Through Christ’s Atonement on the Cross, divine grace was extended to those whose personal faith enabled them to receive his Word. Thus, like the blind man miraculously restored to sight, personal faith allowed the genuinely repentant to behold the wonders of God’s redeeming love. As shown in Christ’s miracle of walking on the water, the Church of Christ was embarked on the sea of this world. In pursuing the course of duty, the Church of Christ was exposed to many storms and sometimes threatened with shipwreck. But ultimately God would deliver it from the treacherous rocks of false worship. Stanley’s firm defence of the Established Church during the 1830s prompted some to label him a High Churchman. In 1834 Althorp attributed Stanley’s abandonment of the Grey cabinet to his High Church principles. Certainly, like Thomas Arnold, Stanley’s inclusive broad-church views embraced a staunch commitment to the Anglican Church as an Established institution, safeguarding the moral basis of civil society. But Stanley’s evangelical Anglican faith also underpinned a fierce objection to pseudoCatholicism. He believed the errors of Tractarians within the Anglican Church and Catholics outside it were becoming all the more dangerous as the sectarian disputes of the 1830s intensified. Religious extremism was undercutting political moderation. Sectarian controversy over Irish appropriation, commutation of the English tithe, abolition of the church rates, the admission of non-Anglicans to Oxford and Cambridge, and elementary education, was dangerously infusing party disputes. By the late 1830s Protestant Dissent was markedly more militant and insistent on the

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voluntary principle, as opposed to church Establishments. Debate within the Church of England itself was becoming increasingly anguished. The prophetic movement inspired by Edward Irving and the Albury Circle was calling for a recovered faith in the Holy Spirit. Oxford Tractarians, such as Newman, Keble, and Pusey, were launching a wholesale assault on religious and secular liberalism. In August 1836 Stanley declared his opposition to radical Dissenting members of the Liverpool Corporation proposing the use of edited biblical texts in corporation schools. Radicals cited the use of such readings in Ireland, under Stanley’s national education system, as a precedent. But Stanley insisted that such texts were necessary in Ireland because of the peculiar circumstances prevailing there. It was not desirable that Protestant children should use such scriptural extracts, rather than read the Bible directly for themselves.106 Heightened religious passions were threatening calm moderation. Stanley retained his belief in a common core of scriptural truths. His commitment to defence of the Established Church, as a legal and civic, rather than apostolic, imperative remained. In 1839 editions of his Conversations on the Parables were published in German and Italian. But, just as his political centrism fell victim to the polarizing forces of Peel’s Conservatism and Russell’s liberalism during 1834 to 1836, so his moderate Anglicanism found little ready purchase on the increasingly militant temper of religious debate. When the 30-year-old Tory MP William Gladstone sent Stanley a complimentary copy of his book The State in its Relations with the Church, in February 1839, Stanley did not respond. Gladstone’s intense personal ecclesiology and his insistence on the apostolic authority of the Anglican Church, Stanley feared, encouraged an escalating extremism of theological views.

Around the Trojan fires indeed, perforce, A watch is kept; and they, among themselves, Due caution exercise. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 325)

Stanley’s political hopes of 1834–5 proved fleeting. The regret that followed was prolonged, the painful abandonment of his aspirations oppressive. Marginalized in the Commons, forced to relinquish his political creed to Peel’s care, and fearing the assault on the Anglican Church from Protestant Dissent, Tractarianism, and Catholicism, Stanley withdrew


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from parliamentary life. The loss of many of his erstwhile supporters in the general election of 1837 marked the demise of his ambitions. As a result he reconciled himself to a more humble political role, between April 1838 and August 1841 accommodating himself to acting as Peel’s lieutenant. In the process, the depression of the previous months gradually began to lift as slowly he resumed a more active part in Westminster. During 1838 the Conservative opposition sought to tease apart the Whig ministerial fabric, a new pattern to be woven around the call for Conservative reform. Peel attended a large Conservative banquet held in his honour at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall, presided over by Lord Chandos, on Saturday 12 May 1838. Over 300 MPs listened to Peel’s delineation of Conservative policy, with Stanley and Graham sitting alongside the Conservative leader at the top table. Peel called for the defence of the settled institutions of Church and State, and the preservation of those customs and habits that had ensured English achievement in war, peace, industry, commerce, and social improvement. The ‘restless spirit of revolutionary change’ was to be checked, the collision of constitutional interests averted, and the 1832 Reform Act accepted as the basis upon which to resist further reckless change. In pursuing these principles, Peel observed, they had frequently rescued the ministry from their own extreme followers. Each occasion proved the Conservatives all the more deserving of the confidence of the country. The clergy, the magistracy, the yeomanry, the gentry, and a great proportion of the trading community, Peel declared, now supported the Conservative party. Against this background, he announced, his union with Stanley was ‘cemented by mutual co-operation, by reciprocal confidence and respect’.107 A rousing rendition of ‘Rule Britannia’ followed. Confessing to ‘overpowering feelings’ at his enthusiastic reception from those present, Stanley then spoke as a representative of that historic Whiggism in which he had been raised. The avowed Whigs of 1838, he pronounced, were no longer faithful to their noble traditions. Corrosive English and Irish radicalism had eroded the Whig commitment to cautious and responsible improvement. Genuine reform, consistent with defence of the constitution of Church and State, was now to be found in the Conservative party. Though changing parties he had not, he averred, changed his beliefs. Indeed, it was his consistency that required him to change his allegiance. Genuine Whig objects could now only be secured through the responsible progress espoused by the Conservative party. He believed that the good sense of the country ‘would ultimately rally round a party that did not profess hostility to improvement (loud cheers), but manifested a determination to abide by the leading principles of the British

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constitution (loud cheers)’. The Establishment of the Anglican Church must be defended from its enemies. Thus his union with Peel was ‘founded on the strongest motives which could act on private feeling or influence public conduct—it was founded on a sense of danger, on a conviction of a common interest’.108 Stanley’s speech echoed Graham’s private assertion that the Whigs ‘retain the name, but … have changed their principles. I adhere to my principles and am indifferent to the name.’109 Printed copies of Peel and Stanley’s speeches were immediately published for distribution among the Conservative party faithful. Speaking in the Commons on Monday 14 May, Stanley delivered a lengthy sequel to his Merchant Taylors’ Hall speech.110 Upon Russell’s introducing resolutions on the Irish tithe, deliberately ambiguous in nature, but generally taken to be abandoning appropriation, he seized on Russell’s vagueness. With great ingenuity, Stanley observed, Russell had spoken for two hours and not made it clear whether or not he had abandoned appropriation, exactly that principle upon which the government had come into office three years earlier. In the event, Russell’s compromise settlement of the intractable tithe issue, further amended at Peel’s suggestion, passed. An Irish Poor Law Bill was also approved by both Houses with relatively little asperity. The bill divided the country into poor law districts, each with a workhouse under a board of guardians, the poor rate to be paid half by the landlords and half by their tenants. The government’s Irish Municipal Corporation measure was, however, abandoned. With two pieces of Irish legislation secured, the session, begun in November 1837, finally ended on 16 August 1838, the longest sitting so far that century. But, as Greville noted, during the session ‘Stanley and Graham have said and done little or nothing.’111 With his new political loyalties affirmed, Stanley returned to a quiet domestic recess at Knowsley. The 19-year-old Victoria’s elaborate coronation at Westminster Abbey on 28 June, which Stanley attended, appeared to mark a final farewell to the scandalous disreputability of her Hanoverian uncles. Only the turning over of two pages at once in the order of service by the Bishop of Bath and Wells, which caused him abruptly to declare the ritual consecration prematurely concluded, disrupted the carefully staged ceremonial. Yet, if the public sense of a dynastic new beginning encouraged hope in others, for Stanley personally muted feelings of chastened withdrawal remained. The hectic political tempo of earlier years was replaced by the relaxed private rhythms of the opposition parliamentary calendar. In the autumn of 1838 Stanley and his father joined the syndicate, consisting of the earls of Sefton, Eglinton, and Wilton, Lord George Bentinck,


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and Lord Grosvenor, planning a Grand Liverpool Steeplechase to be inaugurated on a 2 1/4-mile course at Aintree. The first Grand National, held at the end of February 1839, proved a great success, drawing a crowd of over 30,000 and immediately becoming a permanent fixture in the racing calendar. Meanwhile, his victory in the Stanley Stakes at Heaton Park in late September 1838, his 4-year-old mare Miss Bowe winning by a length, was a gratifying success. Shooting at Knowsley and social rounds in the country, as well as time spent with Emma and their young children, formed the comforting counterpart to Westminster. Lord Derby’s serious ill health during September, brought on by a stroke paralysing his left side, however, caused much anxiety within the family. The wisdom of passive opposition, meanwhile, seemed confirmed by Graham’s succession to Peel as Lord Rector of Glasgow University. The continuing drift of educated opinion appeared to be in favour of the Conservatives. ‘It is a proof’, Graham told Stanley, ‘that the rising youth entertains sound and decided principles.’112 Pleased by his election as Rector at Glasgow, Graham reaffirmed to Stanley their strategy of patient passivity. The hope of a rupture between the radicals and the Whigs is more probable than at any former period since the dissolution of Lord Grey’s government, and in such circumstances ‘our strength is to sit still’—to await the full development of the entire game; to avoid every ground of needless offence to the adversary; to keep our ranks open to receive every new recruit without examining his pass-ticket too closely, and until the eve of the meeting of parliament to keep ourselves unpledged as far as possible to any particular line, ready to avail ourselves of any accession of strength, and to pour our united force on the weakest point in the line of the enemy.

The Conservative party had to be kept united and in good heart, communication with radicals strictly avoided, while any apparent eagerness to take office would be a dangerous indiscretion. The government would fall apart of its own volition. During 1839 Melbourne’s frail government was haunted by continuing crisis. Greville saw the ministry as being ‘in a wretched state of weakness, utterly ignorant whether it can scramble through the session’, threatened by an opposition ‘willing to wound, but afraid to strike’.113 During late March an alarmed Stanley rushed back to Knowsley from London, following his father’s suffering a second stroke, where, alongside his sisters Lady Charlotte Penrhyn and Lady Ellinor Hopwood, he anxiously attended the incapacitated Earl’s bedside. Meanwhile, Durham’s sudden return from Canada in high dudgeon, the prospect of debate on the Corn

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Laws, Chartist disorders, the assassination of Lord Norbury in Ireland, the revival of an Irish Corporations measure, and a constitutional crisis in Jamaica put intolerable pressure on Melbourne’s beleaguered cabinet. At the opening of the 1839 session Greville calculated the Conservatives to be the largest single party in the Commons, with 315 Conservative MPs, facing 267 ministerialists, sixty-six radicals, five doubtfuls, and four vacancies. Never, he observed, ‘did a government hold office by so frail and uncertain a tenure’.114 Villiers’s annual motion calling for an inquiry into the Corn Laws once again split Whigs and Reformers. In the country, with Manchester as its base, the Anti-Corn Law League, headed by Richard Cobden and John Bright, began to organize. During March, in conjunction with Peel, Stanley saved the government from their radical supporters in the debate on Irish corporations. Then, in April, Stanley attacked the government for asking for approval of their policy in Ireland, prior to an official inquiry into recent crimes.115 Until an inquiry was completed the policies of Lord Normanby, the Lord Lieutenant, he insisted, could not be condoned. Indeed, he believed misery and insecurity prevailed in various parts of Ireland, with agrarian disturbance and political agitation moving hand in hand. In these circumstances he declared it unpardonable that the government were lax in enforcing the law. In eleven counties of Ireland (excluding Tipperary) he found, within a twelve-month period, 277 committals for murder, cases of manslaughter not being included. But of these committals only three were followed by convictions. Lord Normanby, Stanley declared, had sought to introduce a new principle into the criminal law, that of governing by affection without fear. After five evenings of debate, on 19 April, Russell’s motion approving Normanby’s government of Ireland passed. But only a flimsy majority of twelve unreliable radical votes secured the ministry their victory. This suited Peel and Stanley’s purposes by prolonging, but not yet ending, the ministry’s agonies. The Jamaican crisis intensified cabinet discomfort. Under Abolitionist pressure the apprenticeships of former slaves had been ended in 1838, rather than 1840 as specified in Stanley’s Slavery Abolition legislation. In addition, parliament had required changes in the administration of Jamaican prisons and workhouses. Relations between the Governor, Sir Lionel Smith, and the Colonial Assembly collapsed. The government, in response, introduced a measure suspending the constitution and putting the island under the direct rule of the Governor. At its first reading on 9 April, Stanley blamed Smith for the crisis, the Colonial Assembly being prevented from being properly prepared for the ending of the apprenticeship system the previous year.116 Rather than soothing an irritated and prejudiced community, the


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Governor’s language had provoked a succession of petty quarrels. At the second reading, on 6 May, Stanley characterized the measure as a bill of pains and penalties.117 Defending the terms of his Abolition measure, he attacked those radicals who were now calling for a suspension of the Assembly, so as to enable former slaves to prepare for the franchise, but who formerly had represented blacks as being already ripe for the full exercise of civil liberty. So extreme liberals, those self-professed lovers of freedom, were now in arms to suspend a free constitution. The Jamaica debate signalled the end of Peel’s tacit support for Whig ministers against their radical associates. The government measure passed by a slim majority of five votes. Melbourne seized on this division as his excuse to resign. On 8 May 1839 a distraught Queen Victoria reluctantly asked Peel to form a government. The meeting was chilly and their relations rapidly deteriorated. Peel began to form a government that, he informed the Queen, would be in a minority in the Commons and required some sign of support from the monarch. During the evening Peel conferred with Stanley and other leading colleagues at Whitehall Gardens. Stanley was offered the Colonial Office, Graham the Home Office, and Wellington seemed destined for the Foreign Office. Immediately, Stanley began selecting his subordinate personnel. He proposed George Hope (the 31year-old Conservative MP for Weymouth) for the Under-Secretaryship of the Colonial Office and the Irish Under-Secretaryship for his former private secretary in Phoenix Park days, George Earle. Ripon, the former Dilly MP Sir James Tennent, and Lord Wilton also sought positions via Stanley’s influence. On Peel’s behalf Stanley ascertained that Spring Rice did not want the Speakership.118 But all plans were halted by the Queen’s sullen refusal, prompted by Melbourne’s ill-judged advice, to consider any change to the list of Whig ladies comprising her Household. This intransigence Peel took as a refusal by the Queen to grant adequate blessing on his commission. On 10 May, Peel happily threw the burden of office back onto the Whigs. Stanley left London for Epsom and the diversion of the Derby. As Wellington commented, ‘if we had taken the government we could have done nothing’.119 Melbourne’s deep dismay was proof of the strength of Peel’s position.120 So Stanley and Peel prolonged the Whigs’ ministerial torment, emphasizing the cabinet’s reliance on Conservative support for rescue from their radical entanglements. ‘Never was a government so knocked about as this had been,’ observed Graham to Stanley.121 On 14 June, Stanley launched ‘a most furious speech’ against the government’s English National Education Bill.122 The issue was well chosen.

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The measure inflamed religious sensibilities, voluntarists, evangelical Anglicans, and High Churchmen, all seeing dangers in the scheme. The state grant to education was to be increased, but a body of inspectors and a supervisory Committee from which clerics were to be excluded would identify those schools, of whatever denomination, suitable for receipt of a grant. To different groups the threats of centralized control, the extension of non-denominational education, and the possible funding of Catholic schools loomed large. Indeed, part of Russell’s purpose in bringing forward the measure was to counter the growing demands by the Anglican National Society, supported by Bishop Blomfield, the young William Gladstone, Lord Sandon, Lord Ashley, and others, for more extensive education of the nation’s children by the Church of England. Stanley objected strongly to giving direct control over moral education to a Committee entirely secular in character.123 By its very constitution, he maintained, the Committee would exclude those best qualified to superintend the religious education of the nation’s youth. Moreover, he found it objectionable that funds were to be placed in the hands of the government without any restriction regarding their distribution, independent of parliament. This was all the more improper, he continued, coming from a ministry as feeble as the present one, which was desperately struggling for survival. There existed, he maintained, no grounds for abandoning the scheme of English educational funding set up in 1834. His statement was supported by Graham, invoking the spectre of disestablishment, and Peel, affirming that the proper responsibility for the moral education of the community lay with the Church of England. Lord Ashley, William Gladstone, Sir Robert Inglis, and Lord Francis Egerton also countered the latitudinarian premisses of the government proposal. Only a protracted process of concession finally secured success for the measure in a much diluted form. During August and September 1839 the government attempted to salvage their position by changing personnel. Normanby replaced Russell at the Home Office, with Russell going to the Colonial Office, Robert Vernon Smith becoming his new Under-Secretary. F. T. Baring succeeded Spring Rice at the Exchequer, Henry Labouchere took over the Board of Trade, and Macaulay replaced Lord Howick as Secretary of War. Stanley doubted whether these ‘political choppings and changings’ strengthened the government.124 Macaulay, he believed, was quite out of his element in his new office. Only Russell and Ebrington, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, he thought, had done anything to enhance their reputations. Graham agreed that Russell was the only man of first-rate ability in the ministry, yet ‘his talents and many virtues are debased by his hatred of the


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Church, which is stronger than his reason, and by his love of party, which is stronger than his principles’.125 On the Conservative side of the House, Stanley and Graham diagnosed their own problems. The hostility of the Queen, Wellington’s declining health, ‘but above all the mad impertinence and indiscretion of a large mass of the party, are more than enough to counteract the caution of Peel’.126 The Conservative back benches, Greville observed, seemed ‘rabid’ and impelled by ‘party rage’, while their leaders were ‘too wise and too decorous to hold such language or to approve such conduct; but it is the animus which distinguished the tail and the body, and they take no pains to conceal it’.127 Stanley spent September at Ballykisteen, hosting the annual cattle show and distributing premiums to those tenants who exhibited the best stock. But, after visiting Knowsley in October, he returned to London in mid-November. During December, Peel discussed their best course of action with Wellington, Stanley, Graham, and Goulburn. Considering the combative mood of their backbenchers, Graham and Goulburn inclined to offensive measures and favoured a motion of want of confidence at the opening of the 1840 session. Stanley and Wellington counselled caution. Peel sided with Graham and Goulburn, starkly portraying the choices as being either to displace the government or to dissolve their party. ‘Let it once transpire’, Graham warned Stanley on Christmas Eve, ‘that you are afraid to take the government, and your party is gone.’128 In the event, Stanley’s misgivings were vindicated. The Conservative want of confidence motion, brought forward by Sir John Yarde Buller on 28 January 1840, produced four nights of impassioned debate. Peel paraded his moderate progressive principles, binding his back benches to responsible reform, while Russell soothed the House with assurances of his repudiation of reckless change, a declaration as conservative as Peel’s pronouncement was liberal. There seemed, Greville judged, hardly any difference between them.129 The result, however, was a victory for the government by the surprisingly large margin of twenty-one votes. As Stanley had feared, this gave Melbourne’s ministry a further short lease of life. In his own contribution to the debate, on 30 January, Stanley asked, on what basis could there be any confidence in the ministry?130 There could only, he declared, be a confidence held by those wedded to extreme opinions. He quoted from a speech of O’Connell, as an ally of government, given in Dublin in 1836 calling for reform of the House of Lords, universal suffrage, the ballot, and the abolition of property qualifications for MPs. This, Stanley declared, was where the government was heading. In the meantime, the ministry had not the

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confidence of the opposition, the landed interest, the advocates of Free Trade, the clergy, or the constituencies of England. After cutting allusions to India and China, he concluded with a searching enquiry into the state of the nation’s finances where, for the past three years, there had been constantly augmented expenditure and an increasing deficit. Yet in the division lobby, on 31 January, the government secured an acquittal. Any further trial of strength was effectively postponed until the next session as, during early February, the public mind became preoccupied with the celebrations accompanying Queen Victoria’s marriage to Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. It was Stanley, however, who maintained Conservative pressure on the ministry. On 25 February he introduced an Irish Registration of Voters Bill.131 The differences in the registration of voters in England, since the Reform Act, and Ireland were significant. In Ireland registration was held before assistant barristers, not before barristers as in England. Claims for registration were required to be sent in during a twenty-day period in Ireland, unlike the three-month period allowed in England. In Ireland, with the exception of £50 freeholders, electors seeking to qualify for the first time had to produce their lease. At the same time, the system of certification of voters practised in Ireland was open to fraud and abuse. The huge discrepancies between those nominally enfranchised by the 1832 Irish Reform Act and those actually possessing the vote were the result. While the fraudulent possession of multiple votes by some was rife, vast numbers of others qualified to vote were denied their entitlement by the arbitrary complexity of the registration system. In Belfast in 1840, for example, only 1,900 individuals were registered to vote out of an entitled electorate of 6,000. Likewise, in Dublin in 1840 a registered electorate of 9,000 individuals comprised a mere half of those eligible to vote. Stanley’s measure proposed annual, rather than quarterly, registration, and the abolition of the certificate system; and gave judges of assize discretionary power to visit costs upon those who made frivolous claims or objections to claims. Stanley emphasized that his plan was not intended to change the franchise and that he was prepared to consider suggestions for its improvement. Amid widespread parliamentary ignorance of the confused complexities of the Irish electoral system his plan did have the rare virtue of simplicity. It was, however, not without partisan purpose. It was believed that most multiple certificates were Whig or radical votes. Yet the government themselves had earlier proposed reforming the registration system in Ireland, and Stanley’s measure placed them in an awkward position. The ministry offered no opposition to the introduction


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of the bill. O’Connell immediately responded, in a speech full of personal invective, designating Stanley as the last person in the world who, from his avowed principles and past conduct, ought to meddle in this matter. The plan, O’Connell asserted, would lead to merciless intimidation and the annihilation of the effective franchise. In reply, Stanley reminded the House that the franchise in Ireland, as settled by the 1832 Irish Reform Act, was more extensive, not less extensive, than the corresponding English franchise. With this spirited defence, from one of the few MPs with a close knowledge of the Irish situation, Stanley’s measure passed its first reading. At its second reading, on 25 March, Stanley’s bill faced strong opposition from O’Connell, Lord Morpeth, Chief Secretary for Ireland, David Pigot, Solicitor General for Ireland, Grattan, and Sheil. Stanley’s measure, they argued, would virtually disfranchise the great mass of the Irish people. O’Connell described the bill as ‘the deadliest stroke yet aimed at our liberty’.132 But the force of O’Connell’s invective was blunted by the ‘wretched ribaldry’ with which he alluded to Stanley’s coming to the House from the sickbed of his father. A few days earlier Derby had suffered a paralytic attack when alighting from his coach at Knowsley, while at nearby Lathom House Stanley’s mother-in-law, Lady Skelmersdale, was fatally ill. After briefly visiting Knowsley, Stanley had rushed back to Westminster in order to confront O’Connell in the Commons. Upon his return, O’Connell suggested to MPs that Stanley should be at his relatives’ bedsides, not at Westminster. O’Connell’s ‘disgraceful and stupid brutalities’, Greville noted, destroyed his denunciation of Stanley’s repressive intentions.133 Russell accused Stanley of compounding with that which was wholesome so much poisonous matter of his own introduction that the government must reject the whole concoction. But the Whigs were on the defensive and O’Connell shamed. Stanley retorted that, in rejecting his bill, his opponents were denying the monstrous abuses that presently existed. He then catalogued examples of fraud carried on by means of the certificate system whereby individual electors possessed multiple votes. In Belfast, he asserted, a group of 197 electors held 618 certificates between them. To remove such corruption his measure proposed an annual revision of the list of voters. The second reading passed by 350 to 334 votes, with a majority of sixteen. Significantly both Lord Howick and Sir Charles Wood, it was supposed under the influence of Lord Grey, supported Stanley’s bill. Following Stanley’s success O’Connell immediately launched the National Association for Repeal on 15 April. This would, he hoped, raise

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the political stakes and divert attention onto Repeal of the Union. In the Commons he spoke out violently against ‘Scorpion Stanley’ and his ‘Scorpion bill’. Unless we rouse ourselves, O’Connell warned his son, Stanley will succeed.134 In the Irish press O’Connell repeated the tag ‘Scorpion Stanley’, adding that Ireland was blessed with a soil which was fatal to serpents, adders, scorpions, and other venomous things that crawl and kill. He also denounced ‘the mock sentimentality’ that greeted his taunts of Stanley for leaving his father’s sickbed. ‘What a monster he is who obliterates natural affection to indulge in unnatural hate,’ O’Connell fulminated. He ‘did not wound the man who felt—he reproved the man who had no feeling’.135 At the committee stage of Stanley’s bill, on 16 May, Russell accused the supporters of the measure of a desire to disfranchise the Irish people. Stanley, in response, decried O’Connell’s violent personal abuse, while dismissing Russell’s vague promises of an alternative government measure.136 By a majority of three votes, 301 ayes to 298 noes, the committee stage proceeded. Conservative tenacity hardened. O’Connell’s alarm mounted, believing predictions that the bill would be thrown out to be idle. ‘The Tories are determined to carry it and, of course, there are loose fists enough amongst the Whigs to assist in the attack against Ireland.’137 But the government dragged the momentum of the bill down with a succession of hostile, though unsuccessful, divisions. Just one government amendment was finally carried, on 19 June, enabling all persons currently on the register to retain their vote after the implementation of any new legislation. Stanley, meanwhile, refused to enter into private negotiation with Morpeth on a compromise measure. Differences between them, he insisted, had to be resolved before parliament and the country.138 Yet, in early July the bill ran out of time and on 6 July Stanley reluctantly withdrew his measure. He would, he warned, introduce a similar bill in the next session.139 In response, during July and August, while Stanley visited his estate at Ballykisteen, O’Connell stoked up the exertions of his Repeal Association. To an audience in Galway, pointing to the national danger of military preparations in France, O’Connell accused Stanley of base disloyalty in choosing such a moment to bring forward his Irish measure, an act deserving of impeachment for high treason.140 Stanley’s Irish Registration of Voters Bill proved the major parliamentary offensive against Melbourne’s government during the 1840 session. It gave vent to backbench impatience, while affording a safe issue around which the party could rally. During June the popular political cartoonist John Doyle issued a new sketch depicting Lord Howick and Charles


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Wood asking the ostler of the Derby Dilly for front places on the coach. The places are already filled, however, by Stanley, who is driving the team, and Peel. ‘Plenty of room behind,’ says Graham, one of the passengers. Another passenger, Lord George Bentinck, comments, ‘What are the odds we don’t beat the other coach off the road before the end of the season!’141 Yet Stanley was careful not to translate this mounting pressure into popular agitation, despite a political meeting in Liverpool, one of the largest ever seen in the town, gathering to sign a petition supporting his measure. In October 1840 Sir Robert Bateson (MP for Londonderry) asked Stanley if he would support an anti-Repeal movement, to be called the Ulster Conservative Association, to counter O’Connell’s Repeal Association. But Stanley poured cold water on Bateson’s plan.142 First, he opposed local associations, whether Liberal or Conservative, as tending to vest political power in a number of clubs diffused throughout the country. Secondly, he believed the formation of an Anti-Repeal Association would unite opposing parties, particularly the government and O’Connell. Thirdly, he doubted whether the advocacy of Repeal and opposition to it were sincere on the part of any parties involved. If the advocacy of Repeal was in earnest, then a government rupture was inevitable and the AntiRepeal Association would be superfluous. If it was a mere convenience, then the formation of a hostile Association would be dangerous. Finally, he doubted whether an Ulster Conservative Association would promote harmony among Conservatives themselves. Ulster Conservatives would support repeal of Catholic Emancipation. English Conservatives would not countenance such a move. Stanley’s constitutional convictions continued to prescribe parliamentary deliberation as the proper means of discerning the national interest, as distinct from subversive popular agitation. In January 1841 both Stanley and Graham joined the Carlton Club, as a belated affirmation of their formal union with Peel’s Conservative party. As Stanley commented, ‘after some years of mutual probation it is more natural that we should be members than we should not’.143 At the opening of the parliamentary session he then revived his Irish Registration of Voters Bill.144 The measure contained the same provisions as the previous year. O’Connell, arguing that Stanley’s measure in itself fully justified the cry for dissolution of the Union, promptly opposed leave to introduce the bill, but was defeated by 261 to seventy-one votes. Stanley’s measure thereafter received its first reading unopposed. At a large Conservative meeting in Belfast, addressed by Lord Downshire, Lord Hillsborough,

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and Sir James Tennent, strong support for the bill was expressed. From St James’s Square, Stanley thanked the Conservatives of Belfast for their support, but welcomed their expression of confidence in his ‘discretion’ and ‘judgement’ in steering the measure through the Commons.145 He wished not to be shackled by popular protest. Morpeth subsequently introduced a government Irish Parliamentary Voters Bill, abolishing the certificate system, but proposing a different appeals procedure and broadening the Irish franchise. The second reading of Morpeth’s Parliamentary Voters (Ireland) Bill was carried by 299 to 294 votes on 27 February. The existence of these two rival measures, as well as a series of by-election losses for the government, dramatically raised the political temperature. In the radical press Stanley was accused of calling Irish Catholic voters, who abused the registration system, ‘perjured Papists’. He forcefully denied the accusation, stating that he believed the registration system in Ireland led to perjury, but he had never imputed perjury to an individual Catholic, as a Catholic. It was the electoral system, he insisted, that required reform.146 He then rejected an approach from Howick seeking a compromise on the issue. Graham believed ‘he had never seen Stanley so determined’.147 On 26 April, Howick carried, by 291 to 270 votes, a hostile amendment to Morpeth’s bill modifying the franchise qualification, which seriously rattled ministerial nerves. Yet, during March 1841, as Stanley celebrated his forty-second birthday, the spotlight of political contention swung over to finance and the budget. Bidding for a popular electoral cry, while attempting to prise the respectable middle-class Anti-Corn Law League away from the Chartists, Russell added a revision of the corn duties onto Baring’s budget. This forced Peel and the Conservatives to state a position on the Corn Laws. As Macaulay observed: ‘All the chances of our party depend on [the budget] … We shall play double or quits.’148 The difficult Irish registration issue was pushed aside. On Thursday 11 March, Stanley agreed to postpone debate of his bill until 28 April, following discussion of Morpeth’s measure.149 The subsequent defeat of Morpeth’s bill effectively deferred the Irish registration and franchise question for the foreseeable future, and Baring’s budget, with its dual authorship and controversial proposals, became the focus of political attention. A motion introduced by Russell on 10 May proposing the reduction of import duties on sugar was decisively beaten by 337 to 301 votes. Yet the cabinet indicated that they would not resign. Peel immediately announced a resolution of no confidence in the government. Between 27 May and 4 June this brought the full artillery of both sides of the House to bear. Stanley, supported by Graham, described to the


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Commons a catalogue of Whig legislative failures, against which Morpeth, Macaulay, and Russell posed constitutional niceties and O’Connell threw accusations of Conservative calumny. In a packed chamber, in the early hours of the morning of 5 June, amid shouting and stamping, Peel’s no confidence motion passed by a hair’s-breadth majority of one vote, 312 against 311. Two days later Russell announced the government’s decision to dissolve parliament. This was, Greville judged, ‘a desperate plunge’.150 The Whigs had little hope of winning the general election. In North Lancashire, on 6 July, Stanley was returned unopposed, top of the poll, accompanied, as in 1837, by the Conservative John Wilson Patten. A larger number of constituencies were uncontested in 1841 than in 1837; 217 Conservatives were returned unopposed, compared with 132 four years earlier. This was the harvest gathered in by assiduous Conservative attention to electoral registers and the partisan culling of Whig and radical voters. Many Whig and radical votes had, in contemporary slang, been ‘burked’, or smothered, and many Reform associations declined to put forward candidates for contests they recognized as unwinnable. The election gave the Conservatives a staggering Commons majority of seventy-eight MPs. Large gains were made in the English counties, as well as some additional seats in English boroughs and in Ireland. Parliament was due to assemble on 17 August 1841 and preparations began for a Peel ministry, the shattered Whig cabinet waiting to resign until party feeling was tested in the new Commons. Stanley expected Melbourne’s cabinet to insert a statement in the Address endorsing their financial policy. This, he advised Peel on 7 August, would be neither a wise nor a dignified course, but they would probably take it and consider a defeat on this ground as deciding their fate.151 The Conservatives’ best strategy, he believed, was very simple. If the government did not put a financial statement in the Address, then an amendment must be moved intended to be decisive. It would be a repetition of the vote of confidence entertained by the last parliament, in which the Lords should join. Stanley agreed with Peel that, amid all the difficulties facing any new government, national finance was the most pressing issue.152 The Whigs’ financial measures had been treated not as great questions of national policy, but as the means of replenishing an exhausted exchequer. Conservative financial policy must receive consideration proportionate to the magnitude of the interests involved. He agreed with Graham that Peel should not, on assuming office, give a detailed statement of

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policy. Time must be allowed to ascertain, from official information, the real state of the nation’s financial prospects. Stanley anticipated that considerable reductions might be possible in expenditure. Their budget might combine the removal of commercial restrictions with an increase of revenue. Reductions might also be achieved, he believed, by the simplification of the commercial tariff, at the expense of the revenue departments, those favourite sources of patronage to all governments, while at the same time improving the commercial system. But all this would have to follow a careful examination of the facts and figures. Reductions in the duty on coffee, sugar, and timber might be possible, which would stimulate consumption and relieve the consumer. Goulburn calculated, after allowing for some improvement of revenue and diminution of expense, a permanent annual deficiency of £1 1/2 to £2 million. A permanent deficit to this extent, Stanley thought, would be a strong enough foundation to bear such a superstructure as an income tax. But he hoped Peel would not resort to it except upon the most evident necessity. During mid-July the annual meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, attended by 40,000 visitors, was held in Liverpool. As chair at their formal meeting, while also acting as a judge in the horse breeding competition, Stanley delivered an eloquent tribute to the farmers of England, whose industry and diligent husbandry secured the prosperity and welfare of the nation.153 He was received with long-continued cheering from all parts of the spacious hall off Falkner Square. To the great amusement of his audience he joked that, following his horse Nightshade’s being placed last, at 5 to 1 odds, in the Sefton Stakes during the previous week’s Liverpool race meeting, it was appropriate that he was judging the competition for carthorses. The warm approbation he received cemented his ties with that section of society in which Conservative loyalty was firmly embedded. At meetings in London, attended by Stanley, Peel, and the Conservative leadership over the weekend of 21 to 23 August, it was agreed to move an amendment of no confidence in Melbourne’s government. The urging of Aberdeen and Gladstone to pass a censure on the ministry for calling a dissolution was rejected. When parliament met on Tuesday 24 August the Conservative no confidence motion was moved in both Houses. In the Commons it was carried by 360 to 269 votes. On Monday 30 August the resignation of Melbourne’s government was announced. The next morning Peel travelled to Windsor to receive his commission from a polite, but dejected, Queen. That afternoon Peel met Stanley


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and other Conservative leaders in Whitehall Gardens. They now held a position of formidable strength. A large parliamentary majority invested them with an authority not enjoyed by any cabinet since 1832. Stanley returned to the Colonial Office. Graham took the Home Office, the experienced Ripon became President of the Board of Trade, while the dull, but sound, Goulburn was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer. Members of Peel’s first cabinet, matured by years in opposition, filled out the rest of the government front bench. On 3 September the new ministers, in full court dress, attended the Queen at Claremont (King Leopold of Belgium’s country house at Esher in Surrey) for their formal installation. Two weeks later, on 18 September, Stanley left London for Knowsley. At his re-election for North Lancashire on 21 September, Stanley faced a storm of radical abuse as an apostate, a renegade, a changeling, and a turncoat, because of his abandonment of the Whigs in 1834. Every epithet of party rancour, The Times reported, was hurled against him. Hitherto, he had publicly treated such insults with silent contempt. On the hustings in Lancaster, however, he finally responded to his detractors. From the recently published memoirs of the French ultra-Liberal Duvergier de Hauranne, he quoted a conversation that had occurred during the author’s visit to Knowsley in 1826. On that occasion, de Hauranne had challenged the young Stanley on his opposition to appropriating the property of the Irish Church. Stanley had immediately replied: ‘On many points I know how to make sacrifices to my party; on that one I never can.’ This showed, he declared to the election crowd, that his conduct in 1834 was informed by consistent principles. ‘From the year 1834 it appeared to him that the government of Lord Melbourne were becoming day by day more tainted with extreme opinions, and were alien from the moderate Conservative Whiggism, which he (Lord Stanley) adopted and maintained.’154 The success of Peelite Conservatism, he averred, was a triumph for historic Whig principles, as distinct from the adulterated Whiggism of his opponents. At the Colonial Office the vexed questions of Canada, Australia, and Jamaica awaited him, while finance, Chartism, the Anti-Corn Law League, and Ireland stood as immediate challenges for the government. With political victory came executive responsibility and, as Stanley well knew, burdensome labour. He had left office in 1834 with hopes of a triumphant return to power at the head of a moderate government. By 1841, resuming the office he had left seven years earlier, he found himself in the humbler role of loyal lieutenant to Peel’s revived Conservatism. An

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appointment that looked like a promising step up the ladder of preferment when he was aged 34 was a disappointing restoration at the age of 42. It was some consolation, however, that he was the youngest minister in Peel’s cabinet. Time and patient application might yet bring greater political reward.

chapter 5

Colonies and Corn Laws: 1841–1845 The unity and harmony of the empire was to be cherished by means of strict commercial connection, carrying with it mutual advantage. It was such a sense which would keep the colonies together. If they deprived the colonies of the sense of mutual commercial advantage, they would diminish the strength arising from union, and if they abandoned the colonies, and commerce with the colonies, they would diminish their national power and glory and sink into the condition of a second rate power. (Stanley to the Commons, 13 May 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxiii. 535)

No minister could hold permanently the reins of power in this country who did not, in addition to the confidence of the Sovereign, possess the confidence of the Commons. (Stanley to the Commons, 30 May 1844, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxiv. 38–61)

n 1841 Britain’s overseas possessions extended around the globe as a varied aggregation of colonies, islands, entrepôts, naval bases, and penal settlements. They broadly comprised the white settlements, claiming rights of ‘representative government’, and those ‘dependent’ colonies acquired by conquest or treaty. In North America were the British and French populations of Upper and Lower Canada, which Stanley had visited seventeen years earlier; the oldest British settlement, on the island of Newfoundland; and the maritime colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. Inland the Hudson’s Bay Company operated a lucrative fur trade. In the Caribbean were long-established island colonies, including St Kitts, Barbados, Antigua, Dominica, St Lucia, and Jamaica, and the more recent acquisitions of Trinidad and Tobago. To the north were the Bahama Islands and Bermuda. In Central America, British Honduras provided a base for naval and commercial activity. On the South American continent was tropical British Guiana, acquired in 1814. Along the Atlantic trade routes were the fever-ridden West African settlements of Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and the Gold Coast, as well as the remote Atlantic islands of Ascension, St Helena, Tristan da Cunha,

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colonies and corn laws: 1841–1845

and the Falklands. The strategic naval base at Cape Town guarded entry to the Indian Ocean and the Cape Colony, whose Dutch Boer settlers had undertaken the ‘Great Trek’ inland in 1837 to beyond the Orange River away from British rule. Fortified bases in Gibraltar, Malta, and the Ionian Islands protected British maritime interests in the Mediterranean, and the strategic stronghold of Aden, recently acquired in 1839, guarded the approach to India from the Red Sea. Access to India, which was administered by the East India Company, was also secured by the Britishheld islands of Mauritius, the Seychelles, and Ceylon. British control in north-east India had been extended by military conquest between 1824 and 1826. The expanding trade with China was channelled through the East India Company’s bases at Penang, off the Malay peninsula, and Singapore, while Britain’s presence in Australia, established by the penal colony of New South Wales in 1788, was consolidated by the setting up of the prison settlement on Van Diemen’s Land (called Tasmania after 1853), the small colony of Western Australia, founded in 1829, and the colony of South Australia, established in 1836. Following extensive missionary activity New Zealand was annexed in 1840, an act formalized in the Treaty of Waitangi. These far-flung possessions were overseen by the Colonial Office from two cramped, damp, and rather dilapidated townhouses, 13 and 14 Downing Street.1 The offices of Stanley, as Secretary of State, George Hope, his Under-Secretary of State, the Permanent Under-Secretary, and their secretaries, the senior clerks, and their assistants were packed into the first and second floors. On the ground floor was the library, the offices of the chief clerk, and a small waiting room, while in the damp basement the copyists, office keepers, and bookbinders laboured. For the next four years these were the buildings to which Stanley, following his ride after breakfast with his young daughter in Hyde Park, regularly walked from St James’s Square. The Colonial Office staff worked from eleven to five o’clock, taking a break for lunch at two o’clock, with the notable exception of the compulsive James Stephen, who diligently toiled for long hours over the detailed dispatches, numerous letters, and extensive memorandums generated by Britain’s colonial rule. In 1836 Stephen had been appointed Permanent Under-Secretary. He immediately introduced greater organizational efficiency to the Colonial Office, a system which remained largely unchanged until the 1870s. But, as subordinates testified, the reclusive and scholarly Stephen was a difficult man to work for, being demanding, loath to delegate, sensitive to criticism, and jealous of encroachments on his authority.2 His health was eventually to pay a heavy


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price for his single-minded dedication when, in 1848, he suffered a nervous breakdown. He also, in 1841, still deeply resented Stanley’s disregard for his advice over the drafting of the Abolition of Slavery legislation in 1833. Stephen’s resentment was shared by the well-connected Sir Henry Taylor, senior clerk to the West Indian division, who in his book The Statesman had penned an oblique, but scathing, critique of Stanley’s temperamental flaws. A friend of John Stuart Mill and the Benthamites, in 1839 Taylor married Spring Rice’s daughter Theodosia. After 1841, because, he claimed, of his asthma, he chose to work away from the Colonial Office at his home in Bournemouth, where his papers were sent in dispatch boxes. Taylor’s colleagues included the conscientious, but pedestrian, Sir George Barrow, senior clerk for the African division, Arthur Blackwood, senior clerk for the North American division, and the dull and unimaginative chief clerk, Peter Smith. When Stanley returned to the Colonial Office in 1841 he found both sullen animosity and routine competence among his officials. Before the advent of the telegraph, which was not used by the Colonial Office until the 1860s, the ability of Whitehall to control events overseas was limited. The tempo of Colonial Office activity was largely determined by the arrival of the mail, reporting on events and decisions of weeks or even months before. As a result, the Colonial Secretary might lay down general principles and review actions taken, but the implementation of policy was largely in the hands of local authorities. Colonial governors exercised significant discretion, with occasional communication from Whitehall indicating the broad direction of official policy. Charles Buller, Lord Durham’s private secretary and Reform MP for Liskeard, pronounced the main business of the Colonial Office to be the education of effective colonial governors who could be left to manage their own affairs.3 Stanley saw his essential ministerial responsibility as safeguarding the prosperity and security of Britain’s existing possessions. He was not an aggressive colonial expansionist. This was a view supported by James Stephen, who regarded colonial territorial expansion as a regrettable cause of unnecessary expense and needless conflict. Britain, in Stanley’s view, did not require greater overseas territory. Rather, her empire provided an economic base upon which to build increasing commerce and trade. Secure profits, not more colonial possessions, were the key to Britain’s international pre-eminence. This view was reinforced by Peel’s preoccupation with sound domestic finance and social stability at home. Although unforeseen events, local commercial considerations, strategic anxieties, and missionary activity might force further territorial extensions of British authority, they occurred despite more cautious views in London. For

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Stanley, meanwhile, protection and preferential colonial tariffs were the necessary fiscal basis for ensuring the economic prosperity and close political links enjoyed by Britain and her overseas possessions. During the 1820s Huskisson had amended import duties on West Indian sugar and Canadian corn so as to strengthen the colonial economy. Stanley saw colonial preference, with its corollary of protective tariffs against non-colonial trade, as essential to preserving Britain’s empire. Stable colonial markets, he believed, were more reliable than volatile international trade. It was on the mutual economic interdependence of Britain and her colonies, defended by her naval supremacy, that Britain’s global power was based. Radical demands for colonial constitutional reform and greater free trade comprised a threat to this pre-eminence. Stanley regretted greater colonial self-government, if it presaged a loosening of ties with the ‘mother country’. But he recognized it as, to some degree, inevitable, as colonies grew in political maturity and economic stability. His imperial views, therefore, were pragmatic, rather than doctrinaire, and supported by Stephen. ‘There cannot be two opinions’, Stephen observed, ‘as to the folly and danger of a government writing abstract and speculative doctrines.’4 Radical democratic argument and the doctrinaire logic of Free Trade were regarded with hostility, as dangerously corrosive of Britain’s colonial achievement. The devout Stephen also agreed with Stanley’s belief that the founding of Anglican Establishments in new colonies was essential to ensuring civil order and social stability. To this end, in September 1841 Stanley confirmed the appointment of George Selwyn as New Zealand’s first Anglican primate. Similarly, following the Treaty of Nan-ching in 1842, Stanley supported the appointment of an Anglican cleric to Hong Kong to oversee the Establishment of the Church of England in the newly acquired Crown Colony. Effective Anglican authority was essential to the moral welfare of Britain’s overseas possessions, securing the foundation of colonial economic prosperity.

Charged with the public weal, and cares of state. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 37)

On assuming office Stanley found himself plunged into the flood of official correspondence and memorandums served up by Stephen and his colleagues. ‘I have … hardly a moment to myself,’ he complained to his old Irish Office colleague Francis Blackburne.5 During September


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and October a deluge of requests for patronage came in, to which, in consultation with George Hope, he gave careful consideration. He wearily observed, however, that the amount of patronage available to him was far less than commonly supposed. Pleas from impoverished colonists or their widows for relief from the funds of Her Majesty’s Bounty were received, which, on occasion, he forwarded to Peel to see if other public funds might be available. Others he responded to with the suggestion that a private subscription might be appropriate.6 On 4 September he attended his first cabinet meeting, held at the Foreign Office, followed by a second meeting of ministers on 6 September. Lord Wharncliffe, as Lord President of the Council, gave a dinner for the cabinet at his residence in Curzon Street on 9 September. On 17 September, Stanley joined his ministerial colleagues in attendance on the Queen at Windsor, where dinner was followed by games of whist. The following day he left London for Lancashire to attend his re-election. By 22 September he was back in London immersed in Colonial Office business. On 5 October he travelled with Graham to Windsor for a Privy Council meeting. He was then a guest, on Saturday 9 October, at a banquet for the new government given by the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House. Although parliament remained in session until 7 October, he made only two very brief statements in the Commons, on 29 and 30 September, on the West African colonies and the Falkland Islands. An attack of gout on 16 October then forced him to his bed and not until 26 October was he able to return to the Colonial Office. During the following days he was preoccupied with administration in Whitehall. Examining the Acts passed by colonial legislatures, over which Stephen passed an experienced eye, and dispensing the scarce funds available to support emigrants to the more distant colonies comprised his daily routine. Since 1832 the Colonial Office had administered, through the Colonial Land and Emigration Commission, a modest fund, built up from colonial land sales, to assist women, skilled artisans, and agricultural labourers to emigrate. On 11 November, Stanley left St James’s Square for Knowsley, where he arrived three days later. Pursued by dispatch boxes, he then enjoyed the comparative relaxation of a brief family Christmas. But, by 28 December, he was attending the Queen at Windsor Castle and he worked the New Year back in London, as preparations for the forthcoming parliamentary session were begun. Drafting legislation for Westminster assumed a greater urgency. After, once again, attending the Queen at Windsor on 3 January, he then visited the Duke of Buckingham at Stowe. By 7 January he was back at St James’s Square attending cabinet meetings and holding interviews at the Colonial Office. Official

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gala dinners, meanwhile, broke up the routine of administrative business. During a Mansion House banquet on Saturday 15 January, when Lord Ripon rose to speak and announced he was going to quote lines from the Scottish song ‘The Boatie Row’, but apologized to the audience for not reciting it with the proper accent, Stanley interjected, ‘Why don’t you sing them!’ Much laughter broke out among the assembly, particularly among the aldermen.7 On 28 January he then attended the dinner at Whitehall Gardens given by Peel for the King of Prussia. On 3 February he reported that ‘our session opened today very favourably. No amendment in either House; immense crowds in the streets and all in high good humour; a very lazy attendance on both sides in both Houses and I should say a general feeling in favour of the government.’8 So was the more relaxed routine of opposition exchanged for the demands of executive duty. Yet, whereas colonial policy, particularly the abolition of slavery, had been a matter of intense parliamentary interest in 1833 and 1834, by 1841 the affairs of the Colonial Office engaged far less attention in Westminster. The informal representation of colonial interests in the Commons, especially those of West Indian proprietors, had been much reduced by the 1832 Reform Act. As a result, the concern of MPs in colonial matters and the number who attended debates on colonial questions had greatly diminished. Moreover, the prime minister’s own preoccupations were with domestic and financial issues. Empire was not a prominent part of Peel’s claim to governing expertise. Therefore, Stanley’s official business dealt not only with matters that were geographically remote, but with issues that many MPs regarded as peripheral to the parliamentary agenda. Over the next three years Stanley was to feel increasingly acutely a sense of political marginalization. The affairs of Australia and New Zealand demanded much of Stanley’s legislative attention during the 1842 session, although the fact that mail took nearly six months to reach London from the Antipodes emphasized his difficulties in knowing what precisely was happening and, in turn, influencing events. The regulation of emigration, stabilizing the finances of the colonies, and modifying their governmental structure were his immediate concerns. In New Zealand implementation of the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was shaping the terms of debate, a discussion in which Stanley and the Colonial Office looked to act as a buffer between white settlers and the indigenous Maori population. The Treaty guaranteed the Maori possession of their lands and conferred on them the rights and privileges of British subjects. In return, the Maori chiefs acceded to British sovereignty. But the Colonial Office’s honouring of these guarantees was


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to prove extraordinarily difficult as growing numbers of white settlers and evangelical missionaries arrived in the islands. Under the auspices of the New Zealand Company, founded by Edward Gibbon Wakefield in 1839 and supported by Benthamite Reformers such as Sir William Molesworth and John Stuart Mill, British emigration was being actively promoted. Maori disillusionment with the Treaty swiftly followed. Both Stanley and Stephen deeply mistrusted the activities of the New Zealand Company, whose enthusiasm for increased settlement, they believed, led its agents, under the inducement of commissions, to assert doubtful claims and to engage in questionable conduct, while blithely ignoring the Maori’s legal rights. Their qualms were reinforced by the fact that the New Zealand Company continually clashed with the Church Missionary Society, of which Stephen was a prominent member. Stanley informed Peel that he disliked the Company because of ‘the perpetual small trickery which from first to last has characterised their proceedings’.9 He also believed that the vulnerability of emigrants was being ruthlessly exploited by unscrupulous shipowners during their passage. In the Australian colonies this was exacerbated by the economic instability prevailing in Western and South Australia, resulting in complex and constantly changing procedures for land purchase. As a result, newly arrived emigrants were confronted with fluctuating land prices, often at levels far in excess of what they had been led to expect. During the winter of 1841 detailed reports of the fraud and deception practised on emigrants were drawn up by the Colonial Office. Statistics showing the increasing volume of recent emigration were also compiled. In 1840, 90,700 persons had emigrated to the Antipodes. During the first nine months of 1841 the number increased to 106,475 individuals. Although it had been previously thought that such activity was not an appropriate area for legislative interference, Stanley became convinced that government regulation was necessary. In the Commons, on Friday 4 February 1842, Stanley, following an audience with the Queen earlier in the day, gave notice of his intention to legislate on both the carrying of emigrants to Australia and New Zealand and the sale of colonial lands.10 Emigration, he observed, was a clear benefit to the nation. It relieved the mother country of its surplus population and augmented the resources of the colonies. Yet both poorer emigrants, exposed to frauds practised upon them, and wealthier emigrants, looking to purchase land, required legislative protection. Two measures were necessary. First, a measure was needed regulating the space given to passengers on board ship and the quantity of provisions and water needed for the voyage. The existing 1825 Passengers Act was clearly inadequate.

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Further legislation, moreover, should apply not only to emigration from Britain, but to all inter-colonial emigration. Secondly, regarding the sale of colonial lands, a comprehensive survey of the land available for settlement should be undertaken, certain portions of land being regularly brought onto the market and sold at one regulated price. Part of the subsequent proceeds could be used for the instruction and benefit of the aboriginal inhabitants, who had both a moral and a legal claim on Britain’s justice and humanity. From the opposition benches Russell, as Stanley’s predecessor, welcomed such legislation as urgently needed.11 During March, Stanley incorporated detailed modifications into his Colonial Passengers Bill and, on 26 July, secured its third reading in the Commons.12 During April, following meetings with a deputation from the New South Wales and Van Diemen’s Land Commercial Association, he successfully steered his Australia and New Zealand Bill, regulating the sale of land to emigrants, through its second reading. He reassured the Commons that no distinction would be drawn between Protestants and Catholics in the treatment of emigrants and that, for the foreseeable future, new settlements in New Zealand would be confined to the North Island.13 But on 19 April he also took the opportunity, arising from a question from the financier and West Indian merchant Patrick Stewart (Reform MP for the county of Renfrew), to advise the House that the demand for additional labour in Australia and New Zealand had now largely been met. In contrast, Canada offered emigrants very favourable prospects of employment.14 He wished to correct what he saw as the dangerously exaggerated claims of emigration bodies, such as the New Zealand Company, who distributed misleadingly optimistic publicity about the opportunities promised by life in the Antipodes. Bringing economic stability to the Australian colonies also demanded Stanley’s prompt attention. When Captain George Grey replaced Colonel George Gawler as Governor of South Australia in May 1841, he reported the colony, established five years earlier, to be nearing a state of insolvency. But the necessary measures of economy introduced by Governor Grey threw a large proportion of the population into distress. Assisted emigration to the Australian colonies administered by the Colonial Office was suspended. On 5 July 1842 Stanley reported to the Commons that a healthier economic state was beginning to prevail and that, in the near future, he anticipated the colony’s becoming financially self-supporting.15 In order to safeguard this improvement, he secured parliament’s agreement that money advanced to the colony by the Treasury in 1841 need not be subject to repayment. At the same time, provisions were introduced to ensure better management of the


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colony’s revenues and the Crown reserved its power to introduce a more popular representative system in South Australia when circumstances appeared to justify it. Ten days later, on 15 July, Stanley received the Commons’ approval for a grant of money to Western Australia, established as a colony in 1829. Experience showed, he informed the House, that it was impossible for infant colonies to bear their own expenses. They must, in their early years, entail some financial burden on the mother country.16 As an example of what more mature colonies might aspire to, during the session Stanley saw through a bill setting up a more popular constitution in New South Wales (founded in 1788), giving political rights to those fairly entitled by wealth to a voice in their government. Stanley’s mistrust of the emigration societies came to a head in April 1843 when Charles Buller urged the Commons to support greater systematic colonization of Australia and New Zealand. Stanley’s long, detailed response denounced Buller’s proposal as injurious to the public.17 Exaggerated expectations of the benefit of emigration, he declared, were being induced in the minds of the nation’s poor. Following his legislation of 1842, he insisted, emigration was proceeding satisfactorily, widely, and safely under the superintendence and protection of the government. But it was not the duty of the government to force or compel emigration, only to assist, guide, and protect its course. He laid out in detail the mischievous and unfounded expectations being incited by publications such as the Colonial Gazette, where misleading promises were held out to emigrants. There was now no significant shortage of labour in the colonies to which they were being encouraged to travel. After a prolonged debate Buller’s motion was withdrawn. This marked the culmination of Stanley’s effort to check what he saw as misplaced enthusiasm for systematic colonization as a simplistic panacea for domestic poverty and unemployment. The harsh realities of colonial existence, he believed, should not be obscured for those desperate for a better life. Stanley’s ‘sound sense’, The Times applauded, was ‘worth more than a whole library of treatises on political economy’.18 A few months later Stanley sent the 38-year-old Captain Robert Fitzroy to New Zealand as Governor. Fitzroy had captained HMS Beagle on Charles Darwin’s voyage to the Galapagos Islands and, in 1841, had been elected Conservative MP for Durham. A devout Christian, his appointment was supported by the Church Missionary Society, who sent a deputation for discussion with Stanley during June. Fitzroy was instructed by Stanley to ensure that the terms of the Treaty of Waitangi were strictly adhered to and to mediate between the white settlers and the Maori. On his arrival in December 1843, Fitzroy found tensions between the

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colonists and the Maori running high, particularly over land claims. Like Stanley, he came to distrust the agents of the New Zealand Company. Both the Colonial Secretary and newly arrived Governor believed that the Treaty granted all the lands of New Zealand to the Maori. The Company, however, argued that its terms applied only to those lands the Maori actually occupied. Differences escalated when Fitzroy sided with the Maori following the murder of a number of settlers by natives at the Wairau River, a decision endorsed by the colony’s Attorney General, William Swainson. Stanley had no doubt that Fitzroy’s handling of the incident was correct. In September 1844 he reported to Peel that the ‘catastrophe was wholly attributable to the colonists, and that they were in the wrong throughout’.19 Nonetheless, violent clashes between white settlers and Maori increased during 1844 and Fitzroy was forced to call in troops from New South Wales to restore order. Fitzroy became a despised figure among the settlers. Stanley too, although he had very little information about what was occurring, became a hated figure. Domestic pressure, incited by the radical press as well as the Company’s lobbying in London, mounted against him. The non-settlement of land claims, the association of missionaries with the Maori, the distance of Auckland, as the seat of colonial government, from the white settlements, and the inefficiency of the local police were the complaints of the settlers.20 At the same time Stanley was receiving deputations from the London Missionary Society complaining of the settlers’ illegal behaviour.21 By the end of 1844 the situation in New Zealand had become a source of acute political difficulty for the Colonial Secretary. Colonial unrest also confronted Stanley in Van Diemen’s Land. In 1837 the naval officer and Arctic explorer Sir John Franklin had arrived as Lieutenant Governor in what remained largely a violent penal colony. By 1835 the whole indigenous Aboriginal population had been either exterminated or deported, and escaped convicts, known as bushrangers, terrorized the country surrounding the notoriously barbarous penal settlements of Macquarie Harbour and Port Arthur. Immigrant settlers, arriving in the colonial capital of Hobart, faced a bleak and brutal prospect. With religious zeal Franklin immediately sought to improve the condition of the convicts, to lay the groundwork for the introduction of a representative assembly, and to establish schools. His enthusiasm was only exceeded by the zeal of his wife. But their reforming ardour alienated government officials on the island and created influential political enemies. Stanley concluded that Franklin’s mild humanity was not up to imposing civil order in the factious colony and in November 1843 Franklin was recalled. In May 1845


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the 59-year-old Franklin set off on his ill-fated search for the north-west passage, an expedition from which he never returned. In September 1841 West Indian business also occupied much of Stanley’s time. Most immediately, this assumed the form of reforming the Anglican dioceses in the region. Correspondence with the Archbishop of Canterbury, the unassuming 75-year-old William Howley, and the Bishop of Barbados confirmed Stanley’s belief in the need for additional ecclesiastical appointments. The creation of further sees in the West Indies appeared necessary to the maintenance of the Anglican Church’s authority.22 But an indication that the Bishop of Barbados intended to resign, although in good health and in perfect possession of his mental powers, concerned him. Coming on the eve of legislative reform, he feared it would create an unfavourable impression in the public mind.23 Nevertheless, by the end of September 1841 the Bishop had stepped down. Despite this setback Stanley pushed ahead in drawing up a bill proposing the creation of sees for Berbice, Demerara, and Antigua, as well as those already established in Barbados and Jamaica, bishops in the two latter dioceses receiving an increase in salary. On 8 February 1842 he gave notice of his West Indian Clergy Bill.24 A month later, during the committee stage, the anticlerical radical MP for Marylebone Sir Charles Napier pressed for a reduction in the number of proposed bishoprics. But the bishops, Stanley countered, should not have such extensive dioceses as would prevent them from visiting all parts more than once a year.25 The population in the West Indies was growing, and effective fulfilment of their pastoral duties required no fewer than five sees. A smaller establishment would weaken the Church’s moral influence in the region. Napier’s motion was easily defeated. During February 1842 O’Connell, in another radical challenge, demanded details of the rioting that had occurred in Jamaica over the previous Christmas. Lives had been lost when white settlers attempted to repress the traditional ‘negro saturnalia’. Stanley firmly supported the Governor, Sir Charles Metcalfe, who had pointedly disapproved of the Mayor of Kingston’s resort to force in the face of threatened unrest.26 The Mayor’s panic had created alarm and confusion, the police had fired on the rioters, and four black inhabitants had been killed. Only when the troops were called out was order restored. Stanley also defended Metcalfe’s response to the arrest by the Spanish authorities of several British subjects engaged in commercial activities on the border of the Mosquito Coast.27 Metcalfe had successfully negotiated their release, he reassured the Commons on 22 February. Restitution and reparations were now being demanded by the Governor.

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Sustained radical pressure on Stanley in the Commons was maintained, however, by Grantley Berkeley’s enquiries about the West Indian sugar trade. On 14 February, Berkeley pressed Stanley as to whether the report that the making of sugar now exceeded its market value was true and whether the government had any plans for the importation of labourers into the West Indian colonies. The issue applied, Stanley responded, only to Demerara and Berbice, not to all the colonies.28 Although he was aware of the enormous expense of cultivating certain estates, he was opposed to promoting general emigration. Recent emigration from Sierra Leone and the coast of Africa to the West Indies had proved beneficial, but white labourers found the climate difficult, often succumbing to disease, even death. Nor did the government, he declared in a familiar refrain, wish to promote a general, certainly not forced, migration. Emigration should be free and voluntary. In March 1842 Stanley proposed setting up two Commons Select Committees, one examining the state of agriculture in the West Indies, the other inquiring into the conditions of British settlements on the western coast of Africa, Sierra Leone, the Gambia, and the Gold Coast.29 Relevant to both Committees was the issue of emigration, supplying additional labour to work the West Indian sugar plantations. To assist discussion Stanley requested that a census be carried out in all the British West Indies. He assured the Commons that the benefits resulting from his Slavery Abolition measure of nine years earlier had exceeded his most sanguine expectations. The physical condition and prosperity of the black population of the West Indies had markedly improved. But he acknowledged that West Indian planters were suffering serious loss and economic injury. Less sugar was being imported from the West Indies into Britain. Planters faced a scarcity of labour. Former slaves were now looking after their own farms, having become possessors of property instead of mere cultivators of the soil. He saw two possible remedies: either a reduction in the expense of cultivation by means of better management, or increased immigration leading to a greater availability of labour and a consequent reduction in wages. Regarding the first option, he believed it might be possible to introduce a system similar to English practice by placing labourers more in the condition of tenants, giving them an interest joint and inseparable from the landlord, and making them share in the amount of produce. With regard to immigration, he believed it was to the coast of Africa that planters should look for the supply of labour, although, once again, he insisted that any emigration must be voluntary. By steering the issue into Select Committee he successfully


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curtailed acrimonious Commons debate. Thereafter, increasing numbers of African ‘recaptives’, blacks rescued from slave ships by British patrols, were, after being landed in liberation depots in Sierra Leone or on the island of St Helena, encouraged to migrate to the West Indies to alleviate the worsening labour shortage. The Times welcomed Stanley’s ‘able and clear’ statements, but felt he dismissed too lightly the economic difficulties confronting the planters following slave emancipation.30 Economic factors of a very different kind, meanwhile, had led to war in China, involving the importation of opium by British traders and commercial access to the huge China market. Since the 1820s opium, as well as raw cotton, from India, was imported through the port of Kuang-tung by British merchants in exchange for bullion, mainly silver, and tea. By 1835 British traders were shipping 27,000 chests of opium, each containing 145 pounds of the drug, each year, into Kuang-tung. By 1839, 40,000 chests of opium were shipped into China by British traders, yielding one-seventh of the total revenue of British India. As a result, something in the region of 2 million opium addicts, mainly among the Chinese middle and upper ranks, were directly dependent on the trade. In 1838 the alarmed Chinese Emperor Tao-kuang appointed his ablest official, Lin Tse-hsu, to eradicate the opium traffic. In March 1839, 350 European and American merchants were forced to abandon their goods in Kuang-tung. Under the protection of the British superintendent of trade, the energetic Captain Charles Elliot, they retreated to the uninhabited island of Hong Kong. In November a naval clash between two British frigates and Chinese war junks initiated an escalating cycle of violence between Chinese forces, seeking to expel the opium traders, and British forces, asserting the right of British merchants to trade on the Chinese mainland. A British expeditionary force of forty-eight ships and 4,000 troops was assembled at Hong Kong in June 1840 under the command of Charles Elliot’s cousin Admiral Sir George Elliot. Over the following months Kuang-tung was blockaded, the offshore island of Ch’u-san occupied, and both the Yang-tzue and Pei-ho rivers obstructed by British warships. A prolonged series of negotiations with Chinese officials in Kuang-tung ensued. But the resulting Convention of Chuenpi was rejected, in January 1841, by both the Chinese Emperor and the British government, precipitating further clashes of arms in Kuang-tung. Sir Henry Pottinger arrived as the new British plenipotentiary in Hong Kong in August 1841 and, under the naval command of Rear Admiral Sir William Parker, British forces established control of Kuang-tung, Ch’u-san, Chinhai, and Ning-po. During the winter of 1841–2 military

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preparations were also undertaken, under the leadership of Major-General Sir Hugh Gough, for British troops to occupy further strategic strongholds on the Chinese mainland. Stanley privately expressed his strong distaste for the situation in China the government inherited. Administering the War Department came under his responsibilities as Secretary of State for the Colonies. But the oversight of supplies and operations was complicated by overlapping authorities. The views of the cabinet, particularly the opinion of Lord Aberdeen as Foreign Secretary, had to be taken into account, while the local decisions of the Governor General of India, reporting to Lord Fitzgerald at the Board of Control, were key to the logistical and strategic considerations required by the war. It was a further complication that naval operations necessarily involved Lord Haddington at the Admiralty and questions of supply required working with the Victualling Department. Stanley’s deep misgivings about the China conflict did not help in negotiating these administrative complexities. To Russell, in October 1841, he complained of the ‘awful bill of costs’ which the China crisis had generated.31 To Lord Fitzgerald at the Board of Control, in December, he laid out the government’s objectives in continuing to prosecute the war. Satisfaction for the injuries inflicted on British subjects and the establishing of peaceful and friendly commercial relations with China, on such a footing as would afford permanent security against a recurrence of misunderstandings in the future, were his primary aims. He entertained, however, no desire to acquire additional territorial possessions.32 Yet he feared that military operations, in defence of British commercial interests, might force them to assert claims to territory, despite their wish not to do so. The fact that the military plan of campaign must be largely left to the Governor General and that dispatches from the region could take two to three months to reach London increased Stanley’s concern. He shared his anxieties with Lord Ellenborough, newly appointed Governor General of India, in February 1842. In the absence of successful negotiations, Stanley recognized that the government might be compelled to assert a British presence on Hong Kong and keep permanent possession of their acquisitions on the China coast, but he worried that this would mean establishing them as free ports only ‘to carry on an essentially smuggling trade’ with the Chinese Empire.33 In terms of the military campaign, Stanley saw two alternative strategies: either, the seizure of Chen-chiang at the intersection of the Yang-tzue and the Grand Canal, or a more ambitious advance much further north to take T’ien-chin, near Pei-ching. The main objective of frightening the Emperor into negotiation, while avoiding any embarrassing defeat of British arms,


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however, remained paramount. He regarded the existing force of 10,000 military and naval personnel adequate for this purpose, but after February 1842 the command of events effectively passed to Ellenborough in India. In May 1842, enjoying a huge superiority of military technology, Parker and Gough advanced on Cha’-p’u, occupying the city and killing hundreds of Chinese for the loss of nine British troops and fifty-five wounded. Large numbers of Chinese civilian men, women, and children in the city subsequently committed suicide or killed each other in fear of the barbarian invaders. On 19 June, Gough occupied Shanghai and proceeded up the Yang-tzue, taking the strategic city of Chen-chiang with again large Chinese military and civilian fatalities, and then moving on towards Nan-ching. On 6 July 1842 Stanley wrote to Ellenborough expressing his dislike of this ‘most unsatisfactory war’. As he explained to the Governor General: There is little advantage and no glory in such affairs as the wholesale slaughter, without loss on our part, of Chinese; and I earnestly trust that the result of this year’s campaign may be such as to enable us to close, whether by treaty or by retaining possession of such parts as we have got and choose to keep, this unfortunate war.34

Stanley’s personal views matched the public response to early reports of military success in China, which, Greville noted, brought little glory and excited not ‘a particle of pride or triumph’.35 With Gough’s troops approaching Nan-ching, the Chinese Emperor finally sent out emissaries to negotiate a peace. The Treaty of Nan-ching, signed in August, concluded the hostilities. As yet unaware of these events, ministers in London during October were still expressing their reluctance to acquire permanent settlements in China. Aberdeen feared the expense, the effect on their future relations with China, and the probable embarrassment it would create with other Western powers. Similarly, Stanley preferred legitimate trade with China based on treaty agreements to ‘the occupation of a Chinese Gibraltar or two’.36 He was quite prepared to give up Hong Kong. But strong pressure was coming from military, civilian, and mercantile circles to take possession of the island. When details of the negotiations reached London, Stanley learnt that Britain was committed to taking possession of Hong Kong under the terms of the Treaty of Nan-ching, ending what became known as the First Opium War. Five ports, Kuang-tung, Hsia-men, Fu-chou, Ning-po, and Shanghai, were opened to British merchants, under agreed import and export tariffs, and the importation

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of opium was banned. The Chinese Emperor also agreed to pay Britain a large indemnity for losses by British merchants in Kuang-tung and the cost of the expeditionary force. In the trade that subsequently established itself in these ‘open ports’, however, opium was still landed by Western merchants in blatant violation of the Treaty. Thus suspicion and bitterness, despite the diplomatic language of the Nan-ching negotiations (suggesting that the Emperor was condescending, rather than submitting, to British demands), continued to dog British relations with the Chinese imperial court for many years. Stanley’s immediate response to the conclusion of the war was one of great relief. The acquisition of Hong Kong he accepted as an unavoidable commitment. A regrettable episode had been brought to an acceptable, if not glorious, close. With regard to the government of Hong Kong he was strongly of the view that it should not be treated as a dependency of India. The control of the Colonial Office should be more directly established, Stanley suspecting that Indian commercial interests would only hope to expand illegal trade and extend territorial claims. In December 1842 he proposed to Peel and Aberdeen that Hong Kong be made a free port, so that it might become an entrepôt for all nations.37 At the same time, all the land should be retained by the Crown, to help defray the cost of operating the port and administering the colony, under a Governor advised by a Council. He also wished to send an Anglican cleric immediately to the colony to help establish secure social foundations for the potentially numerous British community on the island. On 14 February 1843 he moved a Commons vote of thanks to the Army and Navy for their victories in China and welcomed the fact that the triumph of British arms had enabled them to dictate the terms of the peace.38 From the opposition benches Palmerston warmly seconded Stanley’s motion. Stanley’s hope that the terms of the Treaty of Nan-ching would enable British merchants to establish a thriving commercial presence in China were quickly fulfilled, particularly in Shanghai and Hong Kong, although the continued importation of opium remained a contentious provocation. In February 1844 Sir George Staunton, the 63-year-old Reform MP for Portsmouth, challenged Stanley in the Commons over whether British subjects, by endeavouring to import illegal opium into China, forfeited the aid and protection of the British Crown. He also enquired whether opium was allowed to be landed and warehoused under British sovereignty in Hong Kong for re-exportation into China. A supporter of the Opium War in 1840, Staunton was a recognized expert on China. Translator of the Chinese penal code, author of numerous pamphlets on China, one of


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the Royal Commissioners in the British delegation sent to Pei-ching in 1816, Staunton was a staunch defender of British commercial interests in the region. In his reply Stanley sought to reconcile maintaining British good faith in formal treaty agreements with protecting British merchants against foreign abuse.39 Suppressing the opium trade by forcible means, considering the determination of the people of China to consume the drug, he believed to be a hopeless undertaking. It was, he professed, desirable to induce the Chinese authorities to consent, if possible, to the introduction and legalization of the trade, subject to duty. This was an object which Sir Henry Pottinger, he informed the Commons, had been labouring to accomplish since 1842. But the resolution of the government to act with scrupulous good faith towards the Chinese government in all commercial regulations agreed to, however, necessitated the issuing of stringent instructions that no encouragement should be given to any smuggling between the island of Hong Kong and the coast of China. The Hong Kong authorities could not interfere with the cargo of British vessels or act on behalf of the Chinese police. But merchants had been warned that they could not expect the protection of the British government if they violated the laws of China. For smuggling prohibited goods they must face the penalties imposed by Chinese law. Hong Kong could not be made ‘a great nest of smugglers’ for the purposes of carrying on an illicit trade. Rather, he hoped the colony would become ‘a great mart for the commerce of all nations and for the extension of a legal commerce with China’. This policy was calculated to realize Hong Kong’s potential as Britain’s emporium in the Far East, while convincing the Chinese authorities they were in earnest in building its prosperity on legal commerce. Stanley did not intend to prohibit the carrying of opium into the colony for the purposes of consumption. But the imposition of a moderate duty on importation into Hong Kong would deter traders from using the colony as a base from which to smuggle opium into China. The newly appointed Governor of Hong Kong, Sir John Davis, would be encouraged to consider such a step. Indeed, Stanley favoured Davis’s appointment because, as he privately acknowledged to Aberdeen, he was more committed than Pottinger to eradicating the opium trade in Hong Kong as far as possible.40 The First Opium War was not the only conflict in Asia inherited by Peel’s government. Another military engagement was bequeathed by Russell’s ministry in Afghanistan. Anxious about the vulnerability of India’s north-west frontier, with Russian influence in Afghanistan strengthening, Ellenborough’s predecessor as Governor General of India, Lord Auckland,

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sent British troops in 1839 to occupy successively Kandahar and Kabul. The Amir Dost Muhammad, who had been befriended by Russia, was sent as a prisoner to India and Shah Shuja installed by the British as Amir in his place. But securing Shah Shuja’s position required the British Army to remain in Kabul, rather than withdraw as originally intended. For the next two years beleaguered British troops found themselves contained in Kabul surrounded by an increasingly hostile Afghan populace. In November 1841 Kabul rose in rebellion and the British Resident, Sir Alexander Burns, was murdered. Finally, in December under the assurance of safe conduct, General Elphinstone led a British column of 16,000 (three-quarters of whom were non-combatants) out of Kabul to return to India. But in the snow-clad passes of the north-west frontier the struggling column was massacred. Just one sole survivor, an army surgeon, made it back to the British outpost of Jalalabad. A few women were taken hostage. General Elphinstone and the whole of the 44th Regiment were killed. The British agent Sir William MacNaghten was killed and his head, with his severed penis stuffed in his mouth, was paraded about Kabul. It was a disaster of epic proportions. British policy lay in ruins, as Shah Shuja was assassinated and British influence in the region collapsed. This was the critical situation faced by Ellenborough when he arrived in Calcutta as Governor General. Immediately, he sought to restore shaken British prestige by sending a military expedition to relieve the besieged garrisons at Kandahar and Jalalabad. A heavy retribution for earlier humiliations was imposed. British troops under Generals Nott and Pollock subsequently converged on Kabul, rescuing the surviving female British prisoners. The British force then withdrew, returning to India and allowing Dost Muhammad to resume his throne. Auckland’s fear of Russian influence on Afghanistan and the threat this posed to the British north-west frontier was probably exaggerated. The disastrous blow to British authority arising from the massacre of the Kabul force was humiliating. The British advantage in military technology, which had proved so overpowering in China, was far less effective against well-armed Afghans, with British troops remote from naval support. But Ellenborough’s success in recovering the British hostages helped to restore British standing, although he was convinced that keeping British troops in Afghanistan was an unnecessary commitment, only courting further disaster. Stanley privately congratulated Ellenborough on ‘his brilliant successes’; the Governor General and his generals had ‘done great things’.41 At Stanley’s suggestion, guns were fired in Green Park and at the Tower of London, as well as at Edinburgh Castle, to honour the triumph


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of British arms.42 A relieved Stanley assured Ellenborough that ‘we are now out of a mess’ in Afghanistan ‘thanks to you’.43 Stanley agreed with Ellenborough that a British military presence in Afghanistan was both unnecessary and unwise. By remaining within the bounds of the Indus they had ‘restricted those wild daydreams of universal dominion and universal power which seemed to possess the fancy’ of some of their countrymen.44 The parliamentary opposition, however, seized on the triumphalist tone of Ellenborough’s proclamations, following his military successes, as a proof of the Governor General’s lack of judgement. One proclamation, received in London in November 1842, condemned Auckland’s failed policies. In a flight of rhetoric, the proclamation also celebrated that the gates of the Muslim temple of Somnauth at Ghunzee had been brought back to India and presented to Hindu leaders as atonement for the insult of 800 years. Critics of Ellenborough in Britain denounced this act as likely to incite religious violence between Muslims and Hindus, while Ellenborough’s language, they claimed, was an affront to the civilized feelings of the British public. In the Commons, on 9 March 1843, Vernon Smith brought forward a motion criticizing Ellenborough for removing the gates of the temple as trophies of war, and an impassioned debate on the Governor General’s policies ensued. Stanley believed that cynical political motives, rather than moral outrage, prompted the opposition.45 Having served his country well, he complained, Ellenborough was now to be exposed to trifling charges. In reply to Vernon Smith, Stanley laid out the wider context of Ellenborough’s achievement. Never, for the past twenty years, had there been such great events occurring in India as had transpired during the last three or four years. British power in India had been shaken to its foundation and British arms in Afghanistan had suffered an irretrievable disaster. All this had been the result of the previous government’s foolish fantasies of universal domination in Asia, illusions Stanley publicly associated with the grandiose ambition of Palmerston. By contrast, Ellenborough had repaired British prestige, disentangled Britain from Afghanistan, and resumed a course more conducive to stability in the region. Stanley admitted to the Commons, as a matter of tone rather than substance, that he did not approve all of Ellenborough’s language in his proclamation. A more judicious expression of the Governor General’s views would have been the wiser course. Ellenborough’s quarrels with his Council and the personal offence caused by the proclamation were also regrettable. But, in attacking Ellenborough for carrying off the gates of Somnauth, he declared, never could he recollect an opposition so determinedly ignoring all the great features of the case, in order to fix upon one small and isolated

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point. Stanley reminded the Commons that Palmerston, the previous year, had declared that any government withdrawing British forces from Afghanistan would be deserving of impeachment. Instead of seizing on insignificant points, he challenged the opposition to indict the ministry for their policy in India. Stanley’s combative statement, accompanied by a similarly spirited defence by Peel, helped to secure the defeat of Vernon Smith’s motion, the government gaining a Commons majority of eighty-five. But further ministerial embarrassment was brought on by Ellenborough’s actions in the province of Sindh. South of Punjab and forming part of the long border with Afghanistan, Sindh occupied a position of obvious strategic importance. During British military setbacks in Afghanistan, the Amirs of Sindh indicated their doubts about maintaining their allegiance to the East India Company. As a result, the belligerent Sir Charles Napier was sent into Sindh to effect a military conquest. The Amirs of Sindh, whom Napier believed to be ‘cunning rascals’, could not be allowed to abandon their British alliance. In his diary Napier confided: ‘We have no right to seize Sind, yet we shall do so and a very advantageous, useful, humane piece of rascality it will be.’46 In February 1843, under Ellenborough’s urging, Napier annexed the province militarily. Ellenborough then immediately appointed Napier Governor. Both the East India Company’s Court of Directors in London and the cabinet were deeply alarmed by Ellenborough’s insistence on annexing Sindh and Napier’s swift fulfilment of that intention. Peel told his cabinet that Ellenborough’s actions were ‘unjust and indefensible’.47 The Court of Directors privately pressed for Ellenborough’s recall. Fitzgerald, at the Board of Control, sought to mediate the crisis, but the mounting stress bearing on him broke his delicate health and in May he died. Stanley, concerned at the expense and security of the newly acquired territories, shared Peel’s strong reservations about the wisdom of Ellenborough’s policy, but both, as well as Lord Ripon (Fitzgerald’s successor at the Board of Control), reluctantly accepted that they must ultimately endorse what was now a fait accompli. Ellenborough’s subsequent incorporation of Gwalior as a protected state, however, pushed matters to a further crisis. The profound anger of the Court of Directors could no longer be contained. Ellenborough’s characteristically dismissive comments on his critics inflamed feelings further. Stanley himself became deeply alarmed at Ellenborough’s apparent continuing expansionist ambitions and supported Peel in late April 1844 in replacing the high-handed Ellenborough with the more sober Sir Henry Hardinge. Ellenborough, who by now had acquired


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the nicknames ‘the Peacock’ because of his vanity and ‘the Elephant’ because of his trampling underfoot of critics, returned to London under a political cloud, with a reputation for being hot-headed, difficult to work with, and rash. But Stanley retained his broader judgement that Ellenborough’s achievements outweighed his failures. Peel marked Ellenborough’s return by conferring on him an earldom, as recognition for his success in Afghanistan. Stanley’s reluctance to extend Britain’s colonial possessions was also overcome by strategic considerations and local decisions in South Africa. In 1837, in what Stanley described to the Commons as ‘one of the most singular passages in recent history’, approximately 10,000 Boer settlers trekked 600 miles eastwards out of Cape Colony to escape British rule and settled, beyond the Orange River, in Port Natal.48 The Boers’ religious and political grievances prompted the ‘Great Trek’, although Stanley believed that the abolition of slavery in Cape Colony also caused them to seek escape from British rule. The Boers demanded recognition as an independent nation, but this was a claim to which Stanley adamantly refused to accede. Tensions immediately arose between the English traders already inhabiting Port Natal and the large wave of Boer settlers moving into the region. Even more dangerous were the violent clashes that occurred between the Boers and local tribes, the Basutos and Zulus. In 1838 a small British garrison was sent to Port Natal to restore order, but it was withdrawn the following year. Thereafter, demands increased among the British colonists of the Cape for the formal annexation of Natal. In 1842 a larger British force was sent to Natal by the Lieutenant Governor, Colonel John Hare. On 26 April 1842 Stanley reported to the Commons on the current situation in Cape Colony and his support for Hare’s action. The British force, he explained, was instructed to act as a buffer between the Basuto tribesmen and the Boers.49 Port Natal itself had also been occupied. But he hoped that no clash between the British forces and Boers would occur. The Boers must recognize, he stated, that they could not engage in perpetual warfare with the local tribes. Nor could he allow them to place themselves under the sovereignty of any other European power; this would threaten the safety of all Britain’s dependencies on that part of the African coast. To ensure order was maintained and British control preserved, additional troops were being sent to the Cape from India. By the end of the year Natal was formally annexed, so as to secure command of this strategic stronghold and to restore peace between Boer settlers and the native tribes. The immediate result, however, was to drive the resentful Boer settlers, over the following years, deeper into the northern veld.

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A failed African project, inherited from Russell, brought Stanley to his feet in the Commons in March 1842. Under pressure from the antislavery campaigner Thomas Buxton, who in 1839 had formed the African Civilization Society, Russell had agreed to fund a major expedition up the Niger river. The objectives of the expedition were to suppress slave trading in the area, to convert local tribes to Christianity, and to negotiate trading agreements by which inland commercial settlements might be established. After leaving Britain in May 1841, however, the expedition proved a muddled disaster. Venturing into the interior, members of the expedition were killed by fever. By October the demoralized survivors had retreated back to the coast. To the Commons, Stanley explained that the expedition had been undertaken for the most humane motives, in particular the wish to improve the interior of Africa through the agency of commerce.50 But the hostile climate had defeated them. Even so, Stanley suggested, it had not proved a complete failure as it had been shown that local tribes in the region were willing to engage in commercial relations with Britain. In closing his statement, however, he took the opportunity once again to disclaim any intention of occupying territory or asserting rights of sovereignty beyond those colonial possessions already established. An interview with Captain Allen, senior officer of the Niger expedition, at the Colonial Office in September 1842, confirmed Stanley in his view that the formal annexation of territory in this part of Africa was unwise. During 1843 the African Civilization Society was dissolved.51 It was the issues associated with Canada, however, that occupied the greatest amount of Stanley’s administrative and legislative attention as Colonial Secretary. They clustered around three main preoccupations: first, the internal constitutional arrangements in Canada; secondly, the tensions between the United States and Canada over security and boundaries; and, finally, the question of Canadian tariffs, particularly on corn, and its implication for the economic policies of Peel’s government more broadly. The 1791 Constitutional Act for Canada had granted separate ‘representative government’ to both the English-speaking and largely Protestant Upper Province and the French-speaking, largely Catholic Lower Province. In 1824, when as a young man Stanley visited Canada, he had seen at first hand the tense relations existing between the two provinces and the resentment felt over the limits to local autonomy represented by the authority of the Governor General. The armed uprisings in Canada of 1837 appeared to show the inadequacy of existing arrangements. Stanley partly attributed the revolts to the indecision of Melbourne’s ministry and he criticized Whig ministers for not strengthening the military in the face


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of armed insurrection. But during early 1838 he acted as a conciliatory intermediary between Russell and Peel, helping to steer the crisis towards a consensual resolution. Though of little military significance, the 1837 revolts did focus Whig and radical minds on the necessity for constitutional reform. Lord Durham’s commission, which included the colonial pundits Edward Gibbon Wakefield and Charles Buller, was the British government’s response and the Durham Report a proposed solution. The irascible Durham spent barely five months in Canada, accompanied by an elaborate entourage resembling a royal progress. Suddenly returning to England in November 1838, he characteristically lauded the success of his mission, but his Report, co-authored by Buller, was received with mixed opinion. Moreover, the outbreak of a second revolt in the province, following his return, led to accusations that he had fled from intractable difficulties of his own making. The centrepiece of Durham’s recommendations was that ‘representative government’ give way to ‘responsible government’, elected members of the colonial legislative being entrusted to form an executive, with the Governor General playing a part similar to the King in a constitutional monarchy. Thus, as at Westminster, colonial government ministers would be responsible to the legislative body. Durham also recommended that Upper and Lower Canada be unified. As Colonial Secretary, in 1840 Russell passed the Canada Act merging the two provinces, Upper and Lower Canada becoming known as Ontario and Quebec respectively. The Act also set up a Canadian legislature, made up of a legislative council (nominated by the Crown for life) and an assembly of eighty-four elected representatives. Though far short of Durham’s more radical proposals, this represented a step towards ‘responsible government’. It was a reform, however, that did little to assuage factional bitterness within Canada itself. One of Stanley’s first acts on becoming Colonial Secretary was to appoint a new Governor General for Canada. He felt the clever and conciliatory Lord Sydenham, appointed by Russell in 1839, should be replaced. Sydenham’s sudden death, following a riding accident, on 19 September hastened the transition. A new Governor General, Stanley advised the Queen, ‘should combine the qualities of firmness, discretion and temper with a conciliatory manner and disposition’.52 In Sir Charles Bagot he believed he had found the man he needed. The 60-year-old Bagot, youngest son of Lord Bagot, was related by marriage to the Duke of Wellington. In 1815 he had been sent as a special envoy to the United States to resolve the disputes arising out of the 1812 war and secured an agreement limiting naval forces on the Great Lakes. Ambassadorial postings to Russia

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and the Netherlands followed. Stanley summoned Bagot to a meeting at the Colonial Office on 6 September 1841. It was important, Stanley advised Peel, that the new Governor General not become ‘a slave of any party’, but maintain his independence from the differing political groups in the colony. Although, having ‘successfully put down the French party’, it was ‘the exact moment when a show of kindly feeling may convert them into warm supporters of a government from whom alone, they have learnt, they can look for protection from oppression’.53 Bagot’s political skills, however, often fell short of the exacting requirements Stanley prescribed, although, upon arriving in Canada, he followed Stanley’s advice to mediate between the contending parties, the colonial government’s supporters, the Conservatives of Ontario, the residents of former Upper Canada, the British Montreal party, and the French party. Stanley hoped Bagot might draw members of the other parties over to the government’s side. To this end he learnt in early October 1842 that the new Governor General had given the French party a place in the colonial government. Despite Wellington’s strong objections, at a specially summoned cabinet meeting in November, Stanley secured ministerial support for Bagot’s policy.54 In May 1842, following discussions in London with the Attorney General for Canada, Stanley introduced to parliament a measure to modify the constitution of Newfoundland. Rather than extend political rights, however, he wished to restrict the extent of the electoral franchise established in the colony in 1831.55 Sittings of the Newfoundland assembly had already been suspended. Conflict between two main groups of colonial residents, fishermen and farmers, had assumed an unacceptable level. The bulk of the population was extremely poor and, as a result, Stanley observed, extremely ignorant. The qualification for the vote hitherto had been the possession of a house for twelve months—which might be a log hut with a few boards. The qualification to be a representative was the occupation of a house for seven years. This had produced, Stanley believed, an Assembly of generally very uneducated people. He proposed a revised male franchise based upon the possession of a 40s. freehold in rural areas and in the towns the occupation of a £5 house. To become a candidate for the Assembly he proposed the possession of £100 a year or property to the amount of £500 as a qualification. In addition, he believed that all financial votes should originate with the Crown, not the House of Assembly. To remedy the mutual jealousy existing between the Council (nominated by the Crown) and the Assembly (nominated by the electorate) he recommended that both be incorporated into one chamber made up of twenty-five members, ten nominated by the Crown and fifteen elected by the people. This, he


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hoped, would tend towards more harmonious legislation in Newfoundland and avoid further suspensions of business. Then suddenly, in December 1842, Stanley received alarming accounts of Sir Charles Bagot’s health. The Governor General, he was advised, wished to resign. On 31 December, Stanley informed Peel that Bagot had no hope of recovery and that a successor would have to be appointed.56 The Colonial Office’s policy of conciliation, extended particularly to the French, seemed in jeopardy. ‘It is hard’, The Times observed, ‘to proceed upon a system of construction by conciliation, when you have none but antagonistic elements to deal with.’57 The Colonial Office, as represented by James Stephen, become increasingly pessimistic about Britain’s ability to maintain order in Canada. Both Stanley and Stephen became concerned that Bagot’s conciliation had effectively conceded responsible government to the colonial Assembly, with prerogative powers being surrendered to Canadian reformers of suspect loyalty to the Crown. Stanley turned to the able administrator Sir Charles Metcalfe, who, as Governor of Jamaica, had displayed calm in the face of civil disorder and who had demonstrated his skills in negotiating with the Spanish authorities in South America. In March 1843 Metcalfe replaced Bagot, who died two months later, before being able to return to England. The new Governor General continued the policy of pacifying, as far as possible, the parties brought uneasily together by the unification of the provinces of Ontario and Quebec. Metcalfe’s conciliatory efforts, however, were hampered by increasing difficulties with Canada’s immediate neighbour to the south. Diplomatic tensions with the United States were an additional complicating factor in Canadian affairs. Active American sympathy for the Canadian rebels in 1837 had led to the burning of the American vessel Caroline by the Canadian militia and other incidents along the border. In February 1841 a British subject, Alexander McLeod, was arrested in New York for arson and murder in connection with the Caroline affair. A full-blown diplomatic crisis ensued, with Palmerston instructing the British minister in Washington to return to England if McLeod was found guilty and executed, a diplomatic warning that war between Britain and the United States might follow. War was averted when Aberdeen succeeded to the Foreign Office in September 1841, looking to pursue a more conciliatory course, and the following month McLeod was acquitted. Long-standing diplomatic wrangling, however, over the precise boundary between Canada and the United States, along the Maine–New Brunswick border and in the west in Oregon, continued. Since visiting North America nearly twenty years earlier, Stanley had been deeply suspicious of United

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States expansion to the north. He believed such ambitions in Washington might be restrained by the American South with its close economic ties to Britain. But in late 1841 war between the United States and Britain over the Maine boundary problem seemed a possibility. Complaints from Washington about criminals escaping across the Canadian border, in the absence of an extradition treaty, and British frustration over the United States’ failure to suppress slave traffic, as agreed in the Treaty of Ghent concluding the war of 1812, excited popular resentment on both sides. Prior to receiving news in London of McLeod’s acquittal, Stanley was pessimistic about achieving a peaceful resolution of British differences with the United States. The US federal government, as he knew from first-hand observation, was often ‘utterly powerless’ in the face of states’ rights.58 On 12 September he dispatched a young military officer, Lieutenant Fanshaw, to travel through New England and New York State as a private English gentleman seemingly visiting for private amusement. Fanshaw’s real purpose, however, was to gather intelligence about popular feeling on the McLeod case and the boundary disputes in Maine, as well as to report on any military preparations close to the Canadian border and the terrain in the region.59 During November and December, Fanshaw sent valuable confidential reports back to Stanley detailing his findings. Two weeks later Stanley sent Sir George Murray (Master General of the Ordnance) a confidential paper, drawn up by Sir George Arthur (Lieutenant Governor of Upper Canada prior to 1840), laying out a plan for the military defence of the Canadian border.60 McLeod’s acquittal brought Britain and the United States back from the brink of war. During the following weeks Stanley carefully sought to avoid creating new causes of quarrel. In November the British minister in Mexico, Richard Pakenham, informed him of a proposed occupation of Upper California, land precariously held by Mexico, by a group of ‘adventurers’ who would establish British sovereignty and seek the protection of the Crown. This, it was claimed, would help Mexico in fending off an invasion of California by the United States. British agents in Mexico and California had long advocated such a scheme as a means of constraining US expansion. But Stanley decisively quashed the proposal in a firm statement of his wish not to acquire additional colonial territory. Stanley was not, George Hope informed the Foreign Office, ‘anxious for the formation of new and distant colonies, all of which involve heavy direct and still heavier indirect expenditure, besides multiplying the liabilities of misunderstandings and collisions with foreign powers’.61 The proposal was immediately dropped.


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In April 1842 Peel’s cabinet, in a conciliatory gesture strongly urged by Aberdeen, sent Lord Ashburton as special envoy to Washington with plenipotentiary powers to settle all outstanding issues, particularly the border question. Stanley supported Aberdeen’s recommendation, also advising the Foreign Office of a proposal from the Lieutenant Governor of New Brunswick that a convention between New Brunswick and Maine would be beyond the authority of the parties involved.62 The Conservative Ashburton was a good choice as the representative of a conciliatory policy. He was married to a Philadelphia heiress, had extensive social and financial contacts in America through his family firm of Baring and Co., and already knew personally his American counterpart, the Secretary of State Daniel Webster. As Alexander Baring (prior to his elevation as Lord Ashburton in 1835) he had represented the family bank in the United States between 1794 and 1801, buying large territorial interests in Maine. In 1803, with Barings acting as the United States’ agents in London, he negotiated the financing of the ‘Louisiana Purchase’. He also played an important unofficial role in the peace negotiations concluding Britain’s war with the United States in 1814 and served, while MP for North Essex, as Peel’s President of the Board of Trade in 1834–5. Aberdeen wished for a mutually honourable treaty in 1842 and Ashburton stood the best chance of negotiating one. Nonetheless, discussions did not go smoothly, with President John Tyler’s interventions often disrupting negotiations. The old issue of the British stopping and searching American vessels (which had triggered the war of 1812) complicated Ashburton and Webster’s pursuit of compromise. On the main question of the Maine–New Brunswick boundary Stanley, supported by Wellington, insisted that Britain must secure territory south of the St John River as a defensible border. The Ashburton–Webster Treaty, signed on 9 August 1842, largely fulfilled Aberdeen’s hopes of a conciliatory settlement as a basis for improved future Anglo–US relations. To Ashburton he declared himself ‘well satisfied’.63 Approximately 4 1/2 million acres of the disputed territory in Maine were granted to the United States, while slightly more than 3 million acres were given to Canada. The heights supposedly commanding the approaches to Quebec were retained by the British and the route of a military road linking New Brunswick with Ontario was kept within Canada. But Stanley’s hope that the St John River form the boundary was, to the Colonial Secretary’s regret, conceded by Ashburton. Stanley consoled himself that a defusing of dangerous quarrels with the United States would eventually justify Ashburton’s concession. Yet the Treaty also left unresolved other difficulties in Anglo-American relations, in particular the Oregon boundary question in the north-west and the fate of Mexico’s

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northern provinces from Texas to California. The Treaty’s reception in London was mixed. While the government, including Stanley, portrayed it as a statesmanlike resolution of dangerous quarrels, the opposition fiercely denounced it. Palmerston decried the Treaty as a capitulation. Russell, with rather less conviction, followed suit. Privately, Palmerston accused Ashburton of ‘imbecility’, of being more American in his feelings than English, of conducting negotiations in an ‘asinine manner’, and of devising a treaty which was ‘an act of weakness and of pusillanimity’.64 In the debate on the Royal Address opening the parliamentary session on 2 February 1843, Stanley mounted a robust defence of Ashburton’s settlement.65 If the treaty was a surrender, as Russell stated, then a question must immediately spring to the minds of MPs. If it were easy to obtain better terms, what were Russell and Palmerston about during the ten years they were in office? Stanley defended Ashburton as the fittest negotiator for Britain selected to settle the dispute on amicable terms. Five days later a fierce exchange occurred over Roebuck’s proposal that all persons transported from Canada to British penal colonies for political offences, following the 1837 revolts, should now be pardoned. Stanley refused to extend an undiscriminatory mercy or reintroduce into a peaceful Canada a body of convicted felons.66 He successfully secured the withdrawal of Roebuck’s motion. But Stanley’s parliamentary position was subsequently undercut by the report that Metcalfe had already exercised his discretionary powers to pardon some Canadians transported to Van Diemen’s Land for their part in the 1837 revolts. Faced with this fait accompli, Stanley suggested to Peel that all convicted rebels willing to take an oath of allegiance might be allowed to return. Peel feared that a mass pardon would be interpreted as a belated admission that the revolt had been justified. Pardons were afterwards granted on an individual basis, so allowing Stanley to save face, while avoiding forcing Metcalfe to announce a damaging retraction. On 2 May 1843 a Commons vote of thanks to Lord Ashburton again excited acrimonious debate. Stanley described Palmerston’s vehement attacks on Ashburton as unjust and unwarranted.67 Equally unfair was Macaulay’s exaggerated denunciation of the Treaty as a stain on the honour of British diplomacy. Stanley believed that no treaty between two nations had ever been concluded with greater harmony or with greater mutual advantage. The contested vote of thanks was passed by 238 to ninety-six votes, the government gaining a Commons majority of 142. The improvement in Anglo–US relations was then strengthened by the agreement of an extradition treaty. During August 1843 Palmerston


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attacked the treaty for allowing the United States to demand, if it wished, the return of escaping slaves. In a spirited defence of government policy, Stanley extolled the mutual advantage ensured by the Treaty. There were, he insisted, proper exceptions to the Treaty, particularly in the case of escaped slaves, special cases which he regarded as perfectly legitimate.68 Such exceptions, moreover, did not require, as Palmerston insisted, a rejection of the extradition treaty as a whole. In a similar conciliatory spirit, Stanley suggested to Aberdeen that the British naval force on the Great Lakes might now be reduced, a recommendation with which the Foreign Secretary readily agreed. Stanley’s suggestion that an agreement with Washington might be arrived at allowing former American slaves to go to the West Indies under contract as labourers was also discussed, but by 1844 renewed diplomatic tensions over the Oregon boundary question ended the brief honeymoon between London and Washington inaugurated by the Ashburton–Webster settlement.69 Metcalfe’s conciliatory policies in Canada, supported by Stanley in London, were again jeopardized by increasingly volatile political feeling. Canadian tariffs formed the third aspect of Stanley’s oversight of the colony’s affairs, a controversial question with significant implications for the economic policies of Peel’s government more broadly. In December 1841 Peel decided that Britain’s Corn Laws of 1828 required revision. While maintaining the principle of Protection, he favoured a relaxation of the Corn Laws on the grounds that domestic producers could not meet the demand of an increasing population. In practice this meant reducing the sliding scale of tariffs on foreign corn. In cabinet meetings during January 1842 Stanley, along with the rest of the cabinet, with the exception of the Duke of Buckingham, supported Peel’s plan. The Whig policy of a fixed duty, advocated by Russell, was rejected, as were the demands of the Anti-Corn Law League for the removal of all duties on foreign importation. Buckingham resigned and was succeeded as Lord Privy Seal by the Duke of Buccleuch. On Saturday 5 February, Stanley attended a gathering of the cabinet at Whitehall Gardens, hosted by Peel, confirming that a revision of the Corn Laws should be put to the Commons.70 On Wednesday 9 February, Peel introduced the government’s Corn Laws Bill, amended in detail by the cabinet, to the Commons. It proposed that the duty on foreign corn, when the price of domestic corn was between 59s. and 60s. a quarter, be cut from 27s. 8d. to 13s. per quarter. Comparable reductions in the tariff were to operate below and above that point. During the following debate various hostile motions were decisively defeated, including Russell’s proposal of a fixed duty, Villiers’s call for a total repeal,

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and the amendment put forward by the Conservative backbencher Robert Christopher (MP for North Lincolnshire) proposing a higher protective scale of duties. During prolonged debate on the second reading Stanley, on 28 February, spoke in opposition to the motion that imported Canadian corn be freed of all duty.71 While being fully convinced of the necessity of improving, by every means in their power, the commercial intercourse between the British colonies and the mother country, he could not understand the accusation that Canada, under the proposed measure, would be in a worse position than at present. He recognized that there existed an anxious desire that colonial produce should be admitted into the English market free of duty, but the real fact was, he believed, that much of corn imported from Canada was not the produce of Canada. It was United States wheat passing through Canada and, by then being ground in the colony, acquiring the character of Canadian flour. The United States imposed a duty on corn entering from Canada. But the importation of corn from the United States was perfectly free of all duty. While this unequal situation existed Canadian imports into Britain could not be given special relief. In conclusion, he speculated that, if Canada were to impose an import tariff on American corn, then Canadian imports into Britain would be entitled to greater relief. But, in the meantime, he did not see why the British government should undertake indirectly what the Canadian authorities declined to do directly. The Corn Laws Bill passed its second Commons reading in March and, by April, was sent up to the Lords, where it encountered little opposition. But Stanley’s broad hint to the Canadian legislature in his speech of 28 February, which was construed as a public commitment by many in the colony, had an immediate effect. That Stanley repeated his views in a letter to Bagot on 2 March reinforced the impact of his Commons statement. On 15 April, Roebuck suggested to the House that a Canadian import duty on US corn would be a success for the agricultural interest. Stanley firmly denied that it was a matter of class interest, but asserted rather that it was an issue related to Britain’s colonial interests. As such, he favoured a Canadian import duty on US corn.72 Over the following months the Canadian legislature moved to impose a tariff on corn imports from the United States. In early March 1842 Stanley was struck by the irony of compliments made about Peel’s liberality on the Corn Laws at the expense of the opinions of his backbenchers. In conversation with Gladstone he recalled similar compliments about Canning in the 1820s, when Peel was ‘held up as the leader of the illiberal party’. Canning’s mind, Stanley observed to


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Gladstone, ‘was of the highest Tory character’ and it was interesting that Peel now seemed to be assuming a similar position.73 On 10 May, Peel presented the second element in his reform of fiscal policy, complementing the government’s revision of the Corn Laws, by laying out a Customs Duties Bill reducing the import duties on some 750 articles.74 By removing prohibitive duties, reducing duties on raw materials to low levels (not exceeding 5 per cent), on partially manufactured articles (not exceeding 12 per cent), on wholly manufactured articles (not exceeding 20 per cent), and on colonial produce, Peel looked to simplify and enhance tariffs, while reducing the cost of living for the domestic consumer. An ineffective Commons opposition found itself in disarray, unable to object to the principle of reduced tariffs which had formed an important plank in the Whig budget of 1841. It was among the Conservative backbenchers, however, that consternation and alarm erupted. For some the question arose of whether tariff reform was, as Peel described it, a prudent adjustment to a protectionist system or, as some agricultural Conservatives were starting to fear, a temporary resting point in the gradual advance towards complete Free Trade. During May alarmed county deputations called on Downing Street and distressed backbench Conservatives found their greatest concerns focusing upon the reduction of duties on foreign meat and live cattle. To all pleas, however, the prime minister remained unmoved. Stanley, meanwhile, found himself unsettled by Peel’s speech of 10 May. When the prime minister espoused the doctrine of purchasing from the cheapest market the opposition benches had cheered loudly. Coming away from the debate Stanley observed to Gladstone: ‘Peel laid that down a great deal too broadly.’75 Stanley’s own contribution to debate on the Customs Duties Bill focused on the defence of preferential colonial tariffs. This shielded him from Conservative backbench attack and engaged him in disputes with the Whig opposition. Lord Howick and Sir Charles Wood both accused the government of giving an unfair advantage to the colonies in importing to Britain. In doing so, Wood charged, the government was making prices high for the domestic consumer and diminishing the amount of revenue that might be collected. On 13 May, Stanley delivered an extended and detailed defence of colonial preference.76 The acceptance of Wood’s arguments, he declared, would lead to the annihilation of the total system of trade carried on in the widespread colonies of the British Empire. The doctrine that the colonies should enjoy no more advantageous terms in their commercial relations with Britain than foreign nations was one calculated to destroy the whole colonial system. Britain imposed restrictions on its

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colonies. It prevented them from introducing goods from other countries on an equal footing with imports from Britain. It imposed restrictions on their navigation and trade. Stanley conceded that the colonies were not entitled to be placed on the same footing as Britain. The colonies did not bear the same taxes, nor did they pay for military protection. But on the grounds of justice the colonies should be admitted on more advantageous terms to the markets of Britain than foreigners. In a detailed statistical examination of colonial trade he laid out the mutual advantage enjoyed within the colonial system. In 1837 and 1838 an average of £3.7 million worth of trade had entered Canada. Of this total only £700,000 had come from outside Britain and her other colonies, mainly from the United States. The annual value of British manufacturing imported into Canada was approximately £2.6 million. The total value of the trade entering Canada, the West Indies, and Australia in 1837 had been upwards of £10.2 million. By 1838 it had increased to upwards of £10.5 million. Of this trade only £2 million did not derive from Britain or her other colonies. In turn, 80 per cent of colonial exports entered Britain. This represented a vast complex system of mutual commercial benefit, underpinning the secure political relations between Britain and her colonies. Trade with foreign countries, Stanley stated, was liable to embarrassment from caprice or from hostile feeling. It was exposed to many possible sources of interruption. It lacked those elements of security and safety inherent in colonial traffic. Therefore, the unity and harmony of the empire must be cherished by means of a strict commercial connection, carrying with it mutual advantage. This was the economic foundation, protected by naval supremacy, upon which Britain’s standing as a global power stood. If Britain deprived the colonies of their sense of mutual commercial advantage, then the strength and union of the empire would be undermined. This, in turn, would diminish Britain’s international standing. They would sink into the condition of being a second-rate power. With this forceful statement Stanley safeguarded the preferential tariffs for colonial imports proposed within Peel’s broader reduction of custom duties. But the strain of delivering the speech, with the statistical detail it required, had been great. After closing his statement and resuming his seat on the front bench, a fatigued Stanley, seemingly ‘angry with himself’, wearily commented to Gladstone beside him: ‘It does not signify, I cannot speak on these subjects, I quite lost my head.’ Gladstone reassuringly responded that no one but himself would have thought it.77 By June, Peel had subdued Conservative backbench opposition and secured the


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successful passage of his Customs Duties Bill. But the resentment felt by many Conservative MPs threatened future difficulties. At the opening of the 1843 session the issue of the tariff on Canadian corn imports returned. On 16 February, Henry Labouchere (Reform MP for Taunton) pressed Stanley on whether the tariff would be amended. Reports that the Canadian legislature had imposed a duty on corn imported from the United States had created precisely such an expectation, based upon Stanley’s statement of twelve months earlier. Stanley informed the House that he had yet to receive details from the Governor General of the duty introduced by the Canadian legislature. Once received and upon the government being satisfied, however, he would look to import Canadian corn into Britain at a nominal duty.78 On 24 April he advised the Commons that information had finally been received from the Governor General and that a Canadian Corn Laws Bill would now be brought forward.79 Three days later, during a cabinet dinner hosted by Peel in Whitehall Gardens, it was agreed that the measure would legislate solely for Canada, all other colonies being excluded from the bill.80 For the rest of the 1843 session, following a visit to Knowsley in late April, the Canadian Corn measure proved Stanley’s major preoccupation. In the context of the government’s economic and fiscal policies the issue attracted divergent expectations and excited acute anxieties. For Free Traders it represented the dislodging of one further, if small, piece in the edifice of Protectionism, advancing the course of Corn Law repeal more broadly. Seen as such, it created apprehension among Conservative backbenchers, signalling the continuing surrender of Peel’s ministry to the pressures of Free Trade agitation. Stanley, however, was committed by his Commons statement of February 1842 to delivering a significant reduction in the tariff on Canadian corn. But how any legislation he brought forward was presented, and what broader implications it might be seen to have, had become of considerable political significance. In Stanley’s own mind the Canadian Corn Laws Bill he drew up during early May 1843 was separate from the argument about Free Trade. Indeed, Stanley saw it as not even primarily a fiscal question. The Canadian Corn Laws Bill was a colonial issue. Nor did he regard it as an extensive measure. Rather, he saw it as a small, if desirable, adjustment to the colonial commercial system ensuring that Britain’s Protectionist policies worked more effectively, strengthening those colonial ties necessary to Britain’s global influence and prosperity. As a measure apart from the Corn Laws and separate from the question of Free Trade, he regarded it as a potential boon to one of Britain’s most important colonies, helping to

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secure Canada’s loyalty. But Stanley’s perception of his legislation was no sure safeguard against others seizing on it to serve their own agendas. Stanley began Commons discussion of the Canadian Corn tariff on 19 May, while still recovering from a severe attack of gout, with strong warnings about the general misapprehensions and gross misrepresentations which had been circulating regarding his intentions.81 On both sides of the House the objects of his forthcoming measure had been much exaggerated. On one side, unrealistic expectations of its probable benefit to the consumer had been raised. On the other side of the House, unnecessary apprehension about its probable deleterious effect on British agriculture had been reported. In dispelling the fears of some, Stanley anticipated, he must lose the support of others. He felt caught, he confessed, in ‘a sort of crossfire’.82 But he insisted that his bill was a colonial, not a fiscal, measure. It was quite distinct from the impassioned argument about Free Trade. Its purpose lay within a far narrower compass. He proposed to substitute on American wheat passing through Canada a fixed duty of 4s. per quarter, instead of the previous varying duty of 1s. to 5s. per quarter. Corn imported from Canada to Britain would be subject to a sliding scale of duty varying from 1s. to 5s. per quarter according to the state of the British market. This duty would apply as an additional duty on corn originating in the United States. This, he believed, would encourage the importation of Canadian-grown corn, on even more favourable terms when the British price was high, while maintaining the maximum existing level of duty of 5s. per quarter on corn grown in the United States and imported to Britain through Canada. It therefore, he argued, granted a boon to Canada without injuring British agricultural interests. Stanley’s attempt to assuage Conservative backbench anxieties, however, did not silence all disquiet. Sir Gilbert Heathcote (MP for Rutland) objected to any further change in the Corn Laws. There already existed, he declared, ‘a very sore and wounded feeling among the agriculturalists’ because of the changes of the previous session.83 William Ormsby Gore (MP for North Shropshire) also spoke against ‘any further innovation’ in the Corn Laws.84 But three Protectionist amendments were easily defeated. A week later Stanley saw off a hostile amendment moved by Russell, securing a majority of eighty-one Commons votes, and, on 2 June, introduced the second reading of his Canadian Corn Laws Bill.85 Richard Sheil (MP for Dungarvan) accused Stanley of privately threatening the Conservative backbenchers that, unless they supported his measure, he would resign. Stanley responded that the government would do all it legitimately could to ensure the passage of his measure and that he would


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advise the Queen, in the event of defeat, to suggest that Canada repeal their recent legislation regarding US corn imports. On 15 June the bill passed its third reading in the Commons, with Stanley confirming that the measure applied to Ontario and Quebec, but New Brunswick and Nova Scotia stood on a different footing.86 Stanley’s firmness over the Canadian Corn Laws Bill secured his major legislative achievement of the 1843 session. His success buoyed up the spirits of the state dinner he hosted at St James’s Square on 6 July, attended by the Duke of Wellington, the Duke of Somerset, and numerous Conservative MPs, marking the Queen’s birthday. But it did not diminish the deepening unease felt by many Conservative backbenchers that the government was gradually abandoning its commitment to Protection. The opposition also sensed in Stanley’s colonial tariff policy an opportunity to push for a broader reduction of import duties. In March 1844 the Reform MP for Gateshead, William Hutt, proposed that corn imported to Britain from South Africa, India, and Australasia be subject to the same duty as that imposed on Canadian corn. But Stanley adamantly refused to consider any further reduction of colonial tariffs.87 His Canadian Corn Law legislation was not, he insisted, a precedent allowing for any additional adjustment, leading to a wider diminution of import duties. Only in a great emergency, he declared, was it wise to tamper with colonial corn tariffs, or else uncertainty, alarm, and confusion would be created. Moreover, any more extensive adjustment would be of very little practical effect. In 1841, out of 68,858 quarters of corn imported into Britain from her colonies, 68,854 were imported from the single colony of Canada. In 1843, out of a total of 225,600 quarters imported from the colonies, 207,000 had come from Canada. For no appreciable advantage, therefore, he refused to disturb a tariff system of infinite importance, infinite delicacy, and watched with the deepest interest by the people of Britain. By 1844 those sensitivities included the growing mistrust simmering among the government’s own Commons support. Stanley’s opposition to Hutt’s motion, The Times critically concluded, showed that his previous espousal of colonial preference, with regard to Canada the previous year, had been ‘a mere piece of occasional rhetoric’, a ‘mere flashy oratorical argument’ adopted ‘for a particular purpose’.88 Stanley approached his administration of colonial affairs in 1841 with the conviction that his primary duty was to strengthen the security, stability, and prosperity of Britain’s varied existing colonial possessions. British prestige, economic pre-eminence, global influence, and national security were dependent upon the strength of Britain’s ties with her colonies and the strategic, economic, and political protection they provided. The system of

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tariffs that regulated imports into Britain safeguarded colonial relations and provided a fiscal means by which domestic social and economic interests might be maintained in a stable equilibrium. The growth of Britain’s commercial and trading activities around the globe was a desirable aim. When, as part of the consolidation of Britain’s maritime presence in the South Atlantic, a permanent settlement on the Falkland Islands (claimed by Britain in 1833) was established during 1843 it was named Port Stanley in honour of the Colonial Secretary. But the expansion of colonial territorial commitments, in association with growing trade overseas, should be resisted. Britain, he believed, wished for greater international commerce, not increased colonial territory. Stanley’s views, however, were repeatedly tested by events. Remote incidents and distant decisions, over which he exercised a limited and belated control, often forced on him policies to which he was resistant. His sense that it was part of his ministerial duty loyally to support the actions of British representatives overseas often compelled him to accept, even defend, what he had not desired. Despite his wish not to acquire ‘a Chinese Gibraltar’, Hong Kong was established as a Crown Colony. Despite his misgivings, Sindh was annexed as part of British India. Strategic considerations required him to approve the acquisition of Natal, in order to secure Britain’s position in South Africa. Safeguarding Britain’s economic links with her colonies necessitated the reduction of the duty on Canadian corn imports, despite his continuing commitment to protective tariffs. What Stanley did successfully exert was a sobering restraint on more zealous advocates for colonial expansion. He also, as in China, New Zealand, and Canada, consistently endeavoured to appease regional conflicts, with a concern that vulnerable native populations or, as in Canada, aggrieved French settlers should not be deprived of their legal rights by more powerful colonial groups. That he was unable to check, from a distance, the local impetus driving colonial expansion forward was a confirmation of irresistible realities beyond Whitehall.

Themselves with ardour fill’d, he thus address’d. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 3)

Alongside his Colonial Office duties, as a member of Peel’s front bench, Stanley also found himself engaged in non-departmental government business. His reputation as a robust and forceful Commons speaker was


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an obvious asset. But it also became clear that his skill lay in powerful rhetorical assaults against the opposition, rather than in mastering technical administrative detail. The contrast with Peel (eleven years Stanley’s senior) became increasingly striking. Peel’s debating strength lay not in the sublime passage or the polished phrase, but in his formidable command of the business at hand and in his ability to marshal technical detail. Seeking to convince, rather than captivate, Peel’s oratory presented, with calm precision, the case he proposed, after delineating the options available and their respective merits and disadvantages. Partisan passion rarely ignited his Commons statements, which retained the unruffled coolness of his reserved social manner. Stanley’s oratorical skill, by contrast, lay in his impassioned partisan assaults, expressing the spirited denunciation of an opponent’s argument. Stanley’s elaborate ironies and elegant witticisms, punctuated by the telling phrase, were absent in Peel’s more mundane style. Yet Stanley lacked the ease with which Peel could marshal an overwhelming mass of statistical data. Peel sought to reason, while Stanley aimed to rouse. Stanley’s personal sense of unease, when required to lay out complex statistical evidence, had become apparent during the Customs Duties Bill debate of May 1842.89 His discomfort held him back at a critical moment during debate, in March 1842, on the government’s Income Tax Bill. As the third component of the government’s fiscal reform agenda, complementing Corn Law revision and the reduction of customs duties, Peel had proposed to the Commons, on 11 March, the reinstatement of the income tax. By this temporary expedient, lasting for three years, the Whig budget deficits of previous years, Peel declared, would be ended. On 13 March the Irish MP Richard Sheil delivered a blistering attack on the bill. Stanley, having taken notes during Sheil’s speech, was designated to give the ministerial response. But, as the clock struck midnight and Sheil sat down amid peals of opposition cheering, Stanley indicated to Peel that he thought the hour too late for an immediate reply. Peel tersely responded: ‘I do not think it will do to let this go unanswered.’ Nevertheless, with an adjournment being moved, Stanley remained sitting, repeating, as if to himself, ‘No, I won’t, it’s too late.’ Though not intending to speak that evening, Peel then immediately got to his feet and calmly refuted, in telling detail, Sheil’s points. By this spontaneous performance, Gladstone noted, Peel made ‘a deep impression on the House’.90 During the previous days Stanley had been engaged in debate on colonial legislation, his Colonial Passengers Bill, his West Indian Clergy Bill, and his Sale of Colonial Land measure, as well as giving statements on colonial sugar and riots in Jamaica. Sheer

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fatigue may have held him back. But a sense that the technical details of the income tax were not best suited to his rhetorical skills also inhibited him. Stanley’s public reputation as powerful orator remained high. But the incident, in Peel’s own mind, raised private questions about Stanley’s reliability as a speaker on domestic non-departmental issues. That Peel saw finance and fiscal reform as central to his government’s policies underscored the significance of these doubts, which were enforced by the success of younger ministerial talent, particularly William Gladstone (ten years Stanley’s junior), in combining technical mastery with rhetorical fluency. Stanley did speak on the income tax on 11 April 1842, responding to an attack from Macaulay. It was an impressive performance, but, graced with a graphic simile, in Stanley’s own combative style. Rather than a battery of financial detail, he brought his polished aggressive prose to bear on Macaulay’s criticisms. The financial policy pursued by the Whig government prior to 1841, he declared, had been dangerous, obscure, and uncertain, ‘like the progress of men stumbling through night and darkness’. But under the present government the whole course of affairs had changed. ‘All that was dark has been made light. Men now see their way.’91 Stanley’s oratorical power, sustained by fierce partisan ardour, remained a powerful weapon in the ministerial arsenal. But the contrast between Stanley’s adversarial passion and Peel’s technical precision became more marked over the following years. On 21 April 1842 Stanley rose to his feet in the Commons to speak to a subject with which he was very familiar, parliamentary Reform. The radical John Roebuck, in support of a motion moved by Sharman Crawford (MP for Rochdale), called for a better means of identifying intelligence, virtue, and probity in the electorate than the existing franchise, by which the government seemingly wished to exclude the larger portion of the working classes from the vote. Stanley thought highly of Roebuck, regarding him as ‘an able man and a particularly clear speaker’.92 But this did not prevent him from giving a characteristically tough response. The violence of Roebuck’s speech, Stanley declared, was almost a sufficient answer, the MP for Bath’s statement being remarkable for its repetition rather than its argument.93 Roebuck accused the government of believing that all intelligence, virtue, and good feeling in the country was centred in the higher and middle classes of the community. Stanley forcefully rejected such a notion. They did not deny to the humblest man in Britain in any station of life the credit of fulfilling the duties of that station with honesty, virtue, and intelligence. The enfranchised claimed for themselves no exclusive merit.


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But nor was it the case, Stanley continued, that those who supported the 1832 Reform Act laid down as their doctrine that every person who directly or indirectly contributed to taxes had an inherent right, not merely to the enjoyment of the rights of citizens or the protection of the law, but also to the exercise of the vote. Rather, the principle of the Reform Act had been that the vote was a privilege, granted to such a class of the community as might be capable of exercising that privilege wisely for the benefit of the whole nation. At no time was the question argued as an inherent right. The Reform Act had given representation to the great towns, such as Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, and Leeds. Small, corrupt boroughs had been abolished. By giving the vote to the higher and middling classes it had granted the privilege to those who, by their situation, possessed not more intelligence, more virtue, or more sense, but superior means, superior leisure, and superior advantages to improve that sense and to acquire for themselves the power of judging the wants and requirements of the nation. Crawford’s crude and undigested motion, he concluded, could only unsettle men’s minds and prejudice the security of existing arrangements. By vague motions, which could be productive of no effect, only raising discord, the country would be disrupted, when social relations were fixed, certain, and steady. It was a typically vigorous response, on an issue over which Stanley possessed a confident command. Five weeks later, on 27 May 1842, after returning from a few days spent with his family at Brighton, Stanley spoke to Charles Buller’s motion regarding alleged bribery in the recent by-election at Bridport in Dorset. Palmerston had already opposed a committee of inquiry, arguing that worse cases of corruption existed, such as in Ipswich, where the result of the July 1841 election was being petitioned. Stanley, however, advocated a reform to the law which would allow for the investigation of electoral bribery.94 He supported an inquiry and favoured future legislation enabling the Commons to investigate cases of electoral corruption. Once again, it was an issue upon which Stanley felt an assured authority and which did not mire him in intricate financial detail. Stanley’s complacent portrayal of the country’s fixed, certain, and steady relations in April 1842, however, belied a broadening groundswell of popular discontent. Economic distress, Chartist protest, and anti-Corn Law agitation were accompanying worsening unemployment and increasing pauperism, as well as enforced short time and reduced wages in the industrial centres of England and Scotland. In Marylebone, Manchester, Leeds, Clydeside, and Paisley poor law relief and local charity were being

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stretched beyond capacity by growing poverty and unemployment. Petitions to Downing Street from Manchester and Salford, during the sultry summer of 1842, expressed acute anxiety about the spread of potentially violent discontent. A political symptom of this distress was the collaboration of local Chartist and Anti-Corn Law League activists, suggesting a coalescence of those forces of middle- and working-class agitation which, as an alliance over parliamentary Reform in 1830–1, had raised the spectre of revolution. League leaders began privately to discuss a campaign to withhold taxes. On 30 May a hapless attempt by an unemployed young carpenter to assassinate the Queen as she travelled down the Mall, followed by another unconnected assassination attempt by a deranged youth in July, gave vividness to reports of increasing social disaffection. At a meeting of Free Traders in London during July reference was made to rumours of a possible assassination attempt on Peel. Yet, when Stanley received a deputation of Yorkshire manufacturers, at the Colonial Office on 25 July, making representations about increasing unemployment in the industrial regions, he offered them scant comfort. The issue was a complex matter involving a variety of conflicting opinions, he observed, but he assured them that the problem was receiving the serious attention of ministers.95 In the Commons, meanwhile, the Whig opposition fell into increasing disarray as Russell drew back from confrontation with the government, leaving Palmerston to remain as the leading critic of the ministry. Once again, on 6 July, Stanley rose to fend off a Palmerstonian assault, this time over the growing distress in the country.96 With arch sarcasm Stanley opened by offering Palmerston his condolences for the enforced idleness which his creative mind would have to undergo during the approaching recess. The noble lord, he observed, would have no other occupation than grouse shooting and pheasant shooting, being forced to leave the affairs of state, in which he had been so long and so actively engaged, to others. Heavy irony then gave way to a combative refutation of Palmerston’s accusation that the ministry must bear the blame for the serious poverty afflicting the labouring classes. Loud heckling and violent opposition jeering accompanied Stanley’s spirited repudiation of Palmerston’s allegations. To fierce cries of ‘No! No!’ Stanley declared that the distress pervading the country was beyond the reach of human legislation. To taunts of ‘You aggravated it’, he challenged even the boldest Free Trader to deny that the suffering occurring was due to three or four years of deficient harvest. To opposition shouts of ‘The Corn Laws’, he asserted that hardship had arisen from causes beyond the scope of human powers. No one, he continued undeterred, could tell him that with perfect


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freedom of trade there would not be a diminished capital application to the purchase of manufactures by the loss of some £1 million spent in buying food to make up for the bad harvest. Human agency could not remedy Providential hardship. As opposition heckling subsided, Stanley launched a comprehensive and scathing critique of Palmerston’s foreign policy. The ‘world was not wide enough for the universal meddling’ of the long-serving former Foreign Secretary, he declared. He could not identify anywhere in the world where British commerce had not been cramped and crippled by Palmerston’s diplomacy. In South America blockades in this port, political differences in another; in Mexico, Buenos Aires, and in every state of South America, commerce had been checked by Palmerston’s belligerent meddling prior to 1841. In China a doubtful and unnecessary war against an unwarlike people, who were slaughtered without glory and almost without resistance, had paralysed British trade. In India, Palmerston’s interference had left embarrassed finances and diminished commerce. And while everyone acknowledged the distress afflicting the country, none could agree on a remedy. Some blamed the Poor Law. Some denounced the Corn Laws. Some attributed it to difficulties arising out of the monetary crisis in the United States. Some found fault with the war in India. Some complained against the war in China, while others pointed to an increasing population, or condemned the new tariffs introduced by the ministry. He could not sit still, he concluded, and listen to Palmerston’s boasts without censuring his reckless foreign policy, which had checked the commerce of Britain in every quarter of the globe. Enthusiastic cheering broke out on the Conservative benches as Stanley sat down. It was a bravura performance, exhibiting Stanley’s most pungent style of partisan rhetoric. It served its political purpose by injecting sagging Conservative morale with a much needed tonic. At the annual meeting of the Royal Agricultural Society in Bristol, on 12 July, at which Stanley presided, he was received with acclaim. Following a brief visit to Graham at Netherby in mid-August, Stanley returned to London for the prorogation of parliament on 24 August. He then worked at the Colonial Office until early October. On 6 October he visited Peel at Drayton, on his way to Knowsley, returning to London for a few days in late October. At the beginning of November he attended a dinner with the Queen and Prince Albert at Windsor, followed by shooting with the Prince in the Great Park, before spending Christmas in Lancashire, first at Lathom House and then at Knowsley Hall. The Earl of Derby’s deteriorating health, however, cast a pall over the festive season. On 2 January 1843 Stanley again attended the Queen at Windsor, bagging,

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in less than two hours’ shooting with Prince Albert, 259 head of partridge, pheasant, and rabbit. Returning to St James’s Square, preparations were then begun on his Canadian Corn Laws legislation, which was to occupy the forthcoming session, along with the furore over Ellenborough’s proclamation and warnings against misguided claims for systematic colonization. On 2 February 1843 Stanley responded to opposition criticisms of the Royal Address, praising Ellenborough’s energy and wisdom, endorsing Ashburton’s qualifications as plenipotentiary in Washington, defending ministerial revisions to the Corn Laws, and attributing the necessity for the reinstatement of the income tax to Whig budget deficits.97 At the end of July 1843 Stanley again provided the ministerial response to a major speech by Palmerston, who, preceded by Russell, Hume, Benjamin Hall (Reform MP for Marylebone), Thomas Milner Gibson (Liberal MP for Manchester), and Vernon Smith, deplored the state of the nation under Peel’s administration. In his familiar pugnacious style, Stanley directed his blows against the failed financial policies of Russell and the meddling diplomacy of Palmerston. Earlier in the debate Russell had expressed his regret for the deficits accumulated under his premiership. Stanley likened the financial measures of Russell’s late government to ‘the galvanic energy seen sometimes in the last moments of a dying person’. Russell’s belated apology appeared ‘very like a death-bed repentance’, which was to be contrasted with the bold attempt of Peel’s ministry to remedy the disordered finances of the country.98 To Russell’s accusation that the government were following the principles neither of Free Trade nor of Protection, he replied that the doctrinaire application of rigid theory was wholly impractical in the current circumstances of the country. Such a notion, which would throw financial affairs into inextricable confusion, ‘might fit the theory of a schoolboy theme’, but could not be undertaken by practical men of business. This was a sharp hit against Russell, who, it was widely known, had been immersing himself in the study of Adam Smith and other political economists, whose works he had formerly slighted. Russell, Stanley noted, declared the government’s ‘war cry’ to be Protection. So far from Protection being their ‘war cry’, he responded, the cabinet had sought, with due caution, to remove restrictions. Palmerston, he observed, suggested that deep dissensions existed within the government majority. This insinuation he somewhat disingenuously dismissed as a youthful fancy, a pointed sardonic strike at the 59-year-old Palmerston’s reputation for amorous adventures and his long-standing affair with the society hostess Lady Cowper, whom he had finally married in 1839. Caricaturing the diminutive Russell as a diligent schoolboy and Palmerston as a fanciful


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youth brought wry smiles to Conservative faces. For good measure, Stanley returned to his established theme of Palmerston’s reckless diplomacy. As Foreign Secretary, when anything arose in the pettiest state in any quarter of the globe, Palmerston always had to say something. As a result, he had bequeathed to Peel’s government irritations between Britain and France. France had proved Palmerston’s bugbear, because he was suspicious that she always acted out of jealousy of Britain. By contrast, Stanley concluded, the present government had pursued a straightforward course, not pretending that current evils were at once to be remedied by ‘some great clap-trap measure … only intended to make a noise for a time and never to be brought into operation’. Only by steady and assiduous attention to the interests of the country could the nation be effectively administered. It was another ardent morale-boosting performance. But again, the contrast with Peel’s dispassionate rhetoric and the technical fluency of his rising acolyte Gladstone was striking. In early March 1843 Graham introduced a Factory Bill to the Commons. The sensational interim report of a Royal Commission the previous year revealed the extensive abuse of child labour in factories and shocked an unsuspecting public. Social unrest also highlighted the need for humanitarian regulation, as part of the restoration of public order in manufacturing districts. Better education, Graham believed, would encourage a stronger sense of civic responsibility. Regulating hours of work for children, the measure also proposed the setting up of factory schools, each under the management of seven trustees, at least three of whom should be Anglican clergymen or churchwardens and at least two factory owners. The schoolmaster, who would be appointed by the trustees, would be responsible for religious instruction, subject to the approval of the bishop of the Anglican diocese in which the school was located, although, in anticipation of Nonconformist complaint, Graham included a clause allowing children to be exempted from religious instruction if their parents objected. Children under the age of 8 were prohibited from employment in textile factories and children under 13 limited to 6 1/2 hours’ labour, with at least three hours’ education daily in the factory schools. The limitation on working hours of young persons (aged 13–18 years) remained unchanged at twelve hours daily. The educational clauses in the measure, however, excited fierce attacks. The hostility of Dissenters, who saw the clauses as an extension of Anglican influence, and High Churchmen, who feared a lapse into ‘interdenominationalism’, ignited an extra-parliamentary campaign which led, over the following weeks, to several thousand petitions containing over 2 million signatures being presented to Westminster. ‘The Dissenters’,

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Graham lamented to Stanley, ‘will convert my measure of Peace into a Firebrand and a Sword.’99 Nonetheless, in cabinet on 15 June, Stanley, supported by Aberdeen, Lord Haddington, and the Duke of Buccleuch, argued forcefully for the retention of the education clauses. Stanley’s membership of the Privy Council Committee on Education since 1841, as well as his introduction of the National Education system in Ireland in 1831, gave him authority on the issue. The Anglican Church had already conceded much, he declared, and the ministry could not let her enemies triumph. If the present scheme failed, then there could be no education of the people by the State and either the young must remain in their current ‘miserable condition’, or the government would be forced to accept plans allowing the ‘separate and indiscriminate endowment of schools of different sects’. Moreover, for the cabinet seemingly to surrender in the face of popular agitation would undermine the government’s authority.100 Graham, Peel, Ripon, and Gladstone, however, disagreed and the education clauses were subsequently dropped. The rest of the bill was withdrawn shortly after, because of lack of parliamentary time. In February 1844 Graham presented to the Commons a modified version of his Factory Bill. Although the working hours of young persons remained unchanged, an additional provision proposed limitations to the working hours of adult females to twelve hours daily. Once again, deeprooted hostility to the measure among the opposition and Conservative back benches erupted. On 15 March, Lord Ashley moved an amendment to reduce the limitation on the working hours of young persons and women to ten. As a compromise some Conservative MPs suggested a limitation of eleven hours. At a cabinet meeting on 23 March, Stanley supported Peel and Graham in strongly opposing any reduction to the twelve hours limitation.101 In cabinet two days later Stanley again backed Peel’s objections, on the grounds that any concession would secure only a temporary respite from further demands.102 Stanley’s opposition to the further regulatory reduction of working hours stood on the economic argument that such legislative interference with the labour market would damage the manufacturing interest. The following day, 25 March, he spoke in the Commons against Ashley’s amendment. Such a modification, he declared, would only create further distress in manufacturing districts by damaging the local economy, so frustrating Ashley’s benevolent aims.103 Such a restriction, he believed, should be permissive, not compulsory, or else it would be prejudicial to both the manufacturing and the labouring classes. The same evening Graham stated that the ministry would bring


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forward a new bill after the Easter recess, while denouncing legislative interference with the free market for labour. This secured a brief breathing space for the cabinet, but Graham’s pillorying of his critics created further ill feeling. The measure Graham submitted a few weeks later was essentially unchanged. Sour Conservative dissent once again broke out. But his indication that the ministry would resign if a ten hours amendment was carried forced Conservative dissidents into line. A ten hours amendment proposed by Ashley was heavily defeated on 13 May. It was a victory, however, bought at a high price in terms of Conservative backbench resentment, where smouldering rancour over the cabinet’s willingness to reduce import tariffs and corn duties persisted. Ashburton privately complained to John Wilson Croker, editor of the Quarterly Review, that the prime minister ‘liked to drill his men as our great Duke does his guards’.104 Against this dark backdrop of economic recession, social unrest, and religious controversy in England, the complex problems of Ireland continued to play themselves out. Stanley held the highest opinion of the urbane and self-confident Lord de Grey, whom Peel appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in September 1841. The Irish Chief Secretary, Lord Eliot, heir to the Earl of St Germans, however, was to prove a more thin-skinned partner in Irish administration, his patience and tact often giving way to ineffectual and impulsive gestures. The men did not get on well, their personal difficulties echoing the tensions of Stanley’s relationship with Anglesey of ten years earlier, although, in the case of de Grey and Eliot, it was the Lord Lieutenant who was more staunchly Protestant and the Chief Secretary who was more inclined towards concession. Stanley was pleased that both men would have the services of Francis Blackburne as Irish Attorney General. When Stanley left the Irish Office in March 1833 Blackburne was the only senior member of the Irish administration for whom he had unqualified praise. After 1841 Blackburne, as with Stanley ten years before, supported de Grey’s views about maintaining the Church of Ireland’s status, as opposed to Eliot’s more latitudinarian inclinations. Stanley wrote to Blackburne on 29 September 1841 outlining his hopes for the Conservative administration in Ireland, thoughts which he also shared with de Grey and Eliot.105 In recent years he believed that the Orange party had been ‘trampled under foot’ and felt it. He would be sorry, however, to see them rise again; ‘it would be fatal to the government had they a chance of doing so’. There were few estimable men among them and the expression of their strong opinions should be discouraged by the government. On the other side, Roman Catholics had been compelled to

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follow in the wake of an O’Connellite tyranny, which the more respectable of them abhorred in their hearts. Stanley’s strong advice was to seek out respectable Catholics willing to support the ministry and bold enough to dissociate themselves from the agitators. If such individuals could be found they should be employed and promoted, in preference to Protestant appointments. ‘Trust to the maxim that where the sheep jumps the rest of the flock will be very apt to follow,’ he counselled Blackburne. Stanley judged O’Connell’s influence to be far diminished from what it had been ten years before and any action should be avoided which would have the effect of rendering O’Connell a popular martyr. In a similar vein Peel believed that O’Connell’s Repeal Association seemed to possess a desire for martyrdom, which the Irish executive should carefully resist satisfying.106 Immediate difficulties arose, however, over the vexed question of Irish education. Stanley’s Irish National Education scheme, with schools administered by a Board of Commissioners, including the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin, had overseen the founding of numerous elementary schools. But Stanley’s hope that shared religious instruction would bring Protestant and Catholic children together and ease sectarian animosity had not been achieved. Individual schools largely retained either an Anglican, Catholic, or Presbyterian character. The Anglican primate, the Archbishop of Armagh, and de Grey, in October 1841, advocated a separate state grant to the Anglican Church Education Society, a policy which Eliot opposed as likely either to undermine fatally the National Education scheme or else allow it to become an almost exclusively Catholic organization.107 Peel called a cabinet meeting to clarify the government’s view. It was a further complicating factor that, at the same time, the Catholic hierarchy began to press for an increased grant for Maynooth College. On 7 November 1841 the cabinet agreed not to institute an inquiry into Maynooth and not to propose a separate grant for Anglican education in Ireland. The National Education scheme would be maintained and the Maynooth grant left undisturbed. Stanley wrote to Peel from Knowsley, on 30 November, acknowledging the difficulties the ministry faced.108 His hopes for his national scheme, as a framework ‘for united education’, had ‘in great measure failed … and that in a small proportion only of the schools are Protestants and Roman Catholics combined’. But, on the other hand, he believed the scheme ‘has been and may be to a greater extent the means of giving a much more scriptural education than would otherwise be given to a much larger number of Roman Catholics than would otherwise have been induced to receive it’. He felt it was also true that ‘the system is so flexible and capable of being moulded so easily to


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suit the views of a manager in each particular case that I am satisfied that Protestants have it in their power to make education as scriptural as they please for those of their own communion’. The proof of this, he observed, was that the system had been generally adopted by the Presbyterians in the north. Nonetheless, he despaired of seeing clergy such as the Archbishop of Armagh conceding the ground they had taken up. The government might, therefore, be forced to modify the national scheme, but this would alter an arrangement which, in some cases, did provide united education and, in the great majority of schools, the least objectionable education to be consistently given to the entire satisfaction of the great body of Roman Catholics. The Maynooth grant, meanwhile, Stanley saw as ‘one of the rocks ahead’, over which he anticipated much future difficulty. His own inclination was to endow Maynooth more liberally, but also to exercise a greater authority and supervision over it. This, he believed, had been the original intention of the grant. But to this course, as to every policy in Ireland, ‘we should have a double opposition from two opposite quarters’. Despite Stanley’s doubts, faced with the cabinet’s firm refusal to consider a separate grant for Anglican education in Ireland, the Archbishop of Armagh agreed to abstain from further agitation on the issue. The existing system continued unaltered. In July 1842, during the Commons debate on finance for education in Ireland, Stanley took the opportunity to defend his national scheme.109 Notwithstanding many difficulties, he declared, it had given Irish children a great amount of sound religious education. By calling together children of different persuasions and causing them to read the Scriptures without explanation, the language of the Scriptures was lodged in their memory, if not their heart. The present system, he believed, gave the best solution of the difficulties faced in Ireland and gave the greatest amount of scriptural education possible. He regretted that many Protestants interfered with the beneficial workings of the system, which had led to its partial failure. Nonetheless, he believed it had done much to lessen religious animosity. In October 1842 Stanley shared with Peel, in a letter from Knowsley, further thoughts about the hazardous issue of the Maynooth grant.110 Increasingly, he informed the prime minister, he was coming to the view that, sooner or later, an inquiry establishing a new basis for an enlarged permanent grant was both desirable and inevitable. The annual vote, supported by large majorities in the Commons, was incapable of being defended on any definite principle. Yet, the withdrawal of the grant would engender very bitter feelings. Its continuance on its present scale no longer effected the object originally contemplated, that of providing the State

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with a control over the education, and a hold upon the affection and the interests, of the Roman Catholic priesthood. On the contrary, he believed that the priesthood trained at Maynooth had become less well educated and far less attached to England. I cannot but think that an enquiry conducted with temper (if such a thing can be on Irish subjects) into the character of the institution, the effect of government aid, and the result of an improved and actual superintendence by the government, might lead the way in the public mind to that which every day’s experience satisfies me is more desirable, tho’ now wholly unattainable, a concord of some sort with Rome, by which the state should obtain defined authority over the Roman Catholic priesthood, and they should have an acknowledged status, both in this country and in the colonies.

Stanley was well aware of the difficulties in such a course. Visceral anti-Catholicism among sections of the Conservative back benches, Nonconformist outrage at British taxpayers giving increased funds to train Catholic priests, and papal resistance, strengthened by an ultramontane Catholic hierarchy, to granting the British State any authority over its Irish priesthood were all formidable obstacles. Yet, he was increasingly coming to believe that securing the loyalty of the Irish Catholic laity, ensuring the dissociation of Catholic priests from political agitation, and preserving orderly government within Ireland as a part of the Union required a fundamental revision of the Maynooth grant. Putting the grant on a more generous and permanent basis, while consolidating ministerial supervision of the Maynooth curriculum and establishing government authority over an Irish priesthood, was now desirable. These were thoughts to which Peel and his cabinet were to return in early 1844. In the meantime, however, it was the danger of revived O’Connellite agitation that once again raised the wearyingly familiar spectre of political unrest. Considerations of conciliation abruptly faded before the immediate danger of civil disturbance and the urgent need for measures of coercion. The particularly shocking and brutal murder of a young man near Stanley’s Tipperary estate in May 1842 foreshadowed further acts of violence in the region. In early January 1843 Stanley’s estate manager, Thomas Bolton, received an anonymous threatening notice, although a number of tenants subsequently contributed to a reward for information leading to the identification of those responsible. Elsewhere in Tipperary and Limerick violent attacks on land agents increased.111 Then, during early 1843, O’Connell’s Repeal movement sprang explosively to life. In March and April the Repeal Association began to hold


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monster meetings throughout Ireland. Catholic clergy and their educated laity, alongside large numbers of agrarian peasantry, quickly enrolled, as Association subscriptions rapidly increased. Catholic bishops, including the formidable John MacHale, Bishop of Tuam, joined the Association, while the radical nationalist group Young Ireland, through their journalistic mouthpiece The Nation, gave encouragement to O’Connell’s campaign. As financial support flowed in from Irish emigrants in the United States and Canada, the French liberal press also gave bellicose encouragement to Irish nationalist ambitions to throw off the English yoke. With his characteristically skilful brinkmanship O’Connell rode the wave of popular agitation, while just keeping within the bounds of constitutional legality. At the same time, his public exhortations that Irishmen would soon have to choose between living as slaves or dying as freemen cranked up the intimidating pressure on the Irish executive. Caught unawares by the intensity of the Repeal campaign, de Grey dispatched alarmed communications to London. But Peel’s cabinet resisted panic. Stanley, laid up in bed with gout, advised Peel against any sudden repressive measures, a recommendation Peel shared with the rest of the cabinet on 8 May.112 Ministers promptly agreed not to take legal action against the Repeal Association until clearly treasonable offences had been committed. The following day Peel told the Commons that his ministry would do all in its power to maintain the Union. Resolute words in public and a private determination not to act in haste, Peel believed, were the wisest response to O’Connell’s provocation. Eliot did introduce to the Commons, however, an Irish Arms Bill prohibiting lethal weapons such as daggers and pikes, proposing the registration of firearms, and banning the sale of gunpowder. The opposition quickly seized on this opportunity to denounce the Conservatives’ Irish administration. On 16 June, Stanley, recovered from gout, answered Russell, assailing the Whig leader for not confining himself to discussion of Eliot’s measure in his wide-ranging condemnation of the general state of Ireland.113 Russell’s irresponsible invective, when Irish affairs were at a critical juncture, Stanley pronounced, excited an agitation for which Russell himself had no remedy. He brings forward at this moment of popular excitement, and, as he admits, of national danger every topic which can inflame to madness the people of Ireland, and for the purpose it would seem of throwing odium upon a government to which he is opposed for not having remedied a state of things which, by the noble Lord’s own confession, has existed for years before they came into office.

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All parties were agreed, Stanley insisted, that while the right to bear arms was universal in England, qualified only by individual circumstances, the reverse must be the case in Ireland, where a licence should be necessary to acquire arms. Russell asserted that parliamentary Reform had been applied unequally in England and Ireland. But who, Stanley retorted, was the leading member of Lord Grey’s administration in the Commons when those measures were brought in? Russell himself; why did he not then remonstrate against Ireland’s unequal treatment? The franchise established by his Irish Reform measure of 1832, Stanley insisted, was more extensive than that conferred by the English Reform Act. Over registration he accepted that defects, abuses, and grievances existed. But he had recently brought forward a bill to remedy these defects. Unfortunately, his registration reforms had been considered a matter of party contest rather than treated with calm deliberation. Applying the registration tests used in England to Ireland on the principle of equality, he noted, would restrict the Irish county electorate further. Russell taunted the government with their deferral of Irish Poor Law reform while pressing ahead with an Arms Bill. But the existing Arms legislation expired at the end of the current session, Stanley responded, and further legislation was a matter of absolute necessity. Russell, he noted, ascribed the discontent in Ireland to two main sources, the nature of Irish tenancies and the status of the Irish Church. But Russell had no remedy for either, unless he wished to abolish the Protestant Church and confiscate the landed property of Ireland under the name of fixity of tenure. Russell said that the current Irish administration did not possess the confidence of the country. If, Stanley observed, Russell meant the numerical mass of the Irish people, then it might be true. But if, he continued, Russell meant the wealth, the intelligence, and the property of the united empire of Great Britain and Ireland, then the government did possess the confidence of the country. If the Union was to be maintained then the government of Ireland must be conducted, not by the will of the masses, but by the wealth, property, and intelligence of the entire empire of Great Britain and Ireland. Finally, Russell declared that Irish Catholics had been brought from a dungeon into a light room, but they were still being kept in solitary confinement. This was a pretty simile, Stanley commented, but it had no clear meaning. In sum, Russell could only suggest difficulties, but was unable to propose solutions. During July 1843 a prolonged Commons debate on the state of Ireland was occasioned by an opposition motion for a committee of inquiry, during which Stanley answered his familiar Commons protagonist Palmerston.114


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The opposition accused the government of being indifferent to the welfare of Ireland, as well as being unjust in its administration of the country. Russell, Macaulay, and Palmerston seemed to think, Stanley observed, that of the political, religious, and social complaints voiced by Irish protesters, their political grievances were the most important, particularly the falling number of county electors. But any measure introducing franchise arrangements analogous to those operating in England would only reduce the county electorate. Russell charged the government with not bringing forward reforms for the Church of Ireland. But the opposition was divided over what should be done. Palmerston called for religious equality, but what did this mean? Did he wish the Catholic hierarchy to be admitted to the House of Lords and the priesthood to be endowed and paid by the State? It was the social problems of Ireland, Stanley believed, that were the most serious cause of complaint. But even here the faults were not all on one side. Neither landlord nor tenant had the control they ought to have over their property. Landlords faced great problems in enforcing their property rights. It was very difficult to remove Irish tenants from property they had leased for a number of years. Although this was an everyday occurrence in England, it was in Ireland a cause of bloodshed. Irish landlord and tenant relations required calm consideration. But it would be unwise, he stated, for any government to raise expectations, the disappointment of which would only aggravate the evil. Yet neither Stanley’s speeches, nor those of his ministerial colleagues, suggested that the cabinet had a positive policy with regard to Ireland. During August 1843 O’Connell maintained his Repeal campaign with a monster meeting at Tara in Meath, the site of the palace of the old Irish kings. In early October preparations were begun for another meeting at Clontarf. But by 6 October, Peel, Graham, and the Irish law officers were agreed that sufficient evidence had been gathered to justify O’Connell’s arrest on the grounds of treasonable conduct.115 On 7 October de Grey issued a proclamation banning the Clontarf meeting and indicating that the authorities were prepared to disperse it by force if necessary. Immediately O’Connell called off the meeting and appealed to his followers not to violate the law. Nevertheless, a determined government arrested O’Connell and other leading members of the Repeal Association a week later for conspiracy. Released on bail, O’Connell instructed his followers to refrain from unlawful disturbance. During the following weeks it became clear that these climactic events had decisively checked the momentum of O’Connell’s campaign. On 20 October, Stanley wrote to Peel from Knowsley, congratulating the prime minister ‘on the success

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of our Irish move: O’Connell is even more submissive and the excitement even less than I expected’.116 That morning Stanley had heard from de Grey, who seemed ‘in very good spirits’, that ‘the political barometer is above changeable, and though not yet at ‘‘set fair’’, as high as it was reasonable to expect’. In his reply to Stanley the following day Peel remarked that O’Connell did not seem to recognize ‘the impolicy of the submissive tone which he now takes. What must his former partisans think of him when he abandons, in the face of the threatened prosecution, Repeal of the Union for Federal Parliament?’117 Indeed, O’Connell’s surrender before de Grey’s proclamation effectively ended his leadership of Irish nationalist aspirations. Stanley’s bitter Irish opponent of the early 1830s now appeared, at 68 years of age, a broken man. With order restored in Ireland, Peel’s cabinet turned to the consideration of measures of conciliation. As Peel pointed out to Graham, although force was necessary, it was not a permanent remedy for the social evils of Ireland.118 The liberal English and Irish landowner Lord Devon was appointed chair of a small committee to consider landlord–tenant relations, that subject which Stanley had identified as one of the main causes of discontent in his Commons speech of July 1843. A constructive Irish policy, Peel recognized, would also have to address the position of the Catholic Church, which embraced the Maynooth grant and the possible establishment of state salaries for Catholic clergy. The views which Stanley had privately expressed to Peel in October 1842, the desirability of an enlarged and permanent Maynooth grant, accompanied by a concord with the papacy giving status to the Catholic priesthood in return for state supervision, were fed into ministerial discussion. Stanley encouraged Peel to consider an inquiry into Maynooth, which, if nothing else, would bring forward factual information rendering more acceptable ideas, which at present could not even be permitted to be discussed, for example, an enlarged and permanent grant.119 But both men, as well as Graham, appreciated that such proposals required extremely delicate handling even in cabinet, let alone in any subsequent discussion with their backbenchers. Maynooth did not appear on the cabinet agenda until late January 1844, and the Irish portions of the Queen’s Speech, on 1 February, referred only to the Devon Commission and a possible reform of the Irish county franchise. In the meantime, O’Connell’s trial in Ireland proceeded amid blunder and disorder. At one point the Attorney General Thomas Smith, who had succeeded Blackburne upon his promotion as Irish Master of the Rolls in November 1842, challenged one of O’Connell’s defending counsel to a duel.


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This foolish impropriety gave the government’s opponents heaven-sent ammunition. During debate on the Address, on 2 February, Stanley did his best to defend Smith. Though unable to excuse the Attorney General’s unfortunate conduct, he insisted that there had been no premeditated intention to outrage the ordinary course of legal proceedings.120 He believed that Smith had been deliberately provoked and that, therefore, the country should extend him some indulgence. The court found O’Connell and his colleagues guilty of conspiracy, but, to Peel’s annoyance, it delayed passing sentence, allowing O’Connell the freedom to attend Westminster in the interim. This legal floundering, regarded by ministers as characteristic of the Irish judiciary, formed the sorry background to a large set-piece Commons debate on the state of Ireland during mid-February 1844. Russell, in a very able 3 1/2-hour speech, opened the debate on Tuesday 13 February. In 1841 the Whigs, he declared, had passed over Ireland to Peel tranquil and undisturbed. Why was it now in such an alarming condition? Because Ireland was occupied, not governed. In England prevailed a government of opinion, while in Ireland it was notoriously a government of force. No Catholic was placed in a position of trust and all Catholic jurors had been dismissed from the O’Connell trial. Endowing the Catholic clergy and extending full civil rights to the Irish were necessary remedies. On Friday 16 February Stanley rose to put forward the government case. In an equally long speech he sought to refute, in turn, Russell’s accusations.121 He denied that Ireland was filled with a disaffected people awaiting the moment to break out into rebellion. By suggesting such was the case, he continued, Russell only excited, at a moment when every popular prejudice was in ferment, volatile Irish passions. The government rejected the charge that they had engaged in a continual violation of constitutional principles in Ireland. Rather, without resorting to extraordinary powers, they had pursued a steady legal course. Nor had they ruled Ireland by military force. In May 1842 the military in Ireland had numbered less than 13,000 men, a lower number of military personnel than at any time between 1832 and 1841. During 1843 large meetings, pernicious agitation, and violent language had revived unrest. A reasonable fear had been deliberately aroused of settled government being overthrown. During 1843 the military force in Ireland had been increased. But even then, it was less than that serving in Ireland in 1833. To loud ironic cheers from the opposition and constant hostile interruptions, Stanley declared that the law in Ireland had not been strained in order to suppress agitation. To sustained interjections from Russell, he insisted that a parliamentary franchise in Ireland,

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introduced on the same basis as in England, would actually reduce the size of the electorate. But the bulk of his speech addressed that issue which, he stated, lay at the centre of the debate, the existence of a Protestant Established Church in Ireland. Although Russell denied wishing to do away with the Irish Church, his call for perfect equality between religious sects was antithetical to an Establishment. In reviewing the history of Catholic Emancipation, during which, Stanley observed, Catholics denied any intention of disestablishing the Irish Church, it was apparent that there was no inconsistency in supporting Emancipation and also firmly maintaining the Established Church. Russell called for equality, but the Catholic Church refused to enter into an alliance with the British State. Will Catholics allow the state to regulate their ecclesiastical functions? Will they allow the state to appoint their bishops, to control their proceedings, to regulate the fees they are to take, to name the hours of worship? No, they say give us all the advantages of endowments by the state and make us independent of the state, give us with that independence all the advantages the Protestant Church enjoys in consequence of its connection and alliance with the state. Russell seeks, I presume, to put Catholic bishops on equality with the Protestant bishops—does he mean to admit them to the House of Lords? [Russell: ‘No, I do not’—another opposition voice, ‘We do’.] You do, happy united party! But Catholic bishops are appointed and consecrated by a foreign potentate, they cannot sit in the Lords where bishops are appointed by the Crown. But if Catholics are excluded from the Lords, where is your principle of equality? Do you mean to remove Protestant bishops from the Lords?

In conclusion, Stanley declared his wish to maintain the Protestant Church in Ireland, but nor did he wish to abandon the just claims of Roman Catholics. He believed that the bulk of the people of England were determined to do full justice to the civil rights of their Catholic fellow subjects. But in common with the vast majority of the people of England, he also entertained a fixed determination to uphold the Protestant Establishment. In the division lobby, on Friday 23 February, Russell’s motion for an inquiry into the condition of Ireland was decisively defeated by 324 to 225 votes. But just before the vote a brief further clash occurred between Stanley and Russell, when Russell criticized Stanley for describing the Irish, in a hustings speech during the 1830s, as ‘the minions of Popery’. Characterizing the Irish people as servile dependants, Russell declared, was language guaranteed to cause deep resentment. Reports of this phrase in the opposition press the previous year had already prompted Stanley, in


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July 1843, to dismiss indignantly the accuracy of this accusation and insist he had no desire to use provocative language with regard to the Catholic laity. Russell’s stinging repetition of the charge in the Commons on 23 February 1844 brought an infuriated Stanley once more to his feet. He had not applied those words to Catholics in Ireland, he fulminated, but rather, he had used the phrase against Russell and his government, who he believed at that time to be in thrall to O’Connell and his Irish radicals.122 Stanley’s relations with Russell were brought to a state of bitter personal antagonism. Stanley’s diligent schoolboy hit back sharply at his opponent’s patronizing dismissal. In a speech at Liverpool, in March 1844, O’Connell dubbed Peel’s government ‘the Inhuman Ministry’ for denying the poor cheap bread by maintaining corn duties. They keep bread dear, O’Connell declared, ‘in order that Lord Stanley and others may live in luxury’.123 With bitter debate over Ireland raging in the Commons and O’Connell stirring up radical opinion outside parliament, Peel initiated cabinet discussion of the Maynooth grant. The proposal to increase the grant, advocated by Peel and Stanley in cabinet on Monday 12 February, caused ministerial disquiet. Gladstone, in particular, saw it as an issue which might require his resignation. In cabinet the following day anguished discussion continued. It also spilled over into conversation around Stanley’s dinner table among those ministers, including Gladstone, present at St James’s Square on Saturday 17 February. The next morning Stanley wrote to Peel, urging the necessity of conciliating moderate Irish Catholics. The difficulty remained of how to do this without alienating the great body of Protestants or of using the revenues of the Irish Church. ‘I know not whether these objects are compatible, but the attempt must be made.’124 Any use of Irish Church revenues for the benefit of Maynooth would not only involve the government in ‘serious difficulties’, but would also excite demands for a similar payment to the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, and agitation against the church rates in England. From their conversation the previous evening, he did not give up all hope of reconciling Gladstone to a remodelling of Maynooth. Stanley recommended the setting up of three new colleges in Ireland: one in the north, at which the Presbyterians might receive education, one in Munster, and one in Connaught, which would be principally, though not exclusively, Catholic, and where ‘young men destined for the priesthood might receive a liberal ecclesiastical education in conjunction with a general education which they share with others not so destined’. A similar curriculum could then be established at Maynooth, in return for an increased grant. ‘I think the promotion of Catholic

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ecclesiastical (combined with civil) education should be the point at which we should endeavour to meet the wishes of the Roman Catholics,’ and if anything could be done it should be delivered by an Act of parliament so as to remove the necessity for an annual vote. A few days later Peel circulated a memorandum to the cabinet suggesting the desirable ends outlined by Stanley and procedure by way of a Royal Commission as a means of achieving them. Cabinet disagreement, however, persisted. On Monday 4 March, Stanley had a two-hour private conversation with an emotionally wrought Gladstone in Westminster. Stanley urged that Ireland could not be governed without concessions to the Catholics, nor England governed by any other ministry than the present one.125 If there were a break-up of the government on this issue, then civil war in Ireland, he predicted, would be the result. Given the state of the Commons and Ireland, it was impossible, he argued, for the ministry to take a stand on civil equality and yet do nothing for the Catholics. But Gladstone remained adamant. He could not remain in the cabinet if the Maynooth grant was augmented and made permanent. Faced with Gladstone’s intransigence, despite Stanley’s best efforts to find grounds for agreement, Peel reluctantly decided to defer legislation on Maynooth. During March, Stanley corresponded with Peel about reform of the Irish county franchise as another strand of their conciliatory Irish policy. Writing from St James’s Square on 20 March, he recommended an extension of the county franchise to those with a beneficial interest in £5 freeholds.126 It had become widely argued that the Irish franchise should be conferred on substantially the same basis as in England. But there were few, if any, bona fide 40s. freeholders in Ireland, as were enfranchised in English counties. Enfranchising the £5 freeholder, Stanley thought from his long acquaintance with Irish society, would best approximate the English electorate. The government’s Irish County Franchise Bill was introduced by Eliot in April. But it immediately looked to become a much contested measure, as Irish Reformers voiced their criticism. As a result, the bill was at first postponed and then finally withdrawn by the government. Thus franchise reform, during the 1844 session, went the same way as concessionary modifications to the Maynooth grant. The government’s Charitable Trusts Bill, designed to encourage the setting up of private endowments for Catholic clergy, however, fared better and delivered at least one element of the ministry’s Irish reform agenda. While walking home with Gladstone towards Carlton Gardens, after dinner with Aberdeen on 17 April, Stanley briefly opened up the topic of reforming


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Irish education. But this remained a fleeting thought hanging in the spring night air.127

Wond’ring, he view’d the battle, where he sat. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 1)

By May 1844 two and three-quarter years of draining executive labour, overseeing the empire, securing colonial tariff reform, confronting Russell on Ireland, and clashing with Palmerston over foreign policy, had taken a heavy toll on Stanley’s health. In May 1843 he was laid up with gout, suffering acute pain in his feet and legs. Six months later, in September, after taking a walk with Peel, his foot was so painful and swollen he could not put a shoe on. Another severe attack of gout followed. For a number of weeks he could only hobble around on crutches. Not until early December was he able to leave London for a visit to the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton House, which was followed by a journey to Yorkshire on 18 December, prior to spending Christmas at Knowsley. Although he was aged only 45 in March 1844, Stanley’s fragile health often suggested the physical enervation of an older man. Yet, on other occasions, the spirited ferocity of his Commons speeches breathed a fire that belied his physiological susceptibilities. So the seeming ebullience of youth starkly alternated with the premature enfeeblement of middle age. The sudden death of Lady Stanley’s elder brother, the popular Richard Wilbraham, aged only 43, on 5 May 1844 was a shocking personal blow. Stanley and Wilbraham had become close friends, their two families often visiting each other when Stanley, his wife, and children were at Knowsley. On his deathbed Wilbraham entrusted the care of his four young daughters and son to his brother-in-law. This family bereavement and the painful occasion of Wilbraham’s funeral on 16 May were further reminders of the fragility of life. On 24 May the Conservative Mancunian barrister William Entwistle, supported by Stanley and Lord Francis Egerton, was elected as Wilbraham’s successor as MP for South Lancashire, Entwistle pledging himself to the Corn Laws and declaring his opposition to the Whigs’ New Poor Law. Recurrent illness underscored Stanley’s growing sense of political marginalization. In 1841, with extensive ministerial experience, Stanley had been the youngest member of Peel’s cabinet. The high ambitions of 1834–5 had faded. Yet there remained good reason to anticipate a promotion to the forefront of British politics, an aspiration cloaked behind

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his disavowal of any personal desire for advancement, in deference to the obligations of public duty. But the central domestic and financial agenda of Peel’s ministry after 1841 emphasized the roles of Graham and Goulburn as Peel’s principal advisers. The Exchequer, the Home Office, and the Board of Trade became the main departments of government policy. The number of MPs who took an active interest in colonial matters had greatly diminished since the early 1830s. Moreover, the recognition of Gladstone’s administrative talents, marked by his appointment as President of the Board of Trade in May 1843, identified the MP for Newark as Peel’s most promising younger disciple; upon Gladstone’s shoulders Peel’s mantle of technical governing expertise might be placed. Stanley observed to Gladstone in conversation in mid-May 1844: ‘you are as certain to be prime minister as any man can be, if you live—the way is clear before you’.128 This was not just recognition of Gladstone’s prospects, but tacit acknowledgement by Stanley that his own future in the Commons posed no bar to Gladstone’s claims. Stanley’s relationship with the austere Peel remained based on mutual respect, rather than easy rapport. Their contrasting temperaments, Stanley’s avuncular manner juxtaposed with Peel’s formal reticence, were too dissimilar for easy companionship. Stanley was flattered when, in early 1844, Peel asked him to sit for a portrait for his collection. But during a shooting party in the autumn of 1845, it was noted how ‘the dignified calm’ of Peel’s countenance was severely strained by ‘a volley of bad jokes’ from Stanley, which Peel could ‘neither tolerate nor resent’.129 Their political relationship, moreover, mitigated against a relaxed intimacy. Warm friendship rarely flourishes between prominent politicians who regard each other as equals. The delicate filaments of political association are strained by latent rivalry and wary suspicion. Such friendships sooner thrive on the uneven exchange of admiration for allegiance. Graham’s career, for example, was shaped by successive acts of adherence, first to Stanley and then to Peel. But Stanley was not a natural subordinate, happiest when devoted to obedient support. His strong sense of his own talents and status did not bend easily to being a dutiful lieutenant. His temperament assumed command more readily than compliance. It was not in Stanley’s nature to become Peel’s loyal confidant, like Graham, nor, like Gladstone, to become Peel’s eager disciple. Age, status, and patrician self-regard kept him outside the charmed circle of Peel’s faithful acolytes. Stanley’s increasing dissatisfaction with his political position revealed his growing estrangement from Peelite managerialism. The contrast between Peel’s cool precision and Stanley’s partisan ardour was more than a


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difference in debating styles. It betrayed a divergence of view regarding the essential nature of executive power. For Peel governance was ultimately a matter of executive capability, drawing on administrative skill, hard work, personal integrity, and a sense of duty, serving, in the last resort, a national interest distinct from what parliamentary supporters might desire. This was a view of executive government harking back to Peel’s ministerial apprenticeship prior to 1830. Being the Queen’s first minister superseded his obligations as party leader, a view of the national interest reinforced by his reserved social manner. The sociable Stanley, by contrast, saw executive authority as springing from the endorsement of party opinion in parliament. Ministerial power rested on the virtuous association of MPs, parties, as the voluntary affiliation of the country’s parliamentary representatives, imposing mutual obligations of trust on both leaders and those they led. This was the legacy of Stanley’s Whig education during the 1820s. In defining what was right, Peel expected his party to follow him. In pursuing what was possible, Stanley looked to achieve what party opinion might allow. Peel’s didactic Commons speeches sought to expound; Stanley’s partisan ardour aimed to arouse. Between February and April 1844 Stanley, wearied by Colonial Office routine, played a less prominent part in Commons debate. Early in April he left London for Knowsley. Violent clashes with Russell and Irish MPs, such as Sheil, over Ireland confirmed he was a target of deep hostility. In pursuing a constructive policy of conciliation in Ireland it seemed that Stanley was becoming a liability, rather than an asset, to the ministry’s debating strength in the Commons. The Irish recollection of ‘Scorpion’ Stanley as the repressive Chief Secretary of twelve years earlier remained a vivid memory. This was an ironic contrast with his private support for constructive Irish measures in cabinet during the winter of 1843–4. Yet it reinforced his dispiriting sense of marginalization. His brief statements to the House during March and April 1844 carried a diminishing political significance. The one notable exception, Stanley having returned to London from Lancashire on 17 May, was his major speech on 30 May, when he laid out his constitutional views in a debate on the government of Canada. In calling attention to the troubled relations between Upper and Lower Canada, Roebuck argued that resisting American democracy in Canada required the granting of greater ‘responsible government’ to the colony. In his extended response Stanley set out his own understanding of ministerial responsibility, party status, and executive authority within British parliamentary government.130 The speech answered Roebuck’s

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arguments concerning Canada. But it also carried an implicit warning about the dangers of party disaffection for a heedless ministerial leadership. The basis of the British constitution, Stanley stated, was that government was vested in the confidential advisers of the sovereign, who were responsible to parliament for the counsel they gave. Therefore, no British minister could hold the reins of power who did not, in addition to the endorsement of the sovereign, possess the confidence of the Commons. Ministerial authority rested upon voluntary party support in parliament. In turn, although exercising limited political power, the sovereign enjoyed the respect of the people because of the dignity of the Crown, derived from its hereditary nature, and the influence of loyalty and attachment to the person of the sovereign. The Lords exercised an influence over public opinion by virtue of their hereditary rank, high station, territorial possessions, and wealth, which gave peers importance in their several localities individually and collectively within the country. Nonetheless, the executive authority of the cabinet issued from the confidence of the Commons as expressed in party support. The warning was unstated, but clear. Ministers who disregarded their party and lost the support of MPs forsook the authority to govern. Stanley rejected Roebuck’s argument that, by analogy, the Governor General of Canada should assume the role of the monarchy in the British parliamentary system. There existed in Canada a representative form of the constitution chosen by the people, but no parallel to the Lords. The colonial council possessed none of the advantages of the peerage in Britain. They were not elevated by rank, station, or property above their fellow citizens. They exercised no great influence. They were nominated by the Crown and held office for life. The Governor General had none of the dignity of the sovereign about his position. If he was stripped of all power and compelled to act under the control of the colonial legislature, then a form of republican government would be instituted, inconsistent with both monarchical government and colonial dependence. The Durham Report had recommended the principle of ‘responsible government’. But, Durham, Stanley observed, did not seem to have considered the mode in which it was to be carried out or the practical results to which this principle would give rise. Neither Durham nor Russell, he believed, had wished ‘responsible government’ to render the Governor General a mere machine, a passive instrument in the hands of the Executive Council. Without power there could be no responsibility. But Roebuck, Stanley concluded, proposed to take all power from the Canadian Governor. Stanley sat down amid loud cheers. The Conservative back benches were delighted by his


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performance. Not only had he forcefully rejected Roebuck’s argument, he had also clearly reasserted the importance within Westminster of party endorsement to ministerial authority. It proved Stanley’s eloquent swan song in the Commons. During June and July 1844 he made few statements to the House, despite extensive debate over the Corn Laws and the Bank Charter Bill. Only during the debate on sugar import duties during June, over which Peel got himself into considerable difficulties and once again deeply offended the feelings of many Conservative backbenchers, did Stanley speak at any length and successfully heal, for the moment, painful rifts in Conservative party sentiment.131 Gladstone believed that the ‘whole honour of the fray, in the ministerial sense, redounded to Lord Stanley’, who had saved the government from defeat, an angry and exasperated Peel already privately considering resignation.132 Certainly Stanley’s brief, but telling, call for Conservative unity rescued the ministry from mounting backbench resentment. Rejection of the bill, he warned Conservative MPs, would only bring into office Whig ministers holding little regard for agricultural or West Indian interests. Following the debate Stanley remarked to Russell that a defeat would have resulted in the Conservative party being ‘broken to pieces for many years’. To Hobhouse, Stanley observed, ‘This is doing business, Sir John Hobhouse.’ ‘Yes you are getting on,’ Hobhouse responded. ‘I wish we were getting off,’ Stanley darkly replied.133 On 6 July, Stanley left London for Tunbridge Wells. Two weeks later he travelled north for the Liverpool races, where the victory of his 3-year-old colt Ithuriel in the St Leger by two clear lengths on 19 July gave him some compensatory pleasure. On Saturday 27 July 1844 Stanley wrote confidentially to Peel from St James’s Square frankly laying out the full extent of his dissatisfaction with his political situation. The communication was candid and heartfelt. ‘I am not satisfied with my position, either with reference to myself or to the public interest.’134 He believed he was ‘thrown away’ where he was and that he might be useful elsewhere. He hoped he discharged his departmental duties satisfactorily. But the discharge of these duties takes me out of the general conduct of affairs. In the House of Commons it has now become necessary that business should be done by departments, and it is done accordingly by yourself, Graham, Goulburn and Gladstone. You do not want speakers in the House except on rare occasions, such as occur two or three times a session; Colonial affairs seldom come on; and when they do come on, they are to be discussed before an audience who know nothing about them, and

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take no interest in them. I am, therefore, a cypher in the House, and I feel that while I am sitting there nine hours a night, doing nothing, my place might just as well be filled by any member.

There was another place, he continued, where he might be of ‘essential service’. The House of Lords, he suggested, was in a state alike discreditable to the government and the reputation of the Upper House. The 75-year-old Duke of Wellington was the distinguished Conservative leader in the Lords. But Wellington was now ill, increasingly deaf, and inadequately supported by effective speakers among the Conservative peerage. Lord Ripon was seriously ill, Lord Lyndhurst seemed reluctant to enter the fray, Lord Wharncliffe lacked vigour, and Lord Aberdeen confined himself to foreign affairs. As Greville observed to Henry Reeve a few weeks later, ‘there is nobody there who can speak, and they have therefore been obliged to hire Brougham by the night, and it is desirable that they should no longer be dependent on such a queer auxiliary, and one often so mischevious’.135 If Stanley was elevated to the Lords, then the burden of debate resting on Wellington’s ailing shoulders might be eased. ‘Stanley will fight the government battles himself,’ Greville noted, ‘and not suffer Brougham to take the ministerial bench under his dangerous and discreditable protection.’136 Moreover, a seat in the Lords would bring Stanley into the general administration of the government. Stanley reassured Peel that he did not see himself being a rival to Wellington, immediately displacing the venerable Duke as Conservative leader in the Lords. Wellington’s ‘age, his character, his position, would render such an idea not less presumptuous on my part, than absurd in reference to the feelings of the House, the party and the country’.137 But Stanley could be of daily use to the Duke. Moreover, in the inevitable event of Wellington’s retirement, an eventuality which the Duke’s age and frailty required them to consider, Stanley might assume the party leadership in the Lords. With that in mind, he thought it ‘of paramount importance that I should be introduced into [the Lords] while the Duke is still in full possession of his powers’. Stanley did not deny that such ‘a change would be agreeable to me personally, as relieving me from a position in which I feel I am misplaced’. Marginalized as a cabinet minister, isolated in a department peripheral to the government’s main policies, and underused as a frontbench speaker, his talents were overshadowed by younger Peelite protégés, such as Gladstone, while his closeness to Peel was barred by more trusted confidants, such as his own former lieutenant Graham. Stanley went out of his way to state, with sufficient insistence as to give


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substance to the thought, that he harboured no jealousy of Graham. Since 1841 Graham had shown ‘a power of conducting business, a knowledge of detail, a temper, and an indefatigable assiduity’ as to justify Peel’s decision to place him at the Home Office, instead of himself. Graham’s success, however, only enforced his own growing sense of languishing on the political sidelines. Immediately after writing to Peel, Stanley again left London for the rural comfort of Tunbridge Wells. Striking in its candour, Stanley’s letter was as explicit an expression of his personal ambition as he ever wrote. With his advancement blocked in the Commons, he wished to enter the Lords where, after loyally supporting the elderly Wellington, he might succeed to the party leadership in the Upper House. Peel consulted Wellington, who indicated he would welcome Stanley’s assistance.138 The prime minister immediately wrote a gracious reply to Stanley acceding to his request, but regretting his loss to the Commons, where Peel would feel as though he were losing his right arm.139 But Peel did not try to dissuade Stanley from leaving the Commons. From Goodwood, on Wednesday 31 July, where he was staying with Richmond, Stanley thanked Peel for ‘the handsome terms’ in which the prime minister had written of his assistance to the Commons front bench. Yet his elevation to the Lords, he believed, would ‘improve the cast of parts in the administration of public business’.140 Stanley straight away wrote to his father at Knowsley to discuss the arrangements for his successor’s election in North Lancashire. Back at St James’s Square, on Monday 5 August he wrote to John Wilson Patten and Edmund Hornby advising them of his imminent elevation, as yet known only by his father and some of the cabinet, and the need to prepare for an election. He reassured both Patten and Hornby that his move to the Lords was something he himself desired on both public and private grounds.141 Then, on Tuesday 13 August, following a cabinet meeting at the Foreign Office, he left London to stay for a few days with Graham at Netherby. In late August he then left Netherby for Lathom House, also visiting Earl Spencer at Wiseton Hall and the Marquess of Exeter at Burghley during the following weeks. Although the Commons remained sitting until 5 September, he preferred to absent himself from the chamber, although on 3 September he attended a Privy Council meeting with the Queen at Windsor. To Ripon, on 12 September, he wrote of his disgust with the proceedings of the Lower House, where ‘every year more time is wasted, and business done more unsatisfactorily’.142 Two days later the Lancashire landowner and Guards officer John Talbot Clifton was elected Stanley’s successor as Conservative MP for North Lancashire, with a promise to

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defend protective duties on imported corn. Stanley endorsed Clifton’s candidature by upholding the policy of combining perfect freedom of religious opinion, with a warm attachment to the Established Church; seeking to extend the inestimable blessings of commerce, but not overlooking existing interests, and the protection due to domestic industry; repudiating alike, in our civil institutions, that timid policy which shrinks from all improvement, and clings blindly to all long-established abuses; and that reckless spirit of innovation, which seeks to unsettle everything, and is ever courting, for its own sake, unnecessary change.143

In early October, Stanley finally received his summons to the Lords as Lord Stanley of Bickerstaffe, the title created in 1832 to allow his father to enter the Lords during the 12th Earl’s lifetime. Stanley’s Commons career of twenty-two years was ended. His elevation, Gladstone later commented, changed the whole course of British politics. It is intriguing to speculate on the different path events might have taken if, during the traumatic months of 1846 when the Conservatives were bitterly split over Corn Law repeal, Stanley had still been a member of the Commons. Would Stanley’s strong wish to preserve Conservative unity have tempered the outraged invective of Lord George Bentinck and Benjamin Disraeli? Would Stanley have more effectively been able to heal the open wounds of Conservative schism? What divided sections of disparate Conservative opinion might he have been able to coalesce if he had not been removed from the Commons? Gladstone, for one, thought the course of mid-Victorian politics would have been very different if this had been the case. That Gladstone himself resigned from the cabinet in February 1845 because of his objections to Peel’s Maynooth legislation, only three months after Stanley’s departure from the Commons, significantly altered the circumstances which had prompted Stanley to look for advancement in the Upper House. With the retirement of two of Peel’s leading Commons cast, The Spectator archly observed, who was ‘to succeed Lord Stanley in the Tybalt line, or Mr Gladstone in heavy tragedy?’144 By mid-February both Peel and Graham, having lost Stanley and Gladstone, were regretting the dangerous diminution of the government’s debating strength in the Commons. As it was, for the next twenty-five years of his parliamentary career, Stanley was to engage in political events from the elevated grandeur of the House of Lords. Stanley did not make an immediate mark in the Lords, although, on 28 January 1845, returning from a visit to the Duke of Rutland at Belvoir


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Castle, he hosted a political dinner at St James’s Square for the Earl of Auckland, the Earl of Lincoln, Viscount Ossulston, Viscount Canning, Sidney Herbert, and Henry Corry. For much of the 1845 session he attended the Lords regularly, but said little. He did not move or second the Royal Address on 4 February. Nor did he contribute to subsequent debate, lords Wharncliffe, Brougham, Hardwicke, Malmesbury, Lansdowne, and Aberdeen and the Lord Chancellor taking prominent parts in discussion. He did not speak to the House until 13 February, giving a short statement on the railway department of the Board of Trade. On 21 February he spoke briefly on sugar duties. But he remained silent throughout March, leaving for Knowsley on 26 March. It was not until 7 April that he made his first major speech to the Lords, on the Irish constabulary.145 Moreover, when he did speak, it was not in his familiar Commons style of spirited partisan ardour. Rather, he adopted a more dignified and restrained tone, noticeably lacking his former sharp witticisms, cutting sarcasm, and pithy similes. Adapting to the different intensity of political activity in the Lords, he assumed a more sober rhetoric. The transformation was not lost on the press. Fraser’s Magazine remarked that it was impossible to ‘recognise in the quiet, unobtrusive minister who now sits under the wing of the Duke of Wellington … the fierce, fiery leader who was named the Hotspur of the Conservative forces’.146 In the less ardently partisan atmosphere of the Lords, he took care to adapt to his new political surroundings. On 4 April 1845 Stanley supported the third reading of the government’s Property Tax Bill, declaring that there was no mode of taxation so unobjectionable as that which the government had selected so as to meet the budget deficiency.147 The ministry’s earlier reduction of duties, moreover, had already benefited manufacturing and commerce and thereby the agricultural interest, securing the general welfare and prosperity of the country. This marked Stanley’s involvement in broader ministerial business which he hoped would follow his elevation to the Lords. Three days later he defended the government’s Irish administration and the Lord Lieutenant Lord Heytesbury, appointed as Lord de Grey’s successor in July 1844, against the criticisms of Lord Normanby. The general policy of the government towards Ireland, Stanley insisted, was one of avoiding the extremes of either the Protestant or the Catholic parties.148 Ministers looked to deliver an impartial justice to all Her Majesty’s subjects in Ireland, without giving way to the prejudices of either side. Lord Heytesbury, furthermore, was not ill informed on Irish matters, as Normanby suggested. On 11 April, Stanley closed the third and successful

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reading of the Sugar Duties Bill with a statement notable for its dignified restraint.149 A more contentious Lords debate, engaging strong religious feelings, arose on 2 May over the bishoprics of St Asaph and Bangor. Under an Act of 1836 the Ecclesiastical Commission proposed, when a vacancy should occur, to merge the two Welsh bishoprics, part of their endowments creating a diocese of Manchester. In 1844 the Ultra Tory Lord Powis introduced an unsuccessful private Lords bill to preserve the two Welsh bishoprics. In April 1845 Powis again introduced his private bill to repeal the 1836 Act. Some Anglican prelates, such as Charles Blomfield, Bishop of London, supported Powis’s measure on the grounds that there was now sufficient money to establish a Manchester diocese without drawing on existing endowments. But Peel remained adamantly opposed to repealing the merger of the two Welsh bishoprics. Alongside Wellington, Stanley firmly opposed Powis’s bill, arguing against increasing the number of political bishops.150 Supported by a reluctant Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor, and the Duke of Buccleuch, Wellington and Stanley defeated the second reading by 129 to ninety-seven votes. Listening to the debate from the gallery Gladstone heard Stanley’s speech ‘with regret and alarm’.151 Ultra Tories in the Lords were enraged by the government’s inflexibility. Religious resentment in the Lords again flared up when, four weeks later, Peel’s Maynooth College Bill was sent up from the Commons. The bill increased the grant paid to Maynooth and made it permanent, rather than being subject to annual approval. This was what Stanley had privately recommended to Peel in October 1842. The legislation’s contested passage through the Commons was bitterly acrimonious. Having already prompted Gladstone to resign from the cabinet in February, it brought on the most serious rebellion of Conservative MPs to date, with 147 Conservative MPs opposing the second reading. Only opposition support enabled Peel to get the measure through the Commons, with just 148 Conservative MPs voting for it on its third reading. The second reading of the Maynooth College Bill in the Lords, begun on 2 June, continued for three nights of fierce debate. Once again, embittered Ultra Tory peers displayed deep anger at the government’s disregard for their religious convictions. Lord Roden moved a hostile amendment calling for an inquiry into the religious instruction provided at Maynooth. An increased permanent grant to the seminary, Ultra Tories argued, was tantamount to state support for Catholicism and a deadly blow to the Established Church of Ireland. On 4 June, Stanley closed the debate on


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behalf of the government. He attacked Roden’s call for an inquiry as merely a convenient pretext for blocking the bill. Instituting an inquiry would only intensify religious animosities in Ireland. The bill would not injure the Irish Protestant Church, but it would ensure that Catholics in Ireland were educated, rather than condemned to ignorance. Roden’s amendment was defeated by a large majority of 106 votes and the second reading passed by 157 votes. On 16 June, Stanley supported Wellington in securing the third reading of the bill, although Stanley was caught in an ill-tempered skirmish with the Duke of Newcastle, who accused the government of condoning the establishment of a Jesuit College in Malta. The Maynooth Bill was successfully seen onto the statute book. But the price paid in terms of resentment among Ultra Tory peers was high. Stanley now appeared more at ease as a speaker in the Lords. His contributions to debate became more frequent, although he maintained his new-found rhetorical gravitas, avoiding fiery displays of partisan zeal. But departmental colonial business, in particular the unsatisfactory state of affairs in New Zealand, caused him mounting embarrassment. When Stanley identified his subordinate, the inept Governor, as the source of the colony’s problems, The Times, unpersuaded, by way of analogy critically observed: When we sit down to a well appointed banquet, where course follows course decently and in order … we give credit to the good man of the house for understanding the duties of a host and the regulations of an establishment. On the other hand, when we see and hear confusion reigning around, the servants coursing and scampering around the room … and the warmest thing at the table is the face of the mortified hostess, we regret to see good things wasted, and we think the excuse that it was all the fault of the stupid servants insufficient.152

Since arriving as Governor in December 1843, the high-handed Fitzroy, with his naval quarter-deck manner, had thoroughly antagonized the white settlers. The financial difficulties of the colony, the conflict between the missionary colonists on the North Island and the New Zealand Company settlers on the South Island, and continuing Maori unrest, despite Fitzroy’s support for Maori grievances against the white settlers, created a situation of volatile instability. In October 1844 Fitzroy wrote to Stanley requesting that troops and at least two ships of war be sent to the colony. Stanley shared Fitzroy’s deep hostility to the New Zealand Company and the wish to accommodate Maori claims. But Fitzroy’s failure to send regular and

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detailed reports to the Colonial Office of what was happening in New Zealand initially frustrated, then embarrassed, and finally alienated him. On 3 February 1845 Stanley wrote to Fitzroy complaining that it was four months since he had heard from the Governor. Unknown to Stanley, Fitzroy allowed debentures to circulate as money within the colony, called troops to the colony from New South Wales, pardoned a Maori chief for rebellion, and laid aside awards made by Spain. On 1 March, Stanley angrily wrote to Fitzroy that his continued silence represented a serious dereliction of duty.153 Meanwhile, in the Commons the ministry found itself without sufficient information to refute opposition criticisms of their administration of the colony. Stanley submitted to the cabinet on 11 April a detailed report outlining the Governor’s failings.154 The cabinet agreed to Stanley’s recommendation that Fitzroy be recalled. Stanley wrote to the Governor to this effect on 30 April and the decision was announced to the Commons on 5 May. Stanley cited the irregularity of Fitzroy’s dispatches, the Governor’s failure to organize a militia as Stanley had requested, lack of firmness in dealing with the Maori question, the issuing of what amounted to paper money, and the imposition of taxes on the sale of land without authority from London, as the reasons for his decision. The Sandhurst-trained army captain and explorer George Grey, who as Governor of South Australia aged 28 in 1840 had proved a capable administrator, was appointed as Fitzroy’s replacement. This did not prevent a difficult Commons debate from ensuing during June, however, as Stanley’s imputed mishandling of the colony’s affairs was fully aired by Charles Buller and other members of the opposition. Unable to answer these attacks directly, Stanley’s record was stoutly defended by Graham and Peel. By making the issue a party question Peel defeated an opposition motion. Stanley himself, however, was frustrated by his exclusion from the Commons debate. The episode damaged his reputation and weakened the government’s claim to executive expertise. Privately, Peel indicated that Stanley’s unhappy handling of the issue had been clumsy and inept.155 In the press Stanley was attacked for making the question a party issue and thereby protecting a system ‘the effect of which has been the questioning of his sovereign’s authority, hatred of her sway, and hostility of races, bloodshed on both sides, and the defeat of Englishmen’.156 Defenders of Fitzroy, though they were very few in number, claimed that the Governor had received inadequate support from the Colonial Office in terms of military and financial resources. The opposition newspaper the Morning Chronicle declared:


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Lord Stanley is the best hand in the world at a party speech, when such things are wanted. But the possession of this quality is no reason for entrusting him with the fortunes of our colonies, of which he has no time to understand the many wants, while his best energies are devoted to breeding horses for Liverpool and Goodwood races.157

The Times, meanwhile, continued to insist that Stanley was answerable for the acts of those he appointed to govern Britain’s distant possessions, and suggested that the Colonies was too extensive a department to be within the power of any single person to conduct, the solution being the setting up of a Colonial Board.158 ‘We can admire Lord Stanley’s dexterity as a skirmisher in debate, and his skill in fencing, but he is woefully deficient in weight and stability, in comprehensiveness, in fitness for responsible office. He is a dashing ensign, perhaps even a slashing colonel, but he is not endowed with the thoughtfulness and the resource of the general.’159 Such charges of aristocratic mismanagement were an acute embarrassment, both to Stanley personally and to Peel’s administration collectively. When parliament prorogued in early August 1845 simmering resentment against Peel’s leadership suffused the Conservative back benches. The government’s apparent disregard for their political and religious sensibilities had caused deep rancour. The Import Duties Bill in 1842, Stanley’s Canada Corn Law Bill in 1843, Graham’s factory legislation and revision of the sugar duty in 1844, all prompted Conservative backbench revolts. Peel’s legislation in 1845 to increase and make permanent the Maynooth grant occasioned a major rebellion of Conservative backbenchers in both the Commons and the Lords. Graham noted with apprehension, ‘our party is shivered and angry and we have lost the slight hold which we ever possessed over the hearts and kind feelings of our followers’.160 Graham himself, The Times commented, was ‘the most unpopular public man of the day’.161 Free Trade provisions included in Goulburn’s 1845 budget caused further deep resentment. Early in the session Stanley warned Peel that the Conservative peers ‘looked sulky’ over Goulburn’s financial plan.162 In May 1844 he had given a veiled warning of the grave dangers threatened by Peel’s impatience with backbench dissent. During the acrimonious Maynooth debate of April 1845 the Conservative backbencher Benjamin Disraeli scathingly dubbed Peel’s leadership ‘a dynasty of deception’.163

chapter 6

Conservative Schism: 1846–1848 You may be as discreet as you like about my vote [on Corn Law repeal] in the House of Lords, and very safely, for I do not know which way I shall give it. I never was more perplexed in my life. I dislike the measure so much, and am so much alarmed at the ulterior consequences which I foresee, that I do not know how I am to support it; but with the knowledge that many of the Peers will be guided by my answer, and may be turned either way; and with these difficulties before us of carrying on any government except this, I am most reluctant to oppose it. I will not stay away. I will take one course or another broadly, but it is a fearful choice of dangers and evils, and the difficulty is to know how to choose the least. (Stanley to Edward Stanley, 10 February 1846)

We find Lord John Russell at the head of a Whig government, and supported by radical followers, adopting, for the present, a strictly Conservative line of policy, courting the alliance and support of the Church, and braving the hostility of the Dissenters; Sir Robert Peel, the apostle of expediency, professing entire abstinence from party, yet perpetually closeted with his under-strappers, interfering in every borough in the Kingdom, through his agents, and bent on keeping together a party whose bond of union shall be personal subservience to Sir Robert Peel. (Stanley to Croker, 7 June 1847)

n acidic sense of grievance was souring relations between Peel’s cabinet and the Conservative back benches by 1845. As a member of Peel’s front bench Stanley had advocated the Import Duties Bill, defended the reduction of sugar duties, and decreased the import duty on Canadian corn. He supported the reintroduction of the income tax and the government’s Property Tax Bill. He staunchly defended in cabinet the original education clauses of Graham’s factory legislation. He also helped to turn Peel’s mind towards the enlargement and permanence of the Maynooth grant, a policy which, in early 1845, provoked Gladstone’s cabinet resignation and a serious Conservative backbench revolt. Yet, at the same time, Stanley began to nurse a personal sense of marginalization, a private recognition that he was outside the charmed circle of Peel’s closest advisers. This feeling of

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exclusion prompted him to request his elevation to the Lords, where an apprenticeship under Wellington would lead to his assumption of the Conservative leadership in the Upper House. In May 1844 Stanley warned of the dangers to a government of ignoring party feeling. The confidence of the Commons was crucial to the possession of power. Moreover, although he loyally supported the modification to import tariffs introduced after 1841, he retained a faith in the benefits of Protectionism. It was, he believed, crucial to Britain’s colonial economy. Desirable modification was not to be confused with the complete abandonment of protective tariffs as national policy. Moreover, commitment to Protection had underpinned Conservative unity in 1841. Most Conservative MPs remained bound to the preservation of import tariffs and it was on this understanding that they had pledged their support for Peel’s ministry. Stanley’s conviction that backbench loyalty required ministerial regard for party opinion guided his response to the Conservative schism, triggered by a catastrophic famine in Ireland. The devastating events in Ireland precipitated by the outbreak of potato blight, during the autumn of 1845, led to Stanley’s painful separation from Peel and his ministerial colleagues. It proved a watershed in British politics and determined the future course of Stanley’s political career.

Depart we now; for this way our discourse Can lead to no result. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 299)

After visiting the Duke of Bedford at Woburn Abbey, Stanley spent September 1845 in Lancashire. From Knowsley, on 14 October, he reported to Peel the failure of the potato crop in Mayo from a disease which had appeared suddenly over a few days. ‘If this be at all general the consequences will be frightful,’ he warned the prime minister.1 Peel’s response was decisive. The day before, the prime minister had already written to Graham that ‘the removal of impediments to import is the only effectual remedy’.2 Graham agreed that they should suspend the Corn Laws, which would be very difficult to reimpose. During the rain-sodden summer and autumn Peel became increasingly anxious about the harvest. The potato blight first appeared in England during August. By September similar reports were arriving from Ireland. When he received Stanley’s intelligence about Mayo in mid-October, he was convinced that Ireland was facing a major disaster.

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By late October, Peel and Graham were firmly, though not yet openly, agreed that total repeal of the Corn Laws, perhaps following the suspension or reduction of existing duties, was the only effectual response to the catastrophe confronting Ireland. For a long time Peel had come to believe that the Corn Laws must eventually be repealed. Sir Fitzroy Kelly vividly remembered, three years later, that, when appointed Solicitor General in July 1845, ‘Peel had warned him, being then on his way to his constituents, not to pledge himself too strongly on the Corn Laws. Kelly’s impression was that [Peel] had already decided on the change which he afterwards effected.’ Kelly also recalled that Peel’s contempt for his party was very apparent to those who were in office with him. He seemed to take it as a matter of course, that go where he might, they would follow. He thought no more of them than I do of the labourers who work for me. He never contemplated for a moment the possibility of their leaving him on the corn question, he expected a few hard words, and a little murmuring, and that all would go on as before.3

By October 1845 Peel was privately convinced that the Corn Laws must be repealed. In order to bring his government around to this view, he called a cabinet meeting for Friday 31 October. When Malmesbury arrived at Knowsley on Thursday 30 October, anticipating convivial company and much shooting, he was disappointed to discover that Stanley had already suddenly left for London. The following day, at his residence in Whitehall Gardens where he was confined by an attack of gout, Peel presented to the assembled cabinet all the information available regarding the crisis in Ireland. On Saturday 1 November the cabinet reassembled at Whitehall Gardens to hear Peel argue for the immediate suspension of the Corn Laws. Any reinstatement of the duties thereafter would involve a considerable reduction in the existing scale. The cabinet, however, was deeply divided. A number of ministers felt such a step was unjustifiable for a Conservative ministry to contemplate. To suspend, albeit temporarily, the Corn Laws would, in effect, be to repeal them. Eventually, it was agreed to meet again on Thursday 6 November to discuss, after further consideration, the best course to adopt. Stanley was deeply alarmed by Peel’s proposal. On Monday 3 November, unwilling to wait until the forthcoming cabinet, he wrote a detailed memorandum to Peel explaining precisely why he believed repeal of the Corn Laws to be unnecessary.4 There was not, he began, a general scarcity of provisions; wheat, barley, and oats were available in good quantity. Opening the ports to foreign supply would only create alarm among


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domestic farmers and corn flooded onto the market at depressed prices. For the government to remain passive might have been the wisest course if only England were affected by the potato blight. But the crisis in Ireland was not merely a loss of profit, but a loss of subsistence. Clearly, vast numbers of Irish peasantry must be supported by charity or else die of famine. But it did not follow that the government should undertake such support at incalculable expense. Government interference would only check private charity and inevitably fail in providing a lasting remedy. The appointment of Commissioners working under the Deputy Lieutenants in each Irish county would facilitate the establishment of public and private works providing paid labour, complementing the efforts of private charity. The Commissioners might oversee the transport of provisions to areas of absolute scarcity. The removal of the duty on Indian corn might even be considered if this proved inadequate. But repeal of the Corn Laws would deprive the government of the cooperation of English and Irish landed proprietors, upon whom a permanent pecuniary injury would be inflicted in response to a temporary, if serious, shortage. ‘The effect of the abandonment of the Corn Laws at this time will not be that of deliberate conviction, but of hasty flight from our position, in consequence of clamour, aided by most unfortunate, but temporary, circumstances.’ In his covering letter, written from the Colonial Office, Stanley expressed his regret at finding how widely he differed in opinion from Peel and Graham.5 But anxious reflection had convinced him that, if Peel persevered in his intention to repeal the Corn Laws, then the government would be broken up. For good measure, he informed Peel that he had just been visited by Bishop Hughes, the Vicar Apostolic of Gibraltar, recently returned from Ireland. Hughes reported an alarming shortage of potatoes in Wexford and Cork, but added that the farmers in those counties would be amply indemnified by their crop of oats, which was large. Peel, however, was not swayed by Stanley’s arguments. In reply he merely suggested that Stanley had hastily assumed that it was his wish to repeal the Corn Laws completely, an accurate correction by Peel of his precise words, but a somewhat misleading summary of the spirit of cabinet discussion. On Thursday 6 November, Peel proposed to the cabinet that British ports be opened to all foreign grain at a reduced rate, that parliament be recalled on 27 November to ratify the decision, and an announcement made of their intention to introduce a modified corn bill after Christmas; but only Graham, Aberdeen, and Sidney Herbert supported him. Stanley, along with the rest of the cabinet, either objected in principle to repeal, or declared that the necessity for such action had not

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yet been shown. He promptly left London for Lathom House, returning from Lancashire to St James’s Square on 19 November. At a cabinet meeting that day, with ministerial differences still unresolved, it was agreed not to recall parliament until 16 December. In the meantime, Peel continued to urge colleagues of the necessity of suspension. A commission, under Lord Devon, was established to investigate the exact circumstances prevailing in Ireland. Peel sent Stanley a copy of a recently published pamphlet by J. Morton and J. Trimmer entitled An Attempt to Estimate the Effects of Protecting Duties on … Agriculture, which argued for repeal. But, prior to calling on Peel on 30 November, Stanley wrote declaring himself ‘perplexed’ by the pamphlet: ‘All one can say is that figures will prove anything.’ He concluded: ‘I am strongly inclined to think that the best thing, for our own credit and for the country, would be that we should agree to differ.’6 When Graham visited Stanley at St James’s Square in an attempt to persuade him to accept some alteration to existing duties, Stanley declared himself opposed to the opening of the ports and convinced that there were no alternatives other than the maintenance or the abandonment of the principle of Protection.7 As cabinet dissension continued, Russell, on 22 November, published his ‘Edinburgh Letter’, dramatically announcing his abandonment of the principle of a fixed duty and his conversion to total repeal. It was a startling response to the opposition’s urgent need for both a leader and a policy. Peel’s efforts to win over his colleagues at once become more complicated. Suspension, let alone repeal, would now assume the appearance of surrender to opposition pressure. Nonetheless, Wellington, hitherto a staunch advocate of the Corn Laws, declared his willingness to support Peel. But Stanley believed that only Wellington, with his unique status and unquestionable sense of absolute duty to his sovereign, could credibly support a ministry of whose measures he personally disapproved. On Tuesday 2 December, Peel presented the cabinet with a revised proposal, introducing an immediate new scale of duties, which would be reduced over successive years until they were removed altogether within a period of eight years. But the hope that this revised scheme would preserve cabinet unity was promptly dashed when, on Thursday 4 December, Stanley and the Duke of Buccleuch both declared they would resign rather than be associated with Peel’s new plan.8 Peel immediately decided to resign. Although, over the previous four weeks, cabinet resistance had shrunk from eleven to two ministers, Buccleuch’s influence in Scotland and Stanley’s standing in the Lords rendered the option of continuing without them an unacceptable prospect. Moreover, a prompt resignation,


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forcing Russell to attempt to form a government, would immediately test Whig and Liberal adherence to the policy announced in the Edinburgh Letter. On Friday 5 December, Peel tendered his resignation to the Queen. During his audience at Osborne the following day, an agitated Peel was asked by Prince Albert why, with a large Commons majority, he could not continue. Peel replied that, if he persevered, many of the Royal Household would resign, Stanley would lead the Protectionists in the Lords, and enraged Tories in the Commons would turn against him, joined by Whigs and radicals who would claim that Peel had appropriated their measure. Asking Stanley to form a ministry was briefly considered, but quickly dismissed. With the aristocracy as his base, they feared, Stanley would force the people, amid great poverty, to pay for their bread at a high price in the interests of the landlords.9 Riots would follow, bringing a direct confrontation between the Lords and the Commons. Only Russell, they agreed, could be charged with forming a cabinet. The Times concurred, the prospect of a Protectionist ministry able to survive for more than six weeks being ‘a vision of the most utopian description’.10 Peel agreed to remain in post until the Queen had appointed his successor. Russell was not able to attend the Queen at Osborne until Thursday 11 December. Reluctantly he consented to consult his colleagues, while asking the Queen to confirm that the Protectionist members of Peel’s cabinet were unwilling to form a ministry. To this end Peel put the question to Stanley and Buccleuch. Both replied that they would not participate in a Protectionist government.11 Yet Russell, under pressure from his radical backbenchers to push for total and immediate repeal, hesitated. On Tuesday 16 December he informed the Queen of considerable difficulties in his forming an administration. The objections of Lord Grey (who had succeeded his father, the former premier, in July 1845) to Palmerston returning to the Foreign Office finally killed off the attempt. Russell’s Edinburgh Letter, The Times commented, ‘turns out to have been less well-timed than it was at first considered. Instead of tripping up his rival, it has entangled himself.’12 Declaring a policy before forming a government proved a grave tactical error. Lansdowne observed: ‘The advantages of [Peel’s] position are so great (putting all consistency out of the question) and he knows them so well, from the impossibility of their finding or making by any process another Queen Bee, that he will continue to rule in the hive, which if able would willingly sting him to death.’13 On Saturday 20 December, Peel attended the Queen at Windsor and agreed to continue as prime minister.

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During this negotiation, on Thursday 11 December, Stanley wrote from St James’s Square to the Queen explaining that, being unconvinced of the necessity of the abandonment of opinions formerly maintained and expectations held out to their political supporters, he could not consent to the suspension and subsequent repeal of the Corn Laws.14 A meeting between Stanley and Peel in Whitehall Gardens on Sunday 14 December produced no change in the opinions of either man. Stanley then left London to spend a few days shooting and dining with the Marquess of Exeter at Burghley House. When Peel reassembled his cabinet in Downing Street on Saturday 20 December and declared himself determined to propose measures necessary to meet the calamity in Ireland, a dead silence followed.15 Finally, Stanley spoke up, stating that he believed the Corn Laws should be retained. Obligations to their party supporters required it. Stanley concluded: ‘They could not do this as gentlemen.’16 He would have to resign. Buccleuch held off from any immediate decision. Other cabinet members declared their support for Peel. With this endorsement and without Stanley in his cabinet, Peel prepared to move ahead. On Sunday 21 December, Peel approached Gladstone as Stanley’s replacement at the Colonial Office. The following afternoon Gladstone visited Peel and accepted his offer. Stanley wrote to Peel expressing his satisfaction that Gladstone was to succeed him and disavowing any ill feelings towards Buccleuch for finally deciding not to leave the cabinet.17 He confirmed that he resigned with great regret and without the least abatement of his sincere regard for the prime minister. At a meeting with Gladstone, during Monday 22 December, Stanley ‘declared himself much pleased’ with Gladstone’s appointment.18 The Times noted the striking contrast between the two men. ‘Of an ardent temperament and quick susceptibilities’, Stanley was ‘warm in debate, potent in invective, but occasionally somewhat illogical in argument’; while Gladstone was ’eminent for the coolness of his head … Deep in the sublime mysteries of metaphysics, his mind has too strong a tendency to speculate and to moralize, not seldom losing sight of practical realities in the dim clouds of abstraction.’19 On Christmas Eve an uneasy Stanley attended the Queen at Windsor to surrender his seals of office. ‘He was much agitated and had told [Peel] that he dreaded this interview very much.’20 In a polite, but short, conversation the Queen thanked Stanley for his services and begged him to do his best out of office to smooth the difficulties with which Peel would have to contend. To this request Stanley loyally acquiesced. He then travelled back to London alone, separated from his ministerial colleagues and cut adrift from long-standing political friendships. A gloomy sense


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of isolation descended on him that dark wintry evening as he journeyed back to St James’s Square. ‘The political current’, he confessed to Lord Ellenborough, ‘seems steadily setting in a direction which leaves me high and dry on the beach.’21 Stanley’s young daughter, in old age, vividly recollected her father’s deep dejection. It was the only occasion ‘when he was really grieved to resign’. Cut off from most of his old friends, ‘for some weeks his wonderfully cheerful spirit was quite broken’.22 He did not see his way clearly. Although opposed to Peel’s intentions regarding the Corn Laws, he had, during 1842–5, supported the prime minister against repeated backbench revolts. He accepted that a Protectionist ministry was impractical. He was committed to preserving, if at all possible, a united Conservative party. Yet, Peel’s disregard for Conservative backbench opinion forced him to leave the cabinet. Support for the Corn Laws had been the main inducement for their followers to keep Peel’s ministry in office. For ministers to throw over that commitment violated the essential trust binding parties together. Regard for his former ministerial colleagues and loyalty to his party forged a painful dilemma to which Stanley saw no easy resolution. On 27 December 1845 the Illustrated London News seized on his predicament, observing that, as Stanley ‘has no party to attach himself to in opposition, he will not be formidable as an enemy; and thus has a once great and prominent public character been politically extinguished’.23 The bitter Conservative schism over Corn Law repeal of 1846 imposed upon a reluctant Stanley the unwelcome role of party champion against a faithless leadership. As he sought to save the Conservatives from selfinflicted rupture, the painful contradictions of loyal dissent emphasized the ambiguity of his position. It grieved him to cut himself off from longstanding companions such as Graham. His spirits remained desperately low. Yet his opposition to Corn Law repeal was clear. All else was uncertain. With what sops to the agricultural interest would Peel accompany his repeal of the Corn Laws? Would Conservative backbench MPs split the party in protest? Would Whigs support a fixed duty or follow Russell’s sudden conversion to total repeal? While stranded ‘high and dry on the beach’, what subsequent political tides might relaunch him? Over the following months anguished soul-searching accompanied his consideration of what course to pursue, as backbench pressure inexorably mounted on him to head the Protectionist cause. Only the sustained courtship of Protectionist peers and MPs finally secured his agreement to lead their struggle. In March 1846 he cautiously accepted leadership of the Protectionists in the Lords. Not until the end of May did he publicly affirm his overall leadership

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of the Protectionists in parliament. Both before and after 25 May, when he openly opposed the second Lords reading of Peel’s Corn Laws Bill, he clung to the hope of restoring Conservative unity. Conservative fracture he saw as an unnecessary calamity, threatening the very basis of Britain’s landed constitution. Stanley’s estrangement from Peel drew on an amalgam of Whig constitutionalism and Protectionist political economy. Economic, social, and political anxieties were symptoms of his deeper concern with the nature of Britain’s constitutional settlement. For Stanley, Protectionism was not, as caricatured by Free Traders, the narrow special pleading of the agricultural interest. Rather, it was an inclusive national doctrine, embracing the whole community, in contrast to the sectional demands of Free Traders. Most apparent in Stanley’s objection to Peel’s policy was a recoiling from the high-handed manner of the premier’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws. Peel owed a loyalty to his party. His arrogance violated party obligation. For Stanley, the national interest resided in the careful deliberation of Westminster as expressed through party association. Peel, by contrast, evoked an executive definition of the national interest to which parliamentary sentiment was subservient. He rejected the ‘passions and sordid interests’ of Conservative backbenchers as ‘the rule of a minister’s conduct’.24 Peel believed followers should follow. Stanley saw leadership as a trust, resting upon the voluntary endorsement of loyal parliamentary support. Hence his eventual receptiveness to the sustained entreaties of Conservative backbenchers, during the spring of 1846, in the face of Peelite betrayal. Peel’s dangerous presumption, Stanley feared, threatened to subvert parliamentary sovereignty. That Peel justified his action by reference to extra-parliamentary pressure and with fulsome tributes to middleclass radicals, such as Cobden, rendered him the apostle of expediency, susceptible to the sectional blasts of demagogues. Having sheered himself from the firm anchor of parliamentary party support, Peel was drifting into the dangerous cross-currents of popular agitation. The narrow concerns of urban radicalism were endangering a historic constitutional balance conciliating the interdependent interests of society as a whole. Landed wealth, as the base of civil stability and national prosperity, was thereby exposed to the hostility of urban envy. Tariffs provided parliament with a fiscal mechanism for preserving an equilibrium between varied economic interests. By embracing Free Trade, Peel abandoned the duty of parliament to safeguard the social interests of all, in a short-sighted surrender to extraparliamentary pressure. So social dislocation might dissolve harmonious


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communal relations into antagonistic competition, a divisive conflict between aristocratic government and urban radicalism severing those bonds linking the manufacturing middle classes and respectable urban workers with the landed elite. For Stanley, therefore, Peel’s great error in 1846 was much more than the fallacy of an economic conversion. The stakes were far higher than the future of fiscal policy. Peel’s arrogant disregard for his party threatened a profound fracturing of society beyond Westminster. In the process, Stanley apprehended, the integrity of party association would be undermined, the authority of parliament weakened, and the calm consideration within Westminster of the nation’s true interests fatally disrupted. And all this, he remained convinced, was a course irrelevant to the avowed cause of Peel’s conversion, namely imminent widespread famine in Ireland. He recognized the destitution of Irish cottiers. But he believed it to be a baseless illusion to seize upon Corn Law repeal as the panacea for their suffering.

Ev’n now conflicting thoughts my soul divide. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 136)

In early January 1846 Stanley hoped Peel’s repeal of the corn duties would be mitigated by tax adjustments supporting agriculture. This would allow him to support Peel’s measure and avoid a Conservative rupture. As he informed Lord Ellenborough, Wellington’s whip in the Lords, a conciliatory repeal measure, which he could not honourably recommend as a minister, might be supported by him acting as an individual peer.25 Thinking Ellenborough likely to have ‘a stormy opening of the session’, Stanley wished to do what he could to ’pour oil on the waves’. In the constituencies the Central Agricultural Protection Society, led by Richmond and Buckingham, began to organize local resistance to Corn Law repeal and demand pledges from Conservative MPs. Protectionist organization in the constituencies had first stirred during 1844, in September John Wilson Patten sending Stanley an account of the rallying of Protectionist resistance to the Anti-Corn Law League in South Lancashire. In January 1846 the Central Protection Society established an election committee and began distributing circulars to local societies, urging them to demand that Conservative MPs reject any measure brought forward by Peel to repeal the Corn Laws. Both Gladstone at Newark and Lord Lincoln in South Nottinghamshire,

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seeking re-election upon taking up appointments in Peel’s cabinet, were defeated during the first weeks of 1846 by Protectionist candidates. Stanley, meanwhile, privately urged restraint. His own course would be guided by circumstances which he could not yet foresee.26 He wished to avoid any premature declaration of hostility. The landed interest should not be impelled by personal feelings. Rather, they must consider any proposal brought forward by Peel as a whole and as a system of government, not merely as an isolated measure in which the interests of different classes were pitted against each other. It might be better, he suggested, to accept a measure from the present administration of which he did not wholly approve, than run the risk of the evils arising out of a long interregnum in the formation of another ministry, or precipitate a long struggle culminating in an appeal to the excited passions of a general election. In his explanation of his resignation to the Lords, on 22 January, he emphasized that agricultural Protection was the only question on which he differed with his former colleagues. This, for the moment, held him clear from those diehard Tory MPs who had opposed Peel over reform of the Maynooth grant. But when, on 27 January 1846, Peel introduced his Corn Laws Bill to parliament it contained less relief for the agricultural interest than even Russell had earlier proposed. The duties on foreign corn were to be reduced, with a view to their expiry in three years’ time. Colonial corn was to be admitted at a nominal duty immediately. Accompanying clauses, including loans for agricultural improvement and the consolidation of the administration of local highways, were offered as compensation to farmers. But Malmesbury dismissed such relief for the landed interest as ‘a mere mockery’.27 A sense of renewed indignation swept the Conservative back benches. Reluctantly, Stanley acknowledged he must oppose Peel’s legislation. He had hoped for the survival of a united Conservative party ‘as a safeguard against the innovating spirit of the present day in matters even more essential than the maintenance of the Corn Laws’.28 But it now appeared, he conceded, that only a dissolution and a period of Whig government could allow divided Conservatives to rally in opposition. Leadership of the Protectionists in the Lords was a role pressed upon a hesitant Stanley during February and March 1846. In mid-February, Wellington indicated that the party leadership in the Lords awaited him, once Peel’s administration came to end. This, Wellington believed, was imminent. Stanley’s correspondence with Wellington revealed the contrary pressures of party loyalty and personal principle each felt, Wellington’s private dilemma being as acute as Stanley’s own uncertainty. In Wellington’s


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case, however, the continuance of the Queen’s government, obliging his support for Peel, overrode his personal distaste for the policy Peel was pursuing. Peel had ‘broken up a noble party’, Wellington lamented, and it was up to Stanley ‘to rally it again’.29 Stanley agreed that Peel had ‘completely dislocated and shattered the great Conservative party in both Houses’, but reassured Wellington that he would resist entreaties to put himself at the head of a movement to throw Peel out. In response, Wellington affirmed that he regarded Stanley, in due course, as the person best capable of restoring the unity of the party. Stanley remained, Wellington believed, his heir apparent. When the opportunity for reunion presented itself, Wellington advised Stanley, ‘you will see that the stage is entirely clear and open for you’.30 Wellington noted privately: ‘I am most anxious for Lord Stanley’s success. He will always find me ready to promote his views for [the] consolidation of the Conservative party.’31 Stanley explained his feelings to the Duke of Rutland on 7 March. The government and the House of Commons, he feared, had suffered hugely in public estimation because of their ‘sudden conversion’.32 Opinion in the Lords would be closely balanced between rejection and approval of Peel’s bill. For his own part, he would keep himself ‘as far aloof as I can from conversations on the subject; and from deference to the Duke [of Wellington], shall abstain from taking any more active part than that of recording my vote and stating my opinion, in opposition to the second reading of the bill. So much I cannot avoid doing, though I need not say I do it with great reluctance.’ Stanley told the Duke of Montrose that, ‘in the peculiar position in which I am placed, I have thought it my duty to abstain from taking any active step, or seeking to influence the decisions of other peers’.33 But Stanley found himself irresistibly drawn into heading a Lords revolt. On 9 March a meeting of Protectionist peers took place at 51 Portland Place, the London home of the Duke of Richmond. Stanley did not attend. But Lord Eglinton read out to those present a letter indicating Stanley’s intention to vote against repeal. In his letter Stanley suggested calling for a dissolution, on the second Lords reading of Peel’s bill, while emphasizing the contradiction between Commons support for repeal and the firm electoral commitment given by the majority of Conservative MPs in 1841 to preserve the Corn Laws. The peers immediately acclaimed Stanley, in his absence, as their leader. Malmesbury was proposed as Protectionist whip in the Lords and Eglinton appointed as his assistant. When informed of the decision Stanley was, Malmesbury noted, ‘very much pleased and flattered at the confidence reposed in him’.34 Nonetheless, it was a role to which he guardedly acquiesced, rather than a responsibility he actively

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sought. Despite his reluctance to being installed as Protectionist leader, he agreed to share his opinions privately with Malmesbury, Eglinton, and others, so that Lords opposition to Repeal might be marshalled more effectively. He visited Hatfield House, as a guest of Lord Salisbury, for the first time over the weekend of 14–15 March, this social gathering cementing those new political affiliations announced at Portland Place. He confessed to Rutland, on 19 March, that ‘the ‘‘country party’’ have, I think, astonished the country, and I must own they have astonished me, by the display of ability which they have shown. I did not give them credit for having half the talent in their ranks.’35 On 21 March, while presenting Protectionist petitions to the Lords, he took the opportunity to declare publicly his opposition to Peel’s measure. He hoped this statement would ‘fix many waverers’ who were thinking of voting with Peel, though disliking his policy.36 But over the Easter recess, consistent with his wish to stay aloof from intrigue, Stanley promptly left London for most of April. Race meetings at Newmarket provided a refuge away from the sedition swirling around Westminster. In the boisterous company of Lord George Bentinck, he was seen ‘joking and chaffing all the time’ and avoiding any serious talk on politics.37 After staying for a few days at Belvoir Castle with the Duke of Rutland, he then travelled on to Lancashire. During early 1846 Stanley denied any influence over Protectionists in the Commons, rebuffing Lord George Bentinck’s entreaties to assist in organizing a Protectionist opposition in the Lower House. To suppose that a Conservative government could be formed from materials other than those on Peel’s front bench, he responded, was a delusion. He repeatedly deprecated the idea of a formally organized Protectionist party. When an intermediary from Peel approached him in April for an interview, Stanley declined to meet. He would, he explained, give ‘a decided opposition’ to repeal in the Lords, but he ‘had no control whatever’ over affairs in the Commons.38 An impassioned Bentinck, meanwhile, urged him to oppose Repeal in the Lords with all his force. If the Lords gave way, Bentinck warned, they would become ‘a mere cipher in the State, a Chamber of Invalids fit only to be superannuated and abolished’.39 Stanley conceded that Bentinck ‘has proved himself equal to anything if he would give his mind to it’.40 The full significance of Stanley’s recent elevation to the Lords was now apparent. Lord Campbell, for one, believed that, if Stanley ‘had remained in the Commons’, the Protectionists ‘would have won the day’.41 It was known that prominent opposition MPs such as Palmerston preferred a fixed duty to total abolition of the Corn Laws. Yet, as it was, from outside the Commons, during the critical weeks of February


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and March 1846, Stanley advised against the formation of an organized Protectionist opposition. On 11 May, Stanley wrote to the Duke of Newcastle that, given the extreme dislocation of parties, it was impossible to foresee what might occur in the immediate future. It remained, therefore, unwise to begin the organization of any kind of party.42 But a subsequent large meeting of landowners, farmers, and MPs, on the eve of the Lords second reading of Peel’s Corn Laws Bill, at Willis’s Rooms on 21 May, presided over by Buckingham and Richmond, finally forced Stanley’s hand. Any flickering hope of resigning without opposing, in the name of party unity, was snuffed out. ‘The meeting swore eternal hostility to the Corn bill and … announced [Stanley] the leader of the opposition with great triumph.’43 Stanley at last yielded to the pressure of events. There were ‘high notes of preparation among the Protectionists’, The Times observed, in anticipation of a decisive struggle and an important victory.44 Uncertainty now gave way to a malign clarity. Corn Law repeal scorched itself across the soul of the Conservative party. As well as the result of Protectionist outrage in the constituencies, this was the achievement of Bentinck’s vehemence and Disraeli’s scathing sarcasm in the Commons. During January, Bentinck, aided by Richmond, rallied the anti-Peel Conservatives. The MPs Charles Newdegate, William Beresford, Philip Miles, George Bankes, and Stafford O’Brien assisted Bentinck’s efforts. They gathered around them over 220 Conservative backbenchers. By March, Bentinck, despite his inadequacies as a speaker, had emerged as the mercurial champion of the agricultural interest in the Commons. Ardent, wild-eyed fury compensated for his lack of oratorical talent. Retribution for Peel’s betrayal provided the focus for his outrage: ‘what I cannot bear’, he raged, ‘is being sold’.45 The younger son of the Duke of Portland, hitherto Bentinck had been best known as a reformer of the turf. During the late 1820s and 1830s he was a subordinate fellow spirit to Stanley. As a Canningite, Bentinck had supported Grey’s ministry, had joined the Derby Dilly in 1835, and had travelled with Stanley over to the Conservative party in 1836. But, while Stanley in early 1846 desired reconciliation, Bentinck breathed the fire of vengeance against the Peelite apostates. He sold his beloved racing stud, forsook the joys of the turf, and devoted himself to revenge upon the Peelite leadership. Aided by Disraeli’s razor-edged ridicule, they formed an association labelled by detractors as a partnership between ‘the Jockey and Jew’. They were, ‘politically, in a strange state’, Stanley observed to the former Conservative backbencher Charles Murray, now that

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… a new leader has made his appearance in the shape of George Bentinck; who after 18 years silence, has come out as a very able debater, and is the acknowledged leader of the Protectionist party. That party, and the Whig opposition, including all names, are of about equal strength; while the government is at the head of, numerically speaking, by far the weakest party of the three. This state of things will not, I suppose, be disturbed till the Corn Laws shall have been disposed of: but I should hardly think it can go on much longer; and I conclude J. Russell will have to try his hand again at forming a government. But the dislocation of parties is so complete, that he must be a bold man who will venture to predict the course of events for the next six months.46

On the Commons second reading of Peel’s Corn Laws Bill at the end of February, 231 Conservative MPs voted with Bentinck against the measure. Only 112 Conservatives supported Peel on the third Commons reading in May. Disraeli savagely attacked Peel as ‘a burglar of others’ intellect’, whose whole career had been ‘one great appropriation clause’. Never in English history, Disraeli concluded, had a statesman ‘committed petty larceny on so great a scale’.47 Disraeli, Greville noted, ‘hacked and mangled Peel with the most unsparing severity, and positively tortured his victim. It was a miserable and degrading spectacle.’48 Further humiliation followed when Peel’s own speech was greeted with brutal hoots and violent screaming from the Conservative back benches. ‘They hunt him like a fox,’ Greville observed, ‘and they are eager to run him down in the open, and they are full of exaltation at thinking that they have nearly accomplished this object.’ With 222 Conservatives following Bentinck and Disraeli in voting against the bill, Peel’s majority on the third reading was largely composed of Whigs, Liberals, and radicals in support of the isolated Conservative front bench. Attention now shifted to the Lords. Stanley spent the Easter recess at Lathom House, with Lady Stanley, as guests of Lord Skelmersdale. On 17 April they returned to Knowsley, where the family was joined by Sir Thomas Cartwright, British Ambassador to Sweden. The celebration of his father’s seventy-first birthday followed, Lord Derby enjoying better health than for some years past. Stanley, his wife, Edward, Emma, and Freddy then travelled together down to London on 24 April. It was, Stanley declared to his dinner guests at St James’s Square on 13 May, ‘a curious state of parties when a Liberal like Lord Bessborough [Lord Duncannon prior to 1844] whipped up the bishops to support the Duke of Wellington on a Free Trade question’.49 He knew that many Whig peers preferred a fixed duty to Peel’s proposal for total repeal. Lord Normanby,


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via Malmesbury, was making overtures.50 Brougham and Ellenborough were indicating their friendliness towards him. Russell’s elder brother, the Duke of Bedford, was promoting the idea of a Protectionist–Whig alliance on the basis of a fixed duty on foreign corn. On 23 May, Stanley dined at Cambridge House with the Palmerstons, who also preferred a fixed duty to total repeal. If the Lords delivered a majority for a fixed duty, Graham anticipated Stanley’s forming a government with Palmerston as his leader in the Commons.51 Stanley prepared to deliver the fatal blow against Peel’s bill on its second Lords reading. Stanley’s three-hour speech denouncing the Corn Laws Bill in the Lords on 25 May proved one of his most powerful performances. Lord Ashburton judged it ‘magnificent’. He had never heard ‘a sounder or better connected argument put together with so much eloquence’.52 Malmesbury believed Stanley’s ‘splendid speech’ had ‘an immense effect and was praised by all parties’.53 It elaborated the full depth of Stanley’s objections to Corn Law repeal. Tracing the policy of Protection back to Edward IV and appealing from the authority of the dead to that of the living, he evoked the names of those ‘most commercial liberal ministers’ Chatham, Pitt, Huskisson, Liverpool, Canning, and Grey as endorsement for his views.54 Peel’s bill would render England dependent upon foreign nations for food, landowners and rural labourers would be ruined, and the economic bonds with Australia and Canada weakened. All would be sacrificed, as Free Trade in corn undermined national self-sufficiency. By pitting agricultural and manufacturing interests against each other, mutual interdependence would be eroded by cosmopolitan political economy. No longer would the government arbitrate between differing social and economic interests for the general good, through the mechanism of tariffs. Instead, crude self-interested competition, a reciprocity of evil, would sever communal bonds, all in a cause irrelevant to Irish suffering. Corn Law repeal, Stanley insisted, would no more mitigate Irish distress than if parliament passed a law reducing the price of pineapples. The government was haunted by the baseless illusion that Free Trade in corn would halt the catastrophe unfolding in Ireland. The Lords, he concluded, must reject Peel’s bill. He was deliberately guarded in his personal criticism of Peel. His ferocity was directed against the cold and calculating doctrines of the AntiCorn Law League, a body, he declared, whose dangerous rhetoric stirred pernicious class hatred, rending the fabric of society. Cobden was the real enemy, Peel a complicit tool of narrow, philistine argument. Their innocent victim was the prosperity and stability of the nation and its empire.

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Stanley’s speech was an oratorical triumph. Lansdowne declared it ‘the finest speech heard in parliament’.55 But strategically it proved a total failure. Stanley hoped to gather around him those Conservative and numerous Whig peers opposed to total repeal. But two days earlier, on 23 May, Russell forestalled him. At a meeting of sixty peers at Lansdowne House, supported by Minto and Clarendon, Russell demanded from the Whig peerage unanimous support for Peel’s measure. Otherwise, Russell menacingly declared, he would resign as party leader. This blocked any prospect of compromise. Many peers attending the meeting, such as Melbourne and Fitzwilliam, privately favoured the imposition of a fixed duty. But the break-up of their party was too high a price to pay for such a preference. Palmerston, who also attended the gathering, summed it up: ‘All unanimous against the bill, and all unanimous not to oppose it.’56 Any prospect of a Protectionist–Whig coalition, on the basis of a fixed duty, was decisively dashed. As reports spread of the Lansdowne House meeting the Protectionists appeared mortified.57 Alongside Wellington’s conviction that his duty to the Queen outweighed his personal objection to repeal, this decided the outcome of the Lords vote. On 25 May, Stanley delivered a compelling speech to an audience beyond persuasion. On 28 May, Peel’s Corn Laws Bill passed its second Lords reading. In the division 211 peers voted for the bill and 164 voted against it. Stanley carried 126 of those peers present in the chamber into the opposition lobby, 138 peers attending the division voting with the government. It was the weight of proxy votes, 73 for the government and 38 for the opposition, that delivered a convincing victory for the ministry. Many of those Whigs forced into line by Russell, such as the Duke of Bedford, Earl Fitzwilliam, and Lord Melbourne, chose to record their vote in absentia. Only 18 non-Conservative peers joined Stanley in opposing the bill, while 91 Conservative peers, from a sense of duty to the Queen’s first minister, loyally followed Wellington in supporting Peel. The success of Corn Law repeal was assured. Stanley, a caustic Brougham wrote to Peel, had ‘received a lesson which he will not soon forget—how he lets cheers of friends intoxicate him and turn his head!’58 Stanley, Peel patronizingly replied, ‘swallows ‘‘a fact’’ too easily. There seem to me very few facts, at least ascertainable facts, in politics. [Stanley] is not wise in intermeddling with the doctrines of political economy.’59 Stanley was a reluctant rebel, voicing dissent in the cause of party loyalty. As late as 6 May he advised Newcastle that ‘the attempt to form any party except so far as relates to an united effort to reject or greatly modify the measures now contemplated would be premature’.60 But by June the


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Conservative schism was an open and bitter rift. In the Lords on 12 June he asserted that, since 25 May, no one in the chamber had refuted the substance of his speech, which had been defeated by party manoeuvre rather than reasoned rebuttal. This drew a furious Lord Grey to his feet, who denounced Stanley’s insolence. On 15 June, Buckingham’s amendment in the Lords to restore Protection after a three-year suspension was defeated by thirty-three votes, as was Winchilsea’s amendment for a fixed duty the following evening. Stanley voted for a fixed duty ‘as a pis aller, infinitely preferring the sliding scale, but thinking that protection in any shape is better than none’.61 On 29 May, Ellenborough floated the suggestion that Peel and Graham should resign. This would allow Stanley to head a united Conservative ministry. But Peel swiftly rejected the proposal.62 During late June, Brougham and Lyndhurst attempted to bring Protectionists and Peelites together, under the party label of ‘New Conservatives’, in opposition to the Whigs. But all attempts at reconciliation failed.63 Having left London for Knowsley, Stanley reluctantly informed Lyndhurst that reunion, however desirable, would not be achieved soon.64 The intensity of Conservative recrimination in the Commons rendered immediate rapprochement impossible. Families found themselves divided, Lord Lincoln was estranged from his father until the Duke of Newcastle was on his deathbed, and long-standing friendships were shattered, Peel and Croker ending their 30-year-old association. Bentinck and Disraeli now sought to drive Peel from office. The government’s Irish Coercion Bill provided the opportunity for retribution. On Thursday 25 June the Lords passed the third reading of the Corn Laws Bill without a division. In the early hours of 26 June, Bentinck and sixty-nine Protectionist MPs joined forces with the Whig and radical opposition, defeating the second Commons reading of Peel’s Irish Coercion Bill by 292 to 219 votes. This was, in effect, a vote of no confidence. On Monday 29 June, Peel informed the Commons of his resignation, accompanying his announcement with a warm tribute to Cobden as the real author of Corn Law repeal and declaring his wish to be remembered with gratitude in the homes of the poor. The following day Russell succeeded as prime minister at the head of a Whig administration. When Stanley encountered Gladstone in Hyde Park that afternoon, he pointedly enquired: ‘Well, I think our friend Peel went rather far last night about Cobden, did not he?’65 On 8 July, Stanley attended a dinner at the Trafalgar Tavern in Greenwich, chaired by the Duke of Richmond, at which Bentinck hailed him as the leader of the Protectionists in both Houses. The Conservative peers and MPs at the dinner listened to Stanley’s call for firmness and

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moderation. ‘If we are asked what are our principles’, he declared, ‘our reply is, our principles in 1846 are the same that our principles were in 1841.’ His speech, The Times noted, ‘was received at its close with such hearty and protracted cheers as are seldom witnessed even in the excitement of a public meeting’.66 It was an enthusiastic acknowledgement of the position events had forced upon him.

To cherish rancour and malignant hate. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 299)

As Stanley surveyed the warring factions of the Conservative party in July 1846 he retained a hope of eventual reunion. Peel’s crime, in his eyes, had been a wilful disregard for his parliamentary rank and file. A leader’s talents gave a party union and force, while their numbers invested him with political power. This was the mutual trust that Peel had violated. Yet, if Peel was a lost cause, the eventual restoration of party unity remained Stanley’s hope. The recuperative passage of time was necessary if the lacerating wounds of the Corn Law crisis were to heal. Reconciliation in opposition, following a dissolution of the present parliament in 1847, appeared the only cure. In the meantime, he wished to avoid aggravating Conservative animosities. Personal vindictiveness was to be avoided. In the Lords, he sat on the opposition front bench alongside the dukes of Buckingham and Richmond, and lords Brougham, Lyndhurst, and Ellenborough as a signal of his desire to restore mutual accord. Rancour over Corn Law repeal, he believed, should be allowed to dissipate, as the regrettable consequence of a quarrel now passed. This was the strategy he pressed on a belligerent Bentinck during July 1846: ‘until a general election, your policy should be, not to invite, but not to repel [Peelite] support; to treat them coolly if you will, but not to provoke them by injudicious epithets and reflections on the past’.67 After looking over the list of the 112 Conservative MPs who had supported Repeal, Stanley concluded that they represented constituencies which would not quarrel with their late vote. Interfering in their constituencies would merely create gratuitous offence. ‘My opinion, therefore, is that separation must continue until a new election shall have decided whether the Corn Laws are to be finally repealed.’ But calm restraint proved beyond the capacity of outraged Protectionist MPs. A fervent desire for revenge kept their enmity fresh.


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The difficulty of drawing Protectionists and Peelites together in the Commons was affirmed over the Whigs’ Sugar Bill during July. The measure removed the tariff distinction between free-grown and slavegrown sugar. This further instalment of Free Trade reform abandoned the long-defended Conservative preference for colonial over foreign produce. The Whig bill was, nonetheless, supported by forty-seven Peelite MPs, the remaining Peelite MPs abstaining. Peel pointedly defended his vote on the grounds that it was his first duty to prevent the Protectionists from assuming office. As resentful Protectionist MPs smouldered in opposition, Stanley pleaded that the swift passage of the bill through the Commons made it impossible for Protectionist peers to reject it in the Lords. Initially, he had intended to oppose the bill in the Lords, but the size of the government’s Commons majority caused him to change his mind. The present duties expired on 5 August 1846 and the rejection of the measure would involve an enormous loss of revenue which there was no time to make good. If Protectionist MPs failed to defeat the bill, he advised Bentinck, they could not expect the Lords to come to their rescue. ‘In that case the Free Trade policy will for a time triumph in sugar as it has in corn.’68 On 1 August the hot sultry summer weather broke with the most violent hailstorm in living memory. Returning to London, on 6 August Stanley called a meeting of Protectionist peers at St James’s Square. But only twenty-four peers attended. More than forty others sent their apologies for their absence in the country. ‘Love of country is always strong in August,’ The Times archly commented, which, when combined with love of grouse, was irresistible. ‘Their Lordships have transferred their affections from the blacks abroad to the Moors at home.’69 As it proved impossible to get ‘a respectable muster’, it was agreed not to risk a Lords division against the Sugar Bill.70 Stanley comforted Lord Redesdale that ‘the best plan is to allow the Free Trade game to be played out; it is the most likely mode of sickening the country of it’.71 He then immediately left London for Goodwood where, following the intense exertion of the session, he was laid up with gout. His host was extraordinarily violent in his language against Peel, while Bentinck, the Duke of Beaufort, Lord Stradbroke, and Lord Eglinton gathered in Stanley’s bedroom to castigate the apostate Conservative leader. Bentinck’s indignation was characteristically bitter, virulent sentiments which he forcefully shared with the bedridden Stanley. By mid-August, Stanley was recovered and engaged in bagging grouse at the Duke of Rutland’s shooting box in Derbyshire, Longshawe Lodge, where, Lord John Manners noted, he was, once again, ‘full of fun and chaff’.72

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The challenge Stanley faced in restraining outraged Protectionists, while hoping for eventual reunion with the Peelites, was formidable. Bitter resentment flowed unabated. When Lord John Manners (a younger son of the Duke of Rutland) visited Hawarden in early August, Gladstone was deeply shocked to discover that a violent antipathy to Peel was ‘the ruling impulse’ of Manners’s political views.73 The impassioned Bentinck instigated a dispute with Lyndhurst. In response to Lyndhurst’s overtures as to a Conservative reunion, Bentinck accused Lyndhurst of being involved in ‘a nefarious job’ regarding the Justiceship of Bombay. Bentinck apocalyptically declared to Stanley his wish ‘to make a clean sweep of [the Peelites] from the face of the Earth’.74 Relations between Lyndhurst and Bentinck were never repaired. Bentinck also drew Ripon into his charges of jobbing and, by implication, Gladstone. Stanley’s private apology to Ripon could not smooth the ruffled feathers. In October, Gladstone asked Stanley to judge on the truth of Bentinck’s accusation, which was full of ‘black bile and bitter wrath’.75 A strained triangular correspondence followed. Stanley told Bentinck his language was insulting. Bentinck declared Gladstone was deliberately lying. Stanley’s arbitration then collapsed when Bentinck could not produce a copy of the Colonial Office memorandum upon which he based his accusations.76 For Stanley this unpleasant episode was all the more regrettable as Gladstone, like Lyndhurst, was one of the leading Peelites most favourably inclined to reunion. Stanley’s difficulties were increased by the jarring anti-Catholic sentiment voiced by many militant Protectionists. As shown by the Maynooth grant vote of 1845, an intense anti-Catholicism suffused sections of the Conservative back benches. Newdegate, a Protectionist whip in the Commons, was vehemently anti-Catholic, being an active member of the National Club, founded in 1845 to organize parliamentary Protestantism. For Newdegate, like the Irishman Beresford, a close-textured religiosity, constant suspicion, Anglican fervency, and an oppressive sense of being men contra mundum combined with fervent Protectionism. Both Newdegate and Beresford fiercely opposed Peel’s 1845 Maynooth legislation, Beresford’s fervent anti-Catholicism informing his actions as Protectionist chief whip in the Commons after March 1846. Beresford’s gouty temperament and inflammatory language, contemporaries suggested, were fuelled by his hot Irish blood. In contrast to this visceral anti-Catholicism, Stanley’s defence of the Established Church focused on the threat of papal and ultramontane challenges to the legal status of the Anglican Church, rather than the doctrinal errors of the Catholic laity. Anti-Catholic bigotry could only inflame sectarian conflict. He consistently cooled, whenever possible,


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the extreme anti-Catholic ardour of his supporters. Defence of the Established Church need not entail the denial of Catholic civil liberties. During August 1846 he attempted to dampen down the anti-popery cry inflamed by articles in the Morning Herald. These attacked any legal provision for the Catholic clergy in Ireland. To stir up such sentiment in the hope of placating Dissenters, he coolly observed, was ‘the grand error committed by all parties’.77 Conservatives considered favours shown to Catholics an injury to Protestantism, while the Whigs thought nothing could be done for the former without a measure of robbery on the latter. During August he chided Samuel Phillips, leader writer of the Morning Herald, for exciting the Protestant feeling of the country. Stanley had supported a proposition in 1825 for paying Catholic clergy and retained that opinion. ‘I neither entertain myself, nor would aid in keeping up in others, objections to it on religious grounds.’78 As he explained to Brougham, ‘it would be a great improvement if Christians of all denominations were more intent upon combating their common enemy, infidelity, with its accompaniments of vice and ignorance, [rather] than dwelling with bitterness on the points on which they are at variance with one another’.79 Seeking to restore calm Stanley disapproved of Bentinck and Disraeli’s tour of agricultural constituencies during the rain-sodden autumn of 1846 whipping up the primal virulence of Protectionist meetings. ‘We want a prorogation, pour calmer les esprits,’ he wrote to Croker, ‘and to leave the government at leisure to take such steps as may array a Conservative opposition against them.’80 On 24 September he gave a speech to the Liverpool Agricultural Society, at Lucas’s Repository in Great Charlotte Street, which was deliberately moderate in tone. Over 300 guests sat down to the dinner and Stanley’s address was received with loud and enthusiastic cheering. He hoped that the will of Providence, which had visited the devastating potato blight upon all parts of the United Kingdom, would, by an act of that same Providence, alleviate that suffering against which no human foresight could guard. From their misfortune it was to be wished that, in the future, small farmers would trust less exclusively to the cultivation of potatoes. Agricultural improvements, better drainage, better tillage, better breeds of cattle, were now more necessary than ever, while it was in the interest of all classes of the community to maintain a cordial understanding between landlords and tenant farmers. He refrained from commenting on recent Free Trade legislation, as its effect could not yet be gauged. The next election, he pronounced, must settle the issue. Yet privately he acknowledged that there were ‘no leaders in the House of Commons with enough of sangfroid to act upon this cautious and, I

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must admit, difficult line of policy’.81 Through the pages of the Quarterly Review, with the assistance of Croker, he ensured a similar judicious line was maintained. Croker, the man whom Stanley had humiliated during Commons Reform debate in December 1831, became, in 1846, the publicist of Stanley’s views. Highlighting the constitutional threat posed by Peel’s conversion to Free Trade, beginning with ‘The Close of Sir Robert Peel’s Administration’ in September 1846, political articles in the Quarterly Review were submitted for Stanley’s prior approval. These criticized Peel for surrendering to the Whig doctrine of concession and abandoning a Conservative fiscal politics which served as a means of preserving the equilibrium between social interests. Constitutional balance had been relinquished to extra-parliamentary pressure and the representative function of the tariff surrendered to the tyranny of numbers. Stanley was pleased that Croker avoided any mention of the painful controversy between Bentinck, Lyndhurst, Gladstone, and Ripon.82 But the deliberately sober tone of the Quarterly Review was offset by the acerbic spleen of the Tory national dailies, the Standard, the Morning Herald, and the Morning Post, which possessed links with Beresford and Newdegate. In December 1846 Stanley tried to stop Beresford and Bentinck using the Tory press to champion John Bright against the Peelite Lord Lincoln in the forthcoming Manchester by-election. But, when Stanley asked Beresford to halt the Tory press campaign on behalf of Bright, who was ‘a blackguard and a democrat’, Beresford immediately replied that Lincoln was far more dangerous since he would ‘in the end go nearly if not quite so far as the other, and being a gentleman covers the iniquity better’.83 In the autumn of 1846 Bentinck’s venom found a new cause in the issue of the malt tax. During the winter he began a campaign for repeal of the malt tax, appealing to the agricultural and brewery interests with the cry ‘The Quart Pot for Two Pence’. Repealing the malt tax would be a relief to the agricultural interest, compensating for the influx of foreign corn. But Stanley reprimanded him for raising this militant cry and in January 1847 the Protection Society refused to take up the issue. This was a victory for Stanley. But it came at a significant cost. ‘We have’, he observed to Ashburton, ‘succeeded in putting a stop to the agitation on the subject of the malt tax, but I am sorry to say not without much dissatisfaction on the part of G. Bentinck, who is bent on violent measures and I fear is a good deal annoyed at not carrying the party with him.’84 Bentinck did not understand, Ashburton concluded, that ‘the business of a party leader is not to find plans and measures, but to find fault’.85


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Fierce anger flared up at a parliamentary dinner hosted by Stanley on Saturday 23 January 1847 at the Carlton Club. In response to Stanley’s appeal to avoid strong language and agricultural agitation, Bentinck unleashed a torrent of personal invective. In a letter to Bentinck the following day Stanley reiterated his views: ‘We must make a pont d’or for the penitent (and we must not ask them to pass over it in a white sheet) or we must close the drawbridge; and if we take the latter course, we shall only hem in an unwilling garrison and keep out useful recruits.’86 All present at the dinner, he believed, shared in the pained astonishment at the effect his words had had on Bentinck. But in response Bentinck accused Stanley of personal insult, disrespect, timidity, indecision, irresolution, and of dictatorial principles in his leadership of the party. On Sunday 24 January, Stanley and Richmond together visited Bentinck. The Duke began [Stanley recalled], ‘and I took it up, with an assurance that no offence had been intended. [Bentinck] said nothing. I repeated in so many words my assurance that the language used by me was not meant to refer to him. He answered that he did not believe me. I got up to go away, and said to him ‘Bentinck you and I have been old friends: if you mean what you have just stated, and repeat it deliberately, I will not quarrel with you, but we can never speak again.’ He admitted that he had been wrong, apologised, and asked me to sit down and talk over the matter calmly.87

A fragile truce was secured. But cordial relations were never fully restored. Five days later Bentinck wrote an anguished letter to Stanley repeating his pleas that Stanley treat him with respect and consideration. During 1846, Bentinck observed, he had defended Stanley when many Protectionists had criticized their leader for timidity; ‘you hung back and sheathed your sword when the general opinion was that you should have thrown away the scabbard’. He had scouted the idea that Stanley was wanting in bravery, resolution, or fidelity. But in demanding obedience to his views, Stanley could not carry an opposition ‘upon such dictatorial principles’.88 As Bentinck acknowledged, their quarrel had caused ‘to break off the bloom of a friendship which I had hoped our latest days could never have seen withered or fading’. Thereafter, Bentinck’s standing in the party began, very quickly, to decline. But his incendiary actions during the recess, calling for the wild justice of revenge, had already perpetuated the breach between Protectionists and Peelites, placing a foot firmly against the door of reconciliation. Stanley’s strategy of restrained passivity, while awaiting a dissolution, became increasingly difficult to sustain. Unsurprisingly, he

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confessed to Brougham that he sensed a deterioration in public morality and the prestige of public men.89 Bentinck’s disruptive energies played themselves out against the tragic backdrop of increasing famine in Ireland, a crisis which Stanley wished to avoid being made a party issue. The partial potato failure of 1845 was followed by a complete failure of the anxiously awaited harvest during the summer of 1846. By October over 100,000 people were employed on public works, a figure that would rise to nearly three-quarters of a million by March 1847. Russell’s Irish Lord Lieutenant, the ailing Lord Bessborough, whose illness was aggravated by his increasing fondness for drink, was overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster. Widespread Irish starvation brought reports of extensive deaths in December 1846, which increased during the following months. Mayo, Sligo, Roscommon, and Galway were the counties hardest hit by famine, with Tipperary, Cork, and Kerry also suffering. Yet the government must be careful, Stanley warned, to avoid pressing too heavily on proprietors. They should avoid doing more harm than good by excessive interference and liberality from the public purse.90 By September 1846 he saw the potato failure as universal to the three kingdoms, not just Ireland, and was sympathetic to a general modest abatement of 25 per cent in the rents of tillage farmers. But, as always, he saw the dark spectre of civil disorder lurking behind Irish grievances. He feared combinations forming in Ireland refusing to pay rents, involving those able to afford them. He also saw at least the usual amount of Irish exaggeration in the reports of some genuine distress and the usual determination on the part of the Irish to make no effort for themselves, except that which was required to extort aid by violence.91 In November he informed his Ballykisteen estate manager, Thomas Bolton, of his concern at the non-payment of rents. He wished to avoid harshness, but could not submit to systematic dictation.92 To his smaller tenants he offered a 25 per cent cut in rent for the next six months. At the same time, he made clear his dislike of the attacks being made in the Peelite and radical press against Irish landlords. In anonymous leaders in the Morning Chronicle John Stuart Mill was forcefully arguing for the reclamation of waste land in Ireland and the establishment of a peasant proprietary safeguarded by fixity of tenure. Irish landlords were, Mill pronounced, ‘the spoilt children of society’.93 Stanley adamantly rejected such pleas for radical redistribution. Landowners, he insisted, were ‘a body of men who, of late, have been more sinned against than sinning, without whose cooperation little good can be affected, and much mischief must ensue’.94 He noted that the famine had resulted in a raising of prices which was a godsend for the Free Traders,


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lulling the apprehensions of ‘the obtuse agriculturalists’.95 It would be best, he felt, if Ireland could be removed from the battlefield of politics and regarded as a non-party issue. Against Bentinck’s impetuosity and increasing distress in Ireland, Stanley consistently preached a gospel of passivity. To Newdegate he quoted Tierney’s motto, ‘Oppose everything and propose nothing’.96 The best policy for an opposition was to pursue a negative course; only embarrassment would be caused by the Protectionists’ being anxious to suggest, for the temporary purposes of getting up a rallying cry, specific measures and offering pledges on subjects which, in due course, they would be called upon to fulfil. The Protectionists had to be vigilant observers, not hostile assailants: I do not think the present would be a good opportunity for raising Agricultural Protection questions. My own opinion of the effects of last year’s policy remains quite unshaken, but present high prices have blinded the farmers to their danger, and the disappointment of the manufacturing operatives has not yet reached the point at which it will, I think certainly, produce a reaction on the subject of Free Trade.

Their best course was to remain quiet. ‘Proposing measures is always, to a certain extent, showing your hand, which assists your adversary in playing his cards.’ While holding out ‘the olive branch’ they must ‘refuse to bow down to the newly-set-up idol of Free Trade’, leaving unrepentant Peelites, who had broken their solemn pledges, to the vengeance of their constituencies.97 It remained to be seen, however, what course Peel might pursue. Stanley anticipated Peel’s attending parliament regularly, taking a leading part on most questions, and acting, with a small body of adherents, as an arbiter between the government and the Protectionists. This would be a position, he feared, ‘of the greatest embarrassment to all parties’, perpetuating dissensions, rendering Conservative reconstruction impossible, and smoothing the way for Russell to introduce radical measures.98 Peel would be found voting more often with the government than against them. I hope I do him injustice; but I think I saw unmistakable symptoms of his determination to be at the head of a party, and that his release of his former friends from their allegiance to him was meant to leave himself quite free to form any connection, independent of them, which might enable him again to take a prominent part, and guide the progress of social changes which he thinks cannot be averted.

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All this would ‘smooth the way for those measures of gradual downward progress which Lord John Russell must introduce’. By mid-January 1847 Stanley understood Peel to be determined never again to take office, but intending to continue to attend the Commons regularly, though not as a leader of a party. ‘If this is really his scheme it is nearly visionary, for the line he marks out is an impossible one, and its only effect must be to continue our divisions and dissensions.’99 Stanley’s advice to Bentinck and Beresford was to sit alongside Peel at the opening of parliament and not to exclude him from the opposition front bench. Just before Christmas 1846 Stanley sent a circular to all Protectionist peers in anticipation of the approaching session.100 As advised by Redesdale, he also invited a number of Protectionist Whig peers to receive his circular, lords Carrington, Beaumont, De Freyne, Gainsborough, Hastings, Ilchester, Sherborne, and Shrewsbury being contacted. The Morning Post welcomed Stanley’s circular as affirming his position as leader of the Protectionists and as an act ‘gratifying all who still value honour, integrity and talent in political men’. It contrasted ’Stanley’s forthright behaviour’ with the dubious activities of John Young, Edward Cardwell and Francis Bonham who, despite Peel’s protests that he did not wish to be a party leader, were attempting to organize Peelite MPs.101 Bonham’s exertions were stimulated by his anxiety that the Peelites, if ‘left altogether without a leader’, would ‘attach themselves to Stanley, who was always popular with them’.102 Yet the marshalling of Protectionist MPs during January proved difficult. Bentinck declined to send a circular in his own name. He claimed to have few real adherents in the Commons, his support lying among the squires and farmers in the country. ‘I do not think it desirable and it is repugnant to my own feelings to solicit unwilling troops to follow me,’ he informed Stanley on 2 January.103 Stanley urged Beresford to send a circular to all Protectionist MPs. Unless this was done, he warned, those Conservatives unable to join the Whigs would join Peel, who with ‘his puppets will again be triumphant’.104 Beresford reluctantly responded to the call. All this left Stanley profoundly anxious. He had no effective leadership in the Commons, many Protectionists distrusting Bentinck. For all his admirable qualities Bentinck was unpredictable and disposed to emphasize past differences, rather than heal them.105 Peel, meanwhile, seemed to be staying aloof from his former rank and file, while preparing to ease Russell’s difficulties. Stanley’s hope remained that time and the hustings would improve the party’s prospects. On 18 January he hosted a large gathering of Protectionist peers at St James’s Square. For the first time in twenty-four years, it was noted, Wellington did not give a party


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dinner on the eve of the opening of parliament. But, if in the Lords party rancour seemed slowly to be abating, in the Commons bitter enmities remained unchecked. Stanley’s mild response to the Queen’s Speech, on 19 January 1847, signalled his wish to avoid conflict. There was nothing in the Address, he observed, requiring an amendment.106 He regretted that there was no statement on the financial state of the country and pointed to the falling premium on exchequer bills as a warning of future problems. But the bulk of his speech was devoted to foreign affairs, the Spanish marriage question, and the occupation of Kraków. Palmerston’s meddling diplomacy, the theme he had elaborated in 1843 and 1844, offered ground on which to establish Conservative agreement. In November 1846 Austria had extinguished the small Republic of Kraków, a centre of Polish nationalism, an act in which the veteran Prince Metternich had been encouraged by Prussia and Russia. This was the first alteration in the Treaty of Vienna not formally approved by the Quadruple Alliance of 1815. Palmerston’s diplomatic protests had little impact and appeared to confirm Britain’s waning influence in continental Europe. Stanley did not criticize the diplomatic aims of the government, but regretted the recrimination that had replaced cordial understanding between Britain and France since the change of government. Regarding Austria’s annexation of Kraków, a treaty had been violated without communication with Britain, a discourtesy which was the direct result of Britain’s loss of good relations with France. Palmerston’s long-standing suspicion of France was, once again, jeopardizing Britain’s international standing. These observations, at once flattering to Aberdeen and critical of Palmerston, paved the way for a cordial private conversation with Wellington on 2 February.107 Two months earlier Stanley had corresponded with Wellington on relations with France and the Three Powers as affected by the Spanish marriage question. As Peel’s Foreign Secretary, Aberdeen had fostered entente with France. But the simultaneous marriages of Queen Isabella of Spain to the Duke of Cadiz, and her sister the Infanta to the Duke of Montpensier (King Louis-Philippe of France’s youngest son), on 10 October 1846 brought Anglo-French relations to crisis. In July, Palmerston, as Foreign Secretary, had indicated British objections to Montpensier as a marriage partner. The union of a French prince with the Spanish royal family he saw as inimical to British interests. But this only provoked a closer alignment of Madrid with Paris and produced a diplomatic triumph for Louis-Philippe. This, Stanley insisted, should be a major issue in the coming session.108 Britain had been treated with a marked want of consideration. The Foreign

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Secretary, he believed, was too influenced by his old jealousy of France and Guizot and, having taken the high ground, had failed to hold it. The possibility was very remote of the diplomatic crisis bringing into question the provisions of the Treaty of Utrecht, but Palmerston’s distrust of France was likely to be superseded by his still greater jealousy of Russia. Stanley’s reply to the Address on 19 January concluded with comments on the state of Ireland. Declaring a disposition to regard the ministry’s response to the famine with indulgence, he portrayed the issue as too difficult and too important to be treated as a party question. He would not oppose the temporary suspension of the prohibition against the use of sugar and molasses in breweries and distilleries. But the benefit from this measure, he believed, would be small and the price of sugar would be pushed up. Though not the eulogist of Irish landlords, he thought it might be said of them delicta majorum immeriti luunt. He described the difficulties they faced from the impossibility of ousting their tenants, however much those tenants refused to improve their holdings. Still, he recognized the principle that the pauperism of Ireland must be provided for out of the property of Ireland. As an Irish property owner himself, he hoped that the landowners of Ireland would be consulted and that local sources of assistance would be called upon. The government’s proposal to reclaim waste land in Ireland for sale or lease to the peasantry he resisted. The compulsory acquisition, reclamation, and sale of land, he declared, fell outside the legitimate purview of government. Stanley continued his firm defence of Irish landowners during the Lords debate of the Irish Poor Law Extension Bill on 15 February.109 The measure broadened the provision of indoor and outdoor relief, allowing public works projects to be phased out. Support for the destitute would consequently be thrown on to Irish ratepayers and landowners forced to accept their responsibilities and duties. But too indiscriminate a condemnation, he declared, had been pronounced upon Irish proprietors. He would not oppose government reforms, but he warned it was dangerous to introduce legislation opposed to Irish landowners which might counter the right of absolute relief. From the other side of the House, Lansdowne let out a cry of ‘No!’ This spurred Stanley into a detailed diagnosis of Ireland’s economic ills. There existed no large class of substantial farmers, the land being very much divided between the highest and lowest orders of society. Therefore, the burden of the Poor Law fell upon those who were little above labourers themselves. Additional ex officio guardians were needed. Moreover, it was important that no person occupying or possessing land should receive relief, otherwise Ireland would be ruined by the merging of


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pauper and farmer. The serious obstacle to the cultivation of land lay in the fact that nearly half of Ireland’s occupiers of land farmed less than 7 acres. Poor Law guardians should require applicants for relief to choose between either receiving aid, on condition of surrendering the land they occupied, or not receiving relief. Thus a consolidation of land would occur and uneconomic smallholdings reduced. Land redistribution was a function of the market, not the responsibility of government. To the fatally ill Bessborough in Dublin Castle, Stanley declared the Irish Poor Law ‘likely wholly to demoralise its recipients and its dispensers, unless the latter are restrained in its application by the powerful check of self-interest’.110 During the following weeks he corresponded privately with Lansdowne helping to modify the Irish Poor Law Extension measure into a form more acceptable to both sides of the House. These discussions, he was pleased to note, were carried on with ‘an absence of all party feeling’ and ‘in a friendly spirit’.111 A National Day of Fasting throughout the United Kingdom, called by Queen Victoria on 24 March 1847, marked national recognition of the Providential chastisement brought on by the famine. God’s retribution required the humble acknowledgement of divine judgement and called, in most Englishmen’s minds, on the Christian duty of private charity as atonement. Stanley ordered that potatoes no longer be served with meat at St James’s Square. They were replaced with macaroni or rice, as a private gesture of empathy for Irish suffering. Like Stanley, most regarded the Irish calamity as a moral challenge to individual charity, rather than a political indictment of government failure. In response to characterizations of the starving as the helpless victims of a regressive Irish economy, private charity from Britain was channelled across to Ireland. Lady Stanley supported a large charitable bazaar, held in Willis’s Rooms in St James’s Street, to raise alms. Like Stanley, however, most Englishmen also perceived the harsh realities of political economy working an inexorable adjustment in Irish agriculture through the famine, bringing the iron laws of supply and demand into equilibrium. The famine stood as a supplication on private benevolence and as proof of the power of irresistible economic forces, rather than a rebuke of government neglect. By cooperation with the ministry over their Irish Poor Law legislation he hoped to maintain a non-partisan response to the crisis. By defending Irish property owners he hoped to safeguard landlords from becoming the scapegoats for a natural, if Providential, calamity. Stanley’s delicate strategic line of restraint, while keeping his followers up to the mark, was difficult to sustain. Having curbed criticism of

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government policy, by steering the Irish issue into non-party waters, he briefly took up the sugar duties question as a means of rallying his troops. Russell’s cabinet had rejected Bentinck’s call for an increase of duties on foreign sugar in order to protect the interests of West Indian planters. But the government did propose a decrease of duty on colonial sugar, with a view to complete equalization by 1854. Upon the ministry introducing their Sugar Duties Bill, Stanley made known his opposition to the measure. In response, the cabinet sent the Chairman of the Excise to discuss the issue with him. Following this meeting Clarendon enquired if Stanley still intended to bring on a hostile motion. ‘Oh, yes,’ Stanley replied, ‘I mean to give you a gallop. It has been a long time since you had one, and it will do you good. Besides, I have brought my people up, and I must give them something to do now they are come.’112 Behind such levity lay a serious political purpose. A party must feel itself occasionally to be doing something, even if restraint was the best strategic course to pursue. Yet while he hoped to damage the government, he had no wish to overthrow it. He was, therefore, seriously alarmed during February 1847 by the report that Bentinck had indicated to the Duke of Bedford that, in the event of Russell’s government retiring, the Protectionists would be willing to form a ministry.113 The Protectionists, he believed, were far from ready to form a government. They lacked an effective Commons leadership and were thus prey to Bentinck’s volatile moods and Ultra Tory prejudices. In order to exercise a control over Protectionist MPs, keeping up their spirits while restraining their actions, Stanley began meeting leading MPs every Saturday morning at St James’s Square to discuss the business of the coming week. In the absence of a responsible Commons leadership, he took on the task of guiding the party himself, a measure of his lack of faith in Bentinck, Beresford, and Newdegate’s judgement. Having asserted his leadership, again on strategic rather than substantive grounds, Stanley opposed any payment to Catholic priests, despite their becoming destitute because of the famine and without the support of glebe, tithe, or rent change. ‘I do not feel the same scruples on the score of principle, which I do not think are involved, as are felt by many of our friends,’ he confessed to Croker.114 But such an act would enlist the unanimous hostility of the Protestant clergy in England and Scotland and the great mass of English Protestant Dissenters. The danger of raising religious animosity was all the greater because of the continuing debate, during April, on the Irish Poor Law. The payment of Catholic clergy, he concluded, was ‘a subject not to be touched’.115 Protestant fervour


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was already running high and threatened to prove as embarrassing to Conservatives as to the government. On 13 April 1847 peers met in the splendour of Sir Charles Barry’s newly completed House of Lords, the grandeur of Barry’s chamber and August Pugin’s magnificent designs forming the architectural climax of the new Palace of Westminster. Two weeks later, on 29 April, Stanley rejected Lansdowne’s description of the ministry’s Irish Poor Law Extension legislation as a temporary measure.116 It made relief of destitution, he retorted, no longer discretionary, but mandatory. Only by all classes uniting would lavish expenditure be avoided. He also repudiated, once again, accusations made against Irish landlords. It was the tendency to smallholdings that had to be checked, he claimed. Still, he did not oppose outright the Poor Law measure, contenting himself with amendments at the committee stage during May. Amendments introduced by Ellenborough, Monteagle, and the Earl of Desart were all either rejected or withdrawn. Stanley did, however, push through an amendment that, once the rate for six months exceeded 1s. 3d. in the pound, the excess would be charged to the Union at large. The rest of the measure was safeguarded by his wish to prevent the famine in Ireland from becoming a party question, as further private communications with Lansdowne during May helped to avoid party clashes in the Lords.117 By June 1847 Stanley saw a perplexing muddle of parties, persons, and principles. Russell seemed to be pursuing as conservative a policy as any that could be expected from Peel. The prime minister was courting Anglicans and braving the hostility of Dissenters, while Peel, ‘the apostle of expediency’, was maintaining a public aloofness from party connection that dangerously increased confusion. ‘I find myself’, Stanley observed to Croker, ‘in the position of watching, rather than opposing, a government which I cannot trust, yet aware that on some points on which they are most likely to be attacked by those with whom I am acting, as for example on the question of education, I am unable to go to the lengths of my supporters.’118 Added to this, the effects of Free Trade were being obscured by the deficiencies of the previous year’s harvest. The root crop failure and the high labouring wages accompanying the railway boom had driven corn prices up to 114s. per quarter. Thus, for the immediate future, he acknowledged, ‘it is vain to shut our eyes to the fact that Protection, as a cry, is dead’. These difficulties were compounded by the ineffective Protectionist leadership in the Commons. Bentinck’s influence was rapidly waning, while the absence of alternative talent and the spite felt for the Peelites

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wonderfully eased the government’s tribulations. During April, Stanley’s former Under-Secretary at the Colonial Office, George Hope, warned him ‘that bodies of men … can effect nothing unless organised and directed … But organised and directed by George Bentinck the bulk of the Conservative party will not suffer themselves to be.’119 This aggravated a situation, Stanley concluded, in which no one subject seemed to occupy the public mind or serve to clarify political positions, a malaise pathetically evident in his attempt to bring forward a motion, on 15 June, condemning the government for their intervention in Portugal. It was a move finely calculated to keep up party spirits, while not threatening to dislodge the ministry. He spent considerable time preparing the motion, ensuring Wellington was onside, and tailoring it to the preferences of Peelite peers, such as Ellenborough, and others favourably inclined, such as Brougham. Yet, in the event, while Stanley was away from the House at dinner, with Brougham, Ashburton, and Ellenborough choosing not to speak, the debate abruptly closed much earlier than expected. As a consequence his motion was beaten by twenty votes. Stanley returned to the Lords just as the House was breaking up and was enraged. In an angry letter the next day he complained fiercely to Ellenborough of being ‘left in the lurch’.120 The episode was fatal, he declared, to any further effort at a division during the session. Failure to achieve concerted action even among Conservative peers in the Lords, let alone among those MPs at daggers drawn in the Commons, appeared a dispiriting affirmation of the ineffectual state into which the party had descended. During June, away from the exasperations of Westminster, Lord and Lady Stanley attended one of the most glittering occasions of the London ‘season’, a gala concert at Apsley House, hosted by the Duke of Wellington, at which the Queen, Prince Albert, the Grand Duke Constantine of Russia, the Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar, the diplomatic corps, and most of the House of Lords were in attendance. After journeying north on 14 July, Stanley visited the Liverpool races to watch his horse Bowstring win the Bickerstaffe Stakes. Two weeks later Bowstring won, by a length, the race for 2-year-old colts held at Goodwood. Then, on 23 July, parliament dissolved and preparations for a lacklustre general election were begun. Beresford complained to Croker that ‘supineness is the order of the day among most Conservatives’.121 Looking across the parties The Times deplored ‘the want of a decided and specific policy as to measures in the addresses of most of the candidates’.122 The election produced the highest incidence of ‘split voting’, where voters with multiple votes distributed them across different parties, of any general election since


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1832. The smallest number of candidates from all parties of any general election since 1832 stood before the voters. Over 235 constituencies in Britain and Ireland were uncontested. Stanley found the whole election a woefully dispiriting affair, the result being a ‘low jobbing’ parliament. He was discomforted by Bentinck’s outspoken address at King’s Lynn. He felt that Bentinck, despite many sterling qualities, had entire want of control over his language. In the south of England, moreover, their case seemed hopeless. The party appeared the refuge of the destitute. To make matters worse, sectarian prejudice came to the fore in many Conservative hustings speeches. Beresford’s ‘No popery’ cry seemed the only issue that had any resonance among Protectionist ranks and the electorate. A number of Peelites were unseated by the anti-Maynooth sentiment. A great many Protectionist candidates, meanwhile, fashioned their support for the Anglican Church into an explicit attack on the subversive dangers of Catholicism. This was a development Stanley, as well as Bentinck, deplored. ‘No popery’, Stanley insisted, would not gain the Protectionists any seats.123 In the Quarterly Review Croker used a letter from Stanley as the basis for an article dissociating the party leadership from Protestant bigotry.124 But Beresford’s explicit disavowal of Bentinck’s conciliatory views on the Catholic issue and his provocative references to Bentinck’s fanciful mind further aggravated Conservative division. Stanley stood firm, despite the possible association with Nonconformist opinion an anti-Catholic campaign might offer. He never believed in a political alliance with the Dissenters, who, he was certain, ‘would throw over the Conservatives at the first convenient moment’. All this deepened his despondency over the parlous state of the party and the mediocre quality of the MPs returned to the new parliament. Following the election Stanley had great difficulty in determining the relative strength of parties.125 All classes of ‘Liberals’, Whigs and radicals combined, he numbered at 325 to 330, a large, but also very heterogeneous, group. About eighty Peelite MPs, he estimated, had been returned, while the Protectionists numbered about 250 MPs, although Bentinck and Beresford calculated Peelite numbers as being higher.126 Thus Peel, Stanley surmised, would be ready to avail himself of circumstances with his usual dexterity, the government being strong because of the divisions of the opposition. Never, he felt, had there been a parliament of such uncertainty regarding its party composition. The difficulty of assessing party numbers accurately became apparent when Conservative MPs submitted their affiliation to the new Dod’s Parliamentary Companion published after the election. The labels Free Trade Conservative, Liberal

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Conservative, Moderate Conservative, Conservative, Protectionist, and Tory were variously used. This would, Stanley anticipated, mean a good number of ‘loose fish’ and independent members. It was, he opined, a very second-rate parliament, with more than the ordinary number of jobbers and a great increase of railway power, the patronage acquired by railway company directors giving them influence in many boroughs. The mixed nature of the Liberal majority, as Stanley recognized, would force Russell to play a difficult game. The government’s numerical superiority in the Commons was composed of discordant elements. Many of Russell’s nominal followers, Stanley believed, would be inclined to push him faster than he wished to go. Peel would be on the watch to trip up his heels and quietly to encourage the radicals to urge Russell on. Stanley suspected that there was a good understanding between Peel and Russell’s followers. This led him to agree with Redesdale that, if the Conservative party was to be reconstructed, it would have to be rebuilt in the Lords not the Commons. During the autumn he resumed confidential discussions with Wellington. The embittered state of party relations in the Commons, he observed, only promised the prospect of continued confusion and disorder. In the meantime, the game of Free Trade would have to be played out. During August and September the price of corn dropped by 20s. a quarter. Yet there was no corresponding improvement in the condition of the manufacturing classes. This, in the long run, he was convinced, would have its effect. Through the autumn of 1847 Stanley gloomily reflected on what new alignment was likely to emerge from the melting pot of Commons party sentiment. Clearly there was occurring a fundamental rearrangement in the elements of party. What underlay this, he believed, was a struggle between democratic and aristocratic principles.127 He hoped Conservatives and moderate Whigs might draw together. In his disregard for parliamentary opinion, Peel seemed to Stanley far more dangerous than Whigs such as Lord Lansdowne, Lord Minto, Sir George Grey, Sir Charles Wood, Lord Grey, or Lord Granville. Peel’s contempt for party in Westminster was undermining parliamentary sovereignty. This, Stanley observed to Bentinck, was ‘the rock on which, mainly, Peel will split’.128 In 1846 Greville noted that ‘the ultra-Liberals lean rather to Peel than to John Russell’.129 Ashburton advised Stanley that, ‘from the glimpses we occasionally have of [Peel’s] reformed views, I am more afraid of him than of anybody’.130 This suggested that the national interest, with Peel’s active compliance, would be that foisted upon parliament by a noisy democratic mob. The Chartists, or bodies like the Anti-Corn Law League, rather than Westminster, would


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rule. Yet, significantly, the Chartists were not a subject of recurring concern in Stanley’s correspondence. It was betrayal from within parliament, by the ‘apostle of expediency’ Peel, which raised the alarming spectre of unrestrained populism. These considerations prompted a gradual shift in Stanley’s thinking. Hopes for a reunited Conservative party, achieved through a rapprochement with the leading Peelites, slowly began to be eclipsed by the prospect of a fusion between ‘real Conservatives, whether nominal Tories or nominal Whigs’.131 This change accompanied the continuing hostility between Peelites and Protectionists in the Commons. In the Lords many prominent Peelite peers favoured reconciliation. Buccleuch, who had nearly resigned with Stanley from Peel’s cabinet in December 1845, was regarded by Redesdale as the most important Peelite in the Lords, in part because he controlled the election of Scottish representative peers.132 Buccleuch hoped for reunion. So did Dalhousie, another influential Peelite Scottish peer, although Dalhousie’s appointment as Governor General of India in 1847 removed him from Westminster. Aberdeen maintained a friendly attitude towards Stanley. Despite Bentinck’s slanders, Lyndhurst continued to hope for eventual reconciliation and during 1848 he moved closer to Stanley. Ellenborough and Londonderry, having voted for Corn Law repeal in 1846, also looked to eventual reunion. That Wellington, now increasingly deaf and frail, took care to pass his influence over the election of Irish representative peers to Stanley in February 1847 further strengthened Stanley’s hand in the Upper House.133 But among MPs the intense schismatic animosity of 1846 remained unabated. A few backbench Peelite MPs did begin to indicate an inclination to return to the Conservative fold, including Stanley’s cousin John Hornby (MP for Blackburn), Charles Baldwin (MP for Totnes), Lord Chichester (MP for Belfast), George Damer (MP for Dorchester), Lord Newry (MP for Newry), Colonel George Reid (MP for Windsor), and Lord Somerton (MP for Wilton). But the leading Peelites in the Commons, principally Peel himself, Graham, Lord Lincoln, and Sidney Herbert, continued to insist that reunion was undesirable. During 1847 and 1848 they offered their independent support on numerous occasions to the Whig government, while declaring Conservative reconciliation, despite the more friendly disposition of Goulburn and Gladstone (returned to the Commons as MP for Oxford University in August 1847), impossible. All this, during the following years, led Stanley to contemplate a merger with moderate Whigs, whose commitment to the status of landed wealth, as against the radical demands of urban agitation, might form a strong bond of common interest.

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In August 1847, for the first time in eight years, Stanley visited his Irish estate at Ballykisteen. He hoped parliament would not meet in November, but feared the Irish famine might force an emergency session. The harvest brought new reports of diseased potatoes and he noted that the blight appeared at Knowsley on exactly the same day, 8 August, as it had the previous year. Other crops, however, seemed generally good. As a result he believed that agricultural prices would stay up and farmers remain apathetic. In late August, as he travelled to Tipperary, his immediate impression was that the condition of farms, houses, and people’s clothing was better than eight years before. If prices did not fall too low, he remained hopeful that farmers would be tolerably well off during the coming year. But he anticipated great difficulty with the poor rates and did not see how the lower classes were to subsist. On his arrival at Ballykisteen he gave recognition to one of his tenants recommended by his land agent, Thomas Bolton.134 The tenant had repelled a group of men ransacking his kitchen, killing one and capturing another. Stanley praised this act as an example for other tenants to follow. The rights of property were sacrosanct. Meanwhile, the general feeling in Britain towards the destitute in Ireland hardened. Despite the private charity of the spring, agrarian crime in Ireland increased. Criticism of persistent Irish ingratitude and inveterate lawlessness displaced earlier characterizations of the Irish peasantry as helpless victims. Stanley found in Tipperary what he feared was a spreading intention among farmers of smallholdings not to pay the relief rate: exactly that eventuality of which he had warned in parliamentary discussion of the Irish Poor Law during the spring. Apprehensive about resistance to the rate among the smaller gentry, he feared abandonment of collection altogether. Publishing the names of defaulters struck him as one possible response. Otherwise, combinations of smallholders and substantial farmers refusing to pay would dramatically increase the burden on those complying with the law. The increase of the rate in English parishes, due to the influx of Irish paupers, was a further danger widening the breach between the two countries. By the end of his stay, like so many Englishmen before him, he was struck by the mass of contradictions that seemed to infuse all aspects of Irish affairs. Since he was last in Ireland, he recorded, he would not have believed a people could have advanced so much in everything which marked general prosperity. Yet distress was widespread and famine increasing. On 21 September, Stanley returned to Knowsley for a week of festivities celebrating his elder son’s coming of age. Relations and friends filled the


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house. A tenants’ day was held with sports, followed by a large dinner. At the grand family celebration, for which a ballroom was constructed between the dining room and the gallery, hung with pink and white calico and with pale blue gauze, the invalid Lord Derby was wheeled in to receive the guests wearing his Blue Riband and Garter star. With Edward about to begin his final year at Trinity, Cambridge, his father’s thoughts turned to his son’s beginning a career in politics. Stanley wrote to Edward wishing him future ‘health and happiness, with increased sense of your responsibilities in the state of life in which it has pleased God to place you, with increased talents and usefulness, and with increased desire to use these not only for your own honour, but for the good of your fellow creatures, and to the honour of God’.135 Stanley hoped for the ‘satisfaction of seeing my son honoured and admired, not only as a fluent debater, but as a sound, honest, practical British statesman!’ Two years earlier Edward had paid a visit to Malmesbury at Heron Court. The young man, Malmesbury noted, ‘argued with great acuteness and good temper, possessing a remarkable fund of information’, although he seemed to have ‘rather advanced opinions’. He was likely, his host concluded, to distinguish himself some day.136 In November 1847 Stanley undertook negotiations for Edward to represent the borough of Lancaster. A petition to unseat the Liberal Samuel Gregson, just elected in July, on grounds of corruption, was under consideration. Clearly bribery had been practised by Liberal agents, but it was unclear whether Gregson knew of it. Eventually Gregson was removed and, in March 1848, Edward contested the constituency against the radical lawyer Robert Armstrong, prior to taking the final parts of his tripos examinations at Cambridge. Stanley made sure his son was uncommitted by any pledges on religious issues and secured the support of the Duke of Hamilton. The Duke had electoral influence in Lancaster and Edward had been his page at Queen Victoria’s coronation. Stanley also arranged for £500 to be made available from Coutts bank. But his heir was defeated on 9 March by sixteen votes. The unsuccessful candidate, having completed his studies at Cambridge, was immediately sent off on a tour of the United States, similar to the trip Stanley had undertaken twenty-four years before. In his absence, on 20 March, Edward was appointed Deputy Lieutenant of Lancashire. The Lancaster campaign, meanwhile, threw up an incident bearing directly on Stanley’s own reputation. One of Armstrong’s supporters, William Balden, declared to the Lancaster voters that, during his own unsuccessful contest at Preston in 1830, Stanley had declared ‘I could do without this swinish multitude.’ This story had long circulated among

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radical groups in the region. Stanley immediately called on the editors of the local papers to verify whether he had, indeed, used such a phrase. On receiving confirmation that there was no record of his having uttered these words, he wrote to Balden on 22 March demanding a retraction.137 The following day Balden wrote an apology to Stanley, and a public disclaimer, at Stanley’s request, was printed in the Lancaster Gazette. While celebrating his elder son’s twenty-first birthday during September 1847 Stanley considered the issues confronting the nation. The immediate question facing the Protectionists appeared to be the possibility of either Russell or Peel’s proposing the reduction of customs duties to a minimum. With Ellenborough he discussed the objections to Lord Grey’s forthcoming Enlistment Bill, objections he knew were shared by Wellington. The issue might form a bridge with the Iron Duke, who was, he observed, in an anomalous political position. The possibility of the government introducing a Jewish Emancipation Bill, allowing practising Jews to sit in parliament, posed another, potentially awkward, issue. Stanley decided he would oppose such a measure, especially if admission was made merely a matter of a vote in the House of Commons. He worked with Croker on a forthcoming article for the Quarterly Review laying out his objections. He also considered the state of Europe as critical. Palmerston’s reckless diplomacy was destabilizing Great Power relations. In the light of all this he came to the sobering conclusion that the Protectionist party ought to be far better prepared for the next session than in fact they were. The Protectionists’ main difficulty remained the absence of an individual in the Commons of sufficient stature to lead effectively, a deficiency underscored by the fact that the party had a very difficult game to play, maintaining a show of opposition and keeping a check on the government, without any prospect or intention of displacing them. Stanley attempted to make the best of this delicate strategy. But he was working with meagre materials, the subtlety of his strategy being blunted by the prejudices of his Commons rank and file. He pressed Beresford to communicate with Bentinck so that anti-popish difficulties might be avoided. He urged Bentinck to be more decided as a Commons leader through summons and motions; otherwise, Stanley felt, he would be forced to form a private council, made up of three members from each House, to guide the party.138 He also feared Bentinck might support a bill for the admission of Jews to parliament, if introduced by the government, forfeiting any residual support Bentinck still possessed on the back benches. Nobody, he lectured Bentinck, could hope to lead a party who did not, at times, follow it. The result of all this, he privately suspected, would be an easy session in 1848 for


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the government. Arbuthnot lamented that ‘the party to which we belonged has gone to the dogs’ and ‘there is no likelihood of its reuniting in our lifetime’.139 Only the victories of Stanley’s horses Bowstring and Fandango at Goodwood in early October and his attendance at the Newmarket races on 13 October alleviated the dispiriting gloom that shrouded the bleak autumn months of 1847.

Who ’mid our warriors boasts the foremost place. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 6)

Stanley’s expectation of a quiet recess in 1847 was quickly shattered. As the Irish Poor Law Extension Act put increasing pressure on cottiers and tenants of smallholdings, and the contentious issue of the admission of Jews to parliament was raised by Baron Lionel de Rothschild’s success in the City of Westminster election of the summer, the banking system slipped into a dangerous credit crisis threatening the collapse not only of financial houses in London and Liverpool, but also of the Scottish banks, long perceived as bastions of financial probity. The gravity of this crisis highlighted the inadequacies of the Protectionist leadership in the Commons. As Russell’s difficulties mounted, the call on the opposition to deliver an effective counter to ministerial failure increased, raising awkward expectations. A good harvest had brought corn prices down sharply to just 45s. per quarter by August. Yet the growth of food imports was not being compensated for by increased exports. To Protectionists this suggested that the bubble of Free Trade prosperity was about to burst. But the technical details of banking legislation were embarrassingly ill suited to the debating skills of Protectionist MPs. The financial crisis forced parliament to meet in emergency session in November 1847, the government requiring an Indemnity Act to authorize the issue of extra notes by the Bank of England. Stanley immediately recognized an opportunity to attack Peel’s 1844 Bank Charter Act. Peel’s legislation restricted paper currency circulation and confined the issue of notes exclusively to the Bank of England, with the intention of controlling the flow of gold out of the country and preventing financial panics. The crisis of 1847, however, proved the worst calamity since the panic of 1825, as wheat prices fell (partly owing to the influx of foreign corn), finance houses failed, and the credit system collapsed. For Protectionists a ready explanation of the crisis, as a dire consequence

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of Corn Law repeal and Peel’s Bank Charter Act, provided plentiful ammunition for a parliamentary offensive. The pernicious combination of Free Trade and a fettered currency had brought on economic dislocation, the capacity of capital to provide secure employment, in circumstances of unimpeded importation, being undermined by monetary control. Stanley was confident that a proposal for an inquiry into the workings of the 1844 Act would receive wide support. Prior to the meeting of parliament on 18 November he prepared for a general meeting of the party, to be followed by another meeting of leading members of both Houses immediately after the Queen’s Speech. ‘The ‘‘well disposed’’ in this new House of Commons’, Malmesbury concurred, ‘should know from yourself what you expect them to do.’140 They must, Stanley agreed, secure as good a muster as they could get. He believed that Peel’s Act unduly checked the Bank of England’s discretion. While the commercial crisis increased the obstacles to Conservative reunion, it also encouraged speculation about a future junction between the Peelites and younger Whigs. Clarendon thought the country wished to see Peel once again as ‘Curator of the nation’s finances’.141 Stanley accurately suspected that both the Queen and Prince Albert wished to bring about such a merger. Alongside the financial crisis, Stanley expected the condition of Ireland to be another difficulty for the government when parliament met. ‘Monetary difficulties and the state of Ireland will … be the chief ingredients in the ministerial cauldron.’142 On Ireland, he believed, the ministry could do most good by vigorously enforcing the rights of property where outrages had been committed. The prospects in Ireland were alarming and solutions difficult to discern, although he anticipated the government having to abandon recent misguided legislation. He also harboured suspicions that Catholic priests in Ireland were using their influence to subvert the criminal law. There was, he thought, a dangerous rivalry of authority between the confessional and the courts. In the main, Catholic priests discouraged acts of violence, but also, through confession, offered relief from responsibility for crime, rendering the law inoperative. He learnt of instances of priests denouncing informers, thereby undermining the authority of the courts. Though he believed most priests wished to repress crime, the confessional, he maintained, was irreconcilable with the efficient administration of the criminal law. Yet the issue Stanley feared would gain the greatest prominence during the emergency session was the Jewish question. It was possible the government would bring forward a Commons resolution allowing the disbarred Rothschild to take his seat. This, he observed, would be a


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dangerous assumption of authority on the part of the Commons. Moreover, such a debate would exacerbate divisions within his own party. He sought to keep Bentinck in line. But Bentinck remained insistent that Rothschild should be allowed to take his seat in the Commons. Stanley also worked to dissuade Bentinck from bringing forward any projects of his own, as was rumoured, over Ireland. Stanley did agree, however, to Bentinck’s moving for a committee of inquiry into the West Indian sugar trade, which, he concurred, was the first, though not the last, victim of Free Trade. Yet, throughout these discussions, Bentinck remained morose, indicating his wish to abdicate as Commons leader. He declared his ‘sole ambition’ had been to ‘rally the broken and dispirited forces of a betrayed and insulted party’.143 But it was Bentinck himself who now felt acute dejection. Because he refused to have the Commons pre-sessional meeting at his house, a gathering was hosted by Stanley at St James’s Square on 23 November. Then, as preparations for the session were under way, Stanley suffered a serious attack of gout in both ankles and feet, with the threat of it also in his wrists. On 23 November an ill Stanley responded in the Lords to the Royal Address by declaring that it touched on none of the real causes of the alarm under which parliament was meeting.144 The government should have resorted sooner to an infringement of the Bank Charter Act. A great portion of the current commercial distress, he declared, was due to the enormous importation of foreign corn. Such suffering was in sharp contrast to that glowing picture drawn by Richard Cobden of the prosperity of the country under the blessing of Free Trade, while the state of Ireland was worse than that of civil war. Prominent members of society were falling victim to a system of assassination and it was an admitted fact that it was safer to violate than to obey the law. The Catholic priesthood, meanwhile, aided and abetted, rather than denounced, this horrid system. The time had come, he pronounced, for prompt measures to restore civil order in Ireland. Amid loud cheers Stanley assured the government they might reckon on his cordial support in all measures concerning the vital interests of the empire. But The Times, which since 1846 had been sharply hostile to Stanley in its support for Free Trade, dismissed him as ‘a schoolboy developed to the most magnificent proportions’.145 In all his ardour, it suggested, there was a singular omission: he neglected to inform parliament how he would have governed the country for the last two years.146 On 6 December, Stanley again denounced the subversive influence of the Catholic priesthood and the direct incitement to murder held out from

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the altar and elsewhere.147 He was always careful never to denounce the doctrinal character of the Catholic faith, but to decry its effect on civil society. The government should not hesitate, he asserted, to take steps which, even if they appeared to violate constitutional liberty, would provide for what was of far greater importance—the security of the lives of the Queen’s subjects in Ireland. Ten days later he reasserted the importance of laying upon Catholic priests any justified stigma of moral culpability. He welcomed the government Coercion Bill, requiring the withdrawal of firearms, but believed it to be insufficient for the existing emergency.148 He recommended a passport system preventing the influx of strangers into disturbed districts. It was notorious, he reported, that the majority of crimes were committed not by local residents, but by strangers under a solemn vow to murder any individual pointed out to them for the reward of a few shillings. The government’s proposal that people join in the pursuit of assassins would be totally ineffective, as fugitive criminals would be lost in the crowd. He agreed to support the ministry’s Coercion measure, however, on the understanding that if it proved insufficient greater powers would be sought. The Lords debate on the commercial crisis brought on a large set-piece clash on 2 December between Stanley and his erstwhile mentor Lansdowne as Lord President of the Council. Stanley rejected Lansdowne’s suggestion that the financial distress was recent.149 The government both underrated the effects of the crisis and were failing in their duty to propose a remedy for it. The central question, he insisted, was whether or not the Bank Charter Act had aggravated the crisis. On this point, Stanley declared, Lansdowne offered no opinion at all. Apparently the Act worked well when it did not work at all. But in a crisis its operation was so destructive as to be entirely impracticable. He acknowledged he had been a member of the ministry which, in 1844, had proposed the legislation. He still upheld the principle of the Act, a metallic currency standard, the convertibility of gold into paper, and the control of the currency in accordance with the foreign exchanges. But events since 1844 had demonstrated that the restrictions imposed by the Act in pursuit of these objects had been injurious to the exercise of the Bank of England’s discretion, preventing the Bank from accommodating, with the bullion in their possession, the influx of gold from foreign exchanges. Thus the government was forced to recall parliament in emergency session to authorize the suspension of the Act. Stanley thought the suspension wise. But this, in turn, raised fundamental doubts about the efficacy of the Act. The commercial crisis had arisen, he maintained, because of the drain of capital arising from


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the increased importation of corn. Those who had advocated repeal of the Corn Laws had anticipated a large importation of foreign corn. But they had also predicted, as a necessary consequence of that importation, a large exportation of British manufactures and great national prosperity as a result. This had not occurred. Lansdowne claimed, he observed, that the crisis had been caused by speculation against which the government could not guard. But the ministry could not be exempted from blame. Their policies had encouraged improvident speculation. Though he did not oppose the Act of Indemnity, the government should propose a more permanent palliative. If they shrank from doing so, then a proposition to deal more directly with the matter would come from some other quarter. Stanley’s speech was intended to prepare for Bentinck’s call in the Commons for the repeal of the Bank Charter Act. But Bentinck’s subsequent demand for repeal received only lukewarm support from the Conservative back benches in the Commons. As a result, while the Act of Indemnity passed, Bentinck’s assault on the Bank Act ignominiously failed. Clearly the importation of corn had led to large exports of bullion, necessitating a contraction in the currency. Increases in interest rates had induced hoarding and excited panic. But Peelites and Whigs successfully defended the principles underlying the Bank Charter Act, despite these problems, and the institutional arrangements set up by Peel in 1844 survived. Worse still, the question of Baron Lionel de Rothschild taking his Commons seat dominated debate in the Lower House. On 16 December the government introduced their Jewish Disabilities Bill. Bentinck defiantly refused Stanley’s request to record a silent pro-Jewish vote. Instead, he delivered an impassioned speech decrying religious bigotry. This decisively ended his Commons leadership. The Protectionist party, Bentinck privately declared, had degenerated into a ‘No Popery, No Jew’ party.150 While 140 Protectionists voted against the Jewish Disabilities Bill, Bentinck scathingly noted that barely half that number had supported him over the Bank Charter Act. Fervent anti-Catholic MPs such as Sir Robert Inglis, George Bankes, and Richard Spooner attacked the bill as threatening to destroy parliament as a Christian assembly. If Jews were allowed to enter Westminster, they argued, then Muslims, Hindus, and deists would follow. Newdegate declared that the admission of Jews and other infidels would lead to the severance of all relations between the State and the Established Church. Without consultation, Beresford immediately sent Bentinck a letter stating he no longer commanded the allegiance of the Commons party.151 The following day an outraged Bentinck sent a

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letter of resignation to Bankes. Stanley regretted, but was not surprised by, Bentinck’s response. A further fragmentation of the Protectionists in the Commons was, he feared, inevitable. Some, he anticipated, might even defect to the Peelites. The lack of an obvious successor to Bentinck left the party in a critical state. The 69-year-old John Herries, who had been Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1827, was too old; George Bankes and Stafford O’Brien lacked sufficient stature; while Disraeli’s claim had many problems, his Jewish birth, social notoriety, and landless status, despite his debating skills, being exacerbated by Stanley’s personal distrust. Some MPs, including Disraeli, Herries, Granby, Henley, Bankes, and Miles, tried to persuade Bentinck to continue. But Bentinck told Stanley he now felt ‘like a caged bird escaped from his wired prison’.152 Stanley, in reply, did not press Bentinck to stay, but concluded that ‘the ‘‘Wild Bird’’ once more at liberty will wing his way rather more than of late to Newmarket’.153 The lack of effective leadership in the Commons crippled the party for the 1848 session. As Gladstone recalled in 1855, despite occasional rallies, there was scarcely an opposition at all; ‘there was no organised staff of statesmen watching with a jealous eye and habitually criticising the operations of the government, as occasion offered, in each of its departments’.154 Stanley’s response was to call for the readoption of the party label ‘Conservative’, allowing the designations ‘Tory’ or ‘Protectionist’ to fall into abeyance. By doing so he hoped to rescue the party from becoming an anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish rump. The term ‘Conservative’ denoted a broader, more progressive view, re-establishing links with the post-Tamworth period of the 1830s, the party he had crossed the floor of the Commons to join. But Bentinck, Disraeli, and Manners reacted with indignation. For them the title ‘Conservative’ was indelibly stained by Peel’s apostasy. Bentinck decried the name ‘Conservative’ as connoting nothing but ‘an Organised Hypocrisy’.155 Manners was disgusted at ‘the surreptitious readoption of that hateful word ‘‘Conservative’’ ’, preferring the title Tory to that ‘most miserable of all party names’.156 William Miles complained that ‘the epithet ‘‘Conservative’’ had become a byword for reproach’.157 But such carping yielded to Stanley’s resolve. The pre-session circulars sent out by Beresford in January 1848 were issued in the name of the Conservative, not Protectionist, party and MPs increasingly adopted the term. In the aftermath of Bentinck’s resignation, a desperate short-lived arrangement of the Commons leadership was attempted. On 9 January 1848 Stanley wrote to Lord Granby, eldest son of the Duke of Rutland and elder brother to Lord John Manners, suggesting he succeed Bentinck.158


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At the end of January the Duke of Rutland invited both Stanley and Bentinck to Belvoir Castle to discuss the matter. An unenthusiastic Granby subsequently accepted the ‘unenviable office’ of Commons leader, Manners observing that his 33-year-old brother contemplated the prospect with ‘extreme reluctance and dread’, as he had hoped Bankes would take up the post.159 Granby’s ‘beautiful humility’, Manners confessed, would make him a ‘miserable leader’. On 9 February, Stanley held a large party meeting at St James’s Square where he eloquently praised Bentinck’s abilities and his devotion to the party, and expressed great regret at the misunderstanding which had led to his resignation.160 Bankes followed, reading a letter from the absent Bentinck confirming his wish to resign. Beresford then detailed the communications which had led to Bentinck’s decision. Beresford admitted that he had written without authorization to Bentinck informing him that he had lost the confidence of the party. Beresford’s unofficial letter was, as some at the meeting observed, at the least injudicious. In conclusion, Granby was announced his successor. At a meeting of Conservative MPs at Bankes’s house in Old Palace Yard the following day, Granby was chosen Commons leader without opposition.161 But Granby proved a broken reed. In early March, conscious of his inadequacy, he relinquished his position. During January, Stanley had also indirectly sounded out the Peelite Henry Goulburn, Peel’s dutiful Chancellor of the Exchequer, as a successor to Bentinck. Though publicly firmly supporting Peel over Corn Law repeal, Goulburn privately preferred tariff reform to unfettered Free Trade. But Goulburn pointed to differences over the currency, the Navigation Acts, and particularly the issue of Free Trade with the West Indies, existing between himself and Stanley’s followers. Disraeli, indignant at being passed over, was scathing about Stanley’s hope of recruiting the 64-year-old Goulburn, ‘furbished up like an old piece of dusty furniture’.162 Bentinck was furious that Stanley did not ask Disraeli to step into his shoes. Relations between Bentinck and Stanley assumed an icy silence. As Manners noted, ‘Beresford, with Stanley, manages the party, the elections, etc., just as he pleases.’163 Conservative morale fell to a new low. About fifty MPs, whom he called his Imperial Guard, stood by Bentinck, the bulk of Conservatives following Stanley’s instructions, delivered through Beresford and Newdegate. Stanley, meanwhile, saw Disraeli as the single greatest obstacle to Conservative reunion. Disraeli, he observed to Lord Wilton, was a man of undoubted talent, ‘far more so than any other of the party, if that word is any longer applicable’. But Disraeli made ‘no scruple of saying that his tie to the party is a personal attachment to G. Bentinck, who on his part looks on [Disraeli]

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as perfection, and is guided by him, as much as it is in [Bentinck’s] nature to be guided by anybody’.164 Stanley was aware that Disraeli believed he disliked him. Certainly, Stanley confessed, he had no prepossessions in his favour, though recognizing Disraeli’s abilities. During February, Disraeli stayed away from the meetings of leading Conservative MPs at St James’s Square to which he was invited. He characterized the irascible Beresford as ‘a tall coarse man, who could blend with his natural want of refinement, if necessary, extreme servility: very persevering, capable of labour, prejudiced and bigoted’.165 Disraeli’s acid comment on the suspended Commons leadership encapsulated his frustration: ‘Is there a real Stanley? I believe it is a mere myth sung to lull Newdegate.’166 In turn, Stanley’s dismissive response to intense press speculation about the Conservative Commons leadership was characteristically terse. ‘I am afraid that I do not pay as much attention, or attach as much importance, as I ought to newspaper paragraphs.’167 Unsurprisingly, Stanley judged the party’s prospects in early 1848 as dire. ‘I cannot share in the desire you express to see me at the head of the affairs of this country,’ he informed Sir Henry Lambert on 5 January. ‘I do not think I ever recollect a period at which it would be so little inviting an object of ambition as at the present.’168 He foresaw a mischievous session with parties divided, attendance poor, apathy general, and, as a consequence, the government having it all their own way. He anticipated the government’s Jewish Disabilities Bill being thrown out, despite at least seven bishops’ being prepared to support it. The country and clergy, he observed, seemed indifferent. Some High Churchmen, he suspected, welcomed the prospect of parliament being un-Christianized, so they might also be released from its control. This, he commented, would be a fatal policy. This pessimism accompanied the collapse of his health. Pains in his chest, linked to gout, rendered him immobile during February and only very slowly did he recover his strength. Meanwhile, the restoration of diplomatic relations with the papacy, continuing famine and disorder in Ireland, Chartist demonstrations, and worsening national finances tested the capacity of Russell’s beleaguered ministry. When, following the gathering of parliament, Lansdowne unexpectedly announced on 7 February the government’s intention to establish diplomatic relations with the Pope, religious anxieties intensified. Stanley thought the Conservatives should not oppose the move but warn of the difficulties of an ecclesiastic acting as a papal ambassador, as the ministry proposed. He saw in this issue a broad principle around which the party might rally. On the one hand, they need not object to renewed


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diplomatic relations with the temporal sovereign of the Roman States. Upon succeeding to the papacy in 1846 Pius IX had indicated his readiness to introduce measures of liberal reform, over control of the press for example, in the Papal States. Yet, they should insist that no additional recognition be given to the Pope as a spiritual authority. From Stanley’s viewpoint the advantage of this line was that it would enable him to direct Protestant feeling within the party into a safe channel. Otherwise the fervent anti-Catholicism of the Conservative back benches, stirred up by Beresford and Newdegate, would run unchecked. Writing to Russell from Dublin Castle, Clarendon, anxious to influence papal authority to reduce the involvement of Irish priests in anti-Union agitation, denounced the attempt by ‘Stanley and his bigots’ to prohibit the Pope from appointing an ecclesiastic as minister to Britain.169 But in early February, Stanley devoted himself to marshalling Conservative peers on this ground, while remaining careful not to excite volatile Protestant feelings in the country. Following a meeting of Conservative peers on 15 February, it was agreed to press two amendments to the government proposal, one prohibiting ecclesiastics from being received as ministers in London and a second renouncing on the part of Rome any temporal authority in the United Kingdom. Moved by Eglinton, these amendments were duly incorporated into the bill subsequently passed by parliament. In the event, however, Pope Pius IX, preoccupied with the political instability in the Papal States, rejected the measure as a basis for establishing diplomatic relations. Poor Ireland, Stanley lamented in January 1848, was doomed to be England’s reproach and curse. As widespread famine continued, violent crime and the murder of landlords increased. In response, Clarendon, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, drew up an Arms Bill and a Prevention of Crimes measure. Despite Russell’s reluctance, the cabinet insisted that the legislation must be submitted to parliament. The government’s coercion legislation Stanley considered wholly inadequate, the likely result being the government having to adopt stronger measures in the future. Yet mere coercion would do nothing towards permanent improvement. ‘How famine is to be fed is a terrible problem. One thing is certain. That England will not consent to feed it from English taxation—nor ought she—and yet in many districts the alternative is frightful!’170 He remained committed, however, to keeping Ireland, as far as possible, out of party politics and a subject of cross-bench consensus. During April he worked closely with Sir George Grey, the Home Secretary, and Lord Grey, Colonial Secretary, to ensure that an acceptable Mutiny Bill was agreed by parliament. Stanley approved of the assimilation of English and Irish law and the substitution

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of felony for treason in some cases. But he objected to the reduction of punishment proposed in other cases and disliked a measure, designed to meet a temporary purpose, permanently altering the laws of sedition and treason. He agreed to move an amendment in the Lords rendering the bill temporary and so enabling him to give the measure his cordial support. Nevertheless, Stanley deplored what he saw as the government’s tardiness in repressing insurrectionary outrages. In part, he saw the difficulty in there being no intermediate policy in existing law between treason and misdemeanour. But the far greater problem appeared to be the government’s disinclination to do anything until it was suggested by the opposition. Ministerial reluctance to restrict the use of arms and prevent the manufacture and sale of pikes dismayed him. On 12 April he authorized Ellenborough to ask the government whether they intended to restrict the use of arms in Ireland. ‘If we were not the most forbearing set of men in the world,’ he commented to Ellenborough, ‘we could not for so long have refrained … from attacking the government upon their insane abandonment of an Arms bill for the first time since the Union.’171 This produced a short ministerial statement of their intention to do so and the declaration that Dublin Castle would exercise its authority to suppress drilling and training. Likewise, Stanley put the Duke of Beaufort up to press the government on the unrestricted presence of aliens in disturbed districts. The next day the ministry announced a measure addressing this issue. Lansdowne was stung by Stanley’s ‘very hostile speech accusing the government of hesitation, yielding and delay’. The Whig leader hoped ‘we shall not give any just grounds for such imputations’.172 But Whig policy in Ireland, it seemed, was being shaped by Stanley in opposition. Yet ministerial supineness only confirmed Stanley’s growing contempt for Russell’s administration. Finally, in July a panic-stricken Clarendon sought from parliament the suspension of Habeas Corpus. This belated ministerial recognition of the necessity for strong measures, and the consternation within the cabinet it produced, intensified Stanley’s scorn. Fortunately for the government, the Chartist demonstrations of the spring, culminating in the planned monster meeting at Kennington Common on 10 April, despite a background of revolution throughout continental Europe, passed without crisis. Having subsided since the economic depression of 1842, Chartist activity, in the face of increased direct taxation, revived in early 1848. Mass demonstrations, platform agitation, and signed petitions, with London Chartists playing a leading role, were resumed following the February revolution in France and the decision of


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Russell’s government to increase spending on national defence. Stanley was scathingly dismissive of the Paris revolutionaries. They were, he wrote to the Duke of Hamilton, ‘a mere rabble of boys bent on mischief, but with no organisation and no settled purpose’.173 In England, meanwhile, populist cries for reform of parliament and financial retrenchment ensued, with the Chartist leader Feargus O’Connor calling for collaboration between the working classes and middle classes in the exertion of a non-violent moral pressure on parliament. On 10 March a large crowd gathered in Trafalgar Square protesting against the increased income tax. After plundering some nearby shops and smashing the lamps outside Buckingham Palace, the crowd quickly dispersed when troops were called out. Stanley regarded this outburst with patrician calm. Unlike Malmesbury, who brought up five armed gamekeepers from Heron Court to his London residence in Whitehall Gardens, Stanley feared little revolutionary threat from the metropolitan mob. Rather, as he observed to the Lords, such events merely confirmed that ‘the vast, the overwhelming body of the people, were determined to use their personal exertions, if necessary, for the defence of order and good government, and to put down all attempts at riot’.174 The 85,000 special constables, who included Edward Stanley serving alongside the exiled Prince Louis Napoleon, who volunteered to help police the Chartist gatherings in early April, showed, Stanley believed, that the great bulk of respectable opinion would come forward to contain outbursts of popular disorder. Stanley’s calmness was shared by Lady Stanley when, returning to St James’s Square with her daughter and younger son on 8 April, her carriage was surrounded in Trafalgar Square by a large Chartist crowd. Lady Stanley’s unruffled composure secured their eventual safe passage home. When, in the face of police authority and heavy rain, the Chartist leadership then abandoned their threatened march on Westminster on 10 April, the spectre of insurrection quickly faded. Yet, what continued to worry Stanley far more was the insidious subversion of parliamentary authority from within Westminster posed by Peel’s populist opportunism. The greater danger, he feared, was threatened by betrayal from within the governing elite, rather than by what he saw as noisy and confused unrest outside it. This threat was all the greater because of the feeble incompetence of Russell’s ministry. In June, in the aftermath of Chartist demonstrations, Russell argued that further parliamentary Reform extending the franchise was now desirable. He rejected the radical call for the secret ballot, triennial elections, household suffrage, and the greater equalization of electoral districts as a subversion of the settlement of 1832. He wished to extend, he insisted, not to replace, the Reform Act.

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With domestic Chartism proving a faint echo of those revolutionary events convulsing continental Europe, the government bill admitting Jews to the Commons was thrown out by the Lords and legislation repealing the Navigation Acts ran out of parliamentary time. But it was the shambolic ministerial handling of the national finances that, for Stanley, epitomized the government’s inadequacies. Under the threat of a deficit Russell had introduced a budget in February 1848 raising the income tax and extending it for five years. Stanley opposed any increase of the income tax and wished it limited to three years. Radicals combined their call for retrenchment and economy with denunciations of bloated military expenditure, as part of their attack on the aristocratic oligarchy represented by the interrelated family clique of Whig ministers. A deadly combination of Conservative denunciation and radical hostility threatened Russell’s policy. Panicked by virulent radical and Conservative criticism, Russell promptly withdrew his proposals. Ten days later the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Charles Wood, introduced a second budget which continued to elicit violent radical attacks. Wood, Lord Grey’s brother-in-law, a contemporary of Stanley at Oxford and former chief whip, was a bad Commons speaker and a timid Chancellor. During February, Bentinck, encouraged by Stanley, forced the government to establish a Select Committee inquiring into the sugar duties. In response Russell proposed not to increase duties on foreign sugar and, with radical support, secured a narrow Commons majority of 260 to 245 votes. Of the Peelites only Peel, Graham, and three others supported Russell, the ministry being saved by Conservative abstentions. This was a defeat for which Bentinck, incandescent with rage, blamed Stanley’s circumspect leadership, Stanley continuing to regard it as premature to displace Russell. ‘What a moment for the party to be divided’, Bentinck ranted, ‘by a pusillanimous House of Lords leader drivelled and dribbled through Miles in the Commons advocating three more years of Fair Trial to Free Trade!!!’ This was, he concluded, ‘downright Peelism’.175 But Stanley remained convinced that the opposition were not yet strong enough to replace Russell’s ministry with an effective administration of their own. When, in May, Stanley asked Bentinck to attend party meetings Bentinck briskly refused: ‘having been unharnessed by others I will never submit to being harnessed again’.176 Then, in August, the diffident Wood announced the need for further government borrowing of £2 million. Four financial statements from the Whig ministry in one session betrayed the deep confusion pervading the cabinet. One legislative success, Morpeth’s second health of towns measure, was meagre proof of Russell’s reforming zeal.


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During 1848 Stanley became deeply concerned about the timetable of parliamentary business which required the Lords to consider in haste measures sent up from the Commons at the end of each session. He became convinced that something must be done to rescue the Lords from ‘the disgrace and ridicule of a course of proceeding which gets worse and worse every year, and which [the 1848] session has brought to a climax’.177 On 29 March he wrote to Charles Shaw-Lefevre, Speaker of the House of Commons, complaining of the way in which the legislative business of the two Houses was conducted. The worst evil was the House of Lords, having little to do for the first four to five months of the session, being deluged with bills in the last month or six weeks, which must pass the Lords either without consideration or, by dropping them, rendering useless the previous labour on them. Stanley proposed giving each House power to postpone consideration of any bill until the following session if it was felt that inadequate time was left in the current session. ‘The House of Commons is the best originator’, he commented, ‘and the House of Lords the best reviser of legislative measures.’178 He prepared a bill proposing this procedure, but, ironically, there was inadequate time to consider it during the session. The logjam of legislation in the Lords at the very end of each session was to become wearily familiar to the Upper House. The persistence of this problem was eventually to prompt him again to seek procedural solutions of his own. Not only was it inimical to the efficient dispatch of business, it also, Stanley feared, damaged the credibility and reputation of the Lords itself. Despairing of the paucity of alternative talent, during the course of the 1848 session Stanley grudgingly acknowledged Disraeli’s position. At the beginning of July he accepted Disraeli’s invitation to dine at Grosvenor Gate. The dinner, which took place on 19 July, marked the first time the two men met socially. Disraeli made elaborate preparations for the dinner, to which he also invited lords Granby, Worcester, and Galway, and the Conservative MPs Sir William Jolliffe, Charles Law, John Herries, Lewis Buck, Robert Christopher, Caledon DuPre, Spencer Walpole, John Stuart, and George Hudson, as well as Bentinck. The purpose of the gathering was to heal Conservative divisions. In this it was successful. Equally importantly, it was an implicit recognition of Disraeli’s standing. Mary Anne Disraeli was disconcerted by the amount of wine drunk during the evening, but reward for Disraeli’s hospitality followed when Stanley asked him to sum up the session on behalf of the Commons party. Disraeli was later to claim that it was this speech, on 30 August, that subsequently enabled him to become Conservative leader in the Lower House.

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The Whig government’s performance provided rich material for Disraeli’s cutting sarcasm. With Russell dogged by ill health, Disraeli lampooned the way in which government measures were ‘so altered, remoulded, remodelled, patched, cobbled, painted, veneered and varnished that, at last no trace is left of the original scope and scheme’.179 Remedial reforms for Ireland, intended to soften the blow of coercion legislation, had failed. A measure championed by Clarendon to secure for tenants compensation for improvements to their holdings had run foul of cabinet opposition, Lansdowne objecting to it as an infringement of landlords’ rights. An Encumbered Estates Bill passed through parliament, but subsequently proved unworkable. From Dublin Castle, Clarendon lamented that ‘the worst enemies of the Whigs cannot accuse them of good luck. During 20 months we have been buffeted from one unavoidable disaster to another without a single turn in our favour.’180 Stanley, meanwhile, despaired to see such a ramshackle ministry kept in office for want of an effective opposition. At the end of July his despondency was aggravated by another severe attack of gout. Then, on 20 August, he was laid up for nearly two weeks with the most serious attack of gout he had yet suffered. Exhaustion, irritability, and excruciating pain blackened an already bleak political outlook. He congratulated Clarendon, on 2 August, on ‘striking the first blow in Ireland’ in the face of threatened revolt, strengthened by new coercive powers.181 During the spring William Smith O’Brien (MP for Co. Limerick) had begun preparations for an armed insurrection in Ireland. During 1831 and 1832 O’Brien had been a confidential source within O’Connell’s movement for Stanley at Phoenix Park. But since then O’Brien’s politics had become increasingly radical and in January 1844 he joined O’Connell’s Repeal Association. In March 1848, following the arrest of the Young Ireland leader John Mitchel, O’Brien became wedded to the course of nationalist revolution. Upon the suspension of Habeas Corpus in Ireland in July, O’Brien attempted to head an armed insurrection and was promptly arrested. But, Stanley warned Clarendon, ‘you have scotched the snake, not killed it’.182 Throughout a large portion of the south of Ireland, he believed, disaffection was only kept in check by force on one side and cowardice on the other. Even the majority of priests inculcated the imprudence of revolt rather than the crime of treason. He agreed to make his house at Ballykisteen available to the government for the use of civil or military personnel. Then, on 17 August, his Irish land agent, Thomas Bolton, conveyed the alarming news that the potato crop in Tipperary looked as bad as that of 1846.


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It was the sudden and shocking news of Bentinck’s death from a heart attack in September 1848, at the age of 46, however, that abruptly focused attention, once again, on the troubled leadership of the Conservative party in the Commons. Just a week before, Stanley had encountered Bentinck at the Doncaster races, where both men had engaged in friendly conversation. Stanley had been pleased that the coldness of their relations seemed to have partially thawed. Bentinck happily shared in Stanley’s racing victories at Doncaster, which had followed notable successes earlier in the season. In April, Stanley’s horse Archery had won the Produce Sweepstakes at Liverpool and, the same month, his 3-year-old filly Canezou had won the Thousand Guineas Stakes at Newmarket. At Doncaster in September, Canezou decisively took the Park Hill Stakes by three lengths and the Sweepstakes, Stanley’s 2-year-old colt Escalade winning the Petriever Stakes, and Strongbow winning the Doncaster Match. Two weeks later Escalade went on to take the Newmarket Post Sweepstakes by two lengths. Bentinck heartily joined in with Stanley’s celebrations. Although Bentinck’s health had not been good during the past two years, there was, Lady Stanley recalled, nothing indicating that such a tragic loss was near. Then, on 21 September, Bentinck’s dead body was discovered, slumped against a stone wall, midway in his walk from Welbeck to Thoresby Hall. Still unable to hold a pen, because of continuing chronic pain in his wrist, with Lady Stanley writing his correspondence for him, a shocked Stanley tried to assess the impact of Bentinck’s unexpected death. He found it difficult to anticipate the consequences of the sudden loss. It might, he conjectured, make Conservative reunion easier. But resumption of the label ‘Conservative’ had merely thrown a veil over Protection so transparent that it could hardly decently cover the adhesion.183 He offered to organize a memorial for Bentinck. But, after conferring with Newdegate, he agreed that the possibility of the mercantile interest undertaking memorial fundraising would be more gratifying to Bentinck’s family. On 1 November, Stanley added his name to the subscription for Bentinck’s memorial, along with a contribution of ten guineas, being organized by the City. In his letter to the organizer of the fund, Thomas Baring, which was published in The Times on 4 November, Stanley wrote of Bentinck that ‘it never occurred to me to meet with a man of a warmer and more generous heart, of more boundless liberality, and, above all, of more sterling and single-minded honesty of purpose’.184 Bentinck may have been a difficult, wayward, and inflammatory colleague, but Stanley never doubted his absolute sincerity. On 6 October, Stanley took up the proposal that his elder son succeed Bentinck as MP for King’s Lynn. Edward, his father hoped, would

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be not only a worthy successor, but a candidate likely to encourage Conservative reunion. Edward’s absence in the United States, his political inexperience, lack of contact with the borough, and the undesirability of another contest so soon after Edward’s defeat at Lancaster gave Stanley cause for hesitation. During early September, for similar reasons, he had declined the opportunity of his son’s contesting Blackburn. But on 20 October, Stanley agreed to Edward’s standing for King’s Lynn and, five days later, received an assurance that there would be no contest. Declaring the reunification of the Conservative party to be all-important to the best interests of the country, on 30 October Stanley recommended his son to the voters of King’s Lynn, with the promise of the candidate’s assiduous attention to public business and the promotion of the local interests of his constituents.185 The next day, with paternal pride, he wrote to Edward in America, informing him that, upon his return, he would find himself MP for King’s Lynn. ‘God bless you my dearest boy!’ he concluded.186 On 22 December, Stanley’s heir, in absentia, was elected MP for the constituency. The far weightier difficulty remained, however, of deciding who should lead the Conservatives in the Commons. The problem was not helped by Stanley, after watching the victories of Archery and Strongbow in races at Newmarket in late October, again being laid up by a severe attack of gout in almost every limb for the whole of November and early December. On his sickbed he read Lord Campbell’s recently published Life of Lord Erskine, informing the author of a misprint on page 412 in a quotation from Virgil. ‘As an Eton man a false quotation, especially one involving a false quantity, is a thing utterly abhorrent,’ he informed Campbell, although asking the author ‘to forgive this piece of pedantry’.187 Yet deciding the Conservative leadership of the Commons was a matter less susceptible to precise scholarship. Once sufficiently recovered, in mid-December, Stanley took up discussion of the Commons leadership with Beresford. There was an imminent danger, he warned, of the party in the Commons falling to pieces if nothing was done. The available candidates for the leadership, however, were far short of ideal. It was a matter of choosing who was least disqualified. Joseph Henley was crotchety and obstinate. William Miles was irregular in his attendance at Westminster. The 61-year-old George Bankes, he observed, who was never very brilliant, was worn out and utterly impractical. Augustus Stafford was a debater, but had not of late run true and among colleagues was the object of anything but friendly feelings. John Herries, he concluded, was the least objectionable choice, if Granby could not be persuaded to resume the leadership. The 70-year-old Herries had been elected as a Protectionist for Stamford in 1847, after leaving the


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Commons in 1841. Disraeli, with all his talents, was out of the question. Despite Disraeli’s ‘display of superior ability and power in debate’, Stanley commented, his talents were, by themselves, insufficient to qualify him for the leadership of the Commons: ‘personal influence must be added to them to enable anyone to hold the post: and in this respect Disraeli labours under disadvantages which I do not think he can overcome’.188 Yet Stanley’s refusal to endorse Disraeli’s claim was by now running against the current of expectation. Disraeli’s effective speech concluding the session on 30 August had confirmed his standing as the party’s most able orator in the Commons. On 16 December the Peelite Morning Chronicle assumed that Disraeli was now de facto leader, his career being an ‘example of what conscious merit and inborn superiority, backed by strong volition and utter insensibility to the ordinary weaknesses of a sensitive or shrinking nature, may effect’.189

For he, thou know’st, no firmness hath of mind, Nor ever will; a want he well may rue. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 201)

Stanley’s dislike of the adventurer Disraeli remained the main obstacle to the MP’s advancement. On 21 December 1848 Stanley offered Herries the Conservative leadership in the Commons. Disraeli had ‘splendid talents, and must not be lost to us’, he advised Herries, ‘but the party would not have him as a leader’.190 On the same day Stanley wrote his first political letter to Disraeli and, on Granby’s advice, stated in candid terms that, despite Disraeli’s service to the party and his innate talents, his nomination as Commons leader would not receive general approval from the party.191 Stanley hoped, nonetheless, that Disraeli would not sacrifice the public interest to personal feelings and that he could agree to serve the party under Herries’s leadership. But this arrangement was stillborn. On Boxing Day, Stanley received a letter from Herries declining the leadership, on grounds of physical debility. The same day a letter arrived from an affronted Disraeli also rejecting the arrangement.192 Disraeli declared himself not insensible to the principle of duty, of which Stanley had reminded him, but stated his wish to act ‘alone and unshackled’, rather than accept the terms Stanley proposed. Privately, Disraeli dismissed Stanley’s proposition as suggesting that he ‘was a man fit to be used, but not to be trusted’.193 Herries proposed the establishment of a confidential committee as a

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way of resolving difficulties. Stanley immediately picked up on Herries’s suggestion and sought to keep Disraeli within the fold. Stanley commented to Herries on 6 January 1849 that, if Disraeli disregarded party ties, he would be ‘either useless or dangerous’.194 Reports Stanley received of Disraeli ‘coquetting’ with Palmerston strengthened his distrust. He wrote again to Disraeli, stating Disraeli could not withdraw from Conservative affairs in the manner he proposed. ‘You cannot divest yourself of the influence which your abilities and your debating powers give you: and you cannot place yourself in a position of complete independence, or rather isolation.’195 Such an act, he warned, would fragment the opposition ‘into a number of small guerrilla parties, without the means of organising or conducting any combined operations’. He invited Disraeli to meet him, after his return to London, on 29 January. The campaign to install Disraeli as Commons leader gathered pace. The house and estate of Hughenden, in Buckinghamshire, with the financial assistance of the Bentincks and the Rothschilds, was acquired for Disraeli, giving him a landed status he hitherto lacked. Under Lord Henry Bentinck’s urging, the Duke of Newcastle wrote to Stanley on 7 January stating, ‘it appears to be perfectly clear that we must of necessity choose the cleverest man that we possess’.196 Lord Mandeville wrote to Stanley in a similar vein. Disraeli, meanwhile, received Stanley’s second letter with satisfaction. Stanley ‘seems at my feet—but the difficulties are immense’.197 Following meetings with Disraeli, both Bankes and Miles wrote to Stanley urging his candidacy. Samuel Phillips, leader writer for the Morning Herald, began marshalling press support for Disraeli. By 25 January, Disraeli was in confident mood, believing ‘the difficulty now is the position of Stanley: how to extricate him from his first rash letter, and give him a golden bridge’.198 On 28 January, Lord John Manners informed Disraeli that he regarded him ‘as leader of the Country party’ in the Commons and that Sir John Trollope, Granby, Stuart, and especially Christopher were pressing for his installation as Conservative leader.199 Under this mounting pressure Stanley met an expectant Disraeli at St James’s Square on 31 January 1849. But he remained opposed to giving Disraeli sole leadership. Confidence in Disraeli out of the House, he insisted, was not commensurate with his power within it. Moreover, appointing Disraeli as sole leader would destroy any chance of reunion with penitent Peelites, Disraeli being the most powerful repellent they could administer. Instead, Stanley proposed a triumvirate sharing the leadership, made up of Herries, Granby, and Disraeli. Not only Herries, but also Richmond, on 21 January, had recommended the formation of ‘a shadow


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cabinet’ of five or six members.200 Stanley saw Herries’s strength as being in financial and foreign questions, Granby was good for miscellaneous topics, while Disraeli’s forte lay in foreign affairs. For social questions the party could turn to Henley. This arrangement a disappointed Disraeli immediately rejected. Stanley reminded him of his willingness to act with Bentinck under Granby. But Disraeli refused to ‘acquiesce in a position which will enable the party to make use of one in debate, and then throw one aside’.201 Stanley referred to strong objections in the Commons to Disraeli’s being sole leader, which he could not ignore. Such reservations, Disraeli replied, must force him to offer only independent support to the party or, perhaps, look to retirement and the devotion of his time to literature. Stanley responded that adopting an independent position would only lead to Disraeli’s losing any influence. By agreeing to act with Herries and Granby, moreover, Disraeli would avoid the envy attached to supreme command. Granby, possessing station and private character, would give Disraeli support, while having no ambitions of his own. Before too long Granby would, in all likelihood, be elevated to the Lords, while Herries was an old man and unlikely to remain long on the political stage. In due course, Stanley suggested, Disraeli would become leader in the Commons, with time allowed for the jealousy and distrust surrounding him to dissipate. ‘For a man desirous of distinction I cannot see a better prospect than that which such an arrangement opens to you.’202 He asked Disraeli to think the matter over. Disraeli, however, repeated his rejection of the arrangement, though thanking Stanley for the candid tone in which he had spoken. Disraeli reported this exchange to his wife as friendly and amicable. But clearly Stanley was not prepared to appoint Disraeli as sole leader. This left Disraeli with a stark choice, shared leadership for the interim on Stanley’s terms, or isolation and loss of influence. On 1 February, Stanley again invited Disraeli to meet him at St James’s Square, where he informed Disraeli of the intention of the Conservative peers, following a dinner the previous evening, to move an amendment on the Address. If a similar move was to occur in the Commons it was necessary for the two of them to agree on it straight away. Disraeli acquiesced, accepting the amendment Stanley had written out, advised by Richmond, Redesdale, and Malmesbury, and agreeing to move it in the Lower House. So Disraeli allowed his rejection of Stanley’s leadership arrangements of the previous day to be tacitly withdrawn. A week later Stanley invited Disraeli to the first Conservative parliamentary dinner of the session, which, subject to Disraeli’s being able to be present, he planned to hold on 17 February.

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Disraeli accepted Stanley’s invitation. At the St James’s Square dinner, which Herries was unable to attend, twenty-two prominent Conservatives gathered. Disraeli was also present at subsequent dinners hosted by Stanley on 21 and 24 February. So Stanley successfully brought Disraeli into line. He retained his misgivings about Disraeli’s reliability and judgement, subject as they were to a mercurial temperament that too eagerly sought acclaim. But, out of a poor selection, Disraeli’s talents appeared a necessary requirement if the opposition were to make any mark on Russell’s enfeebled administration. Since 1846, inflamed by Protectionist anger and Protestant fervour, the Conservatives had exhibited more vehement outrage than judicious deliberation. A deficit of talent and increasing organizational disorder left resentment standing proxy for ability. Persistent acrimony, with Peel willing to shore up a tottering Whig administration and Graham hostile to reunion, had dashed Stanley’s hope of restoring Conservative unity by allowing rancour to dissipate. It was only with reluctance, after painful private doubts, that Stanley had accepted leadership of the Protectionists in 1846. His subsequent difficulties affirmed the arduous personal consequences of that decision. He looked to temper the indignation of outraged Protectionist and anti-Catholic MPs, keeping the door open to contrite Peelites and discomfited Whigs. Hence his readoption of the Conservative party label, in place of the designation ‘Protectionist’. But in February 1849 the ultimate success of such hopes remained in doubt. The survival of the Conservative party was uncertain. They resembled more an embittered mob than an organized party, having been pulled in contrary directions by militant Protectionism, visceral anti-Catholicism, Bentinck’s volatility, and Disraeli’s resentment. The next twelve months, however, were to prove more encouraging.

chapter 7

Protection and Popery: 1849–1851 I am convinced that in their innermost hearts many of the government (not however including Lord Grey) lament the extent to which they have already carried their Free Trade vagaries, and would like to stop, or even retrace their steps, if they knew how to do it. (Stanley to Christopher, 14 April 1849)

On the Popery question I quite agree with you that we should rather follow the stream, which is running quite strong enough, than attempt to take a lead of our own. I think the government are in a most awkward dilemma, from which they will find it difficult to escape; and the more rope you give them the more chance there is of their hanging themselves at one end or the other. (Stanley to Malmesbury, 2 December 1850)

ime and events can secure converts as surely as reason. In early 1849 the economic tide turned in the Protectionists’ favour. After September 1848 agricultural prices fell. In May 1850 corn reached its lowest value for fourteen years. Poor harvests and the influx of foreign wheat brought widespread agricultural distress, with livestock farmers, as well as arable farmers, suffering falling incomes. From 40s. a rod in the mid-1830s, wool was selling at 23s. per rod in 1849. Rural suffering sparked a resurgence of Protectionism. In February 1849 Newdegate warned Stanley that ‘the farmers see distress staring them in the face and will not submit to it quietly’.1 On 1 May the National Association for the Protection of British Industry and Capital was formed as agricultural meetings were held around the country. The Association campaigned for the reimposition of the Corn Laws, defence of the Navigation Acts, banking reform, and colonial preference, an agenda responding not only to the agricultural interest, but to those with commercial interests in shipping and colonial trade. The refusal of other nations, such as the United States, to adopt a reciprocal liberalization of tariffs seemed to underscore the delusion of unilateral Free Trade. The commercial panic

T

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protection and popery: 1849–1851

of 1847, the slowing of manufacturing production in 1848, and the onset of agricultural depression in 1849, Protectionists argued, had impoverished the labouring classes, incited social unrest, and inflamed political protest, in the form of Chartism. Only the reimposition of Protection could restore social harmony, political stability, and sustained prosperity. Malmesbury optimistically reported to Stanley in December 1848 that ‘our principles are gaining favour with thousands who were carried away with the Free Trade cry in 1846’.2 Manners rejoiced that ‘our prospects … are brighter than ever. We are now on the aggressive, instead of the defensive.’3 The intriguing historical question of 1849–50 is, how did Free Trade survive? The answer is political rather than economic. The results of the 1847 general election had been unclear. No single party emerged with a secure Commons majority. This left Russell dependent upon Peel for support. But Peel refused to countenance any backsliding over protective tariffs. Indeed, the opening up British markets was carried further in 1849 by repeal of the Navigation Acts, a decision which was regarded by Protectionists as destroying Britain’s maritime and commercial supremacy, and ‘crushing the pedestal of the British Empire’.4 After 1846 all Peel’s political capital was banked on his pledge to Free Trade. His commitment to the long-term dismantling of domestic Protection was the altar on which he had sacrificed his party. This Peelite covenant kept Russell’s government committed to Free Trade in 1849, even though some Whig ministers privately inclined to compromise. When the Duke of Bedford suggested a fixed duty on corn, in December 1849, Peel responded with implacable opposition. Peel emphatically informed Graham in July 1849 that ‘the test of party difference is now Protection or no Protection’.5 This left Russell’s beleaguered ministry paying a heavy political price for Peelite consistency. Stanley’s opposition strategy played its own part in the survival of Free Trade. Tory magnates and local activists had delivered an electoral triumph for Peel in 1841. After 1846 their energies were devoted to the formation of local Protectionist societies and Protestant associations, with Tory grandees such as Richmond, Eglinton, and Granby adding their aristocratic endorsement. Their efforts brought by-election victories in South Staffordshire and North Hampshire in August 1847, Cirencester in May 1848, North Hampshire again in April 1849, Reading in August 1849, Kidderminster in September 1849, and the borough of Cork in November 1849. But Stanley declined to cash in this electoral dividend. He kept


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constituency agitation at arm’s length. ‘I look on principle’, he told the Duke of Newcastle, ‘with great jealousy at the formation of clubs and associations of any sort, for the purposes of checking and influencing the executive government.’6 He disliked extra-parliamentary campaigns constraining his freedom of action in Westminster. He declined to step forward as the vindicated champion of popular Protectionist feeling. Parliamentary logic, therefore, insulated national policy from economic events. During 1849 Stanley looked to go on the offensive. But his aim remained to discredit, but not yet topple, Russell’s government. Over the next three years Protectionism and Protestantism breathed wind into the Conservatives’ sails, rescuing the becalmed party from the doldrums of 1848. But Stanley was careful to take his bearings from opinion in Westminster, warily skirting the powerful currents of resurgent Protectionism and fervent anti-Catholicism washing through the constituencies. The beguiling siren call of popular passions, he insisted, was an inducement to shipwreck. The steady helmsman looked to navigate around such dangerous waters through the narrower channel of parliamentary debate. It was a course which tested the loyalty of those under his command. But frustration among his crew never soured into mutiny. They recognized that Stanley was the best, the only, experienced pilot the party possessed. During December 1848 Stanley called for the resumption of meetings of the Conservative leadership each Saturday morning during the approaching session. Inaugurated during the 1846 session, they had lapsed during the disorder of 1848. Regular gatherings, he informed Beresford, would ‘let my opinions be known on most subjects as they arose’.7 His depression and lethargy lifted as a firm resolve and improved health returned. Disraeli, meanwhile, found that closer collaboration raised his estimate of Stanley’s abilities. ‘I find him frank, hearty, good-tempered, flexible, and with as quick a brain and clear a head as I ever encountered.’8 Disraeli noted that ‘since I have been able and obliged to form my opinion of the man from personal experience, and not from social tradition, I recognise in him … a man pleasant and easy to work with; essentially practical; distinguished by common sense; flexible and cautious’.9 Stanley prepared a more offensive strategy in Westminster. On 31 January 1849 he hosted a political dinner at St James’s Square for the Conservative peerage, at which, The Times observed, the resurrection of Protectionism was celebrated.10 But he sought tactical success, not a strategic triumph.

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protection and popery: 1849–1851 … their eyes and minds Turn’d to the front and eager for the fray. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 8)

In January 1849 Stanley saw two critical issues looming. First, the appropriate response to continued Irish suffering. He acknowledged that something must be done to amend the Irish Poor Law and favoured a narrowing of the burden of taxation, thereby increasing individual responsibility. But this must be accompanied by some provision for rate-in-aid in favour of the towns and thoroughly pauperized districts. The tragic process of depopulation had been extensive. But the power of government to alleviate this calamity, Stanley concluded, was limited. Ireland was undergoing a Malthusian transformation necessary to its eventual regeneration. He was receiving melancholy reports of his small tenants in the neighbourhood of Cashel, Thomas Bolton thinking it impossible for them to weather the storm, although near Tipperary there was comparatively little distress, prompt payment of rents, and even, in some cases, the payment of arrears. The second issue confronting the Conservatives was Russell’s intention to repeal the Navigation Acts. Dating from the seventeenth century and reserving all coastal, colonial, and non-European trade for British shipping, the Navigation Acts had already been much amended. But they remained a symbol of restrictive trade. Russell recognized the shipping interest as a bastion of Protectionism. In October 1848 he informed his cabinet that, having failed to repeal the Navigation Acts in 1848, they would try again in the coming session. Stanley was determined to defend the Navigation Acts as the basis of British maritime supremacy. Adam Smith, as he knew from his reading of the early 1820s, regarded the Navigation Acts as a desirable exception to Free Trade. Defence, Smith argued, was more necessary to a nation than opulence. Upon the Royal Address being presented to parliament on Thursday 1 February 1849, Stanley moved an amendment in the Lords deploring the state of British foreign relations, the condition of Ireland, and the omission of any reference to the grievances of the agricultural interest.11 The government had concocted a Queen’s Speech, he declared, in which there was scarcely a single paragraph not open to criticism. Palmerston’s foreign policy had embroiled Britain in the affairs of foreign states. As a result, the British envoy in Spain had been insulted and expelled, Austria had indicated her dissatisfaction with British policy, and British diplomatic interference had prolonged civil war between the King of Naples and his subjects in Sicily. France was an exception only because Britain abstained


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from meddling in her internal affairs. Meanwhile, the temper of Ireland was anything but satisfactory, a long course of colonial oppression having converted some of the most loyal into the most disaffected subjects of the British Crown. In the face of these difficulties, Stanley was astounded at the audacity of the government in proposing large reductions in the Estimates. These reductions, he declared, were not the result of legitimate national need or economic prosperity, but a symptom of the ministry being the pawn of radical pressure in the Commons for retrenchment. He welcomed reform of the Irish Poor Law. But the government’s proposal to proceed by inquiry merely called for further information on a matter investigated usque ad nauseam. To proceed by inquiry, rather than legislation, was for ministers to shrink from their responsibilities. Nor was the commercial state of the country cause for congratulation. The panic of 1847 had passed. But exports in cotton, woollens, linen, silk, hardware, and earthenware had diminished since 1847 by over £5 million. The withdrawal of deposits from savings banks had increased, while the agricultural and West Indian interests were suffering severe distress. The low price of corn was throwing agricultural labour into increasing vagrancy. Large numbers of able-bodied workers were being forced onto the poor rates. This was in stark contrast to the universal plenty promised by Free Trade reformers. The state of the country’s foreign and commercial affairs, Stanley concluded, was not a subject for congratulation, but cause for serious apprehension. Loud cheering followed Stanley’s assault, and his amendment was narrowly defeated by two votes (fifty-two peers voting against and fifty peers voting for the amendment), with ministers complaining of being taken by surprise by Stanley’s attack. The Times, despite its commitment to Free Trade, accorded Stanley’s statement ‘qualified praise’ for the spirit and ability with which he advanced his critique.12 From Dublin an anxious Clarendon denounced the studied misrepresentation comprising ‘the staple of [Stanley’s] oratory’.13 In the Commons, Disraeli delivered a similar denunciation of ministerial policy. Only the failure to secure the attendance of all Conservatives at the opening of parliament, he reported, prevented them from seeing ‘a magnificent commencement’ to the session.14 Conservative confidence soared. Party spirits were high at the four parliamentary dinners Stanley hosted at St James’s Square during late February. Malmesbury urged a more active strategy. ‘I am sure we think too much of parliamentary tactics when we often say it is not our business to suggest remedies. The country likes a man to do so. It takes it as proof that he is ready and fit to succeed the government.’15 But Stanley remained committed to allowing the government to break apart of its own volition

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over measures of their own submission. In the Commons, Disraeli, now acknowledged as the effective leader of the party, maintained the pressure. On Monday 12 February, Augustus Stafford moved an amendment critical of the proposal to grant relief to distressed poor law unions in Ireland from funds raised by general taxation, the motion being defeated by 245 to 125 votes. On Thursday 22 February, Disraeli gave notice of a motion for the relief of real property. Disraeli’s statement, that he hoped for a more equitable adjustment of taxation, was met with loud cheers. At a large Protectionist meeting held at Willis’s Rooms on 6 March, chaired by Richmond and attended by Malmesbury, over 1,000 farmers from all parts of the country acclaimed Disraeli’s call for the relief of the landed interest. On 8 March, Disraeli spoke to the Commons of agriculture and manufacture as complementary, not antagonistic, interests, both being critical to the prosperity of the nation. But his motion was defeated, on 15 March, by 280 to 189 votes. As Stanley anticipated, it was repeal of the Navigation Acts which became the principal battleground between the government and the opposition. In 1847 he had talked of Free Trade being allowed to play itself out. In 1849 he prepared to take the government on. Introduced to the Commons on 16 February 1849, the government bill repealing the Navigation Acts enjoyed the joint support of most Whigs, Peelites, and radicals. It passed its Commons second reading on 12 March by 266 to 210 votes. Forty-nine Peelites voted with the government, 192 Conservative MPs voted against the ministry, eighteen Whigs and Liberals, many of whom had strong shipping interests, joined the Conservatives in opposing repeal. Then, during the Commons committee stage, Henry Labouchere, President of the Board of Trade, introduced an amendment extending repeal to coastal as well as ocean-carrying trade. This stirred fierce opposition in the Lords. By the end of March, Russell was anticipating rejection of the bill by the Lords, an outcome that would require his resignation. This, he melodramatically warned the Queen, would lead to Stanley, dissolution, agitation, Bright, and chaos.16 On 23 April the Navigation Acts Repeal Bill passed its Commons third reading by 275 to 214 votes, a narrow margin in a Free Trade parliament. Forty-five Peelites supported the measure, but thirty-three opposed it. The most striking incident during the debate was the ‘venom’ of Graham’s ‘elaborate and undisguised declaration of war’ against Stanley.17 To loud radical cheers and restrained Whig applause, Graham declared himself for progress. Disraeli retorted that the ‘people don’t want to hear any longer of these undefined windy phrases from the dilettante disciples of progress’. The point was, progress to where? ‘Progress to Paradise, or Progress to the Devil.’18


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Westminster was now awash with rumour, one report being that Russell was about to retire, on the grounds of ill health, and a Whig–Peelite ministry formed under the premiership of Peel. Cobden, it was surmised, would join such a government. Certainly a Whig–Peelite coalition was the favourite project of Prince Albert and, therefore, also the Queen. Prince Albert used his influence to rally peers behind repeal of the Navigation Acts, as well as writing to the Duke of Wellington urging him to save the country from a Lords versus Commons election. Conservatives, meanwhile, speculated on the personnel of a Protectionist government, once the Navigation Acts Bill was thrown out by the Lords. Stanley, however, spent the Easter recess at Newmarket, in the company of the Duke of Bedford, the Duke of Rutland, the Marquess of Exeter, and others, watching Cazenou win the Newmarket Stakes and Strongbow winning the Match by a length. Stanley believed that many in the government regretted the extent to which they had carried their ‘Free Trade vagaries’. They secretly wished ‘to stop, or even retrace their steps’, if they ‘knew how to do it’.19 But he also began to fear that the reaction against Free Trade might be too strong, exciting unrealistic Protectionist expectations in the country.20 During late March he held discussions with Richmond and Disraeli, drawing up a ‘cabinet … in embryo’.21 Herries consented to waive the Commons leadership in favour of Disraeli, who was slotted in as President of the Board of Trade. Under Stanley, as First Lord of the Treasury, Joseph Henley (MP for Oxfordshire) was to be Home Secretary, Herries Chancellor of the Exchequer, John Stuart Attorney General, and Spencer Walpole (MP for Midhurst) Solicitor General. Lord Ashley (who succeeded his father as 7th Earl of Shaftesbury in 1851) was identified as Colonial Secretary and Lord Aberdeen, it was hoped, would accept the Foreign Secretaryship. Aberdeen’s adhesion, Stanley recognized, would encourage Conservative reconciliation. Stanley told Aberdeen that his vote would decide the likely formation of a Protectionist ministry. Aberdeen’s intention, however, remained unclear. Three other peers, Brougham, Ellenborough, and Harrowby, declared their support for Stanley, wishing the Navigation Acts to be taken out of the realm of Free Trade, although Brougham, Stanley remarked to Ellenborough, was ‘dangerous to have, but dangerous to omit’.22 Over dinner with Richmond, on Thursday 3 May, Stanley revised his draft cabinet, regarding Ashley as impracticable at the Colonies and moving him to the India Board. Disraeli, he now thought, should take the Colonial Office and Augustus Stafford or Thomas Baring, a respected

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Director of the Bank of England and MP for Huntingdon, the Board of Trade.23 Yet Stanley retained an uneasy sense that, in seizing upon a Lords defeat of repeal of the Navigation Acts as a vote of confidence, Whigs might be forcing on him a premature attempt at the formation of a Conservative government. The chastening experience of 1834–5 strengthened his caution. Richmond doubted the prospect of forming a credible cabinet. Even the sanguine Disraeli, in mid-March, feared the Whigs might ‘play [Stanley] a trick’ and force him to form a government, the possibility of Stanley’s finding at least seven reputable ministers in the Commons surpassing imagination.24 Stanley appreciated the distinction between holding office and exercising power. The best outcome would be a strong Conservative showing, pushing the ministry to near defeat, yet requiring an enfeebled Russell cabinet to remain in office. This was precisely the result Stanley achieved. Calculations of a Lords division on the Navigation Acts Repeal Bill were, by early May, predicting a narrow majority for the government. The cabinet called on all its resources to secure a victory. Bright reported that Whig peers were prepared to ‘swallow’ the measure, ‘for tho’ they are convinced it will both destroy the commerce and navy of England, they deem such results comparative blessings compared with Stanley being minister’.25 On Tuesday 1 May, Stanley held a large meeting of Conservative peers at St James’s Square. It was agreed that Brougham would immediately precede Lord Grey, the main ministerial speaker, and Stanley would follow. As Stanley described it to Malmesbury, ‘Brougham must poke [Grey] up, and I will knock him down.’ Spencer Walpole provided technical advice on the operation of the Navigation Acts as ‘a question of infinite importance, both in a party and national sense’.26 Then, as the Lords debate on the second reading of the Navigation Acts Repeal Bill began on Monday 7 May, Stanley learnt that Aberdeen, under pressure from Peel, had pronounced for the government. This decided the result of the division. But the debate remained the single most important party clash of the 1849 session. Visitors crowded the Upper House and attendance in the Commons during the two nights of Lords debate was very thin. Lansdowne, opening for the government, was followed by Brougham. Declaring himself to be a Free Trader, Brougham opposed the measure as a reform too far. During the second night of debate, on Tuesday 8 May, Lord Grey rose late and delivered a powerful speech in support of the bill, ‘but in too dry a style: his unadorned manner’, Stanley’s elder son judged, being ill suited to an audience which ‘having passed seven


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hours in listening, was at once exhausted and excited’.27 Stanley rose at past 2 a.m. and, owing to the lateness of the hour, jettisoned his statistics, dealing solely with the general bearings of the question. Stanley ‘kept the attention of the House alive throughout, ridiculed Lord Grey, and appealed to the Duke of Wellington in a singularly beautiful peroration. The Iron Duke appeared moved, turned restlessly in his seat, and covered his face with his hands.’28 Wellington subsequently described Stanley’s speech as ‘not only the finest which [Stanley] had ever made, but the finest ever delivered in parliament’.29 Only Wellington’s sense of duty to his sovereign, Conservatives believed, ensured his support for the government. The crucial issue before the House, Stanley declared, was whether they were prepared to abolish utterly a system which, for two centuries, had formed the basis of national greatness and the foundation of naval strength.30 He had no objection to modifying the Navigation Acts, but he could not acquiesce in their abolition. Stanley quoted Adam Smith and Huskisson as illustrious authorities, superior to Lord Grey, who had supported the Navigation Acts. The supposed benefits to the commercial interest coming from repeal were readily asserted by the government, but they were not put forward by the commercial interest itself. The injurious effect of repeal on the Navy remained unchallenged. Apart from the special case of Canada, who argued for repeal only as a result of the withdrawal of Protection, the British colonies opposed the measure. Repeal would not only damage the domestic economy and undermine Britain’s maritime supremacy, but also estrange Britain from her colonies. He strongly objected to the proposed admission of foreign-built ships onto the British register. It was essential to keep up the efficiency of British shipbuilding yards, which would speedily decrease in number should repeal be adopted. The proposed measure was both dangerous and unnecessary. And while he had no wish to array class against class, the government, by proposing repeal, must assume responsibility for doing so. Stanley sat down just after 4 a.m. and, following a short reply from Lansdowne, a division was called. Greville observed ‘the greatest whipup … that ever was known’.31 Whig peers serving as ambassadors in Brussels, Paris, and Vienna were recalled for the vote. ‘One peer (a ministerialist) came down too drunk to be presentable, but was paired nevertheless. Two insane peers were brought in and made to vote, the keeper of one being in attendance in the lobby.’32 Stanley secured a majority of those peers present, but by virtue of their proxy votes the government gained a narrow victory of 10. Of those present 105 voted for the bill and 119 against, while the proxies were 68 for and 44 against, with 20 votes (10

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on each side) paired off. The result, declared at 5 a.m., was 173 for repeal and 163 against. Malmesbury noticed that ministers ‘looked very downcast and dispirited when the numbers were announced, as it is the first time such an important question has been decided by proxies’.33 Just 24 proxy votes saved Free Trade in 1849. As Stanley hoped, it was a ministerial success by the narrowest of margins. For Russell it was a pyrrhic victory. He gained a legislative success, but suffered a debilitating loss of authority. Meanwhile, Stanley avoided the embarrassment of having to form a Conservative ministry with meagre Commons materials, urged on to extreme policies by popular pressure. He did ‘not think it hopeless to restore a moderate fixed duty’ on corn.34 Outside parliament, objections to repeal of the Navigation Acts had animated the City of London, provincial bankers and merchants, colonial lobbies, and the shipping interest. But, for the moment, he preferred prolonging the agonies of a crippled Whig ministry until, as the agricultural depression worsened, it was wholly discredited. Although The Times dismissed Stanley’s speech as ‘a shot with an empty pistol’, archly suggesting that throughout his role as the chivalric Don Quixote the simple vulgarity of Sancho Panza shone through, it was clear that Whig authority had been seriously damaged.35 On 24 May, Stanley joined the large enthusiastic crowds attending the Epsom races. During Royal Ascot, on 5 June, he attended a grand dinner hosted by the Queen at Windsor. At a dinner given by the Lord Mayor of London to 170 Protectionists on 23 June he praised the English aristocracy for their active participation in national affairs. The essential constitutional function of the House of Lords, he declared, was to check ill-considered legislation sent up by the Commons. This duty, he suggested, was now of particular importance, given the increasing feebleness of Russell’s ministry and the growing danger of radical extremism. As Stafford graphically described it later in the year, ‘Depend upon it, our business is to wait—not much longer perhaps—but it is idle to exhibit fireworks before sunset.’36 During June 1849 Stanley received reports of the reappearance of potato disease in south Lancashire around the neighbourhood of Knowsley. By August, following racing successes at the Liverpool meeting in late July and after a very rough crossing on the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin, he was on his estate at Ballykisteen. Three farms were up for lease and he was anxious to induce English farmers, possessed of skill and capital, to take them. Through the office of Richard Bagge in King’s Lynn, whom he had met as Edward Stanley’s election manager, he was keen to interest Norfolk farmers in the property. The husbandry and


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agricultural skills of East Anglian farmers were, he believed, an ideal means of bringing greater efficiency to the rural management of Ireland. The leasing of Irish farms to English tenants, however, proved difficult. Norfolk agriculturalists showed an understandable reluctance to take up the holdings. In September he attended meetings of the ratepayers of the Tipperary Union, listening to complaints of excessive rate charges. In cases of proven distress he ordered reductions in rent. Then, while attending the elaborate celebrations accompanying the Queen’s visit to Ireland during September, he found himself having to restrain from a distance Disraeli’s restlessness. Disraeli always found it difficult not to ignite rhetorical fireworks.

But thou art ever hasty in thy speech, And ill becomes thee this precipitance! (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 366)

To encourage penitent Peelites to rejoin the Conservatives, Disraeli looked to establish the party on grounds other than Protectionism. In private conversation he asserted that none of his speeches contained an explicit commitment to Protection. As Edward Stanley, increasingly Disraeli’s confidant, confirmed, ‘his great displays on the Corn question have all been attacks on opponents, not assertions of a principle’.37 Following the Lords Navigation Acts debate of early May, the prospect of coalition between Whigs and Peelites had faded. Disraeli concluded that ‘after a decent interval the old Conservative party will be reconstructed under Stanley and of course without Peel’.38 Yet Disraeli believed that reconciliation must be on a basis other than Protectionism. If import tariffs were no longer an acceptable means of securing a balance of economic interests, then the equalization of direct taxation, accompanied by the establishment of a sinking fund to pay off the national debt, would safeguard the constitutional equilibrium. Conservative aims might be achieved by alternative fiscal means. During Commons debates in July 1849, while attacking the government, he carefully avoided calling for the restoration of the Protective system. He told the Commons that the government had incited revolt in the colonies, overseen a £7 million decrease in exports, prostrated agriculture, and caused social decomposition in Ireland. This prepared the ground for his speech, on 12 September, to the Royal Buckinghamshire Agricultural Association. At Aylesbury he proposed an equalization of the land tax as a local rate assessed essentially

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on rents, applied identically to Manchester and Birmingham and other urban areas, as well as in agricultural districts, the increased revenue leading to the establishment of a sinking fund to clear the national debt. Upon receiving in Ireland reports of Disraeli’s Aylesbury speech, an infuriated Stanley immediately fired off a fierce reprimand to Hughenden (Disraeli’s new Buckinghamshire estate). Disraeli’s proposals, he remonstrated, had not arisen from careful consultation. Rather, they appeared as ‘a somewhat hasty promulgation of crude and lightly-considered schemes upon a most important part of our domestic policy’, displaying an absence of agreement between them.39 Stanley acknowledged the advantage of having a ‘watchword’ or ‘party cry’. But ‘that convenience is more than counterbalanced if the watchword is not one which will command universal sympathy, on a scheme such as will stand the severest test of criticism’. He objected to ‘starting detailed projects in opposition’. More particularly, he regarded an increase in direct taxation as fraught with great danger, being neither popular nor practicable. Conservatives were not yet ready to abandon Protection and to adopt, in its place, fiscal reform. Disraeli’s contrite reply on 24 September acknowledged ‘that on this as on every occasion I should hesitate before I open my mouth without the advantage of your opinion’.40 The equalization of taxation and the establishment of a sinking fund, however, he still regarded as ‘two good and even great principles for the landed interest to associate itself with’. In response, on 28 September, Stanley recognized the force of such principles, but believed them difficult to attain. He requested Disraeli to find an early public opportunity to explain away the suggestion that his scheme involved an increase of the land tax.41 For good measure, Beresford was dispatched to Hughenden, who urged that ‘there is a general feeling that a recurrence to Protection is absolutely necessary and, I am sure, as I have ever held to it, that we should work that feeling to the utmost extent’.42 He reassured Stanley, on 30 September, that Disraeli was ‘living here very quietly and working very hard’, studying the Blue Books of the past session.43 Beresford advised him that Disraeli was, despite his Aylesbury escapade, loyally committed to the party. The incident, however, reinforced Stanley’s doubts about Disraeli’s reliability. He complained to Granby that Disraeli’s scheme was neither politic nor practical.44 At current prices, he believed, an additional facility of borrowing money would prove a doubtful boon and lead to increased direct taxation. ‘When a man is in a scrape’, Disraeli admitted to his wife, ‘one must not complain of annoyances and sacrifices; but I have paid dear for the misconceptions of the Aylesbury meeting.’45 As requested by Stanley,


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Disraeli spoke on 5 October to a local Agricultural and Conservative Club in Essex, publicly affirming that a sinking fund would enable the general level of taxation to be reduced. His peroration, that he remained determined to uphold the constitutional preponderance of the land of England, was received with prolonged cheering. On 8 October The Times congratulated Disraeli on having ‘extricated from some of its embarrassments his scheme for the salvation of this empire’.46 Nevertheless, Stanley’s son was struck by the increased unpopularity of Disraeli among Protectionist MPs. Both Beresford and Newdegate advised Stanley of a general feeling that a reversion to Protection remained necessary. On returning from Ireland, Stanley wrote to Disraeli, from Newmarket on 25 October, expressing his dissatisfaction with Disraeli’s conduct. Disraeli’s apparent lack of commitment to Protection, he warned, was creating dissension within the party.47 Stanley agreed that calls from the agricultural constituencies to dissolve parliament and form a Protectionist government were impracticable, divis vota exaudita malignis. But he was not yet prepared to abandon publicly the principle of protective duties. He was, moreover, very uneasy over Disraeli’s inference that a return to Protection was hopeless. ‘I am firmly convinced that the public mind is beginning to be impressed with the conviction that Free Trade has proved a delusion; and at the point at which we now stand our clear policy is to seek to encourage this conviction.’ The party leadership would commit ‘a great error’, he argued, if they abandoned the cause as hopeless before their friends were prepared so to consider it. ‘In order to restore prosperity we must retrace our steps, and recur to a sounder system of finance.’ Disraeli’s private view was that ‘a general diminution of the general burthens of the state by a sinking fund supplied by import duties’ would lead to a reconstruction of the country party ‘on two great popular principles; the diminution of public burthens and the maintenance of public credit’.48 But Stanley firmly discouraged Disraeli from publicly seeking ‘a reconstruction of the Country party’.49 It implied a change of conduct and principle. He approved of equalizing taxation and securing a bona fide surplus revenue. But he did not believe that parliament, in order to do so, would agree to increase taxation and continue the income tax. In pursuing the establishment of a sinking fund, however desirable in itself, the party had no prospect of inducing the country to submit to the sacrifices necessary to secure it, particularly if, in seeking this objective, it was indicated that the cause of Protection was ‘irrevocably lost’. A chastened Disraeli delivered another speech at Aylesbury on 31 October, which he took pains to ensure was accurately reported in

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the press, declaring himself unequivocally a Protectionist. He favoured Protection for ‘all classes of Englishman’, not just agriculturalists. His proposed sinking fund, he now declared, should be supported by a duty on foreign imports. ‘I am for the territorial constitution, which cannot exist in this country unless agriculture flourishes,’ he pronounced.50 On 13 November, Stanley, back at Knowsley, confirmed that this speech was ‘far more conciliatory of the feelings of our friends, and very well suited in its tone to meet their views’.51 He began to feel more confident that they would be able to meet parliament in the New Year without ‘any appearance of dissension, and show a front at least as united as we did during the last session’. Disciplining Disraeli proved an unpleasant exertion. Stanley regarded his capricious lieutenant as too thin-skinned, too conscious of his own powers, and too prone to expose divisions within the party. He acknowledged the force of Disraeli’s argument that an equalization of direct taxation might provide the party with a fiscal strategy, more practicable than Protectionism, in countering the effect of Free Trade. But the Conservative backbenchers, he recognized, were not yet ready to abandon Protection. Beresford reported to Stanley that Disraeli was ‘decidedly piqued and low about the turn which matters had taken’.52 Nevertheless, Disraeli accepted Stanley’s letter of 13 November as ‘satisfactory and conciliatory’.53

This bitter interchange of wordy war. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 367)

Having reined Disraeli in, during early November 1849 Stanley gathered economic statistics illustrating the socially divisive impact of Free Trade. How far were low prices in agricultural produce to be attributed to want of ability to consume or to the increase of importation by the home market? Was the fall of prices in butter, cheese, etc. attributable to increased imports or, as Stanley suspected, was it the result of a diminished ability on the part of the domestic middle and lower classes to consume? The time was ripe, he believed, for a thorough examination of the real effects of Free Trade when parliament reassembled. The best Conservative tactics in the New Year were clear. They should not admit themselves beaten or abandon the struggle. They should avoid language despairing of a return to Protection. Yet, at the same time, they should not sneer at alternative palliatives that may be obtained from the present


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parliament in an approach to the equalization of taxation.54 He rejected Croker’s suggestion that the call for a more equal apportionment of tax burdens be condemned. The Conservatives had a perfect right, he declared, if the government refused all Protection, to demand the removal of unequal fiscal pressure. But this fiscal policy could only be embraced once Protection was accepted as a hopeless cause by their backbenchers. Weaning the party from Protection was a process it would be disastrous to rush. During November, Disraeli agreed to shelve his sinking fund proposal. Stanley favoured the restoration of a moderate corn duty. Russell toyed, in December, with the idea of proposing a fixed duty of 5s. on corn. But Peel’s firm opposition scotched ministerial discussion. This gave Stanley greater freedom of action in leading the reaction against Free Trade. Stanley remained anxious about the pressure exerted on the parliamentary party by popular agitation. On 14 December, Richmond chaired a Protectionist dinner in London, a similar large meeting of Protectionists chaired by Granby occurred at Leicester on 5 January 1850, and another Protectionist meeting took place at Great Marlow on 8 January. On 17 January a meeting of landlords in Dublin demanded the reimposition of corn duties and the dissolution of parliament, so that the issue could be decided at an election. Stanley feared this rising popular feeling spilling over into dangerous channels, in particular the cry for tenant right and the reduction of rent, and a consequent separation of the interests of landlord and tenant. He saw disturbing symptoms of this in Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Leicestershire, and other southern counties. The alarming possibility arose, following the Dublin meeting, of this spreading to Ireland, inflamed by priests and radicals. Four by-elections since August 1849, in Kidderminster, Reading, West Surrey, and Cork, had returned Protectionist candidates. He had no doubt that popular opinion was coming behind them. ‘The general impression in London’, Disraeli noted to his wife in mid-November 1849, ‘is that Stanley is safe to be Prime Minister next session.’55 The challenge remained, while not alienating popular support, to prevent militant feeling in the constituencies from compromising the Conservatives’ position in parliament. Meetings in England and Ireland during the winter of 1849–50 kept alive the spirit of the party. But they could not be allowed to dictate the parliamentary agenda. If, in due course, Disraeli’s fiscal strategy of equalizing direct taxation should prove a more effective means of countering Free Trade and securing a fusion with moderate Whigs, then Stanley did not want militant Protectionism blocking his options.

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For Stanley import tariffs had not only protected the domestic economy, they had also safeguarded Britain’s colonial links. The Whigs’ equalization of the sugar duties in 1846 brought severe financial distress to the plantation owners of the West Indies and British Guiana. Constitutional crises in Jamaica and British Guiana followed in 1848. That same year armed uprisings and popular protest had erupted in Canada, Malta, the Ionian Islands, and Ceylon. To ease the fiscal burden on British taxpayers, in the aftermath of Chartism, the Colonial Secretary Earl Grey had pursued rigorous economy in colonial military expenditure. In 1848 he renewed the transportation of political prisoners, which prompted protest in Cape Colony, New South Wales, and Van Diemen’s Land. At the same time, Grey encouraged greater self-rule in the white settlements. This, he argued, enabled Westminster to achieve economies in response to radical demands for retrenchment. But all this, Stanley feared, accompanied by repeal of the Navigation Acts, threatened to sever Britain’s colonial ties. As Grey’s immediate predecessor as Colonial Secretary, Stanley possessed a clear authority on colonial matters. By December 1849 Stanley believed Grey’s policies were likely to lead to the loss of the colonies, as Grey appeared to be playing the game of the Manchester School radicals, without knowing or intending it. During November 1849 Colonial Reformers such as the radical MP Sir William Molesworth and the writer Edward Wakefield prepared a public campaign demanding further reform of the governments of the colonies. Augustus Stafford, Spencer Walpole, and Charles Adderley (Conservative MP for North Staffordshire) expressed support for the campaign, Adderley writing to Disraeli on 12 December inviting Disraeli to join their newly formed Colonial Government Society (CGS), of which the radicals Milner Gibson and Cobden were also members.56 After consulting Stanley, Disraeli dissuaded Adderley from proposing an amendment to the forthcoming Address. But the CGS persisted with the idea that Molesworth propose an amendment, with reference to Australian self-government, at the commencement of the session. Disraeli advised Stanley on 17 December that, in order to obtain Conservative support, ‘Molesworth and Co. would modify their motions and movements a good deal, and it is not impossible that a deadly blow might be struck in this district of the administration’.57 But Stanley strongly advised Disraeli to avoid involvement with the CGS. It was, he cautioned, difficult to imagine a more heterogeneous combination of names, comprising individuals who were bound to differ over the details of colonial government.58 The prominence of Stanley’s antagonists of the early 1840s, Wakefield and


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Molesworth, in the activities of the CGS was sufficient reason to rebuff any approach. Wakefield’s call for the resumption of systematic emigration, which Stanley had forthrightly opposed prior to 1845, reinforced Stanley’s objections. Lord Grey, meanwhile, began preparing, with the advice of a cabinet committee, legislation for the 1850 session setting up a General Assembly of the Australian Colonies in line with his wish for colonial self-government. This strengthened Stanley’s view that Grey was both a bad Colonial minister and a dangerous member of the cabinet. Stanley’s elder son set off, in mid-September 1849, on a tour of Barbados, Trinidad, Guiana, and Jamaica. Edward reported that, owing to the defects of subsequent British policy, emancipation had failed to deliver to former slaves the prosperity anticipated by his father during the 1830s, views he promulgated in pamphlets on his return. For Stanley himself, Grey’s push for retrenchment and colonial self-government only added dismemberment of the empire to the deleterious effects of the decline of landed influence in Westminster. On 28 December 1849 The Times published a letter from Peel addressing the current state of domestic agriculture. Peel advised his tenants to reconcile themselves to low prices, pointing out that these would be partially offset by lower costs, and not to hope for a return of Protection. He felt unable to consider a general abatement of rent, but would review individual cases. By way of encouraging increased production he outlined a proposal whereby 20 per cent of his current year’s rent would go into improvements such as drainage, the removal of unnecessary fences, and the optimal use of manure. He also offered his tenants extended leases and loans at 4 per cent for additional improvements. Stanley interpreted this ‘manifesto’ as proof of Peel’s growing apprehension that the reaction against Free Trade was serious. Yet what Peel proposed, Stanley scathingly observed, as an extraordinary effort of generosity, was nothing more than most landholders were in the habit of doing ordinarily. Nor, in doing so, did they think it necessary to parade themselves in print. Similarly, Stanley saw the exertions of Cobden during the winter as a symptom of increasing radical alarm at the popular reaction to Manchester School policies. At a meeting of the National Freehold Land Society in London, on 26 November, Cobden proposed extending the urban vote into county constituencies by the sale of 40s. freeholds to Society members. This would, Cobden believed, check the political power of the aristocracy in their strongholds and double the number of 40s. freehold voters in English counties in seven years. But Cobden’s extreme language, Stanley commented, was a measure of his apprehension. Russell discussed with his

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cabinet during November a parliamentary Reform Bill extending both the borough and the county franchise. Although Palmerston scuttled Russell’s proposal, Stanley immediately placed it in the context of the popular reaction against Free Trade. ‘I have little doubt, from what I hear,’ he told the Duke of Beaufort, ‘but that the government will seek to direct public attention from the results of their Free-Trade policy by introducing a new Reform bill! I suppose Johnny Russell wishes also to take the wind out of Cobden’s sails.’59 The important thing for the Conservatives, he maintained, was to keep attention on the failure of Free Trade and the unequal burden of taxation bearing on agriculture. ‘Peel and Cobden have done us infinite good of late,’ he judged.60 A meeting of the Conservative leadership, held at Burghley House from 21 to 25 January 1850, was attended by Stanley, Disraeli, Richmond, Granby, Herries, and Christopher. Other guests included Lord Salisbury, Lord and Lady Southampton, Lord Cardigan, Sir Robert Inglis, and Lord Henry Bentinck, as well as Thomas Maunsell and Augustus Stafford, both MPs for North Northamptonshire. Stanley combined political discussion with extensive shooting on Lord Exeter’s estate, 500 being bagged as a matter of course each day. Stanley, Disraeli censoriously observed, ‘shoots too much’.61 But between this sport Stanley prepared his colleagues for ‘lively work’ at the beginning of the session. The Burghley ‘cabinet’ agreed that an amendment to the Address should be moved in both Houses, calling attention to the severe agricultural distress existing in England and Ireland, mainly attributable to recent legislation, such as repeal of the Navigation Acts, and the heavy pressure of local taxation. Lord Stradbroke and Lord Desart were selected to move it in the Lords. The Protectionist Sir John Trollope was chosen to propose the amendment in the Commons. At a meeting with Disraeli in London on Monday 28 January, Stanley chose Colonel James Chatterton (MP for Cork) to second Trollope in the Commons as a representative of Irish Protectionist feeling. At the opening of parliament on Thursday 31 January 1850 the Conservative amendments, as intended, focused debate on prevailing agricultural distress. The suffering of agriculture, Stanley declared, could only be alleviated by a return to moderate Protection.62 He did not expect the Lords to abandon ‘the great experiment’ in Free Trade which, he feared, was leading to rural ruin. But he asked them to acknowledge that recent legislation and the pressure of local taxation were the real causes of agricultural distress. If the restoration of Protection was impossible, then the revision of direct taxation offered a means of mitigating the effect of Free Trade. Stradbroke’s amendment was defeated by 152 to 103 votes. In the Commons,


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Disraeli supported Trollope’s amendment by describing land as ‘a raw material’ which should be subject to the same economic principles as all other raw materials.63 But many felt that Disraeli’s speech was obscure in its intention and that he was bested in the debate by Cobden. Trollope’s motion was defeated by 311 to 192 votes, a large government majority of 119. Clearly the bulk of Commons opinion was not prepared to compromise on Free Trade, despite agricultural distress. Whigs, Liberals, Reformers, radicals, and Peelites (with the exception of nine Peelite backbenchers who voted for Trollope’s amendment) unanimously affirmed Free Trade as a crucial article of faith. ‘Whatever the British legislature may do for the agriculturalist’, The Times celebrated, ‘it has once more pronounced … that it will not re-enact the Corn Laws.’64 In supporting Stradbroke’s amendment Stanley was deliberately moderate in tone. He avoided calling for an all-out restoration of Protection and trailed tax reform as a palliative, should the reintroduction of import tariffs prove hopeless. This left the door open to Peelites or Whigs alarmed by the extent of recent Free Trade legislation and agricultural suffering. He avoided echoing the militant Protectionist feeling expressed at public meetings during the winter. Greville noted that ‘Stanley, who has never said or written a syllable during the recess, and kept aloof from all agitation, made a very reasonable speech.’ This was in contrast to Richmond, who was ‘coarse and violent, and declared he wanted to turn out the government, and restore Protection at once’. The juxtaposition between ‘the sound and fury’ pervading the country and Stanley’s moderate language was striking.65 Although both Conservative amendments were beaten by sizeable ministerial majorities and Free Trade affirmed as an unassailable orthodoxy uniting non-Conservatives, that majority might fracture over a Conservative call for the equalization of direct taxation. Encouragement was provided by Disraeli’s motion of 19 February, calling for a revision of local taxation. Disraeli accepted that neither House wished to disturb the present commercial policy, but he called for the consideration of alternative ways in which agriculture could be accommodated to the country’s altered circumstances. He proposed that poor rates be moved from real property to the general fund. Significantly, Gladstone, Goulburn, Sidney Herbert, and other Peelites supported Disraeli’s motion, which was defeated by the close margin of 273 to 252 votes, a slim government majority of twenty-one votes. Gladstone created ‘a considerable sensation’ during the debate by speaking against Graham.66 A majority of Peelites and twenty-six Liberals voted with Disraeli. Greville sensed that the Free Trade ‘experiment’ was ‘a fearful and doubtful one’, putting ‘the country

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in a greater state of fermentation and uncertainty than I have ever known it’.67 Stanley welcomed Peelite support for a fiscal policy that need not involve the restoration of Protection. So the Peelites might be prised apart. In conversation with Clarendon, Peel expressed his disgust at Gladstone and Goulburn’s forsaking him. In the event of Stanley being asked to form a government, Peel feared, the Conservative leader would be able to offer the Queen a ministerial list which was not an insult.68 This was hostile endorsement of the cautious parliamentary line Stanley continued to pursue. ‘Lord Stanley’, The Times observed in late April, ‘claims a special privilege of barking without biting as often and as loud as he pleases—a privilege which we feel sure the British public will be only too happy to allow.’69 When, during May, Stanley met a private delegation of Conservatives, led by Eglinton, urging increased efforts for the restoration of Protection, he advised them to keep their agitation within strict loyalty to the Crown and obedience to the law. This was tightrope walking of a high order. His objection to Protectionist motions in parliament, he explained, was that each successive motion involved a renewed pledge to Free Trade on the part of MPs who might be wavering, but not yet converted. ‘It was wiser to point out the working of the system, and let conviction do its work gradually.’70 By leaving the fate of Protection in the hands of lawful protest in the country Stanley shifted contentious debate away from Westminster. He ensured ‘that the agitators could only blame themselves in the event of failure’. At the same time, by affirming to the delegates his continued personal commitment to Protection, he derived ‘some little mischievous amusement’ at the idea of disconcerting any intrigue on the part of Disraeli loosening the party’s pledge to Protective principles.71 Another aspect of Stanley’s careful stance over Protection during these months related to Prince Albert’s plan for a National Exhibition celebrating Britain’s industry and arts. In late 1849 Stanley agreed to become a member of the Royal Commission, chaired by Prince Albert, charged with planning the Exhibition. Stanley and his fellow Commissioners were announced in the London Gazette on 4 January 1850. Most other political members of the Commission, which also included leading industrialists and manufacturers, were avowed Free Traders, notably Peel, Granville, Russell, Gladstone, and Cobden. As the Commission’s deliberations got under way, both the site and the building to be constructed for the exhibition became matters of public controversy. The Tory backbencher Colonel Charles Sibthorp in the Commons and Brougham in the Lords led objections to using Hyde Park for the event. Others discerned an ideological agenda in the project as


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a celebration of the benefits of Free Trade. Richmond declined to become a Commissioner on these grounds. Around the country Protectionist societies voiced their suspicions of the proposal. That the Scottish radical MP Joseph Hume, as former Vice-President of the Society of Arts, championed the event as honouring those virtues of independent exertion, laissez-faire government, and open competition, upon which he claimed Britain’s commercial success was based, further angered Protectionists. It was against this background that Stanley, on 21 March, addressed a banquet at the Mansion House inaugurating preparations for the Great Exhibition, which was attended by politicians, the Archbishop of Canterbury, foreign ambassadors, and over one hundred mayors from England, Scotland, and Ireland. Stanley’s speech proved the most significant of those made that evening to the distinguished audience, arrayed in official dress. The proposed Exhibition, he declared, provided a practical demonstration of the laudable fact that men of different political opinions could work cordially together for objects promoting the public good.72 His carefully prepared speech helped to dissipate the partisan emotions focusing upon Prince Albert’s project. The Great Exhibition, he declared, should not become a flashpoint for doctrinal differences. This pronouncement was consistent with his aim of dampening down Protectionist fervour within Westminster, while it also improved his hitherto cool relations with the court. Newdegate’s resignation as a Conservative whip in the Commons was a small price to pay for these gains. Stanley preferred that other issues, such as Ireland and foreign policy, should be taken up as instances of government failure. To expose the government’s vulnerability Stanley, on Monday 18 February, gave Clarendon ‘a gallop’ over Irish affairs. Following a violent disturbance at Dolly’s Brae, Armagh, in July 1849, during which several lives were lost, Clarendon dismissed, for their part in the incident, a number of Orange magistrates including Lord Roden. Stanley moved for a debate on the Dolly’s Brae affair. Clarendon reluctantly came over to Westminster from Dublin Castle to answer Stanley personally. He believed Stanley raised the matter simply to appease his Irish supporters, who were ‘excessively disappointed and disgusted’ at Stanley’s lukewarm advocacy of Protection and his aloofness from their agitation.73 Certainly Stanley had no intention of pressing the matter to a division, but saw it as a convenient issue with which to maintain party morale and exhibit ministerial weakness. Clarendon was acutely aware that Stanley was forcing him over from Dublin merely to put him through his paces and deeply resented the fact.74 Clarendon’s personal animosity towards Stanley proved a lasting

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legacy of this episode. In a ‘brilliant declamation’ in the Lords a combative Stanley, in the course of ‘a long, clever, and artful speech, delivered in his best style’, argued that Lord Roden had been ill used.75 The report of the commission of inquiry into the incident was garbled and inconsistent. The dismissed magistrates had, he declared, exercised sound judgement and, in summarily dismissing magistrates at the dictation of the Lord Lieutenant, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland had acted unconstitutionally. Impeaching the character of loyal servants of the State, moreover, had dangerously irritated Orange opinion in Ireland. Clarendon’s ‘tame and feeble’ reply secured for Stanley the political capital he sought. Prior to their speaking Greville was interested to see that ‘Stanley and Clarendon rushed to each other across the House, and shook hands very cordially, like a couple of boxers before setting to.’76 Abstaining from a knockout blow, Stanley was content to leave a shaken Clarendon as the bruised representative of a tottering ministry. Weightier discussion of Irish affairs attended the government’s proposal to reform the Irish suffrage and electoral registration system. Under the calamity of the famine the electoral system had collapsed, with vast numbers of voters disappearing from the register. In Stanley’s own county of Tipperary the electorate had slumped from 2,369 in 1832 to about a mere 200 voters in 1849. Introduced to the Commons on 11 February 1850, the government’s Irish Parliamentary Voters Bill extended the franchise to those paying at least £8 in poor rates or having a £5 annual share in a freehold. Registration was also overhauled as certificates and octennial revisions were abandoned and a so-called ‘automatic system’ proposed, requiring no claim for inclusion on the electoral list. Russell hoped to move the bill through the Commons speedily, having secured the second reading by 22 February. But in committee Conservatives slowed it down with amendments. The Times saw this as proof of the re-emergence of ‘a regular parliamentary opposition’, a revived Commons Conservative party, mustering about 250 votes, displaying a new degree of unity under the leadership of its ‘eloquent chief’ Disraeli.77 Greville noted that the Conservatives appeared to be ‘in a very rampant and excited state, overflowing with pugnacity and confidence’.78 Opposition skirmishing ensured that the amended measure was not passed by the Commons until 10 May. Anticipating Lords debate on the Irish Parliamentary Voters Bill, Stanley, in mid-March, was determined to ‘make an effort, either to throw it out, or to mitigate its evil consequences. If it passes in its present form the representation of Ireland is handed over bodily to the


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priests.’79 Initially, he thought the Lords second reading might be allowed without a division, the clauses in the measure relating to registration being ‘very desirable’, while it would be essential during the committee stage to raise the franchise level. But by May, when the much mauled measure finally came up to the Lords, Stanley’s objection to the bill had hardened. Between Monday 20 and Wednesday 22 May he corresponded with Aberdeen. His strong preference was now to vote against the entire measure. The bill, he declared to Aberdeen, was dangerous in terms of both its provisions and its likely consequences. If it passed he doubted the possibility of maintaining the Protestant Church in Ireland, perhaps even the Union. A body of representation would be returned from Ireland requiring repeal of the Union if the monarchy of the United Kingdom was to be preserved.80 Catholic priests would unite with radicals and republicans. The proposed suffrage, moreover, made no distinction in franchise qualification in terms of permanence of tenure or profit over and above rent. The three-generation tenant was put on the same footing as the cottier on an annual lease. Thus the bill threatened to be a revolutionary measure. Stanley now saw no possibility of amending the bill so as to render it harmless. The next election, held under the terms of the current franchise, would produce a strong Conservative vote; an election held under the proposed franchise would result in a Republican triumph. Rejection of the bill he regarded as imperative. But Stanley’s attempt on 6 June to kill the measure on its second reading failed. It did provide him with the opportunity to denounce the dangerous principle underpinning the measure. The proposed revised franchise qualification, taking no account of the permanence of lease or profit over and above rent charges, would inflict irreparable injury upon the British constitution. But he was thrown back onto amending the bill in committee. On 2 July, Lord Desart succeeded, by seventy-two to fifty votes, in raising the franchise qualification to £15. Immediately Stanley carried an amendment by fifty-three to thirty-nine votes, requiring each voter to make a claim to get on the register. Brougham, Redesdale, and the Earl of Glengall supported him. But, by 8 July, Stanley decided to refrain from further divisions on the bill, although he urged Glengall to mention the difficulties caused by the jumbling together of the county and urban franchises. All now depended upon which of the Lords’ amendments the government would be prepared to accept in the Commons. He anticipated the government ‘eating their leek’ and swallowing the £15 franchise, while fighting compulsory registration.81 In the event, Russell secured a compromise franchise of £12, while

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being forced to accept Stanley’s registration amendment. Russell estimated that, instead of an electorate of 264,000 voters as intended with the government’s original franchise, the £12 franchise qualification created an electorate of 163,000 Irish voters. This was an electorate far closer in size to the 144,000 voters enfranchised under Desart’s £15 qualification. But it still represented a substantial increase, one in forty inhabitants, as opposed to one in eighty-three inhabitants in 1849, having the vote. Forced to accept the bill, Stanley consoled himself that it had been somewhat remoulded to a more Conservative design, although Peelite support for dropping the franchise qualification to £12 deeply rankled.

… proudly eminent Stood forth two mighty warriors. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 26)

It was during June 1850 that Stanley launched a devastating attack against Palmerston’s foreign policy that shook Russell’s weakened ministry to its foundations. This was a return to his anti-Palmerstonian theme of 1843 and 1844, when he had fiercely denounced Palmerston’s constant diplomatic meddling. In January 1850 Palmerston dispatched the British Mediterranean fleet to blockade Piraeus in support of the outstanding claims of British citizens, most notably one Don Pacifico (a Portuguese Jew born in Gibraltar) against the Greek government for damage to their property at the hands of an anti-Semitic Greek mob in Athens in 1847. The incident became an exemplar of Palmerston’s diplomatic methods, brusque manner, and robust style in foreign relations. Palmerston’s subsequent failure to honour French attempts at mediation, favoured by his cabinet colleagues, led to the withdrawal from London of the French ambassador, Drouyn de Lhuys, in protest on 15 May. Palmerston subsequently misled parliament over the gravity of the situation by stating that de Lhuys had returned to Paris merely to consult with his government. But the true seriousness of the crisis became evident when representatives of the French, Russian, and Bavarian courts absented themselves from the official celebration of the Queen’s birthday. Russell, already distrustful of Palmerston and intending to remove him from the Foreign Office in due course, found the Queen and Prince Albert expressing unqualified hostility to Palmerston’s handling of the affair. Palmerston’s recent support for Turkey, against Austrian and Russian demands to return Polish and


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Hungarian refugees, had fixed the Queen in her wish to have Palmerston dismissed. On 22 May, Russell wrote to Palmerston confirming that, at the end of the session, he would have to resign as Foreign Secretary. In parliament, meanwhile, Peelite, radical, and Conservative critics of Palmerston’s foreign policy gave forceful expression to their detestation of Palmerston’s bullying diplomacy. By the beginning of June, the ‘Don Pacifico affair’ had become a cause célèbre. ‘This’, Greville noted, ‘is the greatest scrape into which Palmerston has ever got’ and there will be ‘the devil to pay’ for it.82 Stanley announced his intention, on 27 May, to call for a full Lords debate on the Don Pacifico affair. His motion was twice postponed until, on 17 June, he addressed the House so as ‘to vindicate the authority of a great nation prostituted by an attempt to enforce unjust demands upon a weak and defenceless state’.83 The Don Pacifico issue brought wavering Peelites and disgruntled Whigs, who were reluctant to join Stanley against Free Trade, alongside Conservatives in the Lords. So anti-Palmerstonianism gathered together those divided over domestic policy. Stanley framed his resolution with advice from Aberdeen and Brougham. It condemned Palmerston’s actions as doubtful in point of policy, exaggerated in amount, and enforced by coercive measures directed against the Greek nation and commerce. In his overtures to Stanley, Aberdeen professed great friendship, while carefully avoiding giving any pledge.84 Disraeli darkly suspected Aberdeen of making the Conservatives ‘catspaws in this business’, intending to overthrow Palmerston and then supplanting him with the Whigs. But Stanley roundly dismissed the suggestion, ‘saying that he did not particularly admire Lord Aberdeen, but thought him wholly incapable of such treachery as this’.85 Stanley’s denunciation of Palmerston’s foreign policy on Monday 17 June 1850 proved one of the greatest oratorical performances of his career. One hostile young Liberal peer, Lord Wodehouse, conceded that it was ‘the most brilliant speech I think I have ever heard’.86 The Lords was packed with visitors. ‘The Peeresses’ Gallery was quite full, several ladies sitting on the floor, and many more obliged to return home for want of room.’87 Stanley’s elder son recorded a vivid account of the occasion. … it was 5.15 [pm] when my Father rose and he spoke until past 8. Not for an instant did the attention of his 800 or 1,000 listeners flag: the most profound silence, broken only by cheering and laughter, prevailed during the entire time. The exceeding clearness of the style, pointed, without so much of ornament as would have seemed to direct attention from the substance to the words: the skill with which each thought, or argument, or fact, led

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on to that which followed, as if the speaker had been carelessly pursuing the course of his own ideas, while no one could have removed or transposed without disturbing the whole chain of reasoning: the rapid transitions from ridicule to grave reasoning, or indignant denunciation, often startling in their abruptness, but never unnatural—astonished even me, long accustomed to hear from him similar displays.88

The next morning’s Chronicle reported the speech as being as ‘accurate as an official précis, terse and close as one of Sir James Graham’s official despatches, luminous and graceful as a page of Macaulay, and as entertaining as the last new novel’.89 It was, undoubtedly, one of Stanley’s finest parliamentary moments, the result of ‘immense labour’ with fifteen Blue Books, as well as a fully matured talent. Malmesbury judged the speech ‘magnificent’.90 Stanley informed the Lords that it was with regret that he was forced to review the government’s policy towards Greece, because of the ‘prodigality of folly’ and ‘misplaced ingenuity’ the ministry had shown.91 The peaceful relations of Britain with the other great powers of Europe had been endangered by Palmerston’s ‘unnecessary rashness’ in the pursuit of unjust claims. Greece, he reminded the House, was a kingdom of not more than fourteen years’ standing, whose independence was guaranteed by Britain, France, and Russia. Yet Britain pressed claims on the Greek government with more the appearance of a tradesman’s bill than a national grievance. With regard to the claims of Don Pacifico he ridiculed, amid the laughter of the House, the details with which the furniture of Don Pacifico’s house had been specified. He also pointed out ‘the extraordinary absurdity’ of the British government insisting on the payment of £21,000 for alleged claims on behalf of Portugal which the Portuguese government themselves declared not worth a farthing. Yet, in indignant terms, the British government called for the payment in full of all its demands and sent its fleet to enforce the payment within twenty-four hours. The sufferings of the government of Greece had, as a result, excited the sympathy of Europe. In an extempore peroration he called on the House to vindicate the authority of a nation prostituted to the enforcement of unjust demands upon a defenceless state. It defined Stanley’s foreign policy. Interference with the internal affairs of other nations should be avoided, the European status quo established by the Vienna Settlement of 1815 preserved, and due regard for international law and treaties maintained. The government, Greville noted, ‘made but a poor defence’.92 After debating through the night, the Lords, with morning dawning, divided on Stanley’s motion. Prior to the debate the Conservatives hoped for


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a majority of ten. In the event, they gained a majority of thirty-seven, Stanley’s motion being passed by 169 to 132 votes. The following day Edward Stanley laboured on the transcript of his father’s speech to ensure it was reported by the newspapers accurately. The success of Stanley’s grave rebuke was a hammer blow to Palmerston’s credibility. The Times deemed Stanley’s speech, distinguished by its forbearance and judgement, ‘unanswerable’, declaring in ‘powerful language’ to the world that ‘the Foreign Office of England is not England; that the arbitrary and ambiguous proceedings of a minister are not within the rule of conduct approved by the peers or people of this country; and that we measure the success of our foreign policy by the strength of our friendships, not by the number of our enemies’.93 Palmerston, Stanley commented, now had only two alternatives before him, the honourable course of resignation, or an appeal to the House of Commons. At a cabinet meeting on 18 June ministers were bitterly divided. While Lansdowne and Carlisle urged an appeal to the Commons, Labouchere, Hobhouse, and Sir George Grey favoured handing the Queen their seals of office. This would force Stanley to form a government from the disparate sections arrayed against them. After Russell declared that, despite his own wish to remain in office, the desertion of colleagues left him no choice but resignation, ministerial resolve stiffened. On 20 June the cabinet finally agreed to bring on a general Commons discussion of the government’s foreign policy going beyond the details of the Don Pacifico affair. The patriotic radical John Roebuck was deputed to bring forward a motion. Following his victory in the Lords, preferring Russell to remain in office for a while longer, Stanley hoped to avoid a discussion of the Greek affair in the Commons. There would, he believed, be nothing gained by moving a Commons motion against Palmerston. It would merely raise the possibility of Palmerston’s gaining an acquittal. Disraeli agreed that a Commons debate might ‘whitewash’ over the Lords vote, while Peel, it was learnt through Lord Wilton, also feared the ministry springing ‘a mine’ in the Commons.94 But Roebuck’s announcement of his motion on the evening of Thursday 20 June forced a Commons debate. The cabinet could not allow Stanley’s victory to stand unchallenged. Disraeli’s last-minute objection to Roebuck’s motion on a point of order was overridden. Once a Commons debate became inevitable, Stanley became concerned that opposition to Palmerston in the lower chamber would appear a chiefly Peelite enterprise. Disraeli, he commanded, must speak out. Lingering suspicions among some Conservative backbenchers that Disraeli harboured hopes of a rapprochement with Palmerston made Disraeli’s prominence

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in the denunciation of the Foreign Secretary’s policy, Stanley believed, the more necessary. Conservative speakers, who would not do ‘more harm than good’, were lined up, it being known that Peel, Graham, and possibly Gladstone were preparing to speak. Disraeli, Stanley insisted, must follow Palmerston, ‘hitting hard and not sparing’ the Foreign Secretary. There must be nothing short of guerre à outrance.95 During the four-day Commons debate, beginning on Monday 24 June, however, the ministry, as Stanley feared, secured a triumphant rehabilitation. Russell lauded Palmerston as the Minister of England. Palmerston, in a spectacular speech of 4 3/4 hours on 25 June, defended his policy with the resounding leitmotif ‘Civis Romanus sum’. By speaking early in the debate Palmerston denied Disraeli the opportunity to respond immediately. Leading Peelites, including Gladstone, answered Palmerston directly. The Conservatives Walpole and Granby strongly denounced Palmerston’s diplomatic interventions. The former Peelite Sir Frederick Thesiger, returning to the Conservative fold, attacked Palmerston for insolently disregarding those international understandings regulating the conduct of civilized nations. But Peel’s disapproval and Disraeli’s belated condemnation, delivered during the close of debate on Friday 28 June, failed to defeat Roebuck’s motion. A government majority of forty-six approved Roebuck’s resolution by 310 to 264 votes. This immediately reinstated Palmerston as a popular national hero. Clarendon, who was ‘not disposed to quarrel with the Lords for the result they arrived at’, judged that the ‘Civis Romanus sum’ speech placed Palmerston ‘on a pinnacle of popularity at home, whatever it may do abroad’, ensuring that ‘no change at the F.O. is possible, and that Lord John must either go on with him or go out with him’.96 Palmerston celebrated that popular approbation in the country, and general support from Liberals in the Commons made any wish on the part of Russell to remove him from the Foreign Office an impossibility.97 The cabinet, as Stanley feared, secured an acquittal. Prince Albert bitterly regretted that an ‘unhappy combination of circumstances’ had ‘granted our immoral one for foreign affairs such a triumph in the Commons’.98 In the event, Palmerston appeared ‘the most popular man in the country’.99 Moreover, Disraeli failed to make the successful showing in the debate for which Stanley wished. Indeed, Disraeli’s speech lacked the vehemence of those delivered by Walpole and Granby, suggesting he felt an ambivalence about attacking Palmerston. Yet, Stanley was relieved that Russell was required to stay in office, the unwelcome embarrassment of prematurely trying to form a Conservative ministry being avoided. Russell’s resignation


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might, as the court wished, have given the premiership to Peel. Instead an imminent dissolution now seemed likely, with the cabinet exploiting Palmerston’s popularity. Stanley received, at the end of June, encouraging reports on the party’s electoral prospects in England and Wales. He asked Lord Naas (MP for Kildare) to gather similar information for Ireland. A successful general election might provide a firmer footing for the formation of a Conservative government with Stanley, rather than Peel, at the helm. Peel’s sudden death at the beginning of July 1850 then dramatically transformed the political situation. During the morning of Saturday 29 June, Stanley sat next to Peel at a meeting of Commissioners discussing arrangements for the Great Exhibition. Although the raising of voluntary subscriptions from the public was proving difficult and the first designs for the exhibition building evoked hostility, Stanley ‘never saw [Peel] in higher spirits’.100 That afternoon Peel was thrown from his horse while riding in Hyde Park. On Monday 1 July, Stanley called at Whitehall Gardens to extend his wishes for Peel’s recovery, but the report he received of Peel’s condition was grave. By the next day, with infection from his broken ribs bringing on bronchopneumonia, Peel was dead. The news shocked London. Stanley learnt of Peel’s death during a meeting of the Exhibition Commissioners. There had never been great cordiality between them; ‘their characters differed too widely’.101 The reserved Peel was, in many ways, the antithesis of the sociable Stanley. During the early 1830s they had been rivals. Then, after becoming Peel’s ministerial subordinate during the early 1840s, they were again, after 1846, opponents. Stanley recognized Peel’s abilities, but regarded his refusal to act as a party leader after the Corn Law crisis as both incomprehensible and dangerous, an arrogant denial of political reality. Peelite adulation of their leader was at odds with Peel’s self-avowed aloofness from party connection. On Thursday 4 July, Stanley paid Peel tribute in the Lords, praising his honesty and integrity of purpose. Peel, he stated in a double-edged compliment, had been prepared to make any sacrifice for what he saw as the welfare of the country.102 But Stanley questioned whether these sacrifices were so extensive that the paramount object of the perceived national good was sufficient reason to exact them from any public man. Peel’s accidental death abruptly removed a major figure from the political scene. Disraeli ‘seemed bewildered by the suddenness of the event, and the prospect which it offered of new combinations’.103 Stanley believed it would bring greater clarity to party alignment. Greville judged that it eased Russell’s difficulties. ‘The certainty that there is no alternative between him and Stanley—no Peel who in

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a great emergency might have been called in—will certainly prolong his term of office.’104

Blow follow’d blow, and ills were heaped on ill. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 119)

Ostensibly, the 1850 session gave the Conservatives much encouragement. In the Commons a more confident party had shown greater unity, although this required recognition of Disraeli as leader in the Lower House. Stanley’s condemnation of Palmerston’s diplomacy established ground upon which Conservatives and Peelites could come together. Disraeli’s call for the revision of local taxation brought Peelites into the same division lobby as the Conservative rank and file. While not openly abandoning Protection, Stanley managed to prevent militant popular Protectionist feeling from blocking an alternative fiscal strategy, sidestepping the reaffirmation of differences with the Peelites over Free Trade. In reply to a letter from the Ripon District Protection Association in late May, deploring the misery caused by the experiment of Free Trade, Stanley frankly stated his aversion to retaliatory measures pitting different classes of the community against each other. The Times applauded him for refusing to become ‘the instrument of the petulance and malice of a knot of political bigots’.105 Strident advocacy of Protection, Stanley recognized, would only condemn the Conservatives to a protracted and painful minority existence as an agriculturalist rump. While repeatedly exposing ministerial vulnerabilities during the session, Stanley also evaded the unpleasant responsibility of forming prematurely a Conservative government from meagre materials. To this extent his strategic hopes of the New Year were realized. Peel’s unexpected death, moreover, appeared to remove a major obstacle to Conservative reunion, as long as a clash over the restoration of Protection was avoided. But Stanley experienced deep gloom as the session drew to a close. Even success on the turf—in late June, Canezou won the Newcastle Gold Cup Stakes and in early August the Goodwood Cup by two lengths, while at Doncaster his 2-year-old Croupier won the Eglinton Stakes—did not lift his spirits. The failure to break the parliamentary majority committed to Free Trade, despite widespread rural distress, was disappointing. The error of unmoderated Free Trade, evident in agricultural suffering, appeared patent and powerful. Yet Whigs and Liberals, stiffened by Peelite resolve,


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refused to countenance a reimposition of import tariffs. In defending Protective duties, The Times observed, Stanley was engaging in mere empty words and hollow oratorical display.106 This failure revealed, Stanley dejectedly believed, the disastrous decline of the landed influence in national affairs. Six months earlier Disraeli confessed that he trembled for the aristocratic settlement of the country. ‘The impending struggle for the constitution will be a terrible one.’107 In continental Europe, after the failure of liberal nationalism in 1848, regimes were confronted by a choice between bitter class warfare and social revolution or reactionary constitutional monarchy, the latter being the path taken by France and the Italian and German states. Prominent Peelites insisted that Corn Law repeal had saved Britain from revolution in 1848, blunting popular agitation by alleviating the burden of indirect taxation. Stanley, like Croker, however, feared that increasing Free Trade had encouraged populist unrest by dividing rural and urban communities against each other, only the loyalty of the respectable middle classes facing down civil unrest. On 15 August 1850 Croker wrote to Stanley regretting that, prior to the recess, there had been no review of the session from the opposition: ‘they tell me that the Conservative party throughout the country are puzzled what to think or say.’108 Stanley’s doleful reply, on 18 August, was weighed down with despondency. That, during 1850, economic distress began to abate only reinforced his political gloom. He observed that the Lancashire weather, ‘a steady downpour without a ray of light in any quarter, and not a prospect of a break in the clouds’, mirrored his bleak view of political prospects. The session which has just passed was to my mind most unsatisfactory, not so much from the actual mischief done as from the obvious downward tendency of our course, and from the apathy with which all, or nearly all, appear inclined to let themselves float helplessly down the stream. All the tendency of our legislation and of our proceedings in parliament is towards the lowering in the weight of the social scale, of the proprietors of the soil; and while they, and those dependent upon them, are gradually sinking under the new pressure of their old burthens, the apparent success of the Free Trade policy, as exhibited by the state of the revenue and the amount of our foreign trade, furnishes a plausible argument in its favour, and blinds the eyes of the country to the real dangers we are incurring. The next election must be the turning point of our destiny; but who shall say what we will witness before that time? If the country has by that time seen its danger, and felt it to be danger, then there is some hope of a change for the better; but if this or any other Free Trade government then acquire a majority, the game

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is up; and I firmly believe we shall be in rapid progress towards a republic in name as well as in reality.109

He predicted that Russell would bring in a radical English Reform Bill extending the franchise during 1851, which would be pressed to a division, get beaten, and then allow the government to dissolve with a popular cry, despite Russell’s being ‘reluctantly and coldly supported’ by the bulk of his followers.110 With the Commons ‘ready to support the government in any radical measure’, he lamented to Croker; ‘with a body of professed neutrals in the Lords, always ready to impede our otherwise successful opposition; with a Court jealous of the power of the aristocracy, and ignorant that on that rests the power of the Throne, we are hoping and struggling against hope’.111 Moreover, the most dangerous men, he believed, were the scattered Peelite remnant. Despite friendly relations with Aberdeen, the Peelites had shown ‘themselves powerless for good’, while also preventing the Conservatives from mitigating the mischief of the government’s measures. In particular, Stanley bemoaned Peelite behaviour over the Irish Reform Bill. He believed the government would have accepted a £15 franchise. But Peelite pressure had prompted them to propose a £12 suffrage. ‘I have never before’, he confessed to Croker, ‘taken so gloomy a view of our position.’ What made matters worse was that he saw few, if any, young men coming forward imbued ‘with Conservative principles and ready to stand by and with ‘‘their order’’ ’. A ‘bad harvest at home, which we must now look to, with very large importations from abroad, and low prices, will this year seal the ruin of the land’.112 Giving Croker jeremiad for jeremiad, Stanley concluded with the lamentation that ‘we are falling into the fatal sleep which precedes mortification and death’. Stanley despaired at the absence of young talent within the Conservative party able to prevent the slide towards democratic radicalism, leading to urban domination of the landed polity. This was despite his elder son, Edward Stanley, making a successful maiden speech in the Commons delivered, Greville noted, with great fluency.113 During 1850 Stanley reluctantly accepted the volatile Disraeli as his Commons leader, the lack of any other option underlining the paucity of Conservative ability. Herries was ill and old. Granby was temperamentally unsuitable. Beresford and Newdegate were fervently anti-Catholic. During 1850, moreover, many Conservatives, encouraged by Richmond, Granby, and others, expressed, in Stanley’s view, unwise demands for the immediate restoration of Protection. This assisted Russell’s enfeebled ministry by strengthening the


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bonds of Free Trade allegiance between Peelites, Whigs, Liberals, and radicals. As a result, ‘the lowest and the shortest-sighted utilitarianism’ had ‘become the policy of England’.114 The eventual outcome, Stanley warned Croker, would be the supplanting of landed aristocratic government with republicanism. By 1850 Stanley’s network of political relationships had noticeably narrowed since his days, prior to 1846, as a member of Peel’s front bench. This reinforced his despondency—the more so as those with whom he did regularly discuss political matters espoused views he found inconvenient, while the fact that they were also his near contemporaries exacerbated his anxiety, at the age of 51, over the lack of talent in the rising generation. Among Stanley’s closest circle Malmesbury, eight years younger than Stanley, was his closest confidant, fulfilling a role similar to that taken by Graham in the 1830s. Although given to romantic indiscretions, Malmesbury provided Stanley with loyal political support, cemented by their shared passion for battue shooting. He gave advice on foreign affairs and conveyed general political gossip, being a frequent habitué of the Carlton Club and a popular attendee of London’s social gatherings. During Stanley’s absences from the Lords, Malmesbury deputized as Conservative leader. Lord Redesdale, aged 45 in 1850, was a loyal supporter and close correspondent. But Redesdale’s staunch commitment to Protection made him unsympathetic to adopting fiscal reform as an alternative to import tariffs. In 1851 Redesdale became Chairman of Committees in the Lords, which effectively removed him from party politics. Likewise, the Duke of Richmond’s public pledge to the restoration of the Corn Laws placed an awkwardness in the way of his long-standing friendship with Stanley during 1849 and 1850. Both Richmond and Redesdale were prominent at Protectionist meetings around the country, lending respectability to the aggrieved outcries of agriculturalists. During the early 1830s Richmond, eight years Stanley’s senior, had been a fellow traveller, resigning from Grey’s cabinet with Stanley in 1834. After 1835 Richmond withdrew from politics, devoting himself to his racing stud and estates. His close friendship with Stanley survived, however, through their shared passion for the turf and frequent meetings at Epsom or Goodwood. Peel’s betrayal in 1846 then drew Richmond back into public affairs. The Protectionist Lord Hardwicke, Stanley’s exact contemporary, had followed a naval career and by the late 1840s held the rank of Rear-Admiral. It was to Hardwicke that Stanley turned for advice on matters of defence and maritime commerce, such as the Navigation Acts and the impact of their repeal.

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By 1850 Stanley’s close circle of correspondents among the peerage also included those who had voted for Corn Law repeal. One such, Lord Lyndhurst, sought unsuccessfully to act as a mediator between the divided Conservatives in 1846. Stanley held the elderly Lyndhurst, who had been Lord Chancellor under Peel in 1834–5 and 1841–6, in high esteem. By 1850, despite his increasing blindness and frailty, the 68-year-old Lyndhurst was a respected Conservative elder statesman, to whom Stanley showed solicitous attention as the Nestor of the party. Lord Ellenborough, whose policies in India Stanley vigorously defended between 1841 and 1844, also voted for Corn Law repeal in 1846, although he privately preferred a moderate fixed duty. It was to Ellenborough, aged 60 in 1850, that Stanley increasingly turned for guidance on colonial and Asian affairs. The influential, if usually silent, Scottish peer the Duke of Buccleuch, who voted for Corn Law repeal in May 1846, was also aligning himself with Stanley by 1849, while Lord Aberdeen entered into close correspondence with Stanley during May and June 1850 over the Don Pacifico affair. Lord Ashburton, born in 1773, as part of the Baring connection, was an important link for Stanley with the City and the financial world. But the 75-year-old Ashburton’s death in May 1848 severed this valuable connection. Yet, when Ashburton’s younger son, Francis Baring, re-entered the Commons as Conservative MP for Thetford, in 1848, he quickly became a loyal Stanleyite, while professing progressive views. The Scottish and Irish representative peerage formed an important facet of Stanley’s network of advisers. The strong Protectionist the Earl of Eglinton, aged 38 in 1850, was significant in this regard, as were the Duke of Hamilton, the Duke of Buccleuch, and the Duke of Montrose. Together they owned huge tracts of Scottish land, particularly in Lanarkshire, Ayrshire, and Stirlingshire, and exercised immense influence north of the border in Stanley’s favour. In Ireland, Stanley’s closest aristocratic confidants were the 3rd Earl of Desart, with his estates in Kilkenny, the 4th Marquess of Downshire, and the elderly 3rd Marquess of Londonderry, aged 72 in 1850. After a distinguished military career in the Napoleonic Wars, reaching the rank of General and serving as British Ambassador to Vienna after 1815, Londonderry, despite having voted for Corn Law repeal, after 1846 did much to reinforce Stanley’s sway among the Irish representative peerage at Westminster. Wellington’s passing over to Stanley of his control over the election of Irish representative peers in 1847 was a significant enhancement of Stanley’s influence in the Lords. Consolidating his support among the Scottish and Irish peers was crucially important in Stanley’s gradual rebuilding of the Conservative majority in the Lords,


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an achievement foreshadowed by his Don Pacifico triumph of June 1850. Proof of Stanley’s growing influence was the support of Ellenborough, Lyndhurst, Buccleuch, Canning, and Aberdeen (all of whom had voted for Corn Law repeal in 1846) for Redesdale in his election as Chairman of Committees in the Lords, against the defeated Whig–Peelite nominee Lord Wharncliffe in early 1851. It was a major difficulty, however, that Stanley’s whip in the Lords in 1851, the 27-year-old 3rd Earl Nelson (who succeeded Redesdale), proved embarrassingly inept. Anxious and pernickety, the High Church Nelson did, however, share Stanley’s view that the vehement anti-Catholicism of some Conservatives threatened the status of the Church of England and weakened its influence. It was not until 1852, when the able and enthusiastic 38-year-old Lord Colville, a Scottish representative peer, replaced Nelson as whip, that a more efficient marshalling of Conservatives in the Lords occurred. If Stanley’s circle of close associates in the Lords was prestigious, it was in the Commons that the inadequacy of his confidential connections were dispiritingly evident. Disraeli, just five years Stanley’s junior, was widely mistrusted. Beresford, as chief whip, and Newdegate, as his assistant, were vehemently anti-Catholic, fiercely Protectionist, and lacking in sound judgement. Lord Granby was ardently Protectionist and temperamentally unsuited to the harsh challenges of leadership. Some compensation was provided by Stanley’s developing relationships with certain former Peelites, who were gradually moving back to the Conservative fold. Sir Frederick Thesiger (MP for Abingdon), who was Peel’s Attorney General in 1844, re-established personal contact with Stanley in the late 1840s, providing valuable advice on legal matters. By 1850 Thesiger had rejoined the Conservative opposition. Likewise, Stanley’s fellow member for North Lancashire prior to 1844, John Wilson Patten, had voted with Peel in 1846. But Patten repaired his relations with Stanley and was, by 1850, steering a course back to the Conservative opposition. Stanley’s Under-Secretary for the Colonies prior to 1845, George Hope, also voted with Peel in 1846. But, through private correspondence with Stanley, Hope was preparing the way for his eventual return to the Conservative party. Indeed, by 1851 twelve backbench Peelite MPs had forsaken their precarious independence by rejoining the Conservative opposition. Once Protection was officially abandoned as Conservative policy in 1852, a further forty-one Peelite MPs, including the former office holders Henry Corry, Sir Fitzroy Kelly, General Jonathan Peel, and Lord Charles Wellesley, returned to the Conservative fold. Yet such valuable future accessions could not redress the obvious deficiencies of ability in the Commons that Stanley perceived

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in 1850, in particular, the dispiriting absence of promising young talent. Even the party’s best future hope, Stanley’s heir Edward Stanley, marred his evident abilities by what his father saw as an unwise political intimacy with Disraeli. Edward Stanley’s regular pilgrimages to Hughenden, where he was fascinated by the self-taught Disraeli’s unorthodox philosophical views, tainted his talents in the eyes of more conventional Conservatives. In August 1850 Edward left England on a continental tour, visiting Baden-Baden, Geneva, and Paris. Outside Westminster, Stanley’s political confidants were few, if individually significant. The crusty 70-year-old Tory essayist and editor of the Quarterly Review John Wilson Croker fulfilled Stanley’s need for a philosophical sounding board. With Croker, Stanley was able to discuss those first principles of party doctrine obscured by the details of legislative drafting and the rapidity of political events. Croker also blessed Stanley’s leadership with the sacramental perspective of long historical memory. The Tory man of letters had come of age when Pitt the Younger was premier and Stanley a babe in arms. Through the Quarterly Review Croker acted as Stanley’s publicist. Croker’s essays drew directly on his private correspondence with Stanley. His drafts were dutifully submitted to Stanley’s editorial pen. After 1846 the Quarterly Review became Stanley’s house journal, as Croker’s antique authority applied a patina of venerable orthodoxy to Stanley’s pronouncements. Stanley’s disdain for the press made Croker’s role all the more important. Their eventual estrangement, in late 1852, as a cantankerous Croker deplored the party’s abandonment of Protection, was to leave Stanley without a journalistic voice. On Irish matters Stanley maintained his private correspondence with Francis Blackburne, who in 1848 was appointed Chief Justice of the Queen’s bench in Ireland. Blackburne’s acute mind and unrivalled knowledge of the law remained an invaluable resource for Stanley’s thinking on Irish affairs. In the more intimate setting of Knowsley, following the sudden death of his brother-in-law Richard Wilbraham in 1844, the friendship of his cousin Sir William Hornby provided a comfortable companionship complementing the domestic pleasures of Stanley’s family life. Sir William’s younger brother John Hornby had, as Conservative MP for Blackburn, voted for Corn Law repeal in 1846. But in 1850 he voted for the return of agricultural protection. Stanley’s political and personal relationships showed him to be a man of many acquaintances, but few close friends. That his closest circle encompassed staunch Protectionists and repentant Peelites, land-rich dukes and talent-poor MPs, an Irish lawyer, an English Rear-Admiral, and


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a sensationalist novelist turned politician revealed the varied elements Stanley was seeking to hold together, while gently weaning the Conservatives from fervent Protectionism and tempering visceral anti-Catholicism. What was lacking, as a despondent Stanley saw it in the autumn of 1850, was sufficient youth, possessed of skill, integrity, and judgement, to secure his party’s future. And if his party lacked a future, then the prospects, he feared, for Britain’s landed constitution, social stability, and economic prosperity looked bleak. Gloom, at times verging on despair, dogged the ill Stanley throughout the winter of 1850–1. Protectionists, such as Eglinton, persistently complained of the party being too lukewarm in its defence of distressed agricultural interests in England and Scotland. In response, during November, Stanley tried to restrain Eglinton, declaring ‘that pressing Protection directly, with the present House of Commons, is only courting certain defeat, and I should think our better game is to drive at equalisation of taxes’.115 This was the line Stanley followed in an ‘ambidextrous speech’ to the South Lancashire Agricultural Society at Warrington.116 A severe attack of gout, particularly acute in his right wrist, while visiting his father-in-law at Lathom House, then laid him up from early December until early January 1851. Pain and exhaustion deepened his despondency. The dramatic political events of late 1850 and early 1851 did little to lift his mood. Dejection shrouded his reaction to the ‘papal aggression’ crisis of November 1850 and the ministerial crisis of February 1851 when, following Russell’s resignation, the Queen asked him to form a government. His failure to form a ministry on this occasion, the Peelites collectively refusing to join his cabinet, affirmed his prognostications of six months earlier. By helping to bring a Whig government down, but refusing to support a Conservative ministry, the Peelites showed themselves, indeed, to be ‘dangerous men’.117

The rest, mid wild uproar, maintain’d the fight. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 10)

In October 1850 Pope Pius IX announced the restoration of a Catholic hierarchy in England, dividing the country into twelve sees and bestowing upon Cardinal Wiseman the title of Archbishop of Westminster. When sent on a special mission to Rome in 1847 Lord Minto, Lord Privy Seal and Russell’s father-in-law, encouraged the Pope in thinking the British

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government would not object to such a move. After being forced to leave Rome in November 1848, the Pope had been reinstated in July 1849 with the assistance of French troops. Earlier British hopes of Pius IX’s proving a liberal reformer were then dashed as he subsequently condemned freedom of the press and constitutional government, the suppression of the Roman Republic by military force reviving radical anti-papal sentiment in Britain. In the circumstances of late 1850, the Pope’s announcement of a restored Catholic hierarchy in England excited a furore. The recent Gorham judgement, in which the lay-dominated Privy Council overruled the Bishop of Exeter’s refusal to install an unorthodox evangelical to a Devon living, had already stirred religious passions. High Churchmen and Tractarians saw the Gorham judgement as an intolerable intrusion by the State into the affairs of the Church, while Whigs such as Russell saw it as a blow for a more tolerant Anglican Church. Russell had already infuriated the Oxford Movement by appointing Renn Hampden, well known for his critique of orthodox dogmas, as Bishop of Hereford. Russell pointedly told Brougham that he preferred ‘the Roman Catholic foe to the Tractarian spy’.118 In his Durham Letter of 4 November 1850, publicly denouncing papal ‘aggression’ and accusing Pusey of fostering the ‘mummeries of superstition’ within the Anglican Church, Russell sought to hit both targets. During popular celebrations of Guy Fawkes’ night, the following day, violent anti-papal feeling erupted, followed by ‘no popery’ meetings in Glasgow, Newcastle, Carlisle, and Reading. Some saw Russell’s Durham Letter, written without cabinet consultation, as an attempt to trump Palmerston’s popularity, following Don Pacifico, with an appeal to national Protestant feeling. Stanley suspected, however, that Russell’s zeal was, in truth, a result of the premier’s erroneous belief that Stanley intended to publish a strong Protestant manifesto. Remembering ‘how he had tripped up Peel by his Edinburgh Letter in favour of entire Corn Law repeal’, Russell thought he ‘was going to trip [Stanley] up in the same way’.119 Stanley regarded what followed as a fine example of retributive justice. The prime minister was hoist with his own petard, the Durham Letter detonating at the feet of Russell himself. Though most thought the Pope had been ill-advised, Russell’s Letter fanned the flames of intemperate anti-Catholicism. ‘On the one hand’, Greville observed, ‘it has filled with stupid and fanatical enthusiasm all the Protestant bigots, and stimulated their rage; and on the other it has irritated to madness all the zealous Catholics, and grieved, shocked and offended even the most moderate and reasonable’.120 These were the horns of the self-imposed dilemma upon which Russell was now impaled.


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Stanley considered the Pope and the Catholic hierarchy to have ‘overshot their mark’.121 Certainly the papal declaration was an unacceptable usurpation of not just spiritual, but also political, power. It was peculiarly ill-timed, indicating on the part of the Vatican an intention to re-establish a spiritual despotism to which he hoped English Catholics would not submit. He regretted the feeling it excited. He did not repent of Catholic Emancipation, and would press it again under the same circumstances; but I own that I have been disappointed in the results; and above all disappointed to see how, with a few honourable exceptions, the engagements which we believed to have been entered into have been disregarded by the mass of the Roman Catholics, and the safeguards, such as they are, eroded.122

But Russell’s Durham Letter was unnecessarily offensive, the strength of his expressions recoiling upon himself. ‘Russell has not played his cards as well as he thought he had.’123 By attacking the Puseyites with unwise severity Russell made them scapegoats for what Stanley saw as the result of ministerial ‘truckling to Popish pretensions’.124 Stanley believed Minto and Russell were aware of the Pope’s intentions, but initially chose to do nothing, their difficulties ‘much increased’ by their earlier proposal to establish diplomatic relations with Rome.125 The result, Stanley apprehended, was an intemperate agitation discomfiting both moderate Protestants and loyal Catholics. Stanley let Russell flounder in a perplexity of his own making. ‘We should’, he agreed with Malmesbury, ‘rather follow the stream, which is running quite strong enough, than attempt to take a lead of our own.’ The government had put themselves ‘in an awkward dilemma’ and ‘the more rope you give them the more chance there is of their hanging themselves at one end or another’.126 He observed to Beresford that ‘the blood of the country is fairly up. I am afraid even to a hazardous height.’ The real danger of popular sectarian violence was apparent in the neighbourhood of Knowsley, as anti-Catholic riots occurred on Merseyside. Following the influx of starving Irish labourers and cottiers into Liverpool during the famine, nearly 84,000, or 23 per cent of the borough’s population, were now Irish-born Catholics. In these circumstances Stanley saw Conservative policy as clear, while losing ‘no opportunity of protesting against the Papal aggression, to wait upon the government, and see, not what they say, but what they do’.127 If any government measure was as extreme as Russell’s language, then their Catholic supporters would be mortally offended and Dissenting support neutralized by recognition of the government’s earlier

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encouragement of papal pretensions. If the government blustered and did nothing, then Protestant indignation would overwhelm them. Russell had put himself in a position from which it would be difficult to escape, the premier seeming ‘to prefer the Protestant Dissenters to the Roman Catholics, as the portion of his supporters with whom he would least like to quarrel’.128 As always, Stanley wished to avoid inflaming religious passions. In 1846 he expressed to Croker his dislike of stimulating anti-Catholic zeal and perpetuating ‘the grand error’ that a concession to either Dissenters or Catholics was necessarily an injury to the other denomination. Though the Conservative back benches were the natural guardians of the Established Church, he was content to allow other self-appointed, less cautious, champions to rush recklessly forward, particularly if, by doing so, Russell alienated High Church Peelites, radicals such as Cobden, Bright, Hume, and Roebuck, English Catholics, and Irish reformers. As Stanley recognized, the adoption of militant Protestantism as a rallying cry, like zealous Protectionism, could scatter, rather than unite, support. His own response to the ‘papal aggression’ was to consider amending the 1829 Emancipation Act and to extend its restrictions to the assumption of any territorial titles in the British dominions without the consent of the Crown. This would be ‘the least that will satisfy the public mind’.129 John Sumner’s elevation as Archbishop of Canterbury in 1848 reassured him that calmer counsel would prevail within the Anglican Church itself. Sumner had supported Catholic Emancipation in 1829 and voted for the 1832 Reform Act. As Archbishop of Canterbury, his diplomacy was critical in resolving the furore over the Gorham judgement. But the general climate of religious feeling in November 1850, Stanley believed, should be far calmer than the hysteria excited by Russell. In his Durham Letter, Russell shrilly denounced the Pope’s actions as ‘insolent and insidious’. Stanley regarded them as ‘insolent, not insidious’.130 In early December 1850 Disraeli reported to Stanley ‘great discontent and disquietude’ within Liberal ranks.131 It had been established that there was nothing illegal in the Pope’s action, while the inflammatory language of Russell’s ‘manifesto’ sat uneasily with Liberal notions of civil and religious liberty. The cabinet were bitterly divided over the legislation to which the Durham Letter had committed them. If, Disraeli predicted, the ministry limited themselves to prohibiting the conferring of ecclesiastical and other titles by foreign powers without the permission of the sovereign, then there would be ‘great disappointment in the public heart’. But it was not until 3 January 1851 that a bedridden Stanley felt sufficiently recovered


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from his confinement with gout to write to Disraeli, from Lathom House, asking for a meeting in London on 17 January, to which Herries would also be invited.132 It was then subsequently agreed to meet at Burghley so Stanley need not endure a painful journey from Knowsley to London. But this arrangement too was cancelled and Stanley did not meet Disraeli until Saturday 1 February over dinner at St James’s Square. Because of Stanley’s frailty the gathering was a small affair, attended only by Disraeli, Herries, Beresford, Malmesbury, and Redesdale, so that ‘we might arrange our measures and talk over our course in both Houses confidentially’.133 There was much to discuss. Not only did Stanley expect the Commons ‘to run wild’ over the ‘papal aggression’ issue. He anticipated the next election deciding conclusively whether or not Free Trade was a fait accompli.134 Disraeli had prepared, in consultation with Herries, financial proposals intended to resolve the contest over Free Trade. Disraeli bluntly informed Manners that he regarded Protection in its old form as dead. By relaxing restrictions on banking he hoped to settle, under favourable circumstances, the controversy between town and country. The peculiar state of the country, he declared, appeared to be one of general prosperity, coincident with agricultural distress.135 Malmesbury, in consultation with Disraeli, also prepared proposals on local taxation. Stanley agreed that ‘we must not allow the ‘‘industrial’’ question to be sunk in the ‘‘Polemical’’—which I fear our friends will rather want restraining than urging on. I must say, however, that the Papal party seem bent on forcing matters to a crisis.’136 After arguing that only ‘a general smash of parties’ would enable the Conservatives to take office, on 19 January Redesdale informed Stanley that there was ‘a shell in the cabinet in the shape of this Popish affair ready to explode and blow them to pieces at any moment’.137 While not committing themselves, the Conservatives should await the inevitable detonation, once the government had introduced its measure. Disraeli’s mood was buoyant. ‘The political horizon seems fair, and I never knew a session about to commence with better prospects.’138 Disraeli’s optimism was bolstered by reports of ‘confidential’ intrigues with the Peelite ‘myrmidons’.139 Communications from Lord Londonderry, into which Beresford was drawn, suggested that Graham might be looking to a reunion with Stanley. Graham’s price for joining his old colleague, Beresford advised Stanley on 24 January, was the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer in a Stanley ministry.140 Londonderry was ‘no competent agent in such matters’, however, and Stanley treated this oblique approach with wary scepticism. Knowing Graham well, he put little store in such reports, conveyed through well-meaning, but questionable, intermediaries.

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Edward Stanley noted that Aberdeen during January became a frequent visitor to St James’s Square, Aberdeen’s calls becoming more numerous ‘as our prospect of power brightens’. Aberdeen’s attentions were ‘foretelling a crisis as a Mother Carey’s chicken foretells a storm’.141 Yet a convalescent Stanley refused to be enticed by such indications of friendliness, unaccompanied, as they were, by any firm commitment. Peelite flirtation, with no clear declaration of intent, was no substitute for the solid marriage of Conservative support, even if it indicated Stanley’s increasing desirability among potential suitors. Stanley’s real problem lay in the paucity of Conservative talent with which to assimilate Peelite expertise. ‘It will never do’, he told his elder son, ‘to man a prize-vessel with her own crew, unless one has men enough of our own aboard to keep them under.’142 As Disraeli reminded Londonderry, Stanley was ‘too proud to bid for power’.143 Stanley’s dinner at St James’s Square on 1 February 1851 lasted until one in the morning. The small convivial gathering ‘separated well content’.144 Disraeli’s descriptive formula regarding the state of the country, ‘general prosperity concurrent with agricultural distress’, was happily accepted and agreement given to a motion in the Commons drawing attention to rural suffering. While avoiding any commitment to the full restoration of Protection, it would allow discussion of alternative means, such as reform of local taxation and banking regulation, for alleviating agricultural distress. Likewise, they agreed, over the ‘papal aggression’ issue, to attack ‘the ultramontane party and the Pope, not the Catholics of England’.145 This would leave Russell to face the righteous indignation of High Church Peelites and Manchester School radicals. A dinner hosted by Stanley for Conservative peers at St James’s Square on Monday 3 February ‘went off well’, with all except the fervent Protectionist and Protestant Lord Winchilsea declaring themselves satisfied with the party’s proposed course.146 Stanley dissuaded the Duke of Buckingham from moving an amendment to the Address, calling for a reduction of taxation for the relief of the agricultural classes. Though agreeing in principle, Stanley thought it inadvisable for political reasons.147 The following day he spoke to a meeting of 120 Conservative MPs. He urged unanimity in responding to the important religious and constitutional measures to be brought before parliament. The Queen’s Speech he described as ‘milk and water, with a decidedly larger proportion of the latter element’.148 He deplored the absence, despite a Treasury surplus, of any measures of relief for the agricultural interest. Over ‘papal aggression’ he thought that the government should be pinned to their pledges. ‘If they meant to do nothing, if their language has been held merely to turn off unpopularity


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from themselves, what punishment did they not deserve?’ It was impossible to ignore the existence of the Pope’s power; ‘the only effect of so doing was to make it absolute and uncontrolled’. It was, therefore, ‘better to sanction it to a certain extent by law—to legalise, with a view of limiting it’.149 He proposed that the penal laws should be revised, with all merely offensive and inefficient Acts struck off, and that those retained should be no longer dead letters. Inglis asked if it was intended to draw any distinction between the English and Irish churches. Stanley firmly answered ‘Certainly not.’ In his reply to the Queen’s Speech in the Lords that evening Stanley declared that it was not his intention to propose a hostile amendment. The debate, The Times reported, ‘had nothing of the acrimony or vehemence’ which many had anticipated.150 Stanley was pleased to note sardonically that the Foreign Office had been less actively employed during the recess than was usual.151 He praised the workings of the Irish Encumbered Estates Act, though care needed to be taken not to sever connections between landlord and tenant. It was regrettable, however, that the Queen’s Speech contained no proposals for the relief of agricultural distress. This perpetuated the social divisiveness of Free Trade and ‘dissolved the close community of interest which bound together the prosperity of the manufacturer and the agriculturalist’. He avoided calling for a restoration of Protection, but deplored what he referred to as ‘the condition of the country’. And, while recent steps taken by the Pope were insolent, he saw the issue as a political rather than a religious matter, requiring a vigorous response from the government, which, nonetheless, should not deny loyal Roman Catholic subjects any of their civil or religious rights. The Times endorsed Stanley’s call for the question to ‘be permanently settled in a comprehensive and liberal spirit’.152 The disruption of government support threatened by the intemperate language of Russell’s Durham Letter, meanwhile, excited intense speculation. The introduction of an Ecclesiastical Titles Bill on 7 February exacerbated feelings by highlighting the disproportion between the premier’s impassioned language and the measure’s moderation. From Russell’s Protestant roar, it appeared, had issued forth a legislative mouse, limited to fining any cleric outside the Established Church in England and Ireland assuming a territorial title, Irish Catholic bishops who had already assumed territorial titles being exempted from prosecution. A clearly nervous Russell, having raised expectations he could not satisfy, failed to appease Peelite and radical enmity and was coldly received by the Whigs. In private, enraged Irish MPs expressed their indignation at Russell’s handling of the question and professed a readiness to support

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the Conservatives in turning the government out. Aberdeen, meanwhile, continued to call on Stanley at St James’s Square, even indicating his personal willingness to accept a moderate fixed duty on corn and consent to a Peelite–Conservative junction. Only fear of accusations of inconsistency and Graham’s determined opposition to any form of protective duty, he confessed, held him back. To Aberdeen’s discomfort Stanley declared that, if the Peelites held aloof, then some moderate Whigs, most notably Palmerston, ‘would not be scrupulous about Free Trade’. Stanley’s hint was broad: ‘if you will not join me others will’.153 Its import was clear. He was not prepared to go, cap in hand, to the Peelites; they must come to him. On 10 February it became clear, however, that Graham refused to consider any form of relief for the agricultural interest. Stanley’s scepticism about Peelite contrition was affirmed. Graham, it seemed, was happy to encourage the Conservatives to turn Russell out of office, so as to facilitate a Peelite–Whig merger in opposition to a Protectionist ministry. ‘It is clear’, Stanley concluded, ‘that we have nothing to look to from the leading Peelites but rancorous opposition.’154 As anticipated, the government fared badly in the Commons. On Tuesday 11 February, Disraeli moved his resolution on agricultural distress. By not advocating a restoration of Protection, it took Wood by surprise. After two nights of debate Disraeli’s motion was narrowly defeated by 281 to 267 votes, a narrow ministerial majority of fourteen. Amid ‘great excitement’ Edward Stanley noticed ‘considerable disorder’ in the lobbies ‘and many practical jokes were played: supporters of the government dragged into our lobbies, and vice versa’.155 A motion for relief of the agricultural interest introduced by Disraeli in March 1849 had been defeated by ninety-one votes. In February 1850 a similar motion was defeated by only twenty-one votes. Allied to fiscal reform, in February 1851, his call for relief of agricultural distress failed by a mere fourteen votes. Wood submitted his budget on Monday 17 February, continuing the income tax and applying the Treasury surplus to reduction of the national debt, replacement of the window tax with a tax on houses, and a reduction of importation duties on coffee, timber, agricultural seeds, and sugar. But it was received with cool ‘indifference’.156 Stanley now recognized in the income tax an opportunity, as long as Conservative calls for the restoration of Protection were avoided, to beat the government on the ground of national finances. This line was pressed at the political dinner held at St James’s Square on 12 February. During subsequent furious Protectionist harangue from Hardwicke and Richmond in the Lords, Stanley maintained a motionless silence.157


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Continued Commons debate on the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, meanwhile, produced further Commons invective against Russell. Cobden denounced the ‘no-Popery cry’ as ‘a disgusting display’ and Graham opposed the measure as intolerant and inexpedient.158 On 17 February, Russell again offered Graham the office of Home Secretary, but Graham declined to ‘embark in a boat which was going to sink’.159 Then, on Thursday 20 February, the government were defeated over the radical Peter Locke King’s annual motion for the equalization of the English county and borough parliamentary franchise. During the recess Russell had proposed a government Reform measure lowering the borough franchise to £6 and the county franchise to £20. He wished to avoid redistribution as suggesting that a radical recasting of the 1832 settlement was desirable. But firm cabinet objections, led by Palmerston arguing for a deferral, dogged his proposals, Hobhouse predicting such a measure ‘would break up the government’.160 In a thinly attended Commons, Locke King’s motion was passed, on 20 February, by 100 to fifty-four votes, twenty-seven ministerialists, seventeen Peelites and Conservatives, and ten Liberals opposing the motion. The Conservatives deliberately absented themselves, so as to throw onto Liberals and radicals the unpopularity of resisting the motion. Surprised by this tactic, Russell found his hostility to the radicals embarrassingly exposed. It cast him in the discomfiting role of an opponent of Reform. On Friday 21 February, Stanley called a meeting of Conservative MPs at St James’s Square to prepare for a wholesale assault on the budget. Wood proposed, he announced, to saddle the country with the income tax as ‘a perpetual burden’.161 Stanley indicated that the less said of Free Trade in the coming debate the better and suggested closing the attack, if possible, in one night. The Conservatives, he observed, ‘had had a long run … after their fox, and were on the point of killing him in the open; but they must kill him with their own pack, and not let any straggling curs come in and finish their work for them’. Peelite stray hounds were to be kept at bay. During Westminster conversations that evening, both Walpole and Henley dutifully expressed their disinclination to attempt any reimposition of duty on foreign corn.162 Stanley’s fox, however, elected to die at the feet of the radical, rather than Conservative, pack. On 21 February, Russell informed a surprised cabinet and a disconcerted Queen of his intention to resign over the Locke King vote. A Conservative attack over the budget was forestalled. This, Russell calculated, would render Stanley’s prospects of forming a ministry considerably more difficult. Palmerston and Labouchere’s insistence that

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the Locke King division was an accidental defeat was ignored. Greville noted the consternation created by Russell’s decision, no one regarding the Locke King defeat as ‘a matter of any importance’.163 Lord Canning found that ‘every kind of speculation is afloat—a reconstruction of the government, with only an infusion of new Whig blood; a coalition between the Peelites and the government; a junction of Graham simply with the government; or a government under Stanley’.164

… unnumber’d ills. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, i. 1)

After informing the Queen of his punitive resignation during the morning of Saturday 22 February 1851, Russell advised that Stanley be sent for that afternoon.165 This would, Russell hoped, call the Conservatives’ bluff. Having dined with the Queen at Buckingham Palace the previous evening, Stanley had an audience of over an hour with her and Prince Albert later that day. He asked whether Russell’s resignation was his alone or the act of the entire united cabinet. The Queen confirmed that it was the latter. He then asked if any one had been sent for prior to himself. The Queen assured him that no one else had been sent for; Stanley, being the head of the most powerful party opposed to the late government, had been summoned without delay.166 He then explained his reluctance to form a government, carefully neither accepting nor declining office until the possibility of a coalition Peelite–Whig ministry had been explored. The defeat of the late cabinet, he continued, had occurred at the hands of the radicals, not the Conservatives. The Peelites, ‘men of great ability and experience’, agreed with the Whigs over the important subject of Free Trade. Should the Peelites refuse to join the Whigs in government then Stanley would not abandon the Queen, but royal indulgence would have to be shown towards his appointments because of the lack of ministerial experience among his followers. In response to Prince Albert’s pressing him on Free Trade, Stanley declared he would not wish to alter the tariffs established by Peel, except with regard to sugar and corn, and even with reference to those items any amendments being as moderate as was consistent with his retention of public confidence. In conclusion the Queen agreed to revert to Russell, Aberdeen, and Graham. Stanley deftly passed the poisoned chalice back to his opponents.


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Following the audience Stanley expressed his satisfaction with the situation. He considered Russell’s ‘resignation as a plot arranged by the late ministry, with the connivance of the Prince, to throw upon him the ridicule and discredit of having attempted to form a government and failed’.167 By neither accepting nor declining office he sought to highlight the Peelites’ dilemma. If they refused to join Russell it could only be on purely personal grounds, which would damage them with the country. If the leading Peelites did join Russell, then he anticipated a number of them, disliking their new allies, seceding to the Conservatives. In either event, any subsequent attempt to form a Conservative ministry would stand on the proven inability of the Peelites and Whigs to construct a credible administration. ‘It is’, he observed, ‘a bungling fisherman who strikes at the first nibble: I shall wait until my fish has gorged the bait, then I am sure to land him.’168 During the evening of Saturday 22 February the Queen brought Russell, Aberdeen, and Graham together. As requested by Victoria, Russell invited the Peelites to join him in a reconstructed ministry, while Stanley spent Sunday 23 February drawing up draft Conservative cabinet appointments, allowing for the eventuality of Aberdeen and Gladstone’s either accepting or refusing to join him. By Tuesday 25 February it was clear that neither Aberdeen nor Graham, because of their objections to the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, were prepared to join a Russell cabinet. At this point Russell abandoned his attempt to form a coalition ministry. The Queen then held an audience with Aberdeen, who declared he lacked the parliamentary strength to sustain a government. Late in the morning of Tuesday 25 February, Stanley was recalled to the Palace and charged with the commission to construct a Conservative government. But it proved, despite Russell and Aberdeen’s incapacity, heavy going. Stanley was annoyed, during his second audience with the Queen, by Prince Albert’s interjections with objections to a Protectionist ministry, so endeavouring to alarm the Queen. This was, in part, the result of Peel’s tainting of the court’s attitude towards him, which only dissipated gradually over the succeeding years as Stanley’s contact with the Queen became more frequent. The Queen professed herself seriously offended by Disraeli, who, in the Commons the previous day, had made unwarranted use of the Queen’s name in repudiating Russell’s statement that Stanley had actually ‘declined’ to form a government. Only Stanley’s repeated assertion that without Disraeli a cabinet could not be formed brought her to accept his possible inclusion. Disraeli, Stanley urbanely observed, had had to make his own position. Men who make their own positions will say

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and do things which are not necessary to be said or done by those for whom positions are provided.169 The Queen’s last words were: ‘Remember that you make yourself responsible for him.’170 From fear of Disraeli’s being appointed Foreign Secretary, the Queen suggested Stanley himself might take the Foreign Office. But this, he thought, was impractical. As prime minister he could not occupy any other post than head of the Treasury, while his health prevented him from undertaking the double labour of both appointments. A day of ‘unceasing occupation’ followed.171 Stanley now sought to construct a cabinet upon the ruins of Whig–Peelite union. Before returning to St James’s Square, he immediately called on Disraeli at Grosvenor Gate and then Lord Canning in Grosvenor Square. A beaming Stanley declared to Disraeli, ‘Well, we are launched!’172 But by the evening ‘all had gone wrong’.173 Stanley became, his son observed, ‘more despondent and depressed than I ever remember to have seen him’. Both Aberdeen and Canning (whom Aberdeen recommended as his ‘alter ego’) declined to take the Foreign Office. The Queen blocked Wellington’s appointment as Foreign Secretary ad interim and the banker Thomas Baring expressed reluctance to join the cabinet. After dinner that evening Stanley’s spirits failed him, ‘leaning his elbows on the table, and resting his head in his hands, he sat in that posture without speaking or moving during at least quarter of an hour’.174 Yet, despite the intense activity of the day, he still gave his younger son, Freddy, aged 10, his usual lesson in the morning, subsequently calling ‘for his chessboard’ and playing ‘two games in succession, in which he became as entirely absorbed as if no such things as Courts and Cabinets existed’. Deploying the various ministerial pieces on the administrative board, however, proved difficult. The following morning Gladstone, having just returned from Naples via Rome, visited St James’s Square. Disraeli had already expressed his willingness to serve under Gladstone if he could be brought over. Stanley offered Gladstone a choice of office. But their conversation was brief. After considering Stanley’s invitation and consulting with Canning, Gladstone declined, during the morning of Thursday 27 February, to participate in a Stanley ministry. Gladstone’s friend the Peelite Duke of Newcastle (formerly Lord Lincoln) strongly urged Gladstone not to join Stanley, arguing that if the Peelites ‘held off now the crisis must end shortly in placing the summa rerum in our hands’.175 Gladstone was relieved when, during their meeting, Stanley speculated about a 5s. or 6s. duty on corn. This provided Gladstone with an excuse for his refusal. Stanley also received a rejection from Henry Corry,


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Conservative MP for Co. Tyrone and Peel’s Secretary to the Admiralty, Stanley having counted on Corry for the Colonial Secretaryship. Finally, Ellenborough unexpectedly rejected Stanley’s approaches, wishing to have nothing to do with a possible import duty on corn.176 At 2 p.m. on Thursday 27 February the Conservative leadership, comprising Disraeli, Sir John Pakington, Sir Edward Sugden, Walpole, Malmesbury, Hardwicke, Joseph Henley, Herries, Manners, Lord Eglinton, and Lord Lonsdale, gathered at St James’s Square. All attempts to adhere Peelite support had failed. Moreover, just as the meeting began, a letter arrived from Sir Robert Inglis withdrawing his agreement to serving under Stanley.177 This was attempting to make bricks with precious little straw. Thrown onto meagre Conservative resources, Stanley sought to allocate cabinet offices, securing at least six ministers in the Commons. Their policy would be a 5s. fixed duty on corn and 3d. off the income tax preparatory to its total repeal. But even this modest undertaking collapsed. The final blow came when both Henley and Herries, who arrived late, seemed nervous of assuming cabinet posts. Henley, whom Stanley did not know well, ‘seemed frightened rather than pleased at being in the cabinet, and appeared paralysed’. Disraeli remembered Henley, sitting with his back against the wall, looking like ‘an ill-conditioned Poor Law Guardian censured for some act of harshness’, his black eyebrows ‘deeply knit’ and ‘his crabbed countenance doubly morose’.178 Herries, Malmesbury recalled, ‘looked like an old doctor who had just killed a patient, and Henley like the undertaker who was to bury him’.179 Edward Stanley sensed that ‘a panic seems to have fallen in a moment on [Stanley and Disraeli’s] colleagues: it was as though their senses had suddenly forsaken them’.180 An exasperated Stanley immediately announced to Disraeli, ‘This will never do!’ After a painful silence, he declared that he must decline the formation of a government because of his inability to find members of the Commons who were prepared to cooperate with him. Malmesbury looked distressed, Henley mute and grim, and Herries said nothing. ‘Beresford frantically rushed forward’ and took Stanley aside, informing him that there were several men waiting at the Carlton expecting to be sent for. An impatient Stanley enquired who. Beresford replied ‘Deedes’, Conservative MP for East Kent. ‘Pshaw!’ exclaimed Stanley. ‘These are not names I can put before the Queen.’181 He briskly thanked his colleagues for their attendance and excused himself so that he could immediately write to the Queen. As an exasperated Stanley wrote to the Palace, conveying his inability to form a government, his dejected colleagues lingered in the hall. Malmesbury observed that ‘there is not a woman in London who

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will not laugh at us’. Herries, who seemed annoyed, mumbled about not receiving his summons to St James’s Square until three o’clock and that he remembered governments which were weeks forming. Henley remained silent and grim. Lonsdale exclaimed, ‘Never was such an opportunity lost.’ Beresford ‘looked like a man who had lost all at roulette, and kept declaring that he believed Deedes was a first-rate man of business’.182 But, by late afternoon on 27 February, Stanley’s attempt to construct a Conservative ministry had ended in embarrassing failure. A bitterly disappointed Disraeli regarded their refusal of office as a ‘ludicrous catastrophe’.183 But Stanley consoled him that they ‘had got to the point at which boldness would have degenerated into rashness’.184 Undoubtedly, the blow would be ‘mortifying to us as a party’, but it remained, Stanley insisted, important to ‘save the amour propre of our friends, as far as it can be saved’. Wellington suggested to Stanley that the outcome was not an unsatisfactory one, the Whigs having the burden of office thrust back upon them. The Whigs ‘are in the mud, and now you can look around you’.185 But Disraeli countered that, if the Whigs were in the mud, the Conservatives were ‘not in a more clean predicament’. This only left Lady Stanley, who seemed in high spirits, expressing her great relief, on account of Stanley’s health, that her husband was not assuming office.186 The lessons Stanley drew from the crisis were patent and painful. While Protective duties remained part of Conservative policy none of the leading Peelites would participate in a Stanley cabinet. Earlier Peelite flirtations lacked serious intent. He believed Graham’s actions during the previous weeks had injured his position with the moderate Peelites, while ‘Aberdeen has beyond measure astonished the world at large.’187 His own Conservative resources, meanwhile, were shown to be inadequate. As the unsympathetic Greville noted, ‘Everybody goes over the lists of peers and Commoners whom Stanley can command, and the sorting presents the same blank result of men without experience or capacity, save only Herries, who is past seventy, and has been rusting for twenty years or more; and Disraeli, who has nothing but the cleverness of an adventurer.’188 The Conservative party appeared a cheque without funds. Stanley was profoundly irritated by the vanity of the least capable within his party. ‘It is bad enough’, he remarked to his elder son, ‘to have to deal with mere sticks instead of men: but when these sticks all fancy themselves great ministers what can one do?’189 At the critical moment of decision they were, like Herries and Henley, overtaken by chronic self-doubt. The sole comfort to be drawn from the crisis was that, while a


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severe blow to the Conservatives, it had failed to enhance the credibility of any other party. The behaviour of the Peelites, who seemed prepared to bring governments down but not willing to serve in either a Whig or a Conservative administration, caused general perplexity, while the Whigs, under the impulsive Russell, vulnerable to radical extortion, had shown themselves incapable of providing firm government. The resumption of office by Russell, therefore, was bound to be short-lived. Parties, Stanley concluded, seemed in deadlock.190 Significantly, he did not approach Palmerston, primarily because, during the previous twelve months, antiPalmerstonianism had proved the strongest ground upon which to draw Conservatives and Peelites together. The crisis, without suggesting a cure, had exposed the afflictions of all. He believed a dissolution could not be far distant, the next election being a turning point in their destiny. All depended on the coming general election, he told Manners, which must be near at hand. As ‘parties are so evenly balanced … no government can long command a majority in the present House of Commons’.191 Had it been July he might have run the risk of forming an administration, ‘but with a hostile majority to face, all the business of the session to transact, and colleagues, with only one or two exceptions, in the lower House of no official experience, he felt he should be damaging the cause and injuring the country if he persevered’. If, following a dissolution, the constituencies were in favour of import duties and no income tax he would be ‘ready to take the helm and steer the ship into the harbour of safety’. On Friday 28 February, Stanley gave an account in the Lords of his abortive attempt to form a government. He described the Peelites as men of the highest ability, who seemed to exercise their talents solely to render the formation of any ministry an impossibility.192 He confessed his own party was deficient in men of official experience. Malmesbury, while admiring Stanley’s speech as manly and straightforward, feared this was ‘praising his opponents at the expense of his friends’.193 Stanley also took the opportunity, during his speech, to announce that, if the next parliament should pronounce in favour of Free Trade, he should feel himself bound to yield to what must then be regarded as the deliberate decision of the nation.194 While this important statement was purposely overlooked by his opponents, it prepared the way for Stanley to slip his neck out of the collar of Protection. A reform of direct taxation, an equalized land tax, and a differentiated property tax might replace the lost cause of import tariffs. Stanley’s elder son celebrated that they were ‘now free from the Protectionist incubus, that no-one could ask us to reimpose a Corn Law, the formation of a government on that basis being proved impossible: that,

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therefore, the Conservative party might now be reconstructed on a wider and sounder basis’.195 The Spectator made the same point: Lord Stanley has declared that he will abandon the principle of Protection if a Protectionist majority be not returned at the next election; thus throwing his cause into the Registration Courts, and fairly submitting in prospective to the verdict of the people—releasing himself from the impracticable position of attempting to reverse an accomplished national decision. If all this is not progress, we know not what is.196

In a similar vein, The Times suggested that those historic antagonistic principles, traceable to the immutable instincts of nature, between progress on one side and Conservatism on the other, were now cast off. ‘No party can disclaim resolutions of progress; the question is scarcely one of route—only of speed.’197

A brave man’s spirit its vigour soon regains. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 7)

As, on 3 March 1851, an embattled Russell resumed the premiership, the Peelites continued to refuse to join him because of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. Russell returned to office damaged, weak, and unpopular. A dissolution appeared imminent and Stanley now looked to a broader reconstruction of parties. The three pressing questions of papal supremacy, parliamentary Reform, and Free Trade, he told Hardwicke on 9 March, really constituted a struggle for the whole constitution.198 This was a contest between aristocratic and democratic principles which he had seen underlying Westminster politics since 1846, when that ‘apostle of expediency’ Peel relinquished parliamentary authority to populist demands. By 1851 Russell’s vulnerability to radical pressure threatened to hasten that process, with aristocratic surrender to popular intimidation subverting parliamentary government. The forces of democracy looked to suppress the landed interest by the double operation of a Reform Bill swamping the counties with urban voters, and agricultural prices so low as to ruin all concerned with rural production, and with it the aristocratic landed constitution.199 The survival of the ‘limited monarchical system’ was dependent upon the landed interest. If the political power of the landed aristocracy was maintained the throne was safe. If not, Stanley predicted, then democratic republicanism would triumph. Stanley’s prognostications were confirmed during a long conversation with Wellington, who, despite


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his physical frailty, forcefully deplored the weakness of the executive and the recent advances of Liberalism.200 On 4 March, Stanley wrote to the elderly Whig Lord Ponsonby, through whom he was in contact with the wealthy Whig peer Earl Fitzwilliam. They all, Stanley suggested, came from the same stable. They were all ‘old Constitutional Whigs’.201 This was a very different thing, he argued, from present-day Whigs such as Russell, who were abandoning the aristocratic landed interest to democratic urban forces. Ponsonby informed Disraeli that Stanley’s letter gave him ‘infinite pleasure’.202 Both Fitzwilliam and Ponsonby indicated, during the difficult days of late February, their support for Stanley. A possible alignment of moderate Whigs and Conservatives, in defence of the landed aristocratic constitution, began to take tangible form. After February 1851 Stanley increasingly looked to Whig ranks, rather than the leading Peelites, for accessions of support, as Peelite conceit remained in greater supply than contrition. Stanley regarded Russell’s reinstated cabinet as hopelessly weak. ‘The Whigs are daily’, he observed to Croker, ‘proving their utter extinction as a party, and are at our mercy at any moment.’203 There were no young Whigs. Nor did Stanley expect Russell’s ministry to be supported by parliament. Professions of friendship between Russell and the radicals were hollow. The Peelites, meanwhile, had ‘confessed their inability to form an administration by themselves, and their unwillingness to join any other section’. Before too long, perhaps before the end of the session, Stanley anticipated the Queen’s sending for him again. ‘Sooner or later we must make an attempt to govern the country, which will soon be impatient to be governed, and not left, as at present, at the mercy of any and every wind that blows.’204 He was receiving, by 11 March, favourable reports of the Conservatives’ electoral prospects.205 It was predicted that sixty seats might be won from both Whigs and Peelites. The vital question was not if, but when, Russell’s cabinet would fall. He feared Russell’s ‘playing a dirty game and trying to force on a collision, to wriggle himself out of office’.206 The Conservatives should endeavour ‘to keep the present rickety administration on its legs, at all events till it has got through a considerable portion of the routine business of the session’.207 There was little danger in leaving the ‘papal aggression’ issue open, as Russell dare not appeal to the country on this question. Moreover, Stanley himself feared ‘the violence of friends hardly less than the skilful machinations of opponents’ over this issue.208 Russell’s promise to introduce a Reform Bill, however, did pose a danger. Made ‘in the worst way’, Russell’s promise, Stanley observed, was delivered without forethought in order ‘to buy off’ radical threats

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over Locke King’s motion in February. Thus, it was no less mischievous than his Durham Letter. If a bill were carried on Locke King’s principle, Stanley believed, then the territorial interest would be rendered powerless, with urban votes contaminating the rural electorate. The least dangerous course would be for the Conservatives to assume office before the end of the session, but ‘the later the better’.209 As far as possible, he informed Croker on 14 March, ‘we should keep to a defensive policy, not provoking unnecessarily a conflict with an administration on sufferance, but not allowing them to pass measures, if they are disposed to do so, which may cause fresh embarrassments for the future’. A week later he observed to Croker that ‘there is at the moment an utter break-up of all parties, except the Protectionists, who are, notwithstanding their recent disappointment, gradually consolidating themselves’.210 It was essential to keep ‘the now awakened spirit of Protestantism … within reasonable bounds’. At the same time, ‘the real struggle, the real battle of the constitution which has to be fought is whether the preponderance, in the legislative power, is to rest with the land and those connected with it, or with the manufacturing interests of the country’. On Friday 14 March, Stanley addressed a large party meeting at St James’s Square. He undertook the delicate task of explaining his reasons for declining office, drawing ‘a picture of a hostile Commons, threatened impeachments, a combined opposition headed by all the exofficial members, and the helpless situation of even the ablest minister until he has grown familiar with the routine of his business’.211 He then asked his hitherto silent audience whether or not he still possessed their confidence. He was loudly applauded. Following this endorsement, he urged the necessity of sparing the government a little longer, until the supplies were passed and parliament could be safely dissolved. ‘We have them like chickens in a coop,’ he declared; ‘we may keep them as long as we please, and put an end to them when we please: their existence is always in our hands.’ As Lord Lonsdale noted with pleasure, Stanley had ‘recast his parts’ and was now ‘ready for anything’.212 Stanley’s caged poultry scratched their way through the remainder of the session. He recommended to Disraeli that debate on the second reading of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill on 14 March be taken as pro forma, the Conservatives, in their silence, neither supporting nor opposing the measure.213 The Peelites, however, forced a prolonged discussion. In response to a plea from Russell, Stanley promised Conservative support for the second reading, which passed on 25 March by 438 to ninety-five votes. Disraeli voted with the majority, Gladstone going into the opposition


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lobby. Both Graham’s and Gladstone’s denunciations of the measure were welcomed by the Conservatives, particularly Disraeli, as widening the breach between the leading Peelites and Russell. ‘Every speech uttered by the Peelites’, Edward Stanley noted, ‘places them in a worse position with their constituents.’214 ‘The Peelites are at last dished,’ Disraeli confided to his sister.215 On Wednesday 2 April over 300 parliamentary and political friends attended a dinner for Stanley at the Merchant Taylors’ Hall. With Thomas Baring in the chair, Stanley proposed an extended parallel between the current state of the party and that in 1838, when he and Peel had been honoured in the same hall. As then, the Conservatives faced a weak Whig administration. As then, the Conservatives were opposed to unjust taxation and committed to the defence of Protestant institutions and the Established Church. He appealed to the party to stay as united as it had been then, promising to form a government after the next general election. Their recent failure, he declared, would soon give way to final triumph, a victory ‘of which I am now as sanguine as ever’.216 In the meantime, he would call for a fair and just fiscal policy, safeguarding the economic interests of the whole community, both agricultural and industrial. The most eloquent part of his speech was an eulogium on Lord George Bentinck as the St George of Protection. By his energy and courage Bentinck had raised their great party from its alarm and apprehension, helping to lead it to the position they enjoyed today. At the conclusion of his speech, Malmesbury observed, the enthusiasm of the audience was unbounded; ‘the cheering when [Stanley’s] health was drunk must have lasted five minutes’.217 Nine days later Disraeli attempted ‘another great rally of the party’ by moving an amendment to Wood’s budget, calling for any remission of taxation to be applied to relief of the distressed condition of owners and occupiers of land.218 So might the fatal war of classes between rival industries and competing political interests, brought on by Free Trade, be ended through fiscal reform. The government beat the motion by a narrow majority of thirteen, 263 votes against and 250 votes for the amendment being recorded. The vote, Disraeli reported, showed ‘the Whigs are as weak as before, our troops have gone in great spirits into the country’.219 On 11 April, Disraeli was gratified to receive, via Richmond, the formal thanks of the Sussex Society for the Protection of Agriculture for his efforts on behalf of the rural interest. Because of his increasing disgust for Russell’s government, it became known that Gladstone had almost given his support to Disraeli’s motion.

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Greville recorded Graham’s well-informed view that, once Stanley publicly forsook any form of Protection following a general election, Gladstone as well as Sidney Herbert, and perhaps more doubtfully the Duke of Newcastle, looked to rejoin him. The ‘old Conservative party may be thus rallied and reunited’.220 Stanley’s strategy of allowing Whig incapacity to foster a Conservative revival appeared, by mid-April, to be working. Once again, Aberdeen called at St James’s Square explaining his conduct during February and reassuring Stanley of his wish not to coalesce with the Whigs.221 ‘Stanley has obtained some adherents’, Disraeli noted, ‘whom he did not reckon on and is prepared to take the helm, and I think will display a personnel for which the world does not give his cabinet credit.’222 A postprandial indiscretion of Hobhouse, newly created Lord Broughton, that the Whig government was now virtually defunct was relayed to St James’s Square. In early May, Stanley wrote to Lady Lyndhurst informing her he expected shortly to be asked to form a government. He hoped that her husband, the elderly former Lord Chancellor, who had served under Peel, would be prepared to become President of the Council in the next Conservative cabinet. Lyndhurst’s support, he observed, would strengthen his hand immeasurably. Lyndhurst hesitated solely on the grounds of expense, his pension being diminished by the amount of any official salary, but raised no other difficulty.223 On Thursday 1 May, Stanley attended the formal opening of Prince Albert’s Great Exhibition in Hyde Park. This presentation of the works of industry of all nations, with 14,000 exhibitors showcasing over 100,000 exhibits, was housed in Sir Joseph Paxton’s huge 18-acre glass and iron structure dubbed by Punch the ‘Crystal Palace’. As a commissioner, conscientiously attending meetings throughout March and April, Stanley loyally supported Albert’s ambitious scheme, which attracted in the following months over 6 million visitors. Meanwhile, in Westminster, the Conservatives supported radical moves against Russell’s government, further exposing the ministry’s vulnerability. The radical Hume’s motion, on 2 May, limiting the grant of the income tax to one year, instead of the three years proposed by Wood, was supported by Granby among others. Hume’s motion was carried against the government by 244 to 230 votes. Disraeli and the radicals found common cause in hostility to the current form of the income tax, although their grounds for attacking Whig finance came from opposing doctrinal directions. ‘Ministers’, Edward Stanley noted, ‘have accepted their defeat very quietly, knowing that a second resignation would place us in power.’224 On the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill going into its Commons Committee stage on Friday 9 May, the radical David Urquhart


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moved an amendment to the effect that the Pope’s actions had been encouraged by the government. The Conservatives took advantage of this radical move to oppose the ministry, which failed by the surprisingly close margin of only 280 to 201 votes, the government having secured overwhelming majorities on all other stages of the measure. Stanley disliked the form in which Urquhart’s amendment was introduced, but considered the dangers arising from defeat of the amendment, the Conservatives possibly being charged with inconsistency having supported the second reading, ‘not very serious’.225 While prepared to support radical assaults on the government, Stanley remained wary of Conservative initiatives. Returning to London from Newmarket in early May, he was disturbed to discover that Spencer Walpole intended to move an amendment on the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill, enabling anyone to launch an action against a perceived violation of the measure. This became known as Walpole’s ‘informers clause’. Although accepting that Protectionism was best left in abeyance, Walpole’s commitment to the privileges of the Church of England remained as firm as ever. Stanley was alarmed, he confessed to Disraeli, to find ‘how strong the current runs, on both sides of the House, in favour of the ‘‘informer’’ clause, which we determined to abandon’.226 As he feared, Walpole’s announcement of his intended amendment led to a ‘bungle’. Walpole himself, at the critical moment, displayed a chronic indecision. The government sought to incorporate Walpole’s amendment in their redrafting of the bill, which, after much wrangling in the Commons, and with the Carlton Club thrown into ferment, was agreed on 6 June. Stanley considered the episode ‘disastrous’. It had disheartened their supporters and shown want of power among the Conservative Commons leadership, depriving them of authority and confidence.227 After occupying considerable Commons time, the amended Ecclesiastical Titles measure passed into law, only to become a legislative dead letter. No prosecutions were sought under the terms of the Act, and Gladstone’s government repealed it in 1871. Although Stanley preferred assaults on the ministry to come from the government side of the House, by late May renewed expressions of Peelite support were sufficiently strong for him to endorse a joint Conservative–Peelite attack on Wood’s much mauled budget. On Sunday 18 May, Aberdeen, a reliable barometer of the political outlook, again called at St James’s Square. ‘In the most friendly language’ Aberdeen ‘reported that the Peelites were only holding aloof until the one obstacle to reunion’, the Conservative commitment to Protection, ‘was smoothed

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over: that disposed of, no further difficulty would exist’.228 By early June, after attending the Ascot races and a grand banquet given by the Queen in St George’s Hall at Windsor, Stanley agreed with Aberdeen a financial resolution objecting to the budget on the grounds of its endangering public credit.229 On 16 June, Disraeli taunted the ministerial front bench over their financial policy. On 30 June he moved a resolution to the effect that there should be no material sacrifice of public income to changes in taxation. In the event, Disraeli’s resolution was beaten by a large majority, 242 to 129 votes. But it served its political purpose by indicating common financial ground upon which Peelites and Conservatives might come together. Gladstone both spoke and voted for Disraeli’s motion. Thus far did the weeks immediately following the February crisis give Stanley hope that his next, not too distant, attempt to form a government would be more successful than his last. On 23 May he won the Oaks Stakes at Epsom with his filly Iris at 6 to 1 odds, an event regarded by some, Disraeli noted, as compensation for his political failure of earlier in the year, and by others as an omen of his recovery of office.230

Achilles rais’d on high. (Derby, The Iliad of Homer, ii. 289)

During late June, Stanley was drawn away from Westminster by alarming news of his father’s ill health. The 13th Earl had become increasingly deaf and partially paralysed. During May, Stanley had already been briefly recalled to Knowsley following his father’s suffering a severe apoplectic attack after returning from a visit to the Crystal Palace in London. As reports from Lancashire worsened, Stanley left St James’s Square, accompanied by his elder son, to attend his father’s sickbed. After two weeks of struggle, on 30 June 1851 the 13th earl died, his funeral taking place on 8 July. A procession of nearly a mile in length followed the hearse to Ormskirk Church from Knowsley Hall, where the 13th Earl’s body was laid in the Derby family vault alongside his father. The 52-year-old Stanley immediately assumed his hereditary title as the 14th Earl of Derby, his elder son becoming Lord Stanley. Three weeks later the 25-five-year old Lord Stanley left for an extensive eight-month tour of India, leaving his father to oversee the legal discussions attending the 13th Earl’s estate. During early July the new Lord Derby undertook the sale of his father’s menagerie, the finest in England, perhaps Europe. Under the terms of his


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father’s will the Queen and the Zoological Society took their choice of the collection. The remainder, comprising ninety-four species of mammals and 318 species of birds, Derby put up for auction in early October, the sale drawing bidders from all over Europe. Liverpool Corporation took responsibility for his father’s collection of 15,000 specimens, which, as part of a newly built Liverpool Public Library, Museum, and Art Gallery opening its doors in 1860, became the core of the City Museum on William Brown Street. This fulfilled the late Earl’s wish that his collection should become a public amenity for the people of Lancashire. The extensive buildings which had housed his collection on the Knowsley estate were converted into labourers’ cottages. Derby’s annual income from his newly inherited estates of over 80,000 acres was approximately £110,000 per year. He was now the greatest landowner in the north-west and one of the richest in Britain. Approximately half the Derby estates were urban, rather than agricultural, property. Land in Liverpool, Bury, and Preston, as well as property bought in Bootle and Kirkdale for urban development, significantly enhanced the estate income, while the mineral resources, coal, stone, and clay, of the Derby estates in Pilkington, Bury, Bickerstaffe, and Rainford were returning large profits. Although he initially succeeded in reducing the huge debt of over half a million pounds he inherited from his father, by the time of his own death in 1869 the estate remained significantly in debt. The annual costs of the Knowsley estate (house, stables, gardens, park, and game) were approximately £36,000. In 1851 sixty-seven household servants were working in Knowsley Hall, a similar number of estate workers attending to the grounds. Derby was spending, by the time of his own death eighteen years later, a further £1,300 annually on the remainder of his stud under the management of Timothy Forshaw. Interest on debts, taxes, and family charges comprised an additional annual outgoing of £36,000. By the 1860s additional expenditure on the estate, including agents, was amounting to approximately a further £70,000 per year. After his succession Derby left the close management of the Lancashire estates largely in the hands of his cousin Sir William Hornby, comptroller of the Knowsley properties and close companion, George Hale, the Knowsley land agent, and the long-serving and conscientious William Moult, the estate accountant. Under the oversight of Sir William and Hale numerous stewards, such as the elderly Robert Statter and, after 1853, his eldest son, Thomas Statter, managed the Derby properties in Lancashire. Unlike his elder son after 1869, Derby did not closely supervise the estate business of Knowsley, preferring to delegate such matters to Sir William and Hale.

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Though his income was large, Derby’s commitments and expenditure after 1851 continued to exceed it, giving a personal edge to his political pleas concerning agricultural distress. Nonetheless, he took justifiable pride in his reputation as a benevolent landlord through his support for agricultural improvement and his assistance to those on his estates suffering from hardship. In 1852 he strongly objected to Cobden’s suggestion that he supervised the voting of his tenants, forcing Cobden to apologize and retract the accusation. Certainly visitors to Knowsley observed friendly relations between Derby and his Lancashire tenants, employees, and neighbours. During the 1850s he instituted a form of social security for the cottagers on his estate, with contributions from employee and employer, designed to ensure no one went to the workhouse or had to ask for charity. He also received the same medical attention as his tenants from Dr Gorst of Knowsley, Derby’s local doctor, who was paid £300 a year to attend the poor gratis.231 Yet such dutiful stewardship was combined with a firm defence of the family’s property rights. In an infamous incident in November 1843 a Knowsley gamekeeper, Richard Kenyon, was fatally shot by a band of poachers. One of the poachers, John Roberts, was subsequently hanged for the murder and the others given prison sentences. For nearly thirty years, supported by Thomas Bolton, Derby had taken a personal interest in the family’s Irish estates at Ballykisteen. Here, at his own expense, he oversaw the building of improved labourers’ cottages, an Anglican parish church, a Roman Catholic chapel, and schools supplied with textbooks approved by the National Education Board. He also introduced the practice whereby tenants were repaid for permanent improvements to their land at the end of their tenancy, as an inducement to more efficient agriculture. ‘It will thus be seen’, the Irish Farmers’ Gazette applauded, ‘that Lord Derby has introduced upon his own estate a real system of tenant-right which, if more general, would go far to settle that much vexed question.’232 During the famine of the 1840s he committed all his rental income, supplemented by additional funds, to the provision of local employment and improvements to the property. Evictions were rare. This was a continuation of the stewardship Derby had taken up as a young man in the 1820s when, strongly influenced by Maria Edgeworth’s literary denunciation of absentee landlords, he assumed a personal interest in the family’s Irish estates. But, as Irish Chief Secretary in the early 1830s, he was insistent that respect for the law was an essential precondition to social and moral improvement in Ireland, providing the necessary framework for benevolent stewardship and enforcing the mutual obligations of tenant and landowner. Similarly, as a landlord during the 1840s and 1850s, this


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informed his view of his own rights and obligations. In July 1859 the murder of one of his employees, William Crowe, brought his prescriptive beliefs to the fore. The incident occurred on his small Doon estate, at Cooga in Co. Limerick, just 6 miles from Ballykisteen. Under the instructions of Charles Grey, who succeeded Thomas Bolton as land agent of the Ballykisteen estate in 1858, Crowe was proceeding to serve an eviction notice when he was shot dead and his head pummelled with stones. His body was found 200 yards from a police barracks.233 Eventually, the tenants to be served notice, for non-payment of rent and neglect of their land, the brothers Michael and James O’Brien, were arrested for Crowe’s murder. But it came to light that other tenants on the Doon estate had helped to hide the O’Brien brothers and obstructed their capture. Charles Grey, with Derby’s authorization, immediately served eviction notices on eleven other tenants. The elderly parish priest, the Revd Hickey, was also evicted. This was, The Times commented, rough justice, but it was preferable to no justice at all. The decision was, it concluded, a public act in the cause of social order, vindicating the supremacy of law in Ireland.234 In September 1864 Derby’s elder son visited Ballykisteen, where Thomas Bolton’s son Jasper Bolton had one year earlier replaced Charles Grey as land agent, Edward Stanley reporting to Knowsley what he found. The large tenancies, he informed Derby, were doing well, encouraging the gradual consolidation of holdings. The small tenancies, however, were faring badly. With a typically unsentimental eye, Stanley predicted that the tenants on smaller holdings must eventually fail, short of Derby’s repeatedly setting them up on their legs again after every bad season or loss of their cattle. Awareness of this fact, Stanley judged, was the real meaning of the cry of small tenants for fixity of tenure ‘i.e. slovenly farms, ill-paid rents, and more mouths on the land than the land can feed’.235 Efficiency and self-sufficiency would only come through the gradual absorption of smaller tenancies into larger holdings. This desirable, if painful, process, he confidently believed, would naturally occur under what he reported was the capable management of Jasper Bolton and eventually produce a more sustainable form of tenant occupancy. Derby immediately agreed to support the remedial transformation of smallholdings Stanley described, with the prospect it offered of greater efficiency.236 When Freddy Stanley visited Ballykisteen in August 1866 he reported that ‘everything is going on most satisfactorily’, although Fenianism remained a force in the neighbouring towns.237 Derby’s outdoor passions, away from politics and the family estates, remained horse racing and game shooting. He became Steward of the Jockey Club in 1849. His subsequent letter of 1857 to the Jockey Club,

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prompted by the shady activities of certain owners, became a much cited statement of the appropriate conduct for gentlemen of the turf. With his trainer of twenty-two years, John Scott, it was estimated Derby won during his career a total of £94,000 in stakes alone. Horses such as Dervish, De Clare, Canezou, Iris, Uriel, and Toxophilite brought him much personal pleasure, some financial profit, and considerable prestige. During April and May 1851 his 3-year-old filly Iris won the Newmarket Sweepstakes and the Oaks at Epsom, his 4-year-old Uriel won the Queen’s Plate at Newmarket and the Craven Stakes at Epsom, while Uriel brought him victory in the Newmarket Match. In October his filly Iris again won the Newmarket Sweepstakes. As the favourite for the 1858 Derby, Toxophilite almost gave him the double trophy of the Blue Riband of the turf and the premiership in the same year. Frequently during the parliamentary session he would catch the mail train to Newmarket and spend the morning with Scott and his horses. After watching his stable exercising in the early morning mists around Warren Hill and The Limekilns, or visiting Tattersall’s sale ring in the centre of the town, he would return to London by train later in the day. This routine continued until 1858 when, because of ill health and the pressures of the premiership, he sold a greater part of his horses in training. In 1863, as his health deteriorated, he sold off his stud and formally retired from racing. Meanwhile, his love of battue shooting with his spaniels, usually accompanied by Malmesbury and surrounded by his Knowsley tenants and labourers serving as beaters, endured. Derby’s literary interests also continued to provide relaxation away from public affairs. A lifelong affection for Shakespeare was shared through his readings of the Bard to the family when they were gathered at St James’s Square or Knowsley. In his private conversation and parliamentary oratory he often inserted Shakespearian quotations, while his translating of ancient and foreign contemporary poetry, such as Manzoni’s ‘Ode to Napoleon’, provided private pleasure. The historical romances of Sir Walter Scott were his favourite modern literature. In the early 1850s he began a blank verse English translation of Homer’s Iliad. In 1862 a collection of his translations was privately printed. Then, in 1864, a full translation of the Iliad was published to complimentary reviews. As a fellow Homeric scholar, Gladstone wrote to Derby congratulating him on the universal acclaim his translation received. Although lacking the poetic power of Alexander Pope’s rendition of Homer’s epic tale of heroism, love, and revenge, Derby regarded the greatest merit of his edition as the literalness of the translation. Scholarly opinion concurred, noting its simple elegance and poetic force.


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Derby was aged 52 when he succeeded to the earldom. The fine aquiline features of his youth remained, drawn leaner by advancing years and frequent illness. His worsening short-sightedness required increasing use of spectacles. He also dressed himself in ‘a conspicuously old-fashioned manner’. Derby was, Sir William Fraser remembered, the last whom I recollect in a green frock-coat. He usually wore a canarycoloured cashmere waistcoat; double eye-glass pendant from a hair chain; and, swathed round his neck, a mass of material, not silk, nor satin, falling down, which completely hid his shirt-front; and certainly deserved Moore’s appellation of a ‘feather-bed-neckcloth’. His shirt collars stood somewhat high on his cheeks, and he occasionally dipped his chin deeply between them. His trousers, usually of a light-coloured cloth, had a peculiar slit on the outer side, near the instep, which has completely gone out of use.238

The greater sharpness illness and advancing age gave to his features emphasized his penetrating, self-assured gaze, his face now also being framed by impressive mutton-chop whiskers. Nevertheless, as Disraeli observed, he still looked younger than his years. Derby’s social exuberance and robust manner also survived. The diplomatist Lord Stratford Canning noted that, although Derby ‘gave offence now and then by a sort of schoolboy recklessness of expression, sometimes even of conduct, his cheerful temper bore him out and made him more popular than others who were always considerate but less frank’.239 As a host he would test the boundaries of courtesy by singling out ‘one of his guests, not always a man’, and losing ‘no opportunity of making him or her absurd: nor ever spare them when he could make a joke. Neither relationship nor sex was regarded.’240 Such ‘chaffing’ echoed the lively social manner of his grandfather. Derby’s famous jokes quickly circulated among London society. Once, when posed the old riddle ‘Why is heaven like a bald head?’, he declined the conventional answer, that both were shining places where no parting existed, by immediately replying that ‘in neither place is a ‘‘Whig’’ in sight’.241 Prim Whig hostesses expressed their shock ‘that Lord Derby said such things! ‘‘It was in such bad taste’’, you heard them say.’242 In characteristic vein in 1852 Derby chastised the dapper, youthful-looking Sir John Pakington, serving as First Lord of the Admiralty, for being late arriving from Spithead for a cabinet meeting with the remark that, ‘I’ll be bound there never was such a swell there before.’243 ‘With the pleasantest of smiles’, it was recalled, Derby’s ‘face in repose was sinister’.244 This sharp social manner kept colleagues and acquaintances at a distance from the private self, while in London he only rarely visited

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the Carlton Club and spent most of his time either at St James’s Square or the House of Lords. The half-mile distance between Westminster and St James’s Square formed the boundary of his world in the metropolis, with early morning rides in Hyde Park, with either his daughter or his younger son, providing his regular exercise. Only his social equals and the sharers of his country pleasures, it was noticed, such as Malmesbury, were extended intimacy. Others were left to misinterpret apparent flippancy as a lack of seriousness, confusing an aristocratic insouciant manner with the man. This gave a continued edge to Bulwer Lytton’s literary cameo of Derby as ‘frank, haughty, rash, the Rupert of Debate’. Yet, despite his nonchalant manner, Derby was serious about politics. He immersed himself with equal intensity in all the activities in which he engaged. Malmesbury remembered that one of Derby’s favourite sayings was ‘One thing at a time’.245 Malmesbury also recalled that while Derby was in the field his whole attention was in his present pursuit, and woe to him who attempted to divert him to politics at the time. When over, he could divest his mind completely of the sport and sit down at once to write the longest and most important paper straight off, in a delicate hand and without a single erasure—so completely could he in a few moments arrange his subject in his mind.246

In April 1855 Malmesbury was struck by Derby’s returning from a week at Newmarket so full of his racing that he knew nothing of recent developments regarding the Crimean peace negotiations in Vienna. Yet, once back at Knowsley, he immersed himself in discussion of British diplomacy and Conservative strategy. Such was the habit and power of this remarkable man, Malmesbury recalled, to concentrate his whole mind upon the subject occupying him at the moment and the ability to dismiss it totally with equal facility.247 On Disraeli’s first visit to Knowsley, in December 1853, he found a Conservative ‘cabinet council’ was followed, after dinner, by a game of racehorses into which Derby threw himself wholeheartedly, the host being ‘as much amused and as eager to win the few shillings of which the pool consists as if it were a real race and heavy stake’.248 It was this disposition that led the hostile Greville to deprecate the contrast between Derby the statesman and Derby the sportsman. When, in April 1851, Greville encountered Derby in the betting room at Newmarket, a few weeks after failing to form a government, Greville believed Derby’s admirers and supporters would have been astonished to witness his behaviour. He


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was in the midst of a crowd of blacklegs, betting men, and loose characters of every description, in uproarious spirits, chaffing, rowing, and shouting with laughter and joking. His amusement was to lay Lord Glasgow a wager that he did not sneeze in a given time, for which purpose he took pinch after pinch of snuff, while [Derby] jeered him and quizzed him with such noise that he drew the whole mob around him to partake of the coarse merriment he excited.249

Greville doubted there was ‘any other man who would act so naturally, and obey all his impulses in such a way, utterly regardless of appearances’. While Greville’s sense of propriety was offended by Derby’s manner, it was undoubtedly a key to his personal popularity. The solemn gravity of Peel, the moral earnestness of Gladstone, or the reclusive rectitude of Russell were in sharp contrast to Derby’s nature. His unfeigned enjoyment of the company and colourful repartee of professional ‘bookies’, such as Crutch Robinson, Jemmy Bland, and Jerry Cloves, at Epsom and Newmarket, was alien to the milieu at Drayton Manor, Hawarden, and Pembroke Lodge. But his unaffected nonchalance was not, as suggested by detractors or frustrated subordinates in social situations, symptomatic of shallowness or a lack of serious intent. Rather, he believed that aristocratic hearts did not belong on sleeves. What both detractors and admirers of Derby agreed upon was that he was the most effective contemporary speaker in the Lords. His forceful rebuttals of an adversary’s arguments displayed his formidable debating talents. The verb ‘to Hansardize’, to confront an opponent with former statements recorded in Hansard proving earlier expressions of a different opinion, was attributed to Derby. The galleries were always full when he rose to deliver a major statement to the House. In the Lords, Derby’s oratorical style lost the sharp partisan edge that had marked his speeches in the more combative atmosphere of the Commons. A more dignified, less coarse, and more refined tone, better suited to the Upper House, characterized his major statements in the Lords, although the telling force of his argument remained. Antagonists such as Granville and Clarendon complained that he too easily shaped facts to suit his argument, that in Derby’s mouth the truth was too casually sacrificed to serve his tactical purposes. But his adherents relished the elegant force with which he could bear down on an opponent’s position. There was, Malmesbury observed, ‘a peculiar charm’ in his pure tenor voice, matched by the precision of his diction.250 Derby was punctilious in his own pronunciation, habitually correcting Granville across the floor of the House. ‘Granville always said ‘‘wropped up’’—‘‘wrapped’’ Lord Derby would say in a tone clear to the

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reporters.’251 The Whig Lord Campbell believed there was no subject which Derby could not ‘master thoroughly and lucidly explain. His voice and manner are so good that no one can hear him without listening to him.’252 Derby, Fraser observed, delivered speeches with a natural simplicity. He would begin his speech standing close to the table of the House of Lords: occasionally placing both hands upon it: he would then, after a time, step back, close to the bench from which he had risen; and continue his explanation with some slight gesture. As he became more impressive, he would advance his right foot near the table; the left foot being kept behind and resting on the point. His action, with his right hand only, was studied. His manner of holding his head very dignified; but without stiffness, or formality.253

No indication was ever given of the nervousness he experienced before giving a major statement, ‘although he never’, he confessed to colleagues, ‘closed his eyes the night before an important speech’.254 He once admitted to Macaulay that ‘my throat and lips when I am going to speak are as dry as a man who is going to be hanged’. Yet, Macaulay added, nothing could be more composed than Derby’s manner when he was on his feet. The only fault he had as a speaker, Macaulay concluded, was that he appeared to be ‘a man who never knew what fear or modesty was’.255 Derby successfully concealed, behind his easy manner, the very real strains of public effort. After a major speech he would typically return to St James’s Square and unwind with ‘a gossamer meal of cold chicken’, with his feet in a basin of hot water, and then ‘compose his mind for slumber’ by reading ‘a stupid novel’.256 An insouciant aristocratic manner concealed genuine effort. But by 1851 a recurrent pattern of illness was also apparent. During the parliamentary session, from January to July each year, Derby was usually active and energetic. Powerful performances in the Lords evoked memories of his debating triumphs of the early 1830s. Yet, by August and September, the recurrence of gout and symptoms of depression, irritability, and despair would darken his spirits. During 1847 the exertions of the spring gave way, by September, to an apprehension about public affairs that lasted through to December. During November an attack of gout exacerbated his sense of despondency. In 1848 Derby’s revived optimism of early in the year was undermined by an attack of gout in July. During August he was laid up with one of his most severe attacks of gout to date. As he descended into melancholy another serious attack of gout in November rendered him a despondent invalid. During


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1849 and early 1850 his spirits remained buoyant. The opportunity to challenge the parliamentary dominance of Free Trade appeared to present itself. The excitement of the parliamentary session during February 1850 produced powerful performances in the Lords, culminating, in June, in his triumphant condemnation of Palmerston over the Don Pacifico affair. Yet, by August, back at Knowsley, he was again in deep gloom, verging on despair. Bedridden by a severe attack of gout in December 1850, it was not until January 1851 that he slowly recovered his health and spirits. The possibility of her husband’s assuming office in February 1851 caused Lady Derby real anxiety. The burden of government, she feared, might break his strength. Then, once again active in Westminster from February to June 1851, by September, following the death of his father, he was dogged by gout and looking very ill. For the rest of Derby’s life, throughout the 1850s and 1860s, a familiar pattern of exertion, followed by illness and depression, unfolded. His immersion in the excitement of race meetings at Newmarket, Aintree, and Epsom during the spring of each year marked out this annual emotional and physical cycle. The drama of events at Westminster complemented his absorption in the exhilaration of the turf, the intense excitement of racing and betting accompanying his active engagement in political struggle. The retreat to Knowsley during the recess after the main racing calendar then usually prompted a seasonal debility. As the exhilaration of the London season passed, and as the days drew shorter, his spirits dropped. Knowsley itself, by the 1850s, provided a far from salubrious atmosphere. The biochemical effects of poisoning on the estate from the chemical industries in neighbouring St Helens and Widnes began killing trees in the grounds. Gaseous waste, in the presence of moisture in the air, formed droplets of hydrochloric acid, which destroyed local vegetation, while liquid manufacturing waste containing calcium sulphide and calcium hydroxide drained into the local waterways. The district around St Helens, a local resident observed, was ‘one scene of desolation’, pockmarked by huge heaps of noxious industrial waste.257 While the acres of parkland immediately surrounding Knowsley Hall and the prevailing easterly winds provided some protection from such hazards, by the late 1840s the country around Knowsley was bearing the visible scars of some of the worst environmental damage of industrialization. In the 1880s Derby’s elder son, with fond childhood memories of family life at Tunbridge Wells, preferred residing in the healthier Kentish countryside, away from what he characterized as the dreary Lancashire climate. But it was to a rain-sodden Knowsley that Derby withdrew each year, during those reclusive months of the autumn,

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with parliament not sitting and the main racing season over. Unlike his father he did not have zoological study to occupy his time. Nor, like his elder son, did close supervision of the estate offer him satisfaction. In later life both of Derby’s sons suffered from bouts of depression, an enervating periodic sense of impending danger or calamity following great exertion, which they recognized in the psychology of their father.

Notes chapter 1. groomed for greatness: 1799–1830 1. 2. 3. 4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

The Times, 25 Oct. 1869, 7. Creevey to Ord, 1 Nov. 1829, cited in Sir Herbert Maxwell, The Creevey Papers (1906), 545. John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols (1903), i. 160. C. C. F. Greville, A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV, King William IV and Queen Victoria, ed. Henry Reeve, 8 vols (1888), viii. 182. There are a number of possible reasons for Greville’s strong antipathy to Derby. As Greville grew older he felt increasing guilt about his own weakness for what he came to regard as the rather coarse pursuits of horse racing and gambling, the refuge of blackguards and betters. In Derby he perhaps came to see the baser part of his own personality. It also seems likely that Derby’s patrician manner grated on Greville, who was always sensitive to social slights. Greville was a grandson of the Duke of Portland. W. F. Monypenny and G. E. Buckle, The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, 6 vols (1910–20), iii. 328. T. E. Kebbel, A History of Toryism (1886), 332. G. E. B. Saintsbury, The Earl of Derby (1892), p. v. T. E. Kebbel, The Earl of Derby (1893). F. J. C. Hearnshaw, Conservatism in England: An Analytical, Historical and Political Survey (1933), 211. J. B. Conacher, ‘Party Politics in the Age of Palmerston’, in P. Appleman, W. A. Madden, and M. Wolff (eds), 1859: Entering An Age of Crisis (Bloomington, Ind., 1959), 166. W. D. Jones, Lord Derby and Victorian Conservatism (Oxford, 1956). R. Stewart, The Politics of Protection: Lord Derby and the Protectionist Party, 1841–1852 (Cambridge, 1971). 15th Earl of Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party: The Political Journals of Lord Stanley, 1849–1869, ed. J. Vincent (Hassocks, 1978), 72. E. B. Lytton, memo, [1869? ], Lytton MSS, C.13, fo. 21. M. S. Hardcastle, A Life of John, Lord Campbell, 2 vols (1881), ii. 324. Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 127. Edward Bulwer Lytton, The New Timon, Knebworth edition (1875).

424 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

notes Arnold to Jane Forster, 22 May 1859, cited in The Letters of Matthew Arnold, ed. Cecil Lang (Charlottesville, Va., 1996), i. 456. Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, [11 Mar. 1849 ], cited in Benjamin Disraeli, Letters, v: 1848–1851, ed. M. G. Wiebe, J. B. Conacher, John Matthews, and Mary S. Millar (Toronto, 1993), 152. G. W. E. Russell, Sixty Years of an Empire, 1837–1897 (1897). V. Gibbs (ed.), The Complete Peerage of England (1916), v. 218. E. S. Roscoe and H. Clerque (eds.), George Selwyn: His Letters and his Life (1900). Millard Cox, Derby: The Life and Times of the 12th Earl of Derby (1974), 94. Creevey to Elizabeth Ord, 27 Apr. 1822, cited in Maxwell, Creevey Papers, ii. 37. Peter Levi, Edward Lear: A Biography (1995), 44. Creevey to Elizabeth Ord, 15 Dec. 1822, cited in Maxwell, Creevey Papers, ii. 37. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 184. J. J. Bagley, The Earls of Derby, 1485–1985 (1985), 164. Henry Liddon, The Life of Edward Bouverie Pusey, 3 vols (1893), i. 13. Notebook on Indian History, c.1816, Derby MSS, 1/2. The Times, 22 Dec. 1834, 3. Liddon, Life of Pusey, i. 15. Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, Conversations on the Parables of the New Testament for the Use of Children (1828), 2. Stanley’s poem ‘At the Close of the Year 1817’, Derby MSS, 1/1, and Derby, Conversations on the Parables, 11. E. G. W. Bill, ‘Miscellaneous Historical Notes’, Christ Church Archives, fos. 167–81, quoting from the correspondence of Walter Hook with his family. Ibid. ‘John Evelyn Denison, Viscount Ossington’, Dictionary of National Biography, 22 vols (1908–9). Ibid. Stanley, 25 Mar. 1934, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser. (1830–91), xxii. 636. Bill, ‘Miscellaneous Historical Notes’, fos. 168–74. Christ Church Collection Books, Christ Church Archives, ii.6.4. Edinburgh Review, 35 (July 1821), 304. Thomas Short Notebook, Christ Church Archives, Cen.i.a.4. Stanley to Lansdowne, 20 Sept. [1821 ], Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Lansdowne to Stanley, 12 Sept., 1822 Derby MSS, 115/1. Stanley to Lansdowne, 29 Aug. 1822, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Lord Malmesbury, Memoirs of an Ex-Minister, 2 vols (1885), i. 17. Stanley to Lansdowne, 29 Aug. 1822, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19.

notes 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85.

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Ibid. Lansdowne to Stanley, 12 Sept., 1822 Derby MSS, 115/1. Thoughts and Suggestions on the Education of the Peasantry of Ireland (1820). Lansdowne to Stanley, 12 Sept. 1822, Derby MSS, 115/1. Lambton to Grey, 6 Feb. 1822, cited in A. Mitchell, The Whigs in Opposition, 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1967), 163. Derby to Creevey, 10 Aug. 1822, cited in Maxwell, Creevey Papers, ii. 40. Lansdowne to Holland, 17 Jan. 1825, cited in Mitchell, Whigs in Opposition, 182. Stanley, 30 Mar. 1824, Hansard Parliamentary Debates, new ser. (1820–30), xi. 11–3. Bulwer Lytton, The New Timon. Stanley, 6 May 1824, Hansard, new ser., xi. 559–65. Stanley, 11 May 1824, Hansard, new ser., xi. 704–5. Grey to Wilson, 19 Aug. 1824, cited in Mitchell, Whigs in Opposition, 183. Bagley, Earls of Derby, 166. Ibid. Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, A Journal of a Tour in North America, 1824–1825 (privately printed, 1930), 12. Stanley to Lansdowne, 11 Dec. 1824, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Stanley, Journal of a Tour in North America, 14. Ibid. 151. Ibid. 143. Ibid. 335. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 36. Ibid. 48. Ibid. 80. Ibid. 99. Stanley to Lansdowne, 11 Dec. 1824, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Stanley, Journal of a Tour in North America, 105. The poem Stanley composed while travelling down the St Lawrence ‘On the Death of ’s Baby’ is in Derby MSS, 1/1. Mrs Stanley, Journal of a Tour in North America, 139. Ibid. 171. Ibid. 184. Stanley to Lansdowne, 11 Dec. 1824, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Stanley, Journal of a Tour in North America, 219. Stanley to Lansdowne, 11 Dec. 1824, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19.

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notes

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

Stanley, Journal of a Tour in North America, 247. Stanley to Lansdowne, 10 Feb. 1825, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Stanley, Journal of a Tour in North America, 272. Stanley to Lansdowne, 10 Feb. 1825, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Stanley, Journal of a Tour in North America, 310. Stanley to Lansdowne, 11 Dec. 1824, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Ibid. Stanley to Lansdowne, 10 Feb. 1825, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Ibid. Stanley, Journal of a Tour in North America, 237. Stanley to Lansdowne, 10 Feb. 1825, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Ibid. Stanley, Journal of a Tour in North America, 315. Stanley to Derby, 22 Sept. 1824, in private hands. Stanley, Journal of a Tour in North America, 319–22. Ibid. 330. Ibid. 336. Stanley to Lansdowne, 10 Feb. 1825, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Ibid. Ibid. Oliver MacDonagh, O’Connell: The Life of Daniel O’Connell, 1775–1847 (1991), 215. Stanley to Lansdowne, 10 Feb. 1825, Lansdowne MSS, (3) 7/19. Lord Stanley to Edward Stanley, 3 Feb. 1825, in private hands. Stanley to Mrs Wilbraham, n.d., in private hands. Stanley to Mrs Wilbraham, 15 Sept. 1824, in private hands. Stanley to Emma Stanley, 26 Sept. 1829, in private hands. Stanley, Conversations on the Parables, 22. Ibid. 248. Ibid. 55. B. Hilton, Corn, Cash, Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments, 1815–1830 (Oxford, 1977), 313. Holland to Grey, 2 Sept. 1825, cited in Mitchell, Whigs in Opposition, 192. Stanley to Spring Rice, 15 June 1825, Derby MSS, 4/1. Talbot to Stanley, 31 Mar. 1825, Derby MSS, 14/1. Stanley to Webster, 20 Feb. 1826, Derby MSS, 165/1. Stanley, 6 Apr. 1826, Hansard, new ser., xv. 90–2. For Stanley’s correspondence with his father-in-law regarding their opposition to the Liverpool Manchester Railway Bill, see Derby MSS, 115/7. Stanley, 8 May 1826, Hansard, new ser., xv. 977–9. Stanley to Emma Stanley, 24 Apr. 1826, in private hands. Stanley to Emma Stanley, 20 June 1826, in private hands. Ellice to Grey, 29 Jan. 1827, cited in Mitchell, Whigs in Opposition, 193.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

notes 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

427

Stanley, 20 Feb. 1827, Hansard, new ser., xvi. 586. Stanley, 20 Feb. 1827, Hansard, new ser., xvi. 589. Canning, 1 Mar. 1827, Hansard, new ser., xvi. 770–1. Stanley, ‘Notebook: Parliamentary Proceedings 1825–1828’, 6 Mar. 1827, Derby MSS, 2/3. Brougham to Lansdowne, 1 Apr. 1827, cited in Mitchell, Whigs in Opposition, 192. Stanley to Canning, 5 July 1827, Derby MSS, 165/3. Stanley to Huskisson, 6 Sept. 1827, Derby MSS, 165/4. Lord Colchester (ed.), The Diary and Correspondence of John Abbot, Lord Colchester, 3 vols (1861), iii. 526. Stanley, Letter-book, 6 Nov. to 24 Dec. 1827, Derby MSS, 166. Stanley, ‘Notebook: Parliamentary Proceedings, 1825–1828’, 26 Feb. 1828. Greville, Journal, 25 Feb. 1828, i. 130. Stanley to Huskisson, 16 Jan. 1828, Derby MSS, 165/4. Stanley, 18 Feb. 1828, Hansard, new ser., xviii. 517–24. Stanley, ‘Notebook: Parliamentary Proceedings, 1825–1828’, 26 Feb. 1828. Stanley, 22 Apr. 1828, Hansard, new ser., xix. 23–6. Stanley, 13 May 1828, Hansard, new ser., xix. 711–12. Stanley, 19 May 1828, Hansard, new ser., xix. 804–7. Stanley, ‘Notebook: Parliamentary Proceedings, 1825–1828’. The Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, 1820–1832, ed. F. Bamford and the Duke of Wellington, 2 vols (1950), ii. 192. Stanley, 23 June 1828, Hansard, new ser., xix. 1495–8. Stanley, ‘Notebook: Parliamentary Proceedings, 1825–1828’. Stanley, 27 June 1828, Hansard, new ser., xix. 1543–4. Graham to Stanley, 15 July 1828, Graham MSS, bundle 2, cited in C. S. Parker, The Life and Letters of Sir James Graham, 2 vols (1907), i. 71. Recollections of a Long Life by Lord Broughton, ed. Lady Dorchester, 6 vols (1909), iii. 283. Stanley to Russell, 22 Oct. 1828, cited in The Early Correspondence of Lord John Russell, 1805–1840, ed. R. Russell, 2 vols (1913), i. 282. Spring Rice to Stanley, 31 Dec. 1828, Derby MSS, 62. Stanley, 10 Feb. 1829, Hansard, new ser., xx. 202–8. Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, ii. 240. M. G. Brock and M. Curthoys (eds.), The History of Oxford University, vi (Oxford, 1997), 58. Stanley, 26 Mar. 1829, Hansard, new ser., xx. 1458. Wynn to Bentinck, 16 June 1829, cited in Mitchell, Whigs in Opposition, 216. Stanley, 2 Apr. 1829, Hansard, new ser., xxi. 131–3. Stanley to Bishop of Limerick, 27 Mar. 1828, Derby MSS, 165/3. Stanley, 14 May 1829, Hansard, new ser., xxi. 1331–2. Stanley, 12 June 1829, Hansard, new ser., xxi. 1768.

428

notes

160. 161.

Brougham to Stanley, [?] Jan. 1830, Derby MSS, 116/1. Creevey to Elizabeth Ord, 1 Nov. 1829, cited in Maxwell, Creevey Papers, ii. 203. Creevey to Elizabeth Ord, 14 Nov. 1829, cited in Maxwell, Creevey Papers, ii. 205. Brougham to Stanley, [?] Jan. 1830, Derby MSS, 116/1. Stanley, 18 Feb. 1830, Hansard, new ser., xxii. 724. Stanley, 5 Mar. 1830, Hansard, new ser., xxii. 1337. Graham, 12 Feb. 1830, Hansard, new ser., xxii. 438–59. Stanley, 28 Apr. 1830, Hansard, new ser., xxiv. 204–7. Stanley, 12 Feb. 1830, Hansard, new ser., xxii. 429. Stanley, 13 May 1830, Hansard, new ser., xxiv. 672–3. Stanley, 16 June 1830, Hansard, new ser., xxv. 410. O’Connell to Barrett, 1 July 1830, cited in The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, ed. W. J. Fitzpatrick, 2 vols (1888), i. 208. See M. Brock, The Great Reform Act (1973), 116. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 61. S. Reid, The Life and Letters of Lord Durham, 2 vols (1906), i. 215. See Derby MSS, 15/1. Stanley was not the only member of Grey’s administration who had experienced, if briefly, incarceration. Lord Lichfield, Master of the Buckhounds, had been sentenced to ten days in a Geneva gaol for riotous conduct in the streets, while Sir John Hobhouse was committed to two months in Newgate in 1819 for publishing his pamphlet A Trifling Mistake. Grey to Stanley, 14 Dec. 1830, Derby MSS, 117/5. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 77. Grey to Stanley, 10 Dec. 1830, Derby MSS, 117/5. Stanley to Grey, 11 Dec. 1830, Derby MSS, 165/3. Ellenborough diary, 23 Nov. 1830, cited in A. Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries (1952), 23.

162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175.

176. 177. 178. 179. 180.

chapter 2. coercion and concession: 1830–1834 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

R. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (1988), 298. Anglesey to Graham, 30 July 1831, Graham MSS, 23/1, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 171. O’Connell to his wife, [?] Nov. 1830, cited in A. D. Kriegel, ‘The Irish Policy of Lord Grey’s Government’, English Historical Review, 86 (1971), 25. Althorp to Grey, 26 Aug. 1832, cited in Kriegel, ‘Irish Policy of Lord Grey’s Government’, 24. Grey, 22 Dec. 1830, Hansard, 3rd ser., i. 55. Stanley to Melbourne, 28 Dec. 1830, Derby MSS, 167/1. See also Stanley to Melbourne, 30 Dec. 1830, Derby MSS, 167/1. In July 1829

notes

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

429

Greville commented that Irish disorder required ‘a man of energy and determination who will cause the law to be respected and impartially administered’. Arguably, Stanley arrived in Dublin to do precisely that. Stanley to Melbourne, 30 Dec. 1830, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Melbourne, 1 Jan. 1831, Derby MS, 167/1. Also Stanley to Grey, 3 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Melbourne, 3 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Melbourne, 6 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Melbourne, 4 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Melbourne’s first government appointment had been as Irish Chief Secretary in April 1827. At Pheonix Park, by extending the hospitality of his dinner table to both Protestants and Catholics, he sought to establish a more inclusive regime. Stanley to Melbourne, 8, 10, and 13 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Spring Rice to Stanley, 3 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 117/8. James to O’Connell, 17 Jan. 1831, cited in The Correspondence of Daniel O’Connell, ed. M. R. O’Connell, 8 vols (Dublin, 1972–80), iv. 254. Stanley to Melbourne, 14 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Melbourne, 18 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Melbourne, 19 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Melbourne, 22 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Graham, 31 Jan. 1831, Graham MSS, 4. Stanley to Anglesey, 31 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 2 Feb. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 8 Feb. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 12 Feb. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Ellenborough diary, 22 Feb. 1831, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 56. Earl Russell, Recollections and Suggestions, 1813–1873 (1875), 91. Greville, Journal, ii. 127. Stanley to Anglesey, 26 Feb. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Graham, 27 Feb. 1831, Graham MSS, 4, cited in, Parker, Graham, i. 104. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 93. Stanley to Anglesey, 25 Feb. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 3 Mar. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley, 4 Mar. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., iii. 39. Greville, Journal, ii. 127. Ellenborough diary, 5 Mar. 1831, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteeenth Century Diaries, 63. Stanley to Anglesey, 7 Mar. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Grey, 10 Mar. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/2. Ellenborough diary, 10 Mar. 1831, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 65.

430 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

notes Stanley, 25 Mar. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., iii. 974. Stanley to Anglesey, 15 Apr. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley, 19 Apr. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., iii. 1641–52. Stanley to Anglesey, 28 Feb. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Cloncurry, 12 Mar. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. See also Stanley to Anglesey, 17 Mar. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 22 Mar. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley, 24 Mar. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., iii. 861–72. Stanley, 11 Feb. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., iii. 402. Stanley to Anglesey, 14 Feb. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley, 16 Feb. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., ii. 604. Stanley, 18 Feb. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., ii. 678. Stanley, 21 Feb. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., ii. 813. Stanley to Melbourne, 22 Jan. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 21 Feb. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 29 Mar. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 21 Apr. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 11 Mar. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 29 Mar. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 12 Apr. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley, 13 Apr. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., iii. 1288. Anglesey to Grey, 15 Apr. 1831, Derby MSS, 119/1. Anglesey to Holland, 20 Apr. 1831, cited in Kriegel, ‘Irish Policy of Lord Grey’s Government’, 28. Stanley to Grey, 20 Apr. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 21 Apr. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Anglesey, 21 Apr. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Blackburne, 25 Apr. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Grey to Stanley, 11 May 1831, Derby MSS, 117/5. Stanley to Gosset, 25 Apr. 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to Grey, 14 May 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley to O’Brien, 10 June 1831, Smith O’Brien MSS, 426, fo. 108. I am grateful to Dr Peter Sloan for this reference. Stanley to Graham, 25 May [1831 ], Graham MSS, 119. Stanley to Anglesey, 21 June 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Ibid. Stanley, 21 June 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., iv. 223–7. Stanley to Anglesey, 21 June 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Anglesey to Stanley, 23 June 1831, cited in Virginia Crossman, ‘The Politics of Security: A Study of the Official Reaction to Rural Unrest in Ireland 1821–41’, D.Phil. thesis, University of Oxford, 1989, 174. Stanley, 30 June 1830, Hansard, 3rd ser., iv. 558–61.

notes 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

431

O’Connell to Bishop Doyle, 16 June 1831, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, iv. 335. Stanley, 2 July 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., iv. 618–19. Stanley to Anglesey, 4 July 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. O’Connell to Barrett, 2 July 1831, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, iv. 338. Althorp to Spencer, 2 July 1831, cited in Sir Denis Le Marchant, A Memoir of Viscount Althorp (1876), 326. Stanley, 30 June 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., iv. 573–5. O’Connell to Barrett, 2 July 1831, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, iv. 337. Ibid. 338. O’Connell to FitzPatrick, 9 July 1831, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, iv. 341. Stanley to Anglesey, 17 July 1831, Derby MSS, 119/1. Anglesey to Grey, 10 Feb. 1832, cited in Kriegel, ‘Irish Policy of Lord Grey’s Government’, 34. Anglesey to Graham, 30 July 1831, Graham MSS, 23/1, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 171. Anglesey to Stanley, 18 July 1831, Derby MSS, 119/1. Anglesey to Graham, 30 July 1831, Graham MSS, 23/1, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 171. Stanley to Anglesey, 4 Aug. 1831, Derby MSS, 168. Graham to Anglesey, 2 Aug. 1831, Graham MSS, 23/2, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 171. A. D. Kriegel (ed.), The Holland House Diaries, 1831–1840 (1977), 27. Stanley to Anglesey, 4 Aug. 1831, Derby MSS, 168. Stanley, 9 Aug. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., v. 1040. Stanley, 11 Aug. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., v. 1184. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 30. Ibid. 33. Stanley to Anglesey, 18 Aug. 1831, Derby MSS, 168. Stanley, 15 Aug. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., vi. 27–9. Stanley, 9 Sept. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., vi. 1249–65. Stanley to Hodgson, 6 Aug. 1831, Derby MSS, 172/2. Stanley, 29 Sept. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., vii. 837–45. Stanley, 22 Sept. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., vii. 487. Stanley, 26 Sept. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., vii. 611–14. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 151. O’Connell to Barrett, 5 Oct. 1831, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, iv. 354. Stanley to Anglesey, 12 July 1831, Derby MSS, 167/1. Stanley, 13 July 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., iv. 1220–7.

432

notes

108. 109.

Stanley to Anglesey, 28 July 1831, Derby MSS, 168. Ellenborough diary, 23 July 1831, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 110. Stanley to Grey, [2 Sept. 1831? ], Derby MSS, 168. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 44. Ibid. 46. Stanley, 20 Sept. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., vii. 359–67. Sandon to Stanley, 12 Oct. 1831, Derby MSS, 127/3. Sandon to Stanley, 16 Oct. 1831, Derby MSS, 127/3. See also Sandon to Stanley, 4 Nov. 1831, Derby MSS, 127/3. See Brock, The Great Reform Act, 246–7. Althorp to Stanley, 15 Nov. 1831, Derby MSS, 117/3. Stanley to Grey, 22 Nov. 1831, Derby MSS, 168. Althorp to Stanley, 24 Nov. 1831, Derby MSS, 117/3. Anglesey to Stanley, 18 Oct. 1831, Derby MSS, 119/1. Gosset to Stanley, 16 Oct. 1831, Derby MSS, 121/2. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 68. Stanley to Anglesey, 20 Oct. 1831, Derby MSS, 168. Stanley to Grey, 22 Nov. 1831, Derby MSS, 168. Ibid. Stanley to Bishop of London, [?] Oct. 1831, Derby MSS, 165/5. Blomfield replied: ‘It has long been recognised that it was impossible for the existing management of Church property in Ireland to continue—the sooner it is placed on a new footing the better for the Church. The subject, however, is full of embarrassment and difficulty’ (Bishop of London to Stanley, 11 Nov. 1831, Derby MSS, 127/6). Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 88. Ibid. 90. Stanley, 6 Dec. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., ix. 54–7. Stanley to Anglesey, 7 Dec. 1831, Derby MSS, 168. Stanley to Anglesey, 3 Dec. 1831, Derby MSS, 168. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 91. Ibid. 95. Stanley, 15 Dec. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., ix. 259–80. Stanley, 17 Dec. 1831, Hansard, 3rd ser., ix. 513–26. Greville, Journal, ii. 234. Le Marchant diary, 19 Dec. 1831, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 169. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 156. Littleton diary, 18 Dec. 1831, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 172. Le Marchant diary, 19 Dec. 1831, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 170.

110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126.

127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

notes 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171.

433

Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 99. O’Connell to Duncannon, 4 Dec. 1831, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, iv. 371. Stanley to Anglesey, 1 Jan. 1832, Derby MSS, 168. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 107. Ibid. 117. Littleton diary, 26 Jan. 1832, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 185. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 126. Ibid. 129. Anglesey to Holland, 12 Feb. 1832, cited in Marquess of Anglesey, One-Leg: The Life and Letters of Henry William Paget, First Marquess of Anglesey (1961), 264. Ellenborough diary, 15 Feb. 1832, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 195. Stanley to Anglesey, 18 Feb. 1832, Derby MSS, 168. Taylor to Stanley, 15 Feb. 1832, Derby MSS, 100/2. See Kriegel, ‘Irish Policy of Lord Grey’s Government’, 30–2. Grey to Anglesey, 5 Feb. 1832, cited in Kriegel, ‘Irish Policy of Lord Grey’s Government’, 32. Stanley to Anglesey, 10 Mar. 1832, Derby MSS, 168. Stanley, 13 Mar. 1832, Hansard, 3rd ser., xi. 135–55. Stanley, 16 Apr. 1832, Hansard, 3rd ser., xii. 577–83. See Anglesey, One-Leg, 264. O’Connell to Archbishop MacHale, 31 May 1833, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, v. 39. Stanley, 6 Mar. 1832, Hansard, 3rd ser., x. 1170–9. Stanley later explained his aims for the scheme in Stanley to Hodgson, 6 Aug. 1836, Derby MSS, 172/2. Stanley, 22 Mar. 1832, Hansard, 3rd ser., xi. 764–78. Le Marchant diary, 24 Mar. 1832, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 215. Brock, The Great Reform Act, 268. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 108. Stanley to Grey, 3 Jan. 1832, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Graham, 2 Jan. 1832, Graham MSS, 12, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 135. Sandon to Stanley, 13 Jan. 1832, Derby MSS, 127/3. Littleton diary, 10 Apr. 1832, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 221. Brock, The Great Reform Act, 280. Ellenborough diary, 8 May 1832, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 243. Stanley to Edmund Hornby, 10 May 1832, Derby MSS, 169.

434

notes

172. 173.

Stanley to Edmund Hornby, 10 May 1832, Derby MSS, 169. See Parker, Graham, i. 143; Le Marchant diary, 13 May 1832, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 251–2; and T. Raikes, A Journal Kept by Thomas Raikes Esq. from 1831, to 1847, 4 vols (1856–7), i. 31. In 1837 the Morning Chronicle accused Stanley of declaring, in his speech, that Wellington was a fool and acting purely out of a desire for office. In correspondence with Ebrington in March 1837 he confirmed that what he, in fact, had said was that ‘only a fool’ would attempt to form a government at that moment on anti-Reform principles, and that Wellington was no fool. Stanley to Ebrington, 2 Mar. 1837, Derby MSS, 172/2. Palmerston to Graham, 14 May 1832, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 143. Ellenborough diary, 16 May 1832, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 261. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 181. Stanley to Anglesey, 19 May 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 233. Stanley to Anglesey, 19 May 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Stanley, 25 May 1832, Hansard, 3rd ser., xiii. 119–25. Conclurry to Stanley, [? June 1832 ], Derby MSS, 125/3. Stanley to Anglesey, 26 June 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Stanley to Anglesey, 30 June 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Stanley to Anglesey, 29 May 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Cloncurry to Stanley, [? June 1832 ], Derby MSS, 125/3. Stanley to Anglesey, 17 June 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 194. Ibid. Stanley, 5 July 1832, Hansard, 3rd ser., xiv. 95–112. O’Connell, 13 July 1832, Hansard, 3rd ser., xiv. 361–74. O’Connell accused Stanley of being as assured of carrying his measure ‘as the gamester of winning with a loaded die; he has the loaded die’. Privately O’Connell described the bill as ‘the most violent invasion of private property I ever read of’ (O’Connell to The Pilot, 16 July 1832, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, iv. 429). Le Marchant diary, 1 Aug. 1832, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 279. Stanley to Grey, 11 June 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Stanley to Grant, 27 July 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Stanley to Grey, 1 Aug. 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 250. See Anglesey, One-Leg, 264. Grey to Stanley, 4 Aug. 1832, Derby MSS, 117/5. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 200.

174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190.

191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198.

notes 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213. 214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225. 226. 227.

435

Creevey to Elizabeth Ord, 3 Nov. 1833, cited in Maxwell, Creevey Papers, ii. 265. Graham to Stanley, 16 Aug. 1832, Graham MSS, 14, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 173. Stanley to Grey, 10 Sept. 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Stanley to Grey, 24 Sept. 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Grey to Stanley, 29 Sept. 1832, Derby MSS, 117/5. Stanley to Melbourne, 1 Oct. 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Stanley to Grey, 4 Aug. 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Ibid. See G. I. T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832–1868 (Oxford, 1977), 32–3. Anglesey to Graham, 6 Oct. 1832, Graham MSS, 22/1, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 174. See S. J. Brown, The National Churches of England, Ireland and Scotland, 1801–1846 (Oxford, 2001), 2. Spring Rice to Musgrave, 30 Jan. 1833, Monteagle MSS, 13375, fo. 13, cited in J. Coohill, ‘Ideas of the Liberal Party, 1832–1852’, D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1998, 140. Althorp to Grey, 20 Oct. 1832, cited in Kriegel, ‘Irish Policy of Lord Grey’s Government’, 37. See also I. Newbould, Whiggery and Reform 1830–41: The Politics of Government (1990), 138. Grey to Stanley, 17 Nov. 1832, Derby MSS, 117/5. E. A. Wasson, Whig Renaissance: Lord Althorp and the Whig Party, 1782–1845 (1987), 277. Stanley to Grey, 15 Nov. 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Richmond to Stanley, 20 Nov. 1832, Derby MSS, 131/13. Stanley to Grey, 29 Nov. 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Grey to Stanley, 9 Dec. 1832, Derby MSS, 117/5. Stanley to Russell, 31 Dec. 1832, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Grey, 29 Oct. 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Grey to Graham, 3 Nov. 1832, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 175. Graham to Stanley, 3 Nov. 1832, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 175. Grey to Graham, 8 Nov. 1832, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 178. See Stanley to Grey, 6 Nov. 1832, Derby MSS, 169. O’Connell to Fitzpatrick, 31 Jan. 1833, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, v. 7. Stanley to Grey, 6 Nov. 1832, Derby MSS, 169. O’Connell to Duncannon, 14 Jan. 1833, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, v. 3. Stanley to Taylor, 25 Nov. 1832, Derby MSS, 169. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 259. O’Connell to Duncannon, 14 Jan. 1833, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, v. 3.

436

notes

228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233.

See Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 82–3. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 270. Althorp to Spencer, 2 Jan. 1833, cited in Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 81. Stanley to Anglesey, 19 Jan. 1833, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Taylor, 25 Jan. 1833, Derby MSS, 167/2. Littleton diary, 5 Feb. 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 296. Le Marchant diary, Feb. 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 295. Stanley, 5 Feb. 1833, Hansard, 3rd ser., xv. 183–96. Cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 295. Peel to Goulburn, 3 Jan. 1833, cited in C. S. Parker, Sir Robert Peel, 2 vols (1891), ii. 212–14. Ellenborough diary, 5 Feb. 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 296. Littleton diary, 6 and 7 Feb. 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 297. Keane, 12 Feb. 1833, Hansard, 3rd ser., xv. 615. Le Marchant diary, Feb. 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 300. Stanley, 12 Feb. 1833, Hansard, 3rd ser., xv. 607–14. Le Marchant diary, Feb. 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 300. Stanley to Anglesey, 14 Feb. 1833, Derby MSS, 169. ‘O’Connell has overshot his mark,’ Stanley informed Anglesey. Ibid. Stanley to Blackburne, 14 Jan. 1833, Derby MSS, 169. Le Marchant diary, Mar. 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 312. Russell, Recollections and Suggestions, 112. Ibid. 112–13. Le Marchant diary, Mar. 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 313. Littleton diary, 26 Feb. 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 308. Palmerston to Metternich, 17 Mar. 1833, cited in K. Bourne, Palmerston: The Early Years, 1784–1841 (1982), 525. Greville, Journal, ii. 382. Londonderry to Buckingham, 25 Mar. 1833, cited in Duke of Buckingham, Memoirs of the Courts and Cabinets of William IV and Victoria, 2 vols (1861), ii. 37–8. Richmond to Graham, 11 Nov. 1832, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 178. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 223.

234. 235. 236. 237. 238. 239. 240. 241. 242. 243. 244. 245. 246. 247. 248. 249. 250. 251. 252. 253. 254. 255. 256.

notes 257. 258. 259. 260.

261. 262. 263. 264. 265. 266. 267. 268. 269. 270. 271. 272. 273. 274. 275. 276. 277. 278. 279.

280. 281. 282.

283.

437

Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 297. See Richard Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform, 1830–1841 (Oxford, 1987), 262–3. Stanley to Grey, 25 Apr. 1833, Derby MSS, 167/2. Le Marchant diary, May 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 329. Taylor wrote privately: ‘Stanley leaps into his seat, gets the gout, gets the grippe, goes down into his county to be re-elected, and gives his spare time to the invention of a scheme for settling the W. India question without holding a word of communication with Howick, Stephen or myself’ (Taylor to Miss Fenwick, 12 May 1833, Taylor MSS, Bodleian MS Eng. Lett. d.7, fo. 206, cited in Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics: Whiggery, Religion and Reform 1830–1841, 267). Stanley to Musgrave, 11 May 1833, Derby MSS, 170. Ibid. Ibid. Le Marchant diary, May 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 330. Stanley to Musgrave, 11 May 1833, Derby MSS, 170. Stanley, 14 May 1833, Hansard, 3rd ser., xvii. 1193–1231. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 213. Stanley to Taylor, 1 June 1833, Derby MSS, 170. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 218. Stanley to Taylor, 11 June 1833, Derby MSS, 170. Stanley to Taylor, 12 June 1833, Derby MSS, 170. Stanley to Taylor, 1 June 1833, Derby MSS, 170. Stanley to Musgrave, 4 June 1833, Derby MSS, 170. Taylor to Stanley, 5 June 1833, Derby MSS, 100/2. Stanley to Taylor, 13 July 1833, Derby MSS, 167/2. Taylor to Stanley, 14 July 1833, Derby MSS, 100/2. Stanley to Taylor, 15 July 1833, Derby MSS, 167/2. See Wasson, Whig Renaissance, 280. Stanley, 21 June 1833, Hansard, 3rd ser., xviii. 1073–4. Peel believed that clause 147 was dropped at the direct order of the King; see Parker, Peel, ii. 222. It was more likely, however, that Stanley acted on his own volition, in the certain knowledge that the King wished the clause to be withdrawn. Sheil, 8 July 1833, Hansard, 3rd ser., xix. 268. Le Marchant diary, 21 June 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 339. Coohill, ‘Ideas of the Liberal Party’, 145, shows that 102 Whigs, 58 Reformers, 4 radicals, 96 Conservatives, and 18 other MPs supported Stanley. He was opposed by 23 radicals, 59 Reformers, 24 Repealers (Irish radicals), 43 Whigs, 1 Conservative, and 18 other MPs. William IV to Stanley, 22 June 1833, Derby MSS, 100/1. The King noted that Stanley had had to face ‘the taunts and sneers of Mr O’Connell and others of his stamp’.

438

notes

284. 285. 286. 287. 288. 289.

Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 228. Gladstone memo, 8 May [1839 ], Gladstone MSS, 44819, fo. 46. Greville, Journal, iii. 17. Ibid. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 230. Littleton diary, 21 July 1833, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 350. Reid, Life and Letters of Durham, i. 328–31. Taylor to Stanley, 15 July 1833, Derby MSS, 100/2. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 238. Stephen to Taylor, 11 Sept. 1833, cited in Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics, 268. Parker, Graham, i. 146. Taylor to Stanley, 15 July 1833, Derby MSS, 100/2. Maxwell, Creevey Papers, ii. 264. Greville, Journal, iii. 37. Greville, Journal, ii. 383. Stanley to Richmond, 27 Dec. 1833, Derby MSS, 170. See Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics, 75. Graham to Stanley, 21 Dec. 1833, Graham MSS, 23. King’s Speech, 4 Feb. 1834, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxi. 4. Stanley to Taylor, 12 Jan. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Taylor, 16 Jan. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Grey, 29 Jan. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Grey to Archbishop of York, 25 Jan. 1834, cited in O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church, pt. i: 1829–1859, 3rd edn (1971), 52. Greville, Journal, iii. 62. Russell to Holland, 15 Feb. 1834, Holland House MSS, 51677, fo. 106. Greville, Journal, iii. 72. Coohill, ‘Ideas of the Liberal Party’, 176. Stanley, 15 Apr. 1834, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxii. 790–811. Stanley to Horton, 26 Apr. 1834, Derby MSS, 171. Sheil, 6 May 1834, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxiii. 671. Stanley, 2 May 1834, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxiii. 458–64. Greville, Journal, iii. 84. Ronayne, 6 May 1834, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxiii. 624. Russell, 6 May 1834, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxiii. 664–6. Stanley to Graham, [6 May 1834 ], Graham MSS, 3. Brougham to Graham, [7 ] May 1834, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 187. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 252. Stanley to Richmond, 18 May 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Brougham to Stanley, 24 May 1834, Derby MSS, 116/1. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 252. Stanley to Richmond, 18 May 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2.

290. 291. 292. 293. 294. 295. 296. 297. 298. 299. 300. 301. 302. 303. 304. 305. 306. 307. 308. 309. 310. 311. 312. 313. 314. 315. 316. 317. 318. 319. 320. 321. 322. 323. 324.

notes 325. 326. 327.

328. 329. 330. 331. 332. 333. 334. 335. 336. 337. 338. 339.

439

Le Marchant diary, May 1834, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 379. Ibid. Graham to Lord Stanley, 4 June 1834, Graham MSS, 120, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 195–6. Lord Derby wrote to his grandson, ‘I can only write a line to say I perfectly agree with you in the prospects or rather absolute necessity of the line of conduct you have adopted … [which ] will be approved by all who value consistency and adhere to principle’ (Lord Derby to Stanley, [? May 1834 ], Derby MSS, 105/1). Goodenough to Graham, 9 June 1834, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 196. O’Connell to Fitzpatrick, 30 May 1834, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, v. 138. Stanley, 2 June 1834, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxiv. 34–41. Greville, Journal, iii. 95. Graham to Bentinck, 12 June 1834, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 196. See Coohill, ‘Ideas of the Liberal Party’, 147. Stanley, 2 June 1834, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxiv. 34–41. Greville, Journal, iii. 95. Le Marchant diary, June 1834, cited in Aspinall (ed.), Three Early Nineteenth Century Diaries, 381. Graham to Lord Stanley, 4 June 1834, Graham MSS, 120, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 195–6. Greville, Journal, iii. 94. Stanley to Sligo, 7 June 1834, Derby MSS, 165/3.

chapter 3. ‘visions of the helm’: 1834–1835 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

Lord Francis Egerton’s phrase, as reported by Croker to Peel, 8 Jan. 1835, cited in Parker, Peel, ii. 277. R. Blake, Disraeli (1966), 114. This remark was the occasion of Melbourne’s first conversation with Disraeli, Melbourne also observing: ‘Nobody can compete with Stanley.’ B. Disraeli, Coningsby or the New Generation (1844), 92. Stanley to Graham, 12 June 1834, Graham MSS, 26. Graham to Stanley, 11 June 1834, Graham MSS, 26. Stanley to Graham, 21 June 1834, Graham MSS, 26. Graham to Stanley, 3 July 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 361. Stanley, 4 July 1834, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxiv. 1146–61. Greville, Journal, iii. 102. Grey to Stanley, 10 July 1834, Derby MSS, 117/5. Stanley to Grey, 10 July 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2.

440 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51.

notes Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, iv. 361. Greville, Journal, iii. 110. Ibid. 104. Creevey to Elizabeth Ord, 12 Nov. 1834, cited in Maxwell, Creevey Papers, ii. 295. Stanley to Graham, 3 July 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Richmond, 12 July 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Melbourne, 11 July 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Richmond, 12 July 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Graham to Stanley, 14 July 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Stanley to Richmond, 17 July 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Graham, 17 July 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Stanley to Richmond, 17 July 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Graham, 30 Sept. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Graham to Stanley, 21 Oct. 1834, Graham MSS, 27. 15th Earl of Derby, The Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby between 1878 and 1893: A Selection, ed. J. Vincent (Oxford, 2003), 25. Stanley to Graham, 19 Oct. 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Ibid. Graham to Stanley, 21 Oct. 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Stanley to Graham, 19 Oct. 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Graham to Stanley, 21 Oct. 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Stanley to Graham, 13 Nov. 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Stanley to Graham, 30 Sept. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Graham to Stanley, 9 Nov. 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 272. Stanley to Spring Rice, 14 Nov. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Taylor to Stanley, 2 Jan. 1835, Derby MSS, 100/2. Graham to Stanley, 18 Nov. 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Stanley to Ripon, 20 Nov. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Richmond to Stanley, 15 Nov. 1834, Derby MSS, 131/13 Graham to Stanley, 21 Nov. 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Tennent to Stanley, 23 Nov. 1834, Derby MSS, 131/7. Stanley to Ripon, 20 Nov. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Richmond, 5 Nov. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Ripon, 27 Nov. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Graham to Stanley, 21 Nov. 1834, Graham MSS, 27. Bentinck to Richmond, 2 Dec. 1834, Derby MSS, 131/13. See Greville’s account of the dinner in Greville, Journal, iii. 172. Stanley to Graham, 5 Dec. 1834, Graham MSS, 28. Peel to Stanley, 9 Dec. 1834, Derby MSS, 129/1, cited in Parker, Peel, ii. 257. Sandon to Stanley, 10 Dec. 1834, Derby MSS, 127/3.

notes 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

441

Stanley to Peel, 11 Dec. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2, cited in Parker, Peel, ii. 257–9. Stanley to Richmond, 13 Dec. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Ibid. Graham to Stanley, 13 Dec. 1834, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 216–18. Greville, Journal, iii. 180. Stanley to Freeling, 18 Dec. 1834, Derby MSS, 171. The Times, 22 Dec. 1834, 3. Ibid. Stanley to Richmond, 30 Dec. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Graham to Hornby, 23 Dec. 1834, Graham MSS, 34, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 222. Stanley to Richmond, 21 Dec. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Graham, 29 Dec. 1834, Graham MSS, 28. Stanley to Ripon, 25 Dec. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. The Times, 18 Dec. 1834, 2. Ibid. Stanley to Richmond, 21 Dec. 1834, Derby MSS, 167/2. Graham to Hornby, 23 Dec. 1834, Graham MSS, 34, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 222. Graham to Stanley, 1 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 223–4. Greville, Journal, iii. 189. Peel to Croker, 10 Jan. 1835, cited in L. J. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers, 3 vols. (1884), ii. 225–6. Peel to Taylor, 12 Jan. 1835, cited in Parker, Peel, ii. 280. Stanley to Vernon, 10 Jan. 1835, Derby MSS, 171. The Times, 6 Jan. 1835, 6. The Times, 15 Jan. 1835, 6. Greville, Journal, iii. 202. Stanley to Graham, 16 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. Graham to Stanley, 12 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. See Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 183. Graham to Stanley, 9 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. At the end of December, Sir Matthew Ridley (Whig MP for Newcastle upon Tyne) wrote to Stanley declaring his support. See Stanley to Ridley, 31 Dec. 1834, Derby MSS, 165/2. Greville, Journal, iii. 203. Stanley to Graham, 30 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. Stanley to Graham, 16 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. Stanley to Graham, 31 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 233. Graham to Stanley, 20 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. Stanley to Graham, 30 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29.

442 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114.

notes Stanley to Graham, 21 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. Stanley to Richmond, 16 Jan. 1835, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Denison, 20 Jan. 1835, Derby MSS, 171. On 18 Jan. 1835, Stanley wrote to Sir Matthew Ridley, ‘We shall not be very numerous at first, but in the present position of affairs we may exercise an influence very disproportionate to our numbers’ (Stanley to Ridley, 18 Jan. 1835, Derby MSS, 165/2). Greville, Journal, iii. 201. Peel to Croker, 26 Jan. 1835, cited in Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers, ii. 257. Graham to Stanley, 1 Feb. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. Grey to Melbourne, 1 Feb. 1835, cited in L. Sanders (ed.), Lord Melbourne’s Papers (1889), 240. Holland to Melbourne, 22 Jan. 1835, cited in Sanders (ed.), Lord Melbourne’s Papers, 233. Graham to Stanley, 18 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. See Lansdowne to Stanley, 23 Jan. 1835, Derby MSS, 115/2. Graham to Stanley, 23 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 231. Stanley to Graham, 30 Jan. 1835, Graham MSS, 29 cited in Parker, Graham, i. 232. Stanley to Russell, 31 Jan. 1835, Derby MSS, 171. Stanley to Vernon, 4 Feb. 1835, Derby MSS, 171. Graham to Stanley, 1 Feb. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. Stanley to Spring Rice, 4 Feb. 1835, Derby MSS, 167/2. Stanley to Ripon, 5 Feb. 1835, Derby MSS, 167/2. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 279. Stanley to Spring Rice, 4 Feb. 1835, Derby MSS, 167/2. Parkes to Durham, 26 Jan. 1835, cited in Coohill, ‘Ideas of the Liberal Party’, 121. Ibid. The Times, 15 Jan. 1835, 6. Melbourne to Russell, 5 Feb. 1835, cited in Sanders (ed.), Lord Melbourne’s Papers, 219. Russell to Holland, 26 Oct. [1836 . ], cited in J. Prest, Lord John Russell (1972), 88. See Coohill, ‘Ideas of the Liberal Party’, 127. Howick to Ridley, 12 Feb. 1835, cited in Coohill, ‘Ideas of the Liberal Party’, 127. Greville, Journal, iii. 228. O’Connell’s attendance at the meeting ‘had alarmed and disgusted many of the Old Whigs’. Ibid. 220. O’Connell to Barrett, 21 Feb. 1835, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, v. 274.

notes 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122. 123.

124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140.

443

See Coohill, ‘Ideas of the Liberal Party’, 130. Greville believed that the vote had produced ‘what is vulgarly termed a dead lock’ (Journal, iii. 220). Howick diary, 20 Feb. 1835, Grey MSS, C3/1B, cited in Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics, 84. Wood diary, 20 Feb. 1835, Hickleton MSS, A8/1/1. Wood diary, 25 Feb. 1835, Hickleton MSS, A8/1/1. Graham to Peel, 22 Feb. 1835, cited in Parker, Peel, ii. 289–90. Graham to Stanley, 23 Feb. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. That morning, in response to an anonymous circular sent out by Sir Oswald Mosley and George Young, thirty-three ‘moderate’ MPs had met at the King’s Head, Palace Yard. Graham visited the meeting and invited all present to Carlton Gardens. The invitation was accepted, although Mosley seemed reluctant to comply. See Greville, Journal, iii. 226. See Stanley’s list of ‘MPs who gave their adhesion on Wednesday 23 February 1835’, Derby MSS, 20/1, cited in R. Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830–1867 (1978), 376. Graham to Stanley, 23 Feb. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. Lady Stanley to Taylor, 25 Feb. 1835, Peel MSS, 40303. Lady Stanley wrote to Sir Herbert Taylor that the MPs who attended the meeting ‘pressed such an entire want of confidence in ministers that if [Stanley] had shown more cordiality towards them, or led his friends to imagine there was the slightest appearance of understanding with the government, he could not have attained his end, and carried their votes.’ Taylor having passed the letter on to the King, William IV then forwarded it to Peel. Graham to Stanley, 23 Feb. 1835, Graham MSS, 29. Stanley, 25 Feb. 1835, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxvi. 257–63. Greville, Journal, iii, 229. Stanley, 25 Feb. 1835, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxvi. 257–63. O’Connell, 25 Feb. 1835, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxvi. 397. The Times, 27 Feb. 1835, 4. Greville, Journal, iii. 230. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 281. O’Connell to Fitzpatrick, 9 Mar. 1835, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, v. 279. Lord William Russell to Lord John Russell, 6 Mar. 1835, cited in Russell, Early Correspondence of Lord John Russell, ii. 101. Stanley, 13 Mar. 1835, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxvi. 952–3. Wood diary, 13 Mar. 1835, Hickleton MSS, A8/1/1. Stanley memo, 12 Mar. 1835, Derby MSS, 16. Ibid. Russell to Grey, 13 Mar. 1835, cited in Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 174. Wood diary, 28 Feb. 1835, Hickleton MSS, A8/1/1. Stanley to Peel, 29 Mar. 1835, Derby MSS, 167/2.

444

notes

141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148.

Greville, Journal, iii. 244. Kriegel (ed.), Holland House Diaries, 284. Stanley, 1 Apr. 1835, Hansard, 3rd ser., xvii. 618–40. Greville, Journal, iii. 247. Ibid. 249. Stanley to Grey, 9 Apr. 1835, Derby MSS, 167/2. Greville, Journal, iii. 255. Taylor to Stanley, 13 Apr. 1835, Derby MSS, 100/2. Stanley replied: ‘I am more and more confirmed in what I said to you this morning that the most likely way to secure assent on the part of the real Whigs to a conservative government is prolonged difficulty in the formation of a cabinet’ (Stanley to Taylor, 13 Apr. 1835, Derby MSS, 167/2). Stanley to Taylor, 13 Apr. 1835, Derby MSS, 167/2. Ellice to Hume, 16 Apr. 1835, Ellice MSS, 25, fo. 126. Greville, Journal, iii. 255. Ibid. 256.

149. 150. 151. 152.

chapter 4. conservative consolation: 1835–1841 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22.

Stanley to Verney, [? . . ] Apr. 1835, Derby MSS, 171. Graham to Stanley, 25 Apr. 1835, Graham MSS, 30. Stanley to Graham, 19 Apr. 1835, Graham MSS, 30. Stanley to Graham, 27 Apr. 1835, Graham MSS, 30. Peel to Hardinge, 23 Apr. 1835, cited in Parker, Peel, ii. 312. Stanley to Stratford Canning, 11 May 1835, Derby MSS, 171. Graham to Stanley, 6 May 1835, Graham MSS, 30. Graham to Stanley, 28 Apr. 1835, Graham MSS, 30. Graham to Stanley, 18 Apr. 1835, Graham MSS, 30. Stanley to Russell, 3 July 1835, Derby MSS, 167/2. Greville, Journal, iii. 280. Ibid. 279. Stanley to Russell, 3 July 1835, Derby MSS, 167/2. The Times, 2 July 1835, 5. Greville, Journal, iii. 280. Stanley to Russell, 3 July 1835, Derby MSS, 167/2. Holland diary, Nov. 1835, Holland House MSS, 51871, fo. 918, cited in Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 188. Stanley, 23 July 1835, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxix. 1031–50. 15th Earl of Derby, The Diaries of Edward Henry Stanley, 15th Earl of Derby, 1869–1878, ed. J. Vincent, Camden Society, 5th ser., 4 (1994), 204. Stanley to Ripon, 13 Oct. 1835, Derby MSS, 173/1. Ripon to Graham, 20 Oct. 1835, Graham MSS, 30. Stanley to Ripon, 13 Oct. 1835, Derby MSS, 173/1.

notes 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

445

Ibid. Graham to Stanley, 18 Nov. 1835, Graham MSS, 30. The Times, 5 Sept. 1835, cited in N. Gash, Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 (1972), 140. The Times, 19 Oct. 1835, 3. Stanley to Knight, 29 Dec. 1835, Derby MSS, 172/2. Stanley to Graham, 26 Dec. 1835, Graham MSS, 30. Stanley to Browne, 1 Jan. 1836, Derby MSS, 172/2. Stanley to Knight, 29 Dec. 1835, Derby MSS, 172/2. Stanley to Browne, 1 Jan. 1836, Derby MSS, 172/2. Ibid. Stanley to Vernon, 2 Jan. 1836, Derby MSS, 172/2. Ibid. Graham wrote to Stanley: ‘The cabinet must either be divided and go to pieces from dissension or advance under the impulse of O’Connell at a railroad pace to a Republic’ (Graham to Stanley, 18 Nov. 1835, Graham MSS, 30). Graham to Rooke, 27 July 1835, cited in J. Ward, Sir James Graham (1967), 152. Bentinck to Graham, 24 Jan. 1836, Graham MSS, 31. Stanley to Graham, 17 Dec. 1835, Graham MSS, 32. Graham to Stanley, 20 Nov. 1835, Graham MSS, 30. Greville, Journal, iii. 341. Bentinck to Graham, 24 Jan. 1836, Graham MSS, 31. Stanley, 4 Feb. 1836, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxxi. 63–8. Greville, Journal, iii. 342. Creevey to Elizabeth Ord, 15 Feb. 1836, cited in Maxwell, Creevey Papers, ii. 309. Peel to Wellington, 10 Feb. 1836, cited in Parker, Peel, ii. 322–3. See Gash, Peel, 145. See Stanley, 8 Mar. 1836, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxxii. 83–97. In his speech Stanley challenged O’Connell’s claim to be the plenipotentiary of the Irish people. By what right did O’Connell claim that authority? Stanley to Wortley, 5 Apr. 1836, Derby MSS, 172/2. Stanley to Grey, 16 June 1836, Derby MSS, 173/1. Stanley, 1 June 1836, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxxiii. 1239–90. Stanley to Peel, 23 May 1836, Derby MSS, 173/1. The Times, 31 May 1836, 4. Stanley, 1 June 1836, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxxiii. 1239–90. Greville, Journal, iii. 295. The Times, 3 June 1836, 5. Stanley to Taylor, 2 July 1836, Derby MSS, 173/1. The Times, 7 July 1836, 2. The Times, 10 Oct. 1836, 4. The Times, 26 Sept. 1834, 1.

446 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

notes Stanley to Graham, 9 Dec. 1836, Graham MSS, 32, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 247. Stanley to Graham, 10 Nov. 1836, Graham MSS, 32. Graham to Stanley, 12 Dec. 1836, Graham MSS, 32, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 247. Graham to Peel, 11 Dec. 1836, Peel MSS, 40318. Graham to Stanley, 15 Jan. 1837, Graham MSS, 33, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 251. Ibid. Stanley to Peel, 22 Jan. 1837, Derby MSS, 173/1. See Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers, ii. 311. Greville, Journal, iii. 402. Graham to Stanley, 23 Apr. 1837, Graham MSS, 33. Stanley to Richmond, 13 May 1837, Derby MSS, 173/1. Stanley to Peel, 14 May 1837, Derby MSS, 173/1. Greville visited Knowsley during late July and, as before, was forcefully struck by the difference in Stanley’s manner in Westminster and at leisure. See n. 75 below. The Times, 29 July 1837, 6. See P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832–1841 (2002), passim. The Times, 19 June 1835, 2. Greville, Journal, iv. 12. Stanley to Graham, 8 Oct. 1837, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 254. Lincoln to Graham, 15 Aug. 1837, Graham MSS, 33. Henry Taylor, The Statesman: An Ironical Treative on the Art of Succeeding (1836). Ibid. 51. Taylor to Southey, 9 Sept. 1834, Taylor MSS, Bodleian MS Eng. Lett. d.7, fo. 202, cited in Brent, Liberal Anglican Politics, 269. Peel to Graham, 21 Nov. 1837, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 254. See Gash, Peel, 197. Stanley to Peel, 1 Jan. 1838, cited in Parker, Peel, ii. 354–5. Ibid. Russell to Stanley, 6 Jan. 1838, Russell MSS, PRO 30/22/3A, fo. 39; Howick diary, 11 Jan. 1838, cited in Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 216. Stanley to Peel, 19 Feb. 1838, cited in Parker, Peel, ii. 361–3. Ibid. Stanley, 6 Mar. 1838, Hansard, 3rd ser., xli. 543–64. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, v. 124. Greville, Journal, iv. 79. B. Disraeli, Disraeli’s Reminiscences, ed. H. Swartz and M. Swartz (1975), 123. Stanley, 7 Dec. 1837, Hansard, 3rd ser., xxxix. 807.

notes 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122.

447

Malmesbury, Memoirs of a Ex-Minister, i. 82. Disraeli, Reminiscences, 124. Stanley to Edward Stanley, 31 Jan. 1840, Derby (15) MSS, ‘Letters from Parents’. Ibid. E. Hodder, The Life and Work of Lord Shaftesbury, 2 vols (1886), ii. 77. In the 1870s a story circulated that Edward Stanley had been expelled from Eton for kleptomania. I have found no contemporary evidence to support this allegation and I have, therefore, come to regard it as a rather vicious canard, possibly initiated by E. A. Freeman, intended to besmirch Stanley’s reputation (as 15th Earl of Derby) in the mid-1870s. At the same period unsubstantiated allegations of drunkenness and rape were also circulated by the 15th Earl’s political enemies. In the absence of any evidence, these accusations must be regarded as unfounded, if insidious, slander. The Times, 10 Sept. 1842, 6. The Times, 25 Feb. 1843, 5. Stanley to Edward Stanley, [? Oct. 1844], Derby (15) MSS, ‘Letters from Parents’. Stanley to Edward Stanley, 10 Feb. 1846, Derby (15) MSS, ‘Letters from Parents’. Lady Emma Talbot memoir, in private hands. Ibid. Edward Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby, The Miracles of Our Lord Explained (1839), 61. Ibid. 63. The Times, 12 Aug. 1836, 6. The Times, 14 May 1838, 5. Ibid. 6. Graham to Granville Somerset, 12 Dec. 1836, Graham MSS, 3b. Stanley, 14 May 1838, Hansard, 3rd ser., xlii. 1243–61. Greville, Journal, iv. 132. Graham to Stanley, 18 Nov. 1838, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 274–5. Greville, Journal, iv. 160. Ibid. 167–8. Stanley, 19 Apr. 1839, Hansard, 3rd ser., xlvii. 440–56. Stanley, 9 Apr. 1839, Hansard, 3rd ser., xlvi. 1293–8. Stanley, 6 May 1839, Hansard, 3rd ser., xlvii. 939–54. Stanley to Peel, 9 May 1839, Peel MSS, 40426. See Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 240. Melbourne to Grey, 10 May 1839, cited in Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 240. Graham to Stanley, 5 June 1839, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 285. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, v. 202.

448

notes

123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

Stanley, 14 June 1839, Hansard, 3rd ser., xlviii. 229–59. Stanley to Graham, 2 Oct. 1839, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 285. Graham to Stanley, 6 Oct. 1839, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 286. Graham to Stanley, 25 Nov. 1839, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 286. Greville, Journal, iv. 246. Graham to Stanley, 24 Dec. 1839, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 289. Greville, Journal, iv. 274. Stanley, 30 Jan. 1840, Hansard, 3rd ser., li. 898–923. Stanley, 25 Feb. 1840, Hansard, 3rd ser., lii. 615–28. O’Connell to Archbishop MacHale, 11 Apr. 1840, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, vi. 324. Greville, Journal, iv. 288. O’Connell to John O’Connell, 29 Apr. 1840, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, O’Connell, vi. 326. The Times, 4 Apr. 1840, 7. Stanley, 18 May 1840, Hansard, 3rd ser., liv. 216–31. O’Connell to Fitzpatrick, 23 May 1840, cited in Correspondence of O’Connell, ed. O’Connell, vi. 331. Stanley to Morpeth, 28 June 1840, Derby MSS, 172/1. Stanley, 6 July 1840, Hansard, 3rd ser., lv. 458–61. The Times, 11 Aug. 1840, 6. The Times, 8 June 1840, 5. Stanley to Bateson, 29 Oct. 1840, Derby MSS, 172/1. N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel (1953), 399. Stanley, 2 Feb. 1841, Hansard, 3rd ser., lvi. 220–32. The Times, 5 Feb. 1841, 6. The Times, 25 June 1841, 5. Greville, Journal, iv. 386. Newbould, Whiggery and Reform, 264. Stanley, 11 Mar. 1841, Hansard, 3rd ser., lvii. 113. Greville, Journal, v. 1. Stanley to Peel, 7 Aug. 1841, Derby MSS, 172/1, cited in Parker, Peel, ii. 493–5. Ibid. The Times, 23 July 1841, 6. The Times, 23 Sept. 1841, 4.

133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154.

chapter 5. colonies and corn laws: 1841–1845 1. 2. 3.

See J. Cell, British Colonial Administration in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: The Policy-Making Process (1970), esp. ch. 1. Ibid. 9–12. Ibid. 45.

notes 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

449

Stephen memo, 27 Mar. 1845, Colonial Office MSS, CO 217/189, cited in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), 17. Stanley to Blackburne, 29 Sept. 1841, Derby MSS, 174/1. Stanley to Peel, 6 Oct. 1841, Peel MSS, 40467, cited in Jones, Derby and Victorian Conservatism, 83. The Times, 20 Jan. 1842, 4. Stanley to Ellenborough, 3 Feb. 1842, Derby MSS, 174/2. See T. L. Crosby, Sir Robert Peel’s Administration, 1841–1846 (Newton Abbot, 1976), 128. Stanley, 4 Feb. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lx. 76–85. Russell, 4 Feb. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lx. 85–7. Stanley, 26 July 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxv. 660–5. Stanley, 14 Apr. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxii. 498. Stanley, 19 Apr. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxii. 812. Stanley, 5 July 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxiv. 990–7. Stanley, 15 July 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxv. 202. Stanley introduced a new constitutional act for New South Wales on 26 May 1842 based on Russell’s proposed measure of the previous session (Stanley, 26 May 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxiii. 880). Stanley, 6 Apr. 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxviii. 544–69. The Times, 8 Apr. 1843, 6. Stanley to Peel, 5 Sept. 1844, Peel MSS, 40550, cited in Jones, Derby and Victorian Conservatism, 96. The Times, 10 Feb. 1844, 6. The Times, 12 Feb. 1844, 6. Stanley to Archbishop of Canterbury, 3 Jan. 1842, Derby MSS, 174/1. Stanley to Archbishop of Canterbury, 16 Sept. 1841, Derby MSS, 174/1. Stanley, 8 Feb. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lx. 148–50. Stanley, 11 Mar. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxi. 490. Stanley, 24 Feb. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lx. 1002–4. Stanley, 22 Feb. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lx. 810–11. Stanley, 14 Feb. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lx. 330–2. Stanley, 22 Mar. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxi. 1092. The Times, 28 Mar. 1842, 4. Stanley to Russell, 17 Oct. 1841, Derby MSS, 174/1. Stanley to Fitzgerald, 31 Dec. 1841, cited in Jones, Derby and Victorian Conservatism, 84. Stanley to Ellenborough, 3 Feb. 1842, Derby MSS, 174/2. Stanley to Ellenborough, 6 July 1842, Derby MSS, 175/1. Greville, Journal, v. 126. Stanley to Aberdeen, 17 Oct. 1842, Aberdeen MSS, 43072, cited in Jones, Derby and Victorian Conservatism, 86.

450 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

notes Stanley to Peel, 27 Nov. 1842, Peel MSS, 40426; Stanley to Aberdeen, 30 Dec. 1842, Aberdeen MSS, 43072. Stanley, 14 Feb. 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxvi. 547–65. Stanley, 10 Feb. 1844, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxii. 472–4. Stanley to Aberdeen, 23 Dec. 1843, Aberdeen MSS, 43072. Stanley to Ellenborough, 5 Dec. 1842, Derby MSS, 174/2. The Times, 29 Nov. 1842, 4. Stanley to Ellenborough, 5 Dec. 1842, Derby MSS, 174/2. Stanley, 9 Mar. 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxvii. 668–76. Stanley, 9 Mar. 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxvii. 668–76. See C. C. Eldridge, Victorian Imperialism (1978), 66. Gladstone memo, 3 June 1843, Gladstone MSS, 44819. Stanley, 26 Apr. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxii. 1168. Ibid. Stanley, 4 Mar. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxi. 100. See Porter (ed.), The British Empire: The Nineteenth Century, 210. Stanley to Queen Victoria, 6 Sept. 1841, Derby MSS, 174/1. Stanley to Peel, 10 Sept. 1841, Derby MSS, 174/1. Peel to Stanley, 17 and Oct. 26 1842, Derby MSS, 129/3. Stanley, 26 May 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxiii. 878. Stanley to Peel, 22 and Dec. 31 1842, Peel MSS, 40426. The Times, 18 Jan. 1843, 3. Stanley to Russell, 17 Oct. 1841, Derby MSS, 174/1. Stanley to Fanshaw, 12 Sept. 1841, Derby MSS, 174/1. Stanley to Murray, 29 Sept. 1841, Derby MSS, 174/2. Hope to Canning, 23 Nov. 1841, Colonial Office MSS, CO43/100, cited in Jones, Derby and Victorian Conservatism, 91. Stephen to Canning, 13 Nov. 1841, Colonial Office MSS, CO43/100, cited in Jones, Derby and Victorian Conservatism, 91. Aberdeen to Ashburton, 26 Sept. 1842, Aberdeen MSS, 43123, cited in K. Bourne, The Foreign Policy of Victorian England, 1830–1902 (1970), 255. Palmerston to Monteagle, 28 Oct. 1842, Broadlands MSS, GC/MO/131. Stanley, 2 Feb. 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxvi. 115–26. Stanley, 7 Feb. 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxvi. 245–54. Stanley, 2 May 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxviii. 1190–1206. Stanley, 11 Aug. 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxi. 574–80. Stanley to Aberdeen, 12 Nov. 1842, Aberdeen MSS, 43072, and enclosed Stanley memo, 11 Nov. 1842. Gladstone memo, 5 Feb. 1842, Gladstone MSS, 44819, fo. 77. Stanley, 28 Feb. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lx. 1231–3. Stanley, 15 Apr. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxii. 556. Gladstone memo, [2 Mar. 1842?], Gladstone MSS, 44819, fo. 80. See Gash, Peel, 322–3.

notes 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

451

Gladstone memo, 14 May [1842], Gladstone MSS, 44819, fo. 82. Stanley, 13 May 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxiii. 531–5. Gladstone memo, 14 May [1842], Gladstone MSS, 44819, fo. 82. Stanley, 16 Feb. 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxvi. 701–2. Stanley, 24 Apr. 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxviii. 864–5. Gladstone memo, 30 Apr. 1843, Gladstone MSS, 44819, fo. 90. Stanley, 19 May 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxix. 577–600. Ibid. 577. Heathcote, 19 May 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxix. 620. Ormsby Gore, 19 May 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxix. 971. Stanley, 26 May 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxix. 939–42; Stanley, 2 June 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxix. 1272–80. Stanley, 15 June 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxix. 1574–5. Stanley, 26 Mar. 1844, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxiii. 1570–3. The Times, 22 June 1844, 5. Gladstone memo, 14 May [1842], Gladstone MSS, 44819, fo. 82. Gladstone memo 14 Mar. 1842, Gladstone MSS, 44819, fo. 186. Stanley, 11 Apr. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxii. 264. Gladstone memo, 3 Sept. 1841, Gladstone MSS, 44819, fo. 71. Stanley, 21 Apr. 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxii. 973. Stanley, 27 May 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxiii. 955–8. The Times, 27 July 1842, 6. Stanley, 6 July 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxiv. 1079–84. Stanley, 2 Feb. 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxvi. 115–26. Stanley, 28 July 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxx. 1471–82. Graham to Stanley, 25 Mar. 1843, cited in J. Ward, Sir James Graham (1967), 197. Gladstone memo, 17 June 1843, Gladstone MSS, 44819, fo. 101. Gladstone memo, 23 Mar. 1844, Gladstone MSS, 44777, fo. 152. Gladstone memo, 25 Mar. [1844], Gladstone MSS, 44777, fo. 155. Stanley, 25 Mar. 1844, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxiii. 1520–2. Ashburton to Croker, 7 Apr. 1844, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 17–18. Stanley to Blackburne, 29 Sept. 1841, Derby MSS, 174/1. Peel to Graham, 19 Dec. 1841, cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 17. See Gash, Peel, 400. Stanley to Peel, 30 Nov. 1841, Derby MSS, 174/1. Parts of this letter are cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 35–6. Stanley, 15 July 1842, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxv. 216–18. Stanley to Peel, 21 Oct. 1842, Derby MSS, 174/2. The Times, 2 Jan. 1843, 6. See Gash, Peel, 403. Stanley, 16 June 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxx. 64–75.

452

notes

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

Stanley, 12 July 1843, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxx. 1074–88. Graham to Stanley, 4 Oct. 1843, cited in Parker, Graham, i. 398. Stanley to Peel, 20 Oct. 1843, Derby MSS, 174/2. Peel to Stanley, 21 Oct. 1843, Peel MSS, 40468, fo. 72. See Gash, Peel, 411. Stanley to Peel, 21 Oct. 1843, cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 66–7. Stanley, 2 Feb. 1844, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxii. 177–80. Stanley, 16 Feb. 1844, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxii. 1068–96. Stanley, 23 Feb. 1844, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxiii. 258. The Times, 30 Mar. 1844, 7. Stanley to Peel, 18 Feb. 1844, Derby MSS, 174/2, cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 107–8. Gladstone memo, 7 Mar. 1844, Gladstone MSS, 44777, fo. 139. Stanley to Peel, 20 Mar. 1844, Derby MSS, 174/2. Gladstone diary, 17 Apr. 1844, cited in The Gladstone Diaries, iii: 1840–1847, ed. M. R. D. Foot and C. Matthew (Oxford, 1974), p.369. Gladstone memo, 1 June 1844, Gladstone MSS, 44777, fo. 186. See Lord Dalling and Bulwer, The Life of Henry John Temple, Viscount Palmerston, 1846–65, 3 vols (1870–4), iii. 184. Stanley, 30 May 1844, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxv. 38–61. Stanley, 17 June 1844, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxv. 1057–67. Gladstone memo, 1897, Gladstone MSS, 44791, fo. 86. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, vi. 120–1. Stanley to Peel, 27 July 1844, Derby MSS, 174/2, cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 154–6. Greville to Reeve, 5 Sept. 1844, cited in A. H. Johnson (ed.), The Letters of Charles Greville and Henry Reeve (1924), 95–6. Greville, Journal, v. 262. Stanley to Peel, 27 July 1844, Derby MSS, 174/2. Wellington to Peel, 28 July 1844, cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 156–7. Peel to Stanley, 30 July 1844, cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 158. Stanley to Peel, 31 July 1844, Derby MSS, 174/2. Stanley to Patten, 5 Aug. 1844; Stanley to Hornby, 5 Aug. 1844, Derby MSS, 174/2. Stanley to Ripon, 12 Sept. 1844, 40869, cited in Jones, Derby and Victorian Conservatism, 106. The Times, 13 Sept. 1844, 5. The Times, 3 Feb. 1845, 4. Stanley, 7 Apr. 1845, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxix. 240–6. Fraser’s Magazine (Nov. 1845), 505–8. Stanley, 4 Apr. 1845, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxix. 142–50. Stanley, 7 Apr. 1845, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxix. 240–6. Stanley, 11 Apr. 1845, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxix. 488–94.

125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149.

notes 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163.

453

Stanley, 2 May 1845, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxx. 72–84. Gladstone diary, 2 May 1845, cited in Gladstone, Diaries, iii: 1840–1847, 451. The Times, 18 Dec. 1844, 4. Stanley to Fitzroy, 1 Mar. 1845, Peel MSS, 40468, cited in Jones, Derby and Victorian Conservatism, 99. Stanley memo, 11 Apr. 1845, Peel MSS, 40468. Gladstone memo, 13 July 1846, Gladstone MSS, 44777, fos. 261–8. The Times, 19 July 1845, 4. See Jones, Derby and Victorian Conservatism, 98. The Times, 15 Mar. 1845, 5. The Times, 23 July 1845, 5. Graham to Hardinge, 23 Apr. 1845, Graham MSS, 120/88. The Times, 11 Aug. 1845, 3. Stanley to Peel, 15 Feb. 1845, cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 170. Disraeli, 11 Apr. 1845, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxix. 565–9.

chapter 6. conservative schism: 1846–1848 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

Stanley to Peel, 14 Oct. 1845, Peel MSS, 40468. Peel to Graham, 13 Oct. 1845, Peel MSS, 40451. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 26. Stanley memo, 3 Nov. 1845, Derby MSS, 27/5, cited in Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830–1867, 387–90. Stanley to Peel, 3 Nov. 1845, Derby MSS, 174/2. Stanley to Peel, 29 Nov. 1845, Derby MSS, 174/2. Graham to Peel, 29 Nov. 1845, Peel MSS, 40452, cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 236. See Gash, Peel, 550. Prince Albert memo, 7 Dec. 1845, cited in The Letters of Queen Victoria, ed. A. C. Benson and Viscount Esher, 1st ser., 3 vols (1907), ii. 59. The Times, 17 Dec. 1845, 4. See Gash, Peel, 558. The Times, 17 Dec. 1845, 4. Lansdowne to Le Marchant, 7 Dec. [1845], in private hands. Stanley to the Queen, 11 Dec. 1845, Derby MSS, 174/2, cited in Letters of Queen Victoria, ii. 64. Peel to the Queen, 21 Dec. 1845, cited in Letters of Queen Victoria, ii. 74. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, vi. 229. Stanley to Peel, 22 Dec. 1845, Derby MSS, 174/2. Gladstone diary, 22 Dec. 1845, cited in Gladstone, Diaries, iii: 1840–1847, 507. The Times, 26 Dec. 1845, 4. Prince Albert memo, 25 Dec. 1845, cited in Letters of Queen Victoria, ii. 76. Stanley to Ellenborough, 27 Dec. 1845, Ellenborough MSS, PRO 30/12/ 21/9.

454

notes

22. 23. 24.

Lady Emma Talbot memoir, in private hands. See Stewart, The Politics of Protection, 55. Peel to Hope, 3 Aug. 1846, cited in Sir Robert Peel, The Private Letters of Sir Roberts Peel, ed. George Peel (1920), 281. Stanley to Ellenborough, 27 Dec. 1845, Ellenborough MSS, PRO 30/12/21/9. Stanley to Bentinck, 14 Jan. 1846, Derby MSS, 176/2. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 165. Stanley to Colquhoun, 17 Jan. 1846, Derby MSS, 176/2. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 166. Wellington to Stanley, 19 Feb. 1846, Derby MSS, 133/2, cited in G. R. Gleig, The Life of Arthur Duke of Wellington (1864), 414. Wellington memo, Feb. 1846, Wellington MSS, Southampton University Library, 2/138, fos. 15–44, cited in I. McLean, Rational Choice and British Politics (Oxford, 2001), 43. Stanley to Rutland, 7 Mar. 1846, Derby MSS, 176/2. Stanley to Montrose, 2 Mar. 1846, Derby MSS, 176/2. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 169. Stanley to Rutland, 19 Mar. 1846, Derby MSS, 176/2. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 170. Greville, Journal, v. 396. Stanley to Gardeners, 21 Apr. 1846, Peel MSS, 40590, cited in Jones, Derby and Victorian Conservatism, 117. Bentinck to Stanley, 20 Apr. 1846, Derby MSS, 132/13. Stanley to Rutland, 19 Mar. 1846, Derby MSS, 176/2. Hardcastle, Campbell, ii. 264. Stanley to Newcastle, 11 May 1846, Derby MSS, 176/2. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, vi. 172. The Times, 25 May 1846, 4. See Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, ii. 360. Stanley to Murray, 26 Mar. 1846, Derby MSS, 176/2. Disraeli, 15 May 1846, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxxvi. 651–77. Greville, Journal, v, 400. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 171. Ibid. 172. Greville, Journal, v. 399. Ashburton to Croker, 26 May 1846, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 71. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 172. Stanley, 25 May 1846, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxxvi. 1128–76. Greville, Journal, v. 403. Broughton, Recollections of a Long Life, vi. 173. As Russell later recalled: ‘I induced my party, much against their will, to agree to support Sir Robert

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

notes

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93.

455

Peel’s repeal of the Corn Laws’ (Russell to Graham, 18 Aug. 1852, cited in Parker, Graham, ii. 174). Greville, Journal, v. 403. Brougham to Peel, [13 June 1846], cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 357. Peel to Brougham, 13 June 1846, cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 357. Stanley to Newcastle, 6 May 1846, Derby MSS, 176/2. Stanley to Dartmouth, 5 June 1846, Derby MSS, 176/2. Peel to Ellenborough, 30 May 1846, Peel MSS, 40473, fo. 332. Croker to Hardinge, 10 July 1846, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 72. Stanley to Lyndhurst, 9 July 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Gladstone memo, 10 July 1846, Gladstone MSS, 44777, fo. 245. The Times, 11 July 1846, 4. Stanley to Bentinck, 12 July 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Ibid. The Times, 8 Aug. 1846, 5. Stanley to Ashburton, 7 Aug. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Redesdale, 16 Aug. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Manners to Disraeli, 15 Aug. 1846, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/M/10. Gladstone memo, 5 Aug. 1846, Gladstone MSS, 44736, fo. 2. Bentinck to Stanley, 10 July 1846, Derby MSS, 132/13. Gladstone diary, 26 Oct. 1846, cited in Gladstone, Diaries, iii. 1840–1847, 579. See Stanley to Gladstone, 22 Oct. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Bentinck, 22 Oct. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Croker, 19 Aug. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Phillips, 8 Aug. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Brougham, 8 Sept. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Croker, 23 Aug. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, ii. 76. Ibid. 75. Stanley to Croker, 6 Oct. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Beresford, 30 Dec. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1; Beresford to Stanley, 30 Dec. 1846, Derby MSS, 149/1. Stanley to Ashburton, 16 Jan. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/1. Ashburton to Stanley, 24 Jan. 1847, Derby MSS, 147/15. Stanley to Bentinck, 24 Jan. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/1. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 4. Bentinck to Stanley, 29 Jan. 1847, Derby MSS, 132/13. Stanley to Brougham, 8 Sept. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Bentinck, 2 Oct. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Beresford, 6 Oct. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Bolton, 14 Nov. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. See B. Kinzer, England’s Disgrace? John Stuart Mill and the Irish Question (Toronto, 2001), 51.

456

notes

94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

Stanley to Ashburton, 3 Jan. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Eglinton, 15 Nov. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Newdegate, 10 Dec. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Lyndhurst, 10 Dec. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Croker, 27 Sept. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 85–6. Stanley to Ashburton, 16 Jan. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley circular, 23 Dec. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. The Times, 1 Jan. 1847, 6. Bonham to Peel, 12 Nov. 1846, Peel MSS, 40597. Bentinck to Stanley, 2 Jan. 1847, Derby MSS, 132/13. Stanley to Beresford, 4 Jan. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Ashburton, 3 Jan. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley, 19 Jan. 1847, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxxix. 18–36. Stanley to Redesdale, 3 Feb. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Wellington, 6 Dec. 1846, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley, 15 Feb. 1847, Hansard, 3rd ser., lxxxix. 1336–47. Stanley to Bessborough, 8 Apr. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2. Stanley to Lansdowne, 12 Mar. 1847, Lansdowne MSS (3), box 7. Greville, Journal, vi. 60–1. Stanley to Bentinck, 11 Feb. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/1. Stanley to Croker, 21 Feb. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/1, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 104. Stanley to Croker, 7 June 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 108. Stanley, 29 Apr. 1847, Hansard, 3rd ser., xcii. 112–24. Stanley to Lansdowne, 11 May 1847, Lansdowne MSS (3), box 7. Stanley to Croker, 7 June 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2, cited in Jennings (eds.), Croker Papers, iii. 107. Hope to Stanley, 5 Apr. 1847, Derby MSS, 134/1. Stanley to Ellenborough, 16 June 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2. Stanley’s embarrassment and anger were heightened by the fact that, four months earlier, he had informed Newcastle that, with a real effort, the Protectionists could get a majority in the Lords (Stanley to Newcastle, 21 Feb. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/1). Beresford to Croker, n.d., cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 118. The Times, 24 July 1847, 4. Stanley to Bentinck, 10 Aug. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2. Bentinck heartily concurred: ‘The No Popery cry has not saved or gained us a single member … it is absolutely worthless for good, and hangs round the neck of the party for evil and must eventually drown it’ (Bentinck to Stanley, 7 Aug. 1847 Derby MSS, 132/13). Quarterly Review (June 1847), 309.

99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120.

121. 122. 123.

124.

notes 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

457

Stanley to Croker, 12 Sept. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers iii. 132. Bentinck to Stanley, 19 Aug. 1847, Derby MSS, 132/13. See also Stanley to Brougham, 20 Aug. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2. Stanley to Croker, 12 Sept. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 133. Stanley to Bentinck, 2 Nov. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2. Greville, Journal, v. 388. Ashburton to Stanley, 17 Jan. 1847, Derby MSS, 147/15. Stanley to Croker, 12 Sept. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 134. Redesdale to Stanley, 28 Dec. 1847, Derby MSS, 149/6. Wellington to Stanley, 6 Feb. 1847, Derby MSS, 133/2. For Stanley’s correspondence with Bolton, see Derby MSS, 107/3. Stanley to Edward Stanley, 21 July 1847, Derby MSS, DER (15), ‘Letters from Parents’. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 156 Stanley to Balden, 22 Mar. 1848, Derby MSS, 177/2. Stanley to Bentinck, 27 Oct. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2. Arbuthnot to Graham, 23 July 1847, Peel MSS, 40452, fo. 223. Malmesbury to Stanley, 13 Nov. 1847, Derby MSS, 144/1. Clarendon to Wood, 9 May 1847, Hickleton MSS, A4/57/1. Stanley to Redesdale, 2 Nov. 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2. Bentinck to Croker, 5 Oct. 1847, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 147. Stanley, 23 Nov. 1847, Hansard, 3rd ser., xcv. 22–49. The Times, 25 Nov. 1847, 5. The Times, 26 Nov. 1847, 4. Stanley, 6 Dec. 1847, Hansard, 3rd ser., cxv. 689–92. Stanley, 16 Dec. 1847, Hansard, 3rd ser., cxv. 1211–24. Stanley, 2 Dec. 1847, Hansard, 3rd ser., cxv. 489–508. Bentinck to Croker, 26 Dec. 1847, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 158. Beresford to Bentinck, 19 Dec. 1847, Derby MSS, 149/1. Bentinck to Stanley, 24 Dec. 1847, Derby MSS, 132/13. Stanley to Bentinck, 26 Dec., 1847, Derby MSS, 177/2. [W. E. Gladstone], ‘The Declining Efficiency of Parliament’, Quarterly Review (Sept. 1856), 532. Bentinck to Stanley, 4 Feb. 1848, Derby MSS, 132/13. Manners to Disraeli, 4 Feb. 1848, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/M/21. Disraeli to Manners, 5 Feb. 1848, cited in C. Whibley, Lord John Manners and his Friends, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1925), i. 286. Stanley to Granby, 9 Jan. 1848, Derby MSS, 177/2. Manners to Disraeli, 4 Feb. 1848, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/M/21.

458

notes

160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172.

Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 205. Ibid. 206. Disraeli, Reminiscences, 34. Whibley, Manners and his Friends, i. 298. Stanley to Lord Wilton, 26 Feb. 1848, Derby MSS, 177/2. Disraeli, Reminiscences, 49. Whibley, Manners and his Friends, 299. Stanley to Stuart, 27 Jan. 1848, Derby MSS, 177/2. Stanley to Lambert, 5 Jan. 1848, Derby MSS, 177/2. Clarendon to Russell, 12 Feb. 1848, Lansdowne MSS (3), box 31, no. 35. Stanley to Lambert, 5 Jan. 1848, Derby MSS, 177/2. Stanley to Ellenborough, 12 Apr. 1848, Derby MSS, 178/1. Lansdowne to Russell, [14 Apr. 1848 ?], Russell MSS, PRO 30/22/7B, fo. 288. Stanley to Hamilton, 8 Mar. 1848, Derby MSS, 177/2. Stanley, 9 Mar. 1848, Hansard, 3rd ser., xcvii, 334. Bentinck to Disraeli, 12 Mar. 1848, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/Be/52. Bentinck to Stanley, 18 May 1848, Derby MSS, 132/13. Stanley to Lord Desart, 4 Sept. 1848, Derby MSS, 178/1. Stanley to Shaw-Lefevre, 29 Mar. 1848, Derby MSS, 178/1. Disraeli, 30 Aug. 1848, Hansard 3rd ser., ci. 705. Clarendon to Lansdowne, 27 Feb. 1848, Lansdowne MSS (3), box 31, no. 23. Stanley to Clarendon, 2 Aug. 1848, Derby MSS, 178/1. Ibid. Stanley to Hardwicke, 1 Oct. 1848, Derby MSS, 178/1. The Times, 4 Nov. 1848, 3. Ibid. Stanley to Edward Stanley, 31 Oct. 1848, Derby MSS, DER (15), ‘Letters from Parents’. Stanley to Campbell, 16 Nov. 1848, Derby MSS, 178/1. Stanley to Beresford, 2 Sept. 1848, Derby MSS, 178/1. See Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 120. Stanley to Herries, 21 Dec. 1848, Derby MSS, 178/1. Stanley to Disraeli, 21 Dec. 1848, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/2. Disraeli to Stanley, 26 Dec. 1848, Derby MSS, 145/1. Disraeli to Metternich, 13 Jan. 1849, cited in Benjamin Disraeli, Letters, v: 1848–1851, ed. M. G. Wiebe, J. B. Conacher, J. Matthews, and M. Millar (Toronto, 1993), 131. Stanley to Herries, 6 Jan. 1849, Derby MSS, 178/1. Stanley to Disraeli, 6 Jan. 1849, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/5/3, cited in Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 127. Newcastle to Stanley, 7 Jan. 1849, Derby MSS, 147/14. Disraeli to Mary Anne Disraeli, [8 Jan. 1849], cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 128. Disraeli to Metternich, 25 Jan. 1849, cited in Disraeli, Letters, 136.

173. 174. 175. 176. 177. 178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184. 185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198.

notes 199. 200. 201. 202.

459

Manners to Disraeli, 28 Jan. 1849, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/M/37. Richmond to Stanley, 21 Jan. 1849, Derby MSS, 131/13. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 1. Ibid. 2.

chapter 7. protection and popery: 1849–1851 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

Newdegate to Stanley, 6 Feb. 1849, Derby MSS, 148/1. Malmesbury to Stanley, 3 Dec. 1848, Derby MSS, 144/1. Manners to Disraeli, 2 Feb. 1849, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/M/38. See A. Gambles, Protection and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815–1852 (Woodbridge, 1999), 213. Peel to Graham, 24 July 1849, cited in Parker, Peel, iii. 523. Stanley to Newcastle, 4 Apr. 1849, Derby MSS, 178/1. Stanley to Beresford, 10 Dec. 1848, Derby MSS, 178/1. Disraeli to Londonderry, 12 Mar. 1849, cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 154. Disraeli to Drummond, 25 Aug. 1849, cited in Benjamin Disraeli, Letters, vii: 1857–1859, ed. M. Wiebe, M. Millar, A. Robson, and E. Hawman (Toronto, 2004), 486. The Times, 30 Jan. 1849, 4. Stanley, 1 Feb. 1849, Hansard, 3rd ser., cii. 37–56. The Times, 3 Feb. 1849, 5. Clarendon to Lansdowne, 8 Feb. 1849, Lansdowne MSS (3), box 31, no 53. Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, [6 Feb. 1849], cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 143. Malmesbury to Stanley, 13 Feb. 1849, Derby MSS, 144/1. Russell to the Queen, 27 Mar. 1849, cited in Prest, Lord John Russell, 298. Disraeli to Stanley, [24 Apr. 1849], Derby MSS, 145/1, cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 171. Disraeli, 23 Apr. 1849, Hansard, 3rd ser., civ. 690–701. Stanley to Christopher, 14 Apr. 1849, Derby MSS, 148/1. Stanley to Newcastle, 4 Apr. 1849, Derby MSS, 148/1. Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, 26 Mar. 1849, cited in Disraeli, Letters, 162. See also Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 2. Stanley to Ellenborough, 12 May 1849, Derby MSS, 178/1. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 6. Disraeli to Manners, 18 Mar. 1849, cited in Disraeli, Letters, 159. Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, [24 Apr. 1849], cited in Disraeli Letters. v. 173. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 248. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 7. Ibid. Ibid. Stanley, 8 May 1849, Hansard, 3rd ser., cv. 85–111.

460 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

notes Greville, Journal, vi. 176. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 7. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 248. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 9. The Times, 10 May 1849, p. 5, and 23 May 1849, p. 4. See Whibley, Manners and his Friends, ii. 4. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 8. Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, [28 May 1849], cited in Disraeli, Letters. v. 184. Stanley to Disraeli, 22 Sep. 1849, cited in Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 215–17. Disraeli to Stanley, 24 Sep. 1849, Derby MSS, 145/1, cited in Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 217–8. Stanley to Disraeli, 28 Sep. 1849, cited in Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 218. Beresford to Disraeli, 28 Sep. 1849, Hughenden MSS, B/111/53. Beresford to Stanley, 30 Sep. 1849, Derby MSS, 149/2, cited in Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 219. Stanley to Granby, 22 Sep. 1849, Derby MSS, 178/1. Disraeli to Mary Anne Disraeli, 4 Oct. 1849, Hughenden MSS, A/1/A/257, cited in Disraeli, Letters. v. 226. The Times, 8 Oct. 1849, 5. Stanley to Disraeli, 25 Oct. 1849, cited in Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 223–6. Disraeli to Young, 19 Oct. 1849, cited in Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 221–2. Stanley to Disraeli, 25 Oct. 1849, cited in Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 224. See Disraeli Letters, v. 249. Stanley to Disraeli, 13 Nov. 1849, Hughenden MSS, B/111/55, cited in Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 230–1. Beresford to Stanley, 15 Nov. 1849, Derby MSS, 149/2. Disraeli to Mary Anne Disraeli, 15 Nov. 1849, Hughenden MSS, A/1/A/259, cited in Disraeli, Letters. v. 256. Stanley to Herries, 18 Nov. 1849, Derby MSS, 178/2. Disraeli to Mary Anne Disraeli, 15 Nov. 1849, Hughenden MSS, A/1/A/259, cited in Disraeli Letters, v. 256. Adderley to Disraeli, 12 Dec. 1849, Hughenden MSS, B/XXI/A/69. Disraeli to Stanley, 17 Dec. 1849, Derby MSS, 145/1. Stanley to Disraeli, n.d., Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/23. Stanley to Beaufort, 11 Jan. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2. Stanley to Disraeli, 8 Jan. 1850, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/9. Disraeli to Mary Anne Disraeli, 23 Jan. 1850, Hughenden MSS, A/1/A/286, cited in Disraeli, Letters. v. 297.

notes 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

461

Stanley, 31 Jan. 1850, Hansard, 3rd ser., cviii. 56–71. Disraeli, 31 Jan. 1850, Hansard, 3rd ser., cviii. 161. The Times, 2 Feb. 1850, 5. Greville, Journal, vi. 314. Ibid. 326. Ibid. 315. Ibid. 328. The Times, 25 Apr. 1850, 4. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 18. Ibid. 19. See J. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven, 1999), 62. Greville, Journal, vi. 318. Clarendon to Lansdowne, 10 Feb. 1850, Lansdowne MSS, (3), box 32, no. 73. Greville, Journal, vi. 320. Ibid. 320. The Times, 26 Feb. 1850, 4. Greville, Journal, vi. 328. Stanley to Devonshire, 16 Mar. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2. Stanley to Aberdeen, 16 May 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2. Stanley to Redesdale, 11 July 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2. Greville, Journal, vi. 339. Stanley, 17 June 1850, Hansard, 3rd ser., cxi., 1293–1332. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 19. Ibid. 20. The Journal of John Wodehouse, Earl of Kimberley for 1862–1902, ed. A. Hawkins and J. Powell, Camden Society, 5th ser. 9 (Cambridge, 1997), 44. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 262. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 20. Ibid. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 263. Stanley, 17 June 1850, Hansard, 3rd ser., cxi. 1293–1332. Greville, Journal, vi. 349. The Times, 19 June 1850, 4. Disraeli to Londonderry, 20 June 1850, cited in Disraeli, Letters. v. 337. Stanley to Disraeli, 22 June 1850, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/16. See H. C. Bell, Lord Palmerston, 2 vols (1936), ii. 28. See D. Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846–1855 (Manchester, 2002), 112. See Bell, Palmerston, ii. 29. Greville, Journal, vi. 255. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 23. Ibid. 26.

462

notes

102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108.

Stanley, 4 July 1850, Hansard, 3rd ser., cxii. 862–4. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 23. Greville, Journal, vi. 367. The Times, 6 July 1850, 5. The Times, 17 Aug. 1850, 4. Disraeli to Granby, 29 Nov. 1849, cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 260. Croker to Stanley, 15 Aug. 1850, Derby MSS, 147/11, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 216. Stanley to Croker, 18 Aug. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 219–20. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 28. Stanley to Croker, 18 Aug. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 219. Stanley to Croker, 18 Aug. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2, omitted in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers. Greville, Journal, vi. 345. Stanley to Croker, 18 Aug. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 218. Stanley to Eglinton, 4 Nov. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2. The Times, 21 Oct. 1850, 4. Stanley to Croker, 18 Aug. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 218. Russell to Brougham, 9 Oct. 1850, cited in Prest, Russell, 321. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 52. Greville, Journal, vi. 375. Stanley to Enniskillen, 11 Nov. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2. Stanley to Lambert, 19 Nov. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2. Stanley to Beresford, 2 Dec. 1850, Derby MSS, 179/1. Stanley to Salisbury, 8 Nov. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2. Stanley to Disraeli, 15 Nov. 1850, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/19. Stanley to Malmesbury, 2 Dec. 1850, cited in Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 267. Stanley to Beresford, 2 Dec. 1850, Derby MSS, 179/1. Stanley to Enniskillen, 11 Nov. 1850, Derby MSS, 178/2. Stanley to Disraeli, 15 Nov. 1850, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/19. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 37. Disraeli to Stanley, 7 Dec. 1850, Derby MSS, 145/1, cited in Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 271. Stanley to Disraeli, 3 Jan. 1851, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/25. Stanley to Disraeli, 23 Jan. 1851, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/27. Ibid. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 34. Stanley to Disraeli, 23 Jan. 1851, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/27.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

notes 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166. 167. 168. 169. 170. 171. 172. 173. 174. 175. 176. 177.

463

Redesdale to Stanley, 13 Jan. 1851; Redesdale to Stanley, 19 Jan. 1851, Derby MSS, 149/6. Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, 22 Jan. 1851, cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 404. Disraeli to Stanley, 24 Jan. 1851, Derby MSS, 145/1. Beresford to Stanley, 24 Jan. 1851, Derby MSS, 149/3. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 35. Ibid. Disraeli to Londonderry, 29 Dec. 1850, cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 395. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 35. Ibid. Ibid. 37. Stanley to Buckingham, 4 Feb. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 37. Ibid. The Times, 5 Feb. 1851, 5. Stanley, 4 Feb. 1851, Hansard, 3rd ser., cxiv. 16–30. The Times, 11 Feb. 1851, 4. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 28. Stanley to Malmesbury, 14 Feb. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 40. Ibid. 41. The Times, 20 Feb. 1851, 4. See Ward, Graham, 248. Letters of Queen Victoria, ii. 286–8. Broughton diary, 28 Jan. 1851, cited in Prest, Russell, 325. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 42. Greville, Journal, vi. 389. Ibid. 386. Canning to Malmesbury, 24 Feb. 1851, cited in Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 275. Prince Albert memo, 22 Feb. 1851, cited in Letters of Queen Victoria, ii. 346. Ibid. 349–50. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 44. Ibid. Disraeli, Reminiscences, 43. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 47. Ibid. Disraeli, Reminiscences, 43. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 46. Ibid. 47. Gladstone memo, 22 Apr. 1851, Gladstone MSS, 44777, cited in Gladstone, Diaries, iv. 310–11. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 48. Ibid.

464

notes

178. 179. 180. 181. 182. 183. 184.

Disraeli, Reminiscences, 46. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 279–80. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 50. Disraeli, Reminiscences, 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid. 49. Stanley to Disraeli, 28 Feb. 1851, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/29, cited in Monypenny and Buckle, Disraeli, iii. 295. Disraeli, Reminiscences, 48. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 280. Stanley to Wilton, 4 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1. Greville, Journal, vi. 392. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 48. Stanley to Liddell, 1 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1. Manners to Young, 2 Mar. 1851, cited in Jones, Derby, 180–1. Stanley, 28 Feb. 1851, Hansard, 3rd ser., cxiv, 1003–26. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 279. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 50. Ibid. The Times, 10 Mar. 1851, 8. The Times, 5 Mar. 1851, 4. Stanley to Hardwicke, 9 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1. Stanley to Croker, 9 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 235. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 56. Stanley to Ponsonby, 4 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1. Ponsonby to Disraeli, 6 Mar. 1851, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/P/329. Stanley to Croker, 14 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 230. Ibid. Stanley to Christopher, 11 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1. Stanley to Wilton, 15 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1. Stanley to Croker, 14 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 230. Stanley to Hardwicke, 9 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1. Stanley to Croker, 14 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 231. Stanley to Croker, 22 Mar. 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 235–7. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 55. Lonsdale to Croker, 23 Mar. 1851, cited in Jennings (ed.), Croker Papers, iii. 239–40. Stanley to Disraeli, [14 Mar. 1851], Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/36.

185. 186. 187. 188. 189. 190. 191. 192. 193. 194. 195. 196. 197. 198. 199. 200. 201. 202. 203. 204. 205. 206. 207. 208. 209. 210. 211. 212. 213.

notes 214. 215. 216. 217. 218. 219. 220. 221. 222. 223. 224. 225. 226. 227. 228. 229. 230. 231. 232. 233. 234.

235. 236. 237. 238. 239. 240. 241. 242. 243. 244. 245. 246. 247. 248. 249. 250.

465

Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 58. Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, 27 Mar. 1851, cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 422. The Speech of the Rt. Hon. Lord Stanley at Merchant Taylors’ Hall on Wednesday, April 2, 1851 (1851), cited in Stewart, Politics of Protection, 182. Malmesbury, Memoirs, i. 282. Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, 5 Apr. 1851, cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 424. Disraeli to Lady Londonderry, 20 Apr. 1851, cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 428. Greville, Journal, vi. 412. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 59. Disraeli to Lady Londonderry, 20 Apr. 1851, cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 428. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 63. Ibid. 64. Stanley to Disraeli, 8 May 1851, Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/32. Stanley to Disraeli, [5 May 1851], Hughenden MSS, B/XX/S/37. Stanley to Croker, 7 June 1851, Derby MSS 179/1. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 66. Stanley to Aberdeen, 14 June 1851, Derby MSS, 179/1. Disraeli to Sarah Disraeli, 24 May 1851, cited in Disraeli, Letters, v. 439. Derby, Disraeli, Derby and the Conservative Party, 380. The Times, 30 Sep. 1859, 7. The Times, 29 Sep. 1859, 7. The Times, 27 Sep. 1859, 6. For Grey’s report of the incident, see Grey to Derby, 31 July 1859, Derby MSS, 108/1; also Grey to Derby, 10 Aug. 1859, and Grey to Derby, 16 Aug. 1859, Derby MSS, 108/1. This file also contains pleas for reinstatement from evicted tenants. Stanley to Derby, 24 Sep. 1864, Derby MSS, 105/5. Derby to Stanley, 26 Sep. 1864, Derby MSS, 920DER (15), ‘Letters from Parents’. Freddy Stanley to Derby, Aug. 1866, Derby MSS, 105/10. Sir William Fraser, Disraeli and his Day (1891), 230. S. Lane-Poole, Life of Stratford Canning, Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, 2 vols (1888), ii. 37. Fraser, Disraeli and his Day, 183. Bagley, Earls of Derby, 185. Fraser, Disraeli and his Day, 459. Malmesbury, Memoirs, ii. 127. Fraser, Disraeli and his Day, 183. Malmesbury, Memoirs, ii. 21. Ibid. i. 42. Ibid. ii. 21. Ibid. i. 414. Greville, Journal, vi. 411. Malmesbury, Memoirs, ii. 413.

466

notes

251. 252. 253. 254. 255. 256. 257.

Disraeli, Reminiscences, 93. Hardcastle, Life of Lord Campbell, ii. 324. Fraser, Disraeli and his Day, 276. Ibid. G. O. Trevelyan, Life and Letters of Lord Macaulay, 2 vols (1883), i. 242. Bagley, Earls of Derby, 171. See A. E. Dingle, ‘ ‘‘The Monster Nuisance of All’’: Landowners, Alkali Manufacturers, and Air Pollution, 1828–1864’, Economic History Review, 35/4 (1982), 532.

Bibliography This biography draws primarily on the extensive papers of the 14th Earl of Derby held at the Liverpool Record Office. After emerging from Knowsley in the 1960s, the papers were loaned to Lord Blake at the Queen’s College, Oxford. But the Derby biography Blake hoped to write was never produced and in 1984 the papers were deposited in the Liverpool Record Office as 920 DER (14), where detailed cataloguing was undertaken by the archivist Mrs Naomi Evetts. This work has been continued by her successor Ms Ruth Hobbins. As well as family, estate, and business letters, the archive contains a large collection of official papers, royal correspondence, general and major political correspondence, and an invaluable set of letter-books for the period from 1828 to 1869, boxes 165–98. Quotations from the 14th Earl’s outgoing correspondence, with archival reference to the Derby MSS, come from the copies in these letter-books. Derby manuscripts consulted by the author when in private hands were deposited by him at the Liverpool Record Office in 2004, where they are being catalogued. The papers of the 13th Earl of Derby (920DER (13) ) and the papers and journals of the 15th Earl of Derby (920DER (15) ), also held at the Liverpool Record Office, provided additional important evidence.

manuscript collections Aberdeen MSS: Correspondence of the 4th Earl Aberdeen, British Library. Brabourne MSS: Diaries, papers, and correspondence of Sir Edward KnatchbullHugessen, 1st Lord Brabourne, Kent County Archives, Maidstone. Bright MSS: Correspondence of John Bright, British Library. Broadlands MSS: Diary, papers, and correspondence of Viscount Palmerston, Southampton University Library. Brougham MSS: Correspondence of Lord Brougham, University College London. Broughton MSS: Diaries and correspondence of J. C. Hobhouse, Lord Broughton, British Library. Canning MSS: Papers and correspondence of Charles, Earl Canning, Leeds District Archives. Cardwell MSS: Correspondence of Edward Cardwell, the National Archives. Carnarvon MSS: Papers and correspondence of the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, National Archives.

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Index Abercromby, 2nd Baron, George Abercromby (1770–1843), s.1821: 67 Abercromby, James (1776–1858), Speaker of the Commons 1835–9, cr. Lord Dunfermline 1839, MP for Midhurst and Calne prior to 1832 and Edinburgh 1832–9: 55, 152, 161, 164, 165, 166, 167, 180 Aberdeen, 4th Earl of, George Hamilton-Gordon (1784–1860) 240, 243, 251, 255, 282, 288, 291, 386, 389, 400, 404, 412 joins Peel’s cabinet (December 1834) 154, 157 urges censure of Melbourne’s ministry (August 1841) 224 on war in China (1841–2) 241, 242 sends Lord Ashburton to Washington (April 1842) 253 on factory legislation (June 1843) 270 supports repeal of the Corn Laws (November 1845) 299 fosters entente with France 323 maintains links with Stanley 331 included in prospective Stanley cabinet (March 1849) 361 supports repeal of the Navigation Acts (May 1849) 362 communication with Stanley on Irish Parliamentary Voters Bill (March 1850) 377 on Don Pacifico (June 1850) 379, 388 frequent visits to St. James’s Square (January 1851) 396, 398 opposition to Ecclesiastical Titles Bill (1851) 401 declines to form government (February 1851) 401

declines to serve under Stanley (February 1851) 402 visits St. James’s Square (April/May 1851) 410, 411 Abraham, Revd. Charles (1814–1903) 204 Act of Union, see also Daniel O’Connell, Ireland 72, 73, 74, 79, 116, 117, 138, 221, 274, 275, 276, 278, 344, 377 Society for Repeal of the Union 77, 99, 104, 120, 220, 343 Adam, Robert (1728–1792), architect 8, 9 Adams, President John (1735–1826) 37 Adams, President John Quincy (1767–1848) 40, 41 Adderley, Charles (1814–1905), MP for North Staffordshire 1841–78, cr. Lord Norton 1878: 370 Addington, Henry see 1st Viscount Sidmouth Aden 228 Aeschylus (c.525–456BC) 21 Afghanistan 243–7 African Civilisation Society 248 Agnew, Sir Andrew (1793–1849), MP for Wigtonshire 1830–7: 195, 196 Alabama 40 Albany, New York 36 Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1819–1861) 267, 268, 328 marries Queen Victoria 218 audience with Peel (December 1845) 301 favours Whig-Peelite merger 336, 361 supports repeal of the Navigation Acts (April 1849) 361 Great Exhibition 374

482 Albert, Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha (1819–1861) (cont.) hostility to Palmerston 378, 382 suspicion of Stanley 401 Allen, Capt. William (1793–1864), senior officer of the Niger expedition 1841: 248 Althorp, Lord (1782–1845), s. as 3rd Earl Spencer 1834, MP for South Northamptonshire 1812–34: 32, 58, 62, 67, 75, 80, 82, 88, 90, 91, 98, 100, 101, 103, 104, 107, 111, 115, 116, 120, 121, 125, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 140, 141, 149 character 80 declines to serve in Canning’s ministry (1827) 55 opposes Goderich’s ministry 57 votes for East Retford Disfranchisement Bill (1828) 59 serves alongside Stanley on the Commons Public Income and Expenditure Committee (1828) 61 favours substantial parliamentary Reform (1829) 65 organises opposition (1830) 68–9, 71 Commons leader under Grey (November 1830) 71 budget proposal (January 1831) 79 failure of budget (February 1831) 80 meeting with Irish MPs (August 1831) 93 imminent elevation to the Lords (July 1831) 96 favours giving office to O’Connell (October 1831) 99 announces tithe reform and collection of tithes (February 1832) 106 opposes Ebrington’s motion (May 1832) 110 decries Stanley’s Irish Church Temporalities Bill (October 1832) 117 presses for direct appropriation (November 1832) 117

Index introduces Irish Church Temporalities Bill (February 1833) 122 lack of commitment to Irish Coercion Bill (February 1833) 124 gives pledge to slave abolition (March 1833) 127 meets slave abolition delegates (April 1833) 129 acute mental anxiety (July 1833) 133 introduces Irish Tithe Commutation Bill (April 1834) 138 proposes reform of English Church Rates (April 1834) 145 proposes enquiry into the Irish Church (May 1834) 142 succeeds as 3rd Earl Spencer (November 1834) 151 advises Spring Rice not to stand as Speaker (January 1835) 164 Anglesey, 1st Marquess of, Henry William Paget (1768–1854), cr. 1815: 62, 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 86, 88, 92, 93, 95, 99, 103, 104, 105, 107, 108, 112, 113, 15, 116, 117, 118, 119, 121, 126 appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland 76 favours more placatory policy than Stanley 77 objects to coercion legislation (April 1831) 85 alarm over ‘Newtownbarry Massacre’ 89 deteriorating relationship with Stanley 91 presses for measures of Irish conciliation (February 1832) 106 deteriorating relationship with Stanley (June 1832) 114 declines Governor Generalship of India (November 1832) 114 welcomes Irish Church Temporalities Bill (February 1833) 123 resigns as Lord Lieutenant (August 1833) 134

Index Anti-Corn Law League see also Corn Laws 214, 222, 225, 255, 265, 266, 305, 311, 330 Antigua 227, 237 Arbuthnot, Charles (1767–1850) 61, 70, 128 Arbuthnot, Harriet (1793–1834) 61, 63 Argyll, Elizabeth Duchess of (1733–1790) 9 Aristotle (384–322BC) 20, 21, 22 Armagh, Archbishop of (1832) see Lord John Beresford Armistead, Elizabeth (1750–1842), marries Charles James Fox 1795: 10 Armstrong, Robert (1785–1869) MP for Lancaster 1848–53: 333 Arnold, Matthew (1822–1888) man of letters 4 Arnold, Thomas (1795–1842), headmaster of Rugby 1828–42: 205, 209 Arthur, Sir George (1784–1854), Lieutenant-Governor of Upper Canada 1837–40: 252 Ascension Islands 227 Ashburton, 1st Lord see Alexander Baring Ashburton, 2nd Lord see William Baring Ashburton-Webster, Treaty see also Foreign policy 253, 255 Ashley, Lord (1801–1885), s. as 7th Earl of Shaftesbury 1851, MP for Woodstock 1826–30, Dorchester 1830–1, Dorset 1831–46 and Bath 1847–51: 205, 216, 270, 271, 361 Atholl, 2nd Duke of, Lord James Murray (d. 1764) 8 Auckland, 1st Earl of (1784–1849), Governor-General of India 1836–42: 243, 291 Australia 228, 233, 234, 235, 258, 311 Bacon, Francis (1561–1626) essayist 23 Bagge, Richard (1810–1893) 364

483 Bagot, Sir Charles (1781–1843), Governor-General of Canada 1841–3: 249, 250, 251, 256 Bahama Islands 227 Balden, William 333, 334 Baldwin, Charles (1789–1859), MP for Totnes 1830–2, 1839–52 331 Baldwin, Stanley (1867–1947), prime minister 1923, 1924–9, 1935–7: 2 Ballykisteen, Tipperary 44, 45, 46, 51, 66, 75, 92, 150, 183, 184, 190, 191, 206, 217, 220, 320, 332, 348, 364, 414, 415 Bankes, George (1788–1856), MP for Dorset 1841–56: 309, 339, 340, 341, 350, 352 Barbados 227, 237, 371 Barclay, David (1784–1861), MP for Penryn 1826–32 and Sunderland 1835–7 and 1841–7: 169, 175 Barham, Joseph Forster (1759–1832), MP for Stockbridge 1793–9, 1802–6, 1809–22: 29 Baring, Alexander (1773–1848), cr. Lord Ashburton 1835, MP for Taunton 1812–20, Callington 1820–31, Thetford 1831–2 and North Essex 1832–5: 95, 253, 254, 268, 271, 311, 318, 328, 330 Baring, Sir Francis (1796–1866) cr. Lord Northbrook 1866, MP for Portsmouth 1826–65: 68, 216, 222 Baring, Francis (1800–1868), MP for Thetford 1832–41, 1848–57: 388 Baring, Henry (1804–1869), MP for Marlborough 1832–68: 128 Baring, Thomas (1800–1873), MP for Huntingdon 1844–73: 349, 361, 402, 409 Baring, William, 2nd Lord Ashburton (1799–1864) s.1848, MP for Thetford 1826–30, Callington 1830–2, Winchester 1832–7, North Staffordshire 1837–41 and Thetford 1841–8: 16 Barnes, Thomas (1785–1841), editor of The Times 1817–41: 155

484 Barron, Henry (1795–1872), MP for Waterford 1832–68: 139 Barrow, Sir George (1806–1876), Senior Clerk of the African division in the Colonial Office 1825–70: 229 Barry, Sir Charles (1795–1860), architect 327 Bateson, Sir Robert (1816–1843), MP for Londonderry 1830–42: 221 Bath and Wells, Bishop of, see Revd George Henry Law Bathurst, 3rd Earl, Henry George Bathurst (1762–1834), s.1794: 55 Beaufort, 7th Duke of, Henry Somerset (1792–1853), s.1835: 315, 344, 372 Beaumont, 8th Lord, Miles Stapleton (1805–1854), s.1840: 322 Bedford, 6th Duke of, John Russell (1766–1839), s.1802: 55 Bedford, 7th Duke of, Francis Russell (1788–1861), s. 1839, styled Ld. Tavistock 1802–39: 57, 297, 311, 312, 326, 356, 361 Belfast 83, 153, 161, 168, 195, 218, 219, 221, 222, 331 Bentham, Jeremy (1748–1832), philosopher 22, 32, 229, 233 Bentinck, Lord George (1802–1848), MP for King’s Lynn 1828–48: 2, 120, 155, 212, 221, 290, 308, 314, 315, 317, 320, 321, 322, 326, 327, 330, 331, 334, 342, 347, 352, 353, 354, 409 as Derby Dilly MP 162, 168, 180, 181, 182, 183, 187 emerges as Protectionist leader 308, 309, 310 ejects Peel from office (June 1846) 313 hails Stanley as leader of the Protectionist party (July 1846) 313 dispute with Lyndhurst and Gladstone (October 1846) 316 takes up Malt Tax 318 quarrel with Stanley (January 1847) 319 declines to send out party circular (January 1847) 322

Index encourages the formation of a Protectionist government (February 1847) 326 increasing unpopularity among Protectionist backbenchers 328 election address (July 1847) 329 deplores ‘No Popery’ cry 329 favours the admission of Jews to parliament 337 wish to abdicate as Commons leader (October 1847) 337 calls for repeal of the Bank Charter Act (December 1847) 339 resigns leadership (December 1847) 339–40 objects to Conservative party label (February 1848) 340 supports Disraeli as his successor 341 calls for enquiry into the Sugar Duties (February 1848) 346 attacks Stanley (March 1848) 346 death (September 1848) 349 Bentinck, Lord Henry (1804–1870), younger brother of Lord George Bentinck, MP for North Nottinghamshire 1846–57: 352, 372 Bentinck, Lord William (1774–1839), Governor-General of India 1828–35, MP for King’s Lynn prior to 1828: 142 Beresford, Revd. Lord John, (1773–1862), Archbishop of Armagh 1822–62: 121, 272, 273 Beresford, William (1798–1883), MP for Harwich 1841–7, North Essex 1847–65: 318, 322, 326, 334, 350, 357, 367, 386, 389, 393, 395 helps to organise Protectionist MPs (January 1846) 309 character 316 vehement anti-Catholic 316 Commons chief whip after March 1846 316 opposes election of Lord Lincoln (December 1846) 318

Index sends circular to Protectionist MPs (January 1847) 322 on 1847 election 328 raises No Popery cry 329 denounces Bentinck’s leadership (December 1847) 339, 341 issues Conservative circulars (January 1848) 340 attacked by Disraeli 342 sent to Hughenden by Stanley (September 1849) 366 advises reversion to Protection (October 1849) 366 reports Disraeli dejected (November 1849) 368 on failure to form a Conservative cabinet (February 1851) 403–4 Berkeley, Bishop (1685–1753), prelate and philosopher 27 Berkeley, Grantley (1800–1881), MP for West Gloucestershire 1832–52: 238 Bermuda 227 Bessborough, 4th Earl of, see Lord Duncannon Bexley, Lord, Nicholas Vansittart (1766–1851), cr. 1823: 57 Blackburn 187, 194, 331, 350, 390 Blackburne, Francis (1782–1867) 77, 104, 126, 230, 271, 272, 278, 390 Blackburne, John 120 Blackstone, Sir William (1723–1780) 25 Blackwood, Arthur (1808–1874), Senior Clerk of the North American division in the Colonial Office 229 Blake, Anthony Richard (1786–1849), Chief Remembrancer for Ireland 92 Blessington, Lady, née Margaret Power (1789–1849), social hostess 203 Blomfield, Rev. Charles (1786–1857), Bishop of London 1828–56: 100, 216, 292 Boers see also Cape Colony 228, 247 Bolton 6, 7 Bolton, Jasper, Ballykisteen land agent 415

485 Bolton, Thomas, Ballykisteen land agent 45, 274, 320, 332, 348, 358, 414, 415 Bonham, Francis (1785–1863), MP for Rye 1830–1 and Harwich 1835–7: 322 Bootle 6, 413 Bootle-Wilbraham, Edward, 1st Lord Skelmersdale (1771–1853) 33, 56, 150, 161, 207, 310, 391 Bootle-Wilbraham, Emma, see Lady Emma Stanley, Countess of Derby Bootle-Wilbraham, Richard (1801–1844) 161, 194, 207, 283, 390 Bourne, William Sturges (1769–1845) 60 Bradford 195 Bridgewater, 3rd Duke of 20 Bright, John (1811–1888), MP for Durham 1843–7, Manchester 1847–57 and Birmingham 1857–88: 214, 318, 360, 362, 394 Brighton 152, 177, 180, 187, 265 British Guiana 227 British Honduras 227 Brooks’s Club 9, 69, 110, 184 Brougham, Henry (1778–1868), cr. Lord Brougham 1830: 22, 40, 61, 62, 65, 68, 69, 70, 104, 107, 109, 116, 132, 133, 141, 154, 156, 161, 164, 167, 177, 180, 288, 291, 311, 312, 313, 314, 317, 320, 328, 361, 362, 374, 377, 379, 392 opinion of Stanley 1 encourages Lansdowne to join Canning’s cabinet (1827) 55 illness (1828) 57 votes for East Retford Disfranchisement Bill (1828) 59 favours neutrality towards Wellington’s government 66 hosts dinner at which opposition agrees to support Whig Reform proposal (November 1830) 71 appointed Lord Chancellor (November 1830) 71 opposes discussions with ‘the waverers’ (November 1831) 98

486 Brougham, Henry (1778–1868), cr. Lord Brougham 1830: (cont.) favours giving office to O’Connell 99 advocate of slave abolition 127 seeks to preserve cabinet unity (May 1834) 140 Browne, James (1793–1854), MP for Mayo 1818–1835: 90 Brownlow, Charles (1795–1847), MP for County Armagh 1818–32: 107 Buccleuch, 5th Duke of, Walter Montagu-Douglas-Scott (1806–1884), s.1819: 111, 255, 270, 292, 300, 301, 302, 331, 388, 389 Buck, Lewis (1784–1858), MP for Exeter 1826–32, North Devon 1839–57: 347 Buckingham, 1st Duke of, Richard Temple-Nugent-BrydgesChandos-Grenville (1776–1839) cr. Duke 1822: 126 Buckingham, 2nd Duke of, Richard Temple-Nugent-BrydgesChandos-Grenville (1797–1861) styled Lord Chandos 1822–39: 231, 255, 305, 309, 313, 314, 396 Bulkeley, Sir Richard (1801–1875), MP for Beaumaris 1830–2, Anglesea 1832–7, Flint district 1841–7 and Anglesea 1847–68: 161, 175, 195 Buller, Charles (1806–1848), MP for West Loo 1830–2 and Liskeard 1832–48: 229, 235, 249, 265, 294 Buller, Sir Edward (1800–1874), MP for North Staffordshire 1832–41 and Stafford 1841–7, 1865–74: 169, 187 Buller, Sir John Yarde (1799–1871), cr. Lord Churston 1858, MP for South Devon 1835–58: 217 Bulwer-Lytton, Sir Edward (1805–1873), cr. Lord Lytton 1866, MP for Lincoln 1832–41 and Hertfordshire 1852–1866: opinion of Stanley 3, 4, 418 description of Stanley’s oratory 32

Index Burdett, Sir Francis (1770–1844), MP for Westminster 1832–7 and North Wiltshire 1837–44: 43, 49, 50, 54, 86 Burgoyne, General John (1723–1792) 8, 10, 11, 14 Burke, Edmund (1729–1797), Whig politician and writer 25, 26, 60 Burnet, Bishop Gilbert (1643–1715) 25 Buxton, Thomas (1786–1845) Slavery Abolitionist and MP for Weymouth 1818–37: 130, 248 Byng, Sir John (1772–1860) cr. Lord Strafford 1835 and Earl of Strafford 1847, MP for Poole 1831–5: 87 Calcraft, John (1796–1880), MP for Wareham 1832–41 and 1857–9: 59 Calhoun, John (1782–1850), Vice-President of the U.S. 1825–32: 42 Callaghan, Daniel (1786–1849), MP for city of Cork 1829–49: 87 Camden, William (1551–1623), historian 25 Campbell, Lord, John Campbell (1779–1861), cr. 1841, MP for Edinburgh 1835–41: 161, 308, 350 opinion of Stanley 3, 420 Campbell, Col. Sir Henry (1769–1856), MP for Cromarty and Nairn 1796–1802, 1806–7: 191 Canada 75, 129, 139, 201, 213, 225, 227, 234, 248–55, 261–2, 275, 285, 286, 295, 311, 363, 370 visit by Stanley (1824) 33, 36–7 Clergy Reserves Bill (1827) 50, 53–4 Commons petition complaining of lack of responsible government (May 1829) 65 Labouchere’s motion (May 1830) 68 Howick’s objections to funding for the SPG in Canada 68 1837 revolts 199–200 Canada Act (1840) 249 Canadian Corn Laws Act (1843) 259–61

Index Canning, 2nd Viscount, Charles Canning (1812–1862) s.1837, Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs 1841–6; Postmaster-General 1853–5, Governor-General of India 1855–8, 1st Viceroy of India 1858–62: 291, 389, 400, 402 Canning, George (1770–1827), prime minister 1827, MP for Liverpool 1812–22 and Harwich 1822–7: 20, 28, 30, 31, 48, 49, 50, 53, 56, 59, 66, 127, 129, 146, 170, 256, 311 character and politics 30 Canning’s popularity in the United States 43 proposes Catholic Peers Bill (1822) 49 introduces Corn Law reform (1827) 54 forms coalition government (1827) 55 death 56 Canning’s memory a template for Stanley’s ambition 57–8, 61, 68 Canning, Sir Stratford (1786–1880), Viscount Stratford de Redcliffe cr. 1852, MP for Stockbridge 1831–2 and Kings Lynn 1832–41: 68, 168, 182, 183, 417 Canterbury, Archbishop of, see Rev. William Howley Cape Colony: 129, 228, 247, 370 Cape Town: 228 Cardigan, 7th Earl of , James Brudenell (1797–1868), s.1837: 372 Cardwell, Edward (1813–1886), MP for Clitheroe 1842–7 and Liverpool 1847–52, Secretary to the Treasury 1845–6: 322 Carlisle, 6th Earl of, George Howard (1773–1848), styled Lord Morpeth 1773–1825: 55, 99, 153 Carlisle, 7th Earl of, George Howard (1802–1864), styled Lord Morpeth 1825–48, s.1848: 16, 71, 169, 170, 171, 193, 194, 219, 220, 222, 223, 346, 381 Carlton Club 221, 319, 387, 403, 411, 418 Carnarvon, 3rd Earl of, Henry Herbert (1800–1849), s.1833: 16

487 Caroline, Queen (1768–1821): 11, 21 Carrington, 2nd Lord, Robert John Carrington (1796–1879), s.1838: 322 Cartwright, Sir Thomas (1795–1850), British Ambassador to Sweden 1838–50: 310 Castlereagh, 2nd Marquess of Londonderry, Robert Stewart (1769–1822): 30 Catholic Association see also Daniel O’Connell: 31, 43, 62, 63, 74 Catholic Emancipation: 2, 27, 30, 31, 49, 50, 52, 53, 55, 66, 68, 71, 73, 76, 83, 138, 153, 163, 173, 205, 221, 280, 393, 394 Plunket’s Catholic Emancipation Bill (1821) 49 Canning’s Catholic Peers Bill (1822) 49 Catholic Relief Bill (1825) 49 Catholic Emancipation (1827) 54 Catholic Emancipation (1828–9) 58–64 Central Agricultural Protection Society 305 Ceylon 228, 370 Chalmers, George (1742–1825) 25 Chandos, Lord see 2nd Duke of Buckingham Charles I, King (1600–1649) 16, 20, 102 Charles II, King (1630–1685) 7 Charlton, Edmund (b.1789), MP for Ludlow 1835–7: 172, 175 Chartism 214, 222, 225, 265, 266, 330, 331, 342, 344–6, 356, 370 Chatterton, Col. James (1794–1874), MP for city of Cork 1849–52: 372 Chichester, Lord (1811–1873), son of 2nd Marquess of Donegal, MP for Belfast 1845–52: 331 China 228, 262, 267 Convention of Chuenpi 239 Hong Kong 230, 239–43, 262 Opium trade 239, 242–3 First Opium War 239–41 Treaty of Nan-ching 241

488 Christ Church, Oxford 16, 19–22, 27, 34, 61 Christopher, Robert (1804–1877), MP for North Lincolnshire 1837–57: 347, 352, 355, 372 Church of England see also Oxford Movement 6, 14, 50, 67, 75, 78, 100, 101, 136, 138, 142, 146, 169, 173, 174, 205, 208–9, 210, 212, 216, 230, 237, 270, 272, 316, 329, 389, 392, 394, 411, church rates 62, 138, 145, 159, 185, 198, 209, 281 St Asaph and Bangor debate (1845) 292 tithe 159, 190, 209 Church of Ireland 27, 32, 50, 54, 65, 75, 78, 84, 91, 99–102, 107, 115, 116, 125, 131, 136, 138, 156, 173, 189, 271, 277, 292 appropriation 101, 106, 107, 116–8, 120–1, 131–4, 136–40, 142–5, 161, 173–7, 183, 185, 189–90, 193, 212 Arrears of Tithes Bill 108 Compulsory Composition of Tithes Bill 108, 113–5 ecclesiastical leases and Irish Ecclesiastical Leases Bill (1830) 64, 69 First Fruits Fund 100, 116 Irish Church Temporalities Bill (1833–4) 116–8, 120–3, 130–5, 138, 145 Irish Church Revenues Bill (1836) 188–90 Irish Tithe Bill (1837) 193–4 Irish Tithe Bill (1838) 212 Tithe reform 105–8, 113–4, 115, 120–1, 126 ‘Tithe Wars’ 75, 77–8, 100, 102 Vestry Cess 100 Church Missionary Society 233, 235 Cincinnati 38 Clanwilliam, 3rd Earl of, Richard Meade (1795–1879), s.1805: 190 Clarendon, Lord (1609–1674) 25 Clarendon, 4th Earl of, George Villiers (1800–1870), s.1838: 202, 326, 374

Index opinion of Stanley 5, 419 supports Corn Law repeal 312 on Peel’s popularity (May 1847) 336 denounces Conservative anti-Catholicism (February 1848) 343 appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland and proposes coercion legislation 343 suspends habeas corpus in Ireland (July 1848) 344 laments Whigs’ back luck 348 arrests O’Brien (August 1848) 348 denounces Stanley’s misrepresentation (February 1849) 359 given ‘a gallop’ over Irish affairs by Stanley (February 1850) 375–6 on Don Pacifico 382 Clay, Henry (1777–1852), American statesman 40, 41, 42 Clay, Sir William (1791–1869), MP for Tower Hamlets 1832–57: 193 Clifton, John Talbot (1819–1882), MP for North Lancashire 1844–52: 289–90 Cloncurry, 2nd Lord, Valentine Lawless (1773–1853), s.1799: 79, 83, 112, 113 Cobbett, William (1762–1835), MP for Oldham 1832–5: contests Preston 1826: 52–3 Cobden, Richard (1804–1865), MP for Stockport 1841–7, West Yorkshire 1847–57 and Rochdale 1859–65: 214, 304, 311, 313, 337, 361, 370, 371, 372, 373, 374, 394, 399, 414 Colonial Government Society 370 Colonial Land and Immigration Commission 231 Colonial Office 50, 56, 114, 125, 127, 128, 134, 197, 198, 215, 216, 232, 233, 234, 242, 248, 251, 262, 266, 267, 285, 294, 299, 302, 328, 361 Colonial Passengers Act 1842: 234, 263 Colville, 11th Lord, Charles Colville (1818–1903), s.1849: 389 Constantine, Grand Duke of Russia: 328

489

Index Cooper, James Fenimore (1789–1851), novelist 42 Copeland, Alderman William (1797–1868), MP for Coleraine 1832–7 and Stoke-upon-Trent 1837–52 and 18–65: 168, 175, 202 Corn Laws see also the Anti-Corn Law League 49, 51, 58, 72, 193, 202, 204, 214, 222, 255, 256, 257, 259, 260, 263, 266–8, 283, 287, 290, 295, 331, 336, 339, 341, 355, 373, 383, 385, 387, 388, 389, 390, 392, 405 Corn Law reform (1826) 52 Corn Law reform (1827) 54 Corn Law reform (1828) 59 Corn Law repeal (1846) 2, 297–313 Corry, Hon. Henry (1803–1873), MP for Tyrone 1826–73, son of Earl of Belmore 291, 389, 402, 403 Cowley, Abraham (1618–1667) 27 Cowper, Lady Emily (1787–1869), married Lord Palmerston 1839: 268 Coxe, William (1747–1828) 26 Crawford, Sharman (1781–1861), MP for Dundalk 1834–7 and Rochdale 1841–52: 264, 265 Creevey, Thomas (1768–1838) 10, 11, 51, 65, 66, 148, 187 Croker, John Wilson (1780–1859), editor of the Quarterly Review 66, 154, 160, 193, 271, 296, 317, 326, 327, 334, 369, 385, 386, 387, 394, 407, 408 attacks Reform Bill (September 1831) 96 humiliated by Stanley (December 1831) 102–3 split with Peel over Corn Law repeal 313 supports Stanley through the Quarterly Review 318 dissociates Stanley from Protestant bigotry (June 1847) 329 regrets Stanley’s lack of leadership (August 1850) 385 role as Stanley’s journalistic mouth-piece 390

Crowe, William, Irish estate employee 415 Cruikshank, George (1792–1878), political cartoonist 207 Cumberland, H.R.H. the Duke of (1771–1851) 154 Curran, Judge John (1750–1817) 27 Dalhousie, 10th Earl of, James Andrew Ramsay (1812–1860), s.1838: 331 Damer, Rt. Hon. George (1788–1856), younger son of 1st Earl of Portarlington, MP for Portarlington 1835–47 and Dorchester 1847–52: 331 Darwin, Charles (1809–1882), naturalist 206, 235 Davenport, John (1764–1848), MP for Stoke-upon-Trent 1832–41: 181, 187 Davies, Sir John (1529–1626) 25, 76 Davies, Col. Thomas (1789–1846), MP for Worcester 1818–35 and 1837–41: 122 Davis, Sir John (1795–1890), Governor of Hong Kong 1844–48: 243 Deedes, William (1796–1862), MP for East Kent 1845–57: 403, 404 De Freyne, Lord, Thomas Cholmondley (1767–1855) 322 de Grey, Earl, Thomas de Grey (1781–1859), s.1833, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland 1841–44: 163, 271, 272, 275, 277, 278, 291 de Lhuys, Edouard Drouyn (1805–1861), French ambassador to St James’s 1850–1: 378 de Lolme, Jean-Louis (1741–1804), Swiss-born political philosopher 25 de Tocqueville, Alexis (1805–1859) 35, 39 Denison, John Evelyn (1800–1873), cr. Viscount Ossington 1872: 16, 62, 162 friendship with Stanley at Christ Church 19–20 accompanies Stanley to North America (1824–1825) 34

490 Denison, John Evelyn (1800–1873) (cont.) draws up list of Stanleyite MPs (January 1835) 163 declines to move Royal Address (February 1836) 187 Denman, Thomas (1779–1854), cr. Lord Denman 1834: 71 ‘Derby Dilly’ see also Lord Stanley, 14th Earl of Derby 170–7, 179, 180, 183, 186, 194–6, 221 Derby, Earls of, see Stanley Desart, 3rd Earl of, Otway O’Connor Cuffe (1818–1865), s.1820: 327, 372, 377, 378, 388 Devon, 11th Earl of, William Courtenay (1777–1859), s.1835: 278, 300 Disraeli, Benjamin (1803–1881), cr. Earl of Beaconsfield 1876, MP for Maidstone 1837–41, Shrewsbury 1841–7 and Buckinghamshire 1847–76: 5, 185, 290, 313, 317, 342, 361, 365, 368, 369, 372, 374, 376, 384, 396, 407, 408, 410, 411, 417, 418 relationship with Stanley 2, 3, 342 opinion of Knowsley 8 on events of 1834–1835: 145 ‘Runnymede’ letter on Stanley (February 1836) 186–7 scathing judgement on Lady Stanley 203 implication in Henry Stanley’s disappearance (1831) 203 maiden Commons speech (December 1837) 203 dubs Peel’s ministry ‘a dynasty of deception’ (April 1845) 295 attacks Peel over Corn Law repeal 309–10 claim to Protectionist leadership in the Commons (December 1847) 340 objects to Conservative party label (February 1848) 340 resentment at not being appointed Protectionist Commons leader 341 obstacle to Conservative reunion 341

Index attachment to Bentinck 341 hosts dinner for Stanley (July 1848) 347 reviews 1848 session (August 1848) 348 Stanley’s reservations about Disraeli (September 1848) 351 brought in to Commons leadership (January 1849) 352–4 opinion of Stanley (March 1849) 357 attacks Melbourne ministry (February 1849) 359 acknowledged as de facto Commons leader 359 motion on relief of real property (February 1849) 360 agriculture and manufacturing, complementary interests (March 1849) 360 on repeal of the Navigation Acts (April 1849) 360 advocates fiscal reform 365 Aylesbury speech (September 1849) 365–6 quarrel with Stanley over abandonment of Protection (October 1849) 366–7 the Colonial Government Society (December 1849) 370 speech on Trollope’s amendment (January 1850) 373 call for revision of local taxation (February 1850) 373 suspicions of Aberdeen (May 1850) 379 on Don Pacifico (June 1850) 381–2 on Peel’s death (July 1850) 383 mistrusted by Conservative backbenchers 389 friendship with Edward Stanley 390 on Ecclesiastical Titles Bill 394 financial resolutions (January/February 1851) 395–6, 398 failed attempt to form a Conservative government (February 1851) 401–4 calls for tax relief for landowners (April 1851) 409

Index resolution on tax reform and public income (June 1851) 412 Disraeli, Mary Anne (1789–1872), wife of Benjamin Disraeli, cr. Viscountess Beaconsfield 1868: 347 Dod’s Parliamentary Companion (1847) 329 Dominica 227 ‘Don Pacifico’ 378–82, 388, 389, 392, 421 D’Orsay, Count Alfred (1801–1852), dandy and artist 203 Downshire, 3rd Marquess of (1788–1845), Arthur Blundell Trumbull Hill s.1801: 221 Dorset, 3rd Duke of (1745–1799), John Frederick Sackville-Germain 9, 10 Downshire, 4th Marquess of, Arthur Wills Hill (1812–1868), s.1845: 388 Doyle, John (1797–1868), painter and caricaturist 220 Dryden, John (1631–1700) 27 Dublin 76, 77, 79, 83, 86, 87, 94, 98, 99, 104, 115, 117, 118, 119, 126, 150 Dudley, 1st Earl of, John William Ward (1781–1833), cr. 1827: 57 Duncannon, Lord (1781–1847), s. as 4th Earl of Bessborough 1844: 83, 133, 136, 137, 149, 325 draws up parliamentary Reform legislation 79 intermediary with O’Connell (September 1831) 99 scandalised by Anglesey’s relation with Stanley (November 1833) 115 declines to contest Country Kilkenny (December 1832) 120 fury at the abandonment of Clause 147 (June 1833) 132 presses for inquiry into the Church of Ireland (November 1833) 136 Lichfield House meeting (February 1835) 166 supports Corn Law repeal (1846) 310

491 overwhelmed by famine disaster in Ireland 320 Dundas, Henry (1742–1811), Viscount Melville 66 Dunfermline, Lord see James Abercromby Du Pre, Caledon (1804–1886), MP for Buckinghamshire 1839–71: 347 Durham, Lord, J.G. Lambton (1792–1840), cr. Lord in 1828 and Earl of Durham in 1833: 104, 107, 131, 132, 152, 153, 157, 158, 165, 167, 177, 180, 213 laments opposition disunity (1828) 30 supports parliamentary Reform measure (October 1830) 71 draws up parliamentary Reform legislation 79 opposes Committees on Irish tithe (December 1831) 101 proposes large creation of peers (January 1832) 109 on Tithe Composition Bill (August 1832) 115 supports reduction of Irish Establishment (October 1832) 117 isolated in cabinet 118 objects to Irish Church Temporalities Bill (November 1832) 118 privately denounces Stanley (December 1832) 120 resigns from Grey’s cabinet (March 1833) 125 objects to withdrawal of Clause 147 (July 1833) 133 mission to Canada (January 1838) 199, 249 Durham Report 249, 286 Durham, Sir Philip (1763–1845), MP for Devizes 1834–1836: 168 East India Company 228, 246 Commons petitions on the East India Company Charter (February and May 1830) 168

492 Ebrington, Lord (1783–1861), s. as 2nd Earl Fortescue 1841, MP for Tavistock 1820–31, North Devonshire 1832–39: 110, 111, 120, 121, 125, 132, 133, 136, 145, 158, 216 Ecclesiastical Commission 169, 173, 189, 190, 292 Edinburgh Review 22 Edinburgh University 22 Education, England 209, 210, 215–6, 269–70, 296, 327 Education, Ireland see also Kildare Place Society 5, 27, 32, 45, 54, 75, 78, 92–4, 103, 108, 126, 139, 167, 272–4, 281–3, 414 Edgeworth, Maria (1767–1849), novelist 191, 414 influence of The Absentee on Stanley 44–5 Egerton, Lord Francis see Lord Francis Leveson-Gower Eglinton, 13th Earl of, Archibald William Montgomerie (1812–1861), s.1819: 212, 307, 308, 315, 343, 356, 384, 388, 391, 403 Eldon, 1st Earl of (1751–1838), cr. 1821: 30, 50, 55, 57, 65 Eliot, Lord, Edward Eliot (1798–1877), s. as 3rd Earl of St. Germans 1845, Chief Secretary for Ireland 1841–5; Postmaster-General 1845, MP for Liskeard 1824–32, East Cornwall 1837–45: 271, 272, 275, 282 Elizabeth I, Queen (1533–1603) 7, 25 Ellenborough, 2nd Baron, Edward Law (1790–1871), cr. Earl 1844: 57, 73, 81, 110, 122, 268, 303, 314, 389 joins Peel’s cabinet (December 1834) 157 appointed Governor-General of India 240 on China war 241 on Afghanistan crisis 243–5 Commons attack on Ellenborough’s proclamation (March 1843) 245–6

Index annexes Sindh (1843) 246 recalled from India (April 1844) 247 Conservative whip in the Lords 305 friendliness towards Stanley (April 1846) 311 proposes Peel makes way for Stanley (May 1846) 313 on Irish Poor Law Extension Bill (May 1847) 327 on Stanley’s Portugal motion (June 1847) 328 looks to reunite with Stanley 331 on Grey’s Enlistment Bill 334 on Irish coercion legislation (April 1848) 344 opposes repeal of the Navigation Acts (May 1849) 361 adviser to Stanley on colonial affairs 388 declines to join Conservative government (February 1851) 403 Ellesmere, 1st Earl of see Lord Francis Leveson-Gower Ellice, Edward (1781–1863), MP for Coventry 1818–26 and 1830–63: 53, 86, 87, 95, 132, 137, 141, 174, 175, 177, 180 Elliot, Capt. Charles (1801–1875) 239 Elliot, Admiral Sir George (1784–1863) 239 Elphinstone, General William (1782–1842) 244 Entwistle, William (1808–1865), MP for South Lancashire 1844–7: 283 Epsom 8, 9, 103, 146, 215, 364, 387, 412, 416, 419, 421 Eton 4, 8, 12, 14–18, 19, 20, 21, 34, 46, 56, 204, 205, 208, 350 Euclid 21 Ewart, William (1798–1869), MP for Bletchingley 1828–30, Liverpool 1830–7, Wigan 1839–41 and Dumfries 1841–68: 16, 19, 21, 196 Exeter, Bishop of, see Revd Henry Phillpotts

Index Exeter, 2nd Marquess of, Brownlow Cecil (1795–1867), s.1804: 289, 302, 361, 372 Factory reform 269–70, 295, 296 Falkland Islands 228, 231, 262 Fanshawe, Lt.: despatched by Stanley to gather intelligence in the U.S. in 1841: 252 Fector, John (b.1812), MP for Dover 1835–7 and Maidstone 1838–41: 168 Ferguson, Sir Robert (1795–1860), MP for city of Londonderry 1830–60: 175 Filmer, Sir Robert (d.1653) 25 Fitzgerald, 2nd Lord (1783–1843), s.1835, Sec of Board of Control 1841–3: 240, 246 Fitzroy, Capt. Robert (1805–1865), Governor of New Zealand 1843–5: 235, 236, 293–4 Fitzwilliam, 5th Earl, Charles Wentworth-Fitzwilliam (1786–1857), s.1833, styled Lord Milton 1786–1833: 57, 312, 407 Fleetwood, Sir Philip (1801–1866), MP for Preston 1832–47: 187 Flitcroft, Henry (1697–1769), architect 202 Follett, Sir William (1798–1845), MP for Exeter 1835–45: 155 Foreign policy, see also Ashburton-Webster Treaty, China, France, Greece, Portugal, Russia, Spain and the United states of America 62, 358 Canning’s recognition of the South American states 55 debate on Portugal (1830) 68 debate on Russian-Dutch loan (January 1832) 105 debate on Portugal (1834) 137 diplomatic crisis with the United States (1841–2) 251–5 Stanley attacks Palmerston’s foreign policy (1842) 267

493 Palmerston’s foreign policy (1847) 323–4 diplomatic relations with the Papacy (1848) 342–3 ‘Don Pacifico’ (1850) 378–82 Forshaw, Timothy, manager of Lord Stanley’s stud 413 Forster, Charles (1784–1850), MP for Walsall 1832–7: 187, 195 Foster, John (1787–1846), architect 11 Fox, Charles James (1749–1806) 11, 12, 14, 15, 17, 26 France 11, 70, 105, 137, 220, 269, 323, 324, 344, 358, 380, 385 Franklin, Sir John (1786–1847), explorer and Lieutenant-Governor of Van Diemen’s Land 1837–43: 236–7 Fraser, Sir William (1826–1898), MP for Barnstaple 1852–53 and 1857–9, Ludlow 1863–65 and Kidderminster 1874–80: 417, 420 Fraser’s Magazine 291 Gainsborough, 1st Earl of, Charles Neel (1781–1866), cr. 1841: 322 Galway, Lord, George Edward Monckton (1805–1876), s.1834, MP for East Retford 1847–76: 347 Gambia 227, 238 Garrick, David (1717–1779) actor manager 8 Gascoyne, General Isaac (c. 1770–1841) 82, 86, 88 Gawler, Col. George (1796–1869), Governor of South Australia 1838–41: 234 General elections 1826: 52–3 1830: 69 1831: 86–8 1832: 119–20 1835: 160–1 1837: 194–6 1841: 223 1847: 328–9 George III, King (1738–1820) 26

494 George IV, King (1762–1830) 11, 69, 194 Gibralta 228 Gibson, Thomas Milner (1807–1884), MP for Manchester 1841–57 and Ashton-under-Lyme 1857–68, Vice-President of the Board of Trade 1846–8: 268, 370 Gladstone, John (1764–1851): 52, 70 Gladstone, William (1809–1898), MP for Newark 1832–45, Oxford University 1847–65, South Lancashire 1865–8, Greenwich 1868–80 and Midlothian 1880–98: 2, 3, 4, 29, 52, 133, 256, 257, 258, 263, 287, 296, 313, 331, 411, 419 sends Stanley a copy of The State in its Relations with the Church (February 1839) 210 on English education (June 1839) 216 urges censure of Melbourne’s ministry (August 1841) 224 Peel’s rising acolyte 264, 269, 284, 288 on factory legislation (1843) 270 on Maynooth grant 281–2 appointed to Board of Trade (May 1843) 284 on Stanley’s elevation to the Lords (1844) 290 resigns from cabinet over Maynooth (February 1845) 290, 292 appointment to Colonial Office (December 1845) 302 defeat at Newark (January 1846) 305 shocked by Protectionist hostility to Peel (August 1846) 316 dispute with Bentinck (October 1846) 316, 318 on dislocation of parties 340 supports Disraeli over local tax reform (February 1850) 373 appointed Commissioner of the Great Exhibition 374 on Don Pacifico (June 1850) 382 declines office under Stanley (February 1851) 401–2

Index opposes Ecclesiastical Titles Bill (March 1851) 408–9 likely to rejoin the Conservatives 410 supports Disraeli’s finance motion (June 1851) 412 on Homer 416 Glasgow University 17, 144, 153–4, 157–8, 159, 160, 185, 191, 192, 197, 213 Glenelg, Lord (1783–1866) see Charles Grant Glengall, 2nd Earl of, Richard Butler (1794–1858), s.1819: 377 Globe, The 160, 182 Goderich, Lord, Frederick John Robinson (1782–1859), cr. Earl of Ripon 1833: 57, 82, 101, 114, 128, 141, 142, 151, 152, 154, 155, 159, 163, 180, 184, 188, 192, 200, 215, 232, 270, 288, 289, 318 becomes prime minister (1827) 56 resigns premiership (January 1828) 56 joins Grey’s cabinet (November 1830) 71 opposes creation of peers (September 1831) 96 resigns Colonial Office (April 1833) 125 visits Goodwood (December 1833) 136 annoyance at Stanley’s Thimblerig speech (July 1834) 148 appointed President of the Board of Trade (September 1841) 225 reluctantly accepts annexation of Sindh (May 1843) 246 quarrel with Bentinck (October 1846) 316 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1749–1832) 20 Gold Coast 227, 238 Goldsmith, Oliver (1728–1774), playwright and poet 10 Goodenough, Rev. Edmund (1785–1845), Stanley’s tutor at Christ Church 21, 141 Gore, William Ormsby (1779–1860), MP for North Shropshire 1835–57: 260

Index Gorst, Dr. Knowsley physician 414 Gosset, Sir William (1782–1848), Under Secretary for Ireland 1831–5: 86, 99 Gough, Major-General Sir Hugh (1779–1869) 240, 241 Goulburn, Henry (1784–1856), MP for Armagh 1826–31 and Cambridge University 1831–56: 57, 59, 66, 122, 147, 154, 217, 224, 225, 284, 287, 295, 331, 341, 373, 374 Graham, Sir James (1792–1861), MP for Hull 1818–20, Carlisle 1826–9, East Cumberland 1830–7, Pembroke 1838–41, Dorchester 1841–7, Ripon 1847–52 and Carlisle 1852–61: 59, 67, 69, 70, 71, 79, 91, 92, 103, 107, 109, 110, 115, 117, 119, 126, 132, 134, 135, 137, 142, 148, 150, 156, 173, 174, 175, 176, 180, 182, 183, 184, 197, 198, 202, 204, 211, 212, 215, 216, 217, 221, 222, 223, 231, 267, 278, 287, 290, 296, 303, 311, 313, 346, 356, 373, 380, 382, 387, 400, 401, 404, 409 character 61 supports Stanley (1828) 61–2 on retrenchment (1830) 68 drafts Reform measure 79 visits Goodwood (December 1833) 136 resigns from cabinet (May 1834) 140–1 opposes admission of Dissenters to Oxford and Cambridge (June 1834) 146–7 considers Melbourne’s government ‘bedevilled’ (October 1834) 149 reports Westminster fire (October 1834) 151 regrets temporary commission given to Wellington (November 1834) 152 conversations at Trentham House (November 1834) 153 agrees not to join Peel government (November 1834) 154–5 accompanies Stanley to Glasgow (December 1834) 157 praises the ‘Knowsley Creed’ (December 1834) 158

495 shaken by ‘Tamworth Manifesto’ (December 1834) 160 election at Carlisle (January 1835) 161 formation of the ‘Derby Dilly’ 161–3, 166–71 opposes Abercromby as Speaker (January 1835) 163–4 reports Ultra Tory disgust with Peel (February 1835) 164 defends Stanley’s conduct (April 1835) 177 declines Governor-Generalship of India (April 1835) 180 crosses the floor of the House (July 1835) 181 decries religious dissensions infusing political differences 186 encourages understanding with Peel 188, 190, 192, 193, 194 loses seat (July 1837) 194–5 returned for Pembroke (1838) 201 elected Lord Rector of Glasgow University 213 joins Carlton Club (January 1841) 221 appointed Home Secretary (September 1841) 225 factory legislation 269–71 supports arrest of O’Connell (1843) 277 relationship with Stanley and Peel 284, 288–9 defends Staley’s policy in New Zealand (1845) 294 Conservative dissension (1845) 295 supports Corn Law Repeal 297–300 opposes Conservative reunion 331, 354 Navigation Acts debate (April 1849) 360 on Conservative reunion (January 1851) 395 opposes any form of duty on Corn (February 1851) 398 opposes Ecclesiastical Titles Bill (February 1851) 399 declines Home Office under Russell (February 1851) 399

496 Graham, Sir James (1792–1861) (cont.) believes Gladstone will join the Conservatives (April 1851) 410 Granby, Lord, Charles Manners (1815–1888), s. as 6th Duke of Rutland 1857, MP for Stamford 1837–52 and North Leicestershire 1852–7: 340, 341, 347, 350, 351, 352, 353, 356, 366, 369, 372, 382, 386, 389, 410 Grant, Charles (1783–1866), 1st Baron Glenelg, cr. 1835: 57, 59, 68, 71, 93, 101, 109, 200 Granville, 2nd Earl, Granville Leveson-Gower (1815–1891), s.1846: 330, 374, 419 Grattan, Henry (1746–1820) 26, 87 Grattan, James (1783–1854) 87, 113, 219 ‘Great Exhibition’ 374–5, 383, 410 Greece 63, 380 Greene, Richard 83 Gregson, Samuel (1795–1865), MP for Lancaster 1847–8 and 1852–65: 333 Greville, Charles (1794–1865), Clerk to the Privy Council 1821–59: 57, 80, 81, 102, 126, 133, 138, 141, 142, 147, 148, 155, 160, 161, 163, 166, 170, 171, 175, 176, 177, 178, 182, 189, 193, 196, 212, 213, 214, 217, 219, 223, 241, 288, 310, 330, 363, 373, 376, 379, 380, 383, 386, 392, 400, 404, 410 relationship with Stanley 2, 135, 418–9 Grey, 2nd Earl (1764–1845), prime minister 1830–4: 1, 12, 15, 33, 49, 50, 57, 62, 65, 68, 69, 70, 72, 75, 76, 79, 80, 82, 85, 87, 91, 93, 96, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 109, 112, 114, 116, 117, 118, 119, 120, 127, 131, 132, 134, 135, 137, 138, 141, 144, 145, 146, 149, 153, 158, 161, 163, 164, 166, 167, 171, 173, 176, 177, 179, 209, 213, 219, 276, 309, 311, 387 character 31 resigns party leadership (1826) 51 declines to serve in Canning’s ministry 55

Index favours neutrality towards Wellington’s government 61, 66 appointed prime minister 71 seeks suspension of prosecution of O’Connell (April 1831) 86 brings Stanley into his cabinet (June 1831) 88 encourages discussion with ‘the waverers’ (November 1831) 97–8 includes tithe reform in King’s Speech for 1832: 100 supports enforced collection of Irish tithe (February 1832) 107 resigns (May 1832) 110 recalled to office (May 1832) 111 support Stanley’s resolution of appropriation issue (September 1832) 114–5 introduces Irish coercion measure (February 1833) 121–4 cabinet adjustments (April 1833) 125 dissuaded from resigning (April 1833) 128 criticises Althorp over tithes arrears (July 1833) 133 stalls on tithe reform (December 1833) 136 threatens to resign (January 1834) 136 accepts resignations of Stanley, Graham and Richmond (May 1834) 139–40 offended by ‘Thimblerig’ speech (July 1834) 147–8 resigns office (July 1834) 148 hopes to preserve association with Stanley (January 1835) 153 seeks compromise over Irish Corporation Bill 188 detestation of O’Connell (October 1837) 197 Grey, 3rd Earl (1802–1894), styled Lord Howick 1807–45, s.1845: 128, 131, 183, 187, 216, 220, 330, 346, 355, 363 joins Commons Public Income and Expenditure Committee (1828) 61

Index opposes grant to the Society for Propagating the Gospel in Foreign Parts (June 1830) 68 helps to organise united opposition (June 1830) 69, 71 supports Irish Church reform (October 1832) 117 draws up Slavery Abolition measure (December 1832) 127 criticises Stanley’s Slavery Abolition plan (June 1833) 129–30 proposes Spring Rice’s candidature for the Speakership (January 1835) 164 dislike of alliance with O’Connell and courts Stanley (February 1835) 166–7 supports Morpeth’s motion (February 1835) 171 calls for compromise on Irish Church reform (March 1835) 173 dinner guest of Stanley (May 1837) 194 supports Stanley’s Irish Voters Registration Bill (1840) 219 seeks compromise on Irish Voters Registration Bill (April 1841) 222 opposes Customs Duties Bill (May 1842) 257 scuttles formation of Russell ministry (December 1845) 301 attack Stanley over Corn Law repeal (May 1846) 313 on Enlistment Bill 334 on Irish Mutiny Bill (April 1848) 343 on repeal of the Navigation Acts (May 1849) 362 colonial policy 370–1 Grey, Charles, Ballykisteen land agent 415 Grey, Sir George (1799–1882), MP for Devonport 1832–47, North Northumberland 1847–52 and Morpeth 1853–74: 135, 194, 330, 343, 381

497 Grey, Capt. George (1812–1898), Governor of South Australia 1841–5, Governor of New Zealand 1845–54: 234, 294 Grosvenor, Lord see 2nd Marquess of Westminster Grote, George (1794–1871) 182, 198, 200 Guizot, François (1787–1874), Premier of France 1840–8: 324 Haddington, 9th Earl of (1780–1858): 240, 270 Hale, George, Knowsley land agent 413 Hall, Benjamin (1802–1867), cr. Lord Llanover 1859, First Commissioner for Works 1855–8, MP for Marylebone 1837–59: 268 Hall, Dean Charles (1763–1827): 19 Hamilton, 10th Duke of, Alexander Hamilton-Douglas (1767–1852), s.1819: 159, 161, 333, 345, 388 Hampden, Revd. Renn (1793–1866), Bishop of Hereford 1848–66: 392 Harcourt, Revd. Edward Vernon (1757–1847), Archbishop of York 1807–47: 137 Harcourt, George (1785–1861) 175, 181 Hardinge, Sir Henry (1785–1856), cr. Viscount Hardinge 1846: 78, 79, 81, 90, 110, 155, 157, 180, 190, 246 Hardwicke, 4th Earl of, Charles Yorke (1779–1873), s.1834: 291, 387, 398, 403, 406 Hardy, John (1773–1855) 195 Harrowby, 1st Earl of (1762–1847) cr. 1809: 97, 98, 109, 110, 135 Harrowby, 2nd Earl of (1798–1882), styled Lord Sandon 1803–47: 60, 97, 98, 109, 120, 155, 156, 169, 190, 201, 216, 361 Hartington, Lord, Spencer Compton Cavendish (1833–1908), styled Lord Hartington 1858–91, 8th Duke of Devonshire 1891–1908: 3

498 Hastings, 6th Lord, Jacob Astley (1797–1859), s.1817: 322 Hawkins, Benjamin Waterhouse (1807–1889), sculptor and artist: 206 Heathcote, Sir Gilbert (1795–1867), MP for Rutland 1841–56, cr. Lord Aveland 1856: 260 Henley, Joseph (1793–1884), MP for Oxfordshire 1841–78: 340, 350, 353, 361, 399, 403, 404 Henry IV, King (1367–1422) 7 Henry VII, King (1457–1509) 7, 26 Herbert, Sidney (1810–1861), cr. Lord Herbert of Lea 1861, MP for South Wiltshire 1832–61: 291, 299, 331, 373, 410 Herodotus (c.485 –c425 BC) 16, 21 Herries, John (1778–1855), MP for Harwich 1823–41 and Stamford 1847–55: 57, 66, 105, 157, 340, 347, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 361, 372, 386, 395, 403, 404 Hesketh, Sir Thomas (1777–1843) 195 Heytesbury, Lord, William a` Court (1779–1860), cr. 1828: 291 Hickey, Revd., Ballykisteen parish priest 415 Hilliard, Nicholas (1537–1619), miniature painter 206 Hillsborough, 4th Marquess of, Arthur Blundell Trumbull Hill (1812–1868), s.1845, MP for Co. Clare 1836–45: 221 Hobhouse, Sir John (1786–1869), cr. Lord Broughton 1851, MP for Westminster 1820–33, Nottingham 1834–47 and Harwich 1848–51: 61, 66, 71, 110, 111, 114, 120, 121, 126, 127, 133, 165, 183, 287, 381, 399, 410 Holland, 3rd Lord (1773–1840) 15, 23, 26, 50, 66, 69, 71, 72, 85, 91, 101, 103, 104, 105, 107, 113, 122, 136, 140, 141, 183 alarm over Ireland (August 1831) 92 opposes discussions with ‘the waverers’ (November 1831) 98

Index favours giving O’Connell office 99 reflects on Stanley’s unpopularity (August 1832) 115 objects to abandonment of Clause 147 (June 1833) 132 condemns Stanley’s attacks on O’Connell (July 1833) 133 hopes to preserve association with Stanley (January 1835) 163 Homer 3, 5, 16, 22, 416 Hope, George (1808–1863), Under Secretary of State for the Colonies, 1841–5, MP for Weymouth 1837–41, Southampton 1842–7 and Windsor 1859–63: 215, 228, 231, 252, 328, 389 Hopwood, Revd. Frank (1811–1890), m. Lady Ellinor Stanley 1835: 183 Horace 16, 21 Hornby, Edmund (1773–1857) 12, 13, 52, 120, 159, 162, 168, 289 Hornby, Rev. Geoffrey (1750–1812) 13 Hornby, John (d.1892), MP for Blackburn 1841–52: 331, 390 Hornby, Sir William (1812–1899) 390, 413 Horner, Francis (1778–1817) 22, 23 Horrocks, John (1760–1804), MP for Preston 1802–4: 12 Horton, Sir Robert Wilmot (1784–1841) 53, 54 Howard de Walden, 6th Lord, Ellis Charles Augustus (1799–1868), s.1803: 16 Howick, Lord see 3rd Earl Grey Howley, William (1766–1848), Archbishop of Canterbury 1828–48: 97, 132, 138, 169, 237, 292 Hudson Bay Company 227 Hudson, George (1800–1871), MP for Sunderland 1845–59, railway magnate 347 Hughenden 3, 352, 366, 390 Hughes, Bishop Henry, Vicar-Apostolic of Gibraltar 1839–57: 299 Hume, David (1711–1773), philosopher 22, 23, 24, 26

Index Hume, Joseph (1777–1855), MP for Weymouth 1812–18, Montrose 1818–30, Middlesex 1830–7, Kilkenny 1837–41 and Montrose 1842–55: 32, 59, 82, 101, 110, 125, 166, 172, 173, 177, 196, 198, 268, 375, 394, 410 Hunt, Henry (1773–1835), radical orator contests Preston (July 1830) 69 defeats Stanley at Preston (December 1830) 72 defeated by Henry Stanley at Preston (December 1832) 119–20 Huskisson, William (1770–1830), MP for Liverpool 1823–30: 1, 48, 50, 59, 60, 61, 68, 128, 230, 311, 363 elected MP for Liverpool 30 favours Catholic Emancipation 57 supports Liverpool-Manchester Railway Bill (1826) 52 heads Goderich’s ministry in the Commons (1827) 56 joins Wellington’s cabinet (January 1828) 57 resigns form Wellington’s cabinet (June 1828) 60 looks to forming government including Stanley (1829) 65–6 re-elected for Liverpool (July 1830) 69 fatal accident and funeral (September 1830) 70 Hutcheson, Francis (1694–1746) 154 Hutt, William (1803–1882), MP for Hull 1832–41 and Gateshead 1841–74: 196, 261 Ilchester, 3rd Earl of, Henry Fox-Strangways (1787–1858), s.1802: 322 India 17, 68, 114, 119, 180, 218, 228, 239–47, 261, 262, 267, 299, 331, 361, 388, 412 Ingham, Robert (1793–1875), MP for South Shields 1832–41 and 1852–69: 168, 175, 181

499 Inglis, Sir Robert (1786–1855), MP for Dundalk 1824–6, Ripon 1826–8 and Oxford University 1829–54: 130, 216, 339, 372, 397, 403 Ionian Islands 228, 370 Ireland: see also Belfast; Catholic Association; Catholic Emancipation; Act of Union; ‘Young Ireland’; Church of Ireland; Education, Ireland and Parliamentary Reform, Ireland: Arms Bill (1831) 89–91, 103 Arms Bill (1843) 275–6 Coercion Bill (1833) 123–5 Coercion Bill (1846) 313 Coercion Bill (1847) 338 ‘Dolly’s Brae affair’ (1850) 375–6 Famine 84, 87, 297–305, 320–1, 324–5, 327, 332, 342, 343–4, 393, 414 Grand Jury Bill 94 Insurrection Bill (1831) 85 Irish Municipal Corporation reform (1836) 187–8 Irish Municipal Corporations Bill (1837) 193–4 Irish Encumbered Estates Bill (1848) 348, 397 Irish Poor Law and Irish Poor Law Bill (1838) 85, 88, 91, 93, 198, 212, 276, 326, 332, 358, 359, 360 Irish Poor Law Extension Bill (1847) 324–5, 327, 335 Lord Lieutenants for Ireland Bill 93 Maynooth Grant 78, 94, 272–4, 278, 281–2, 295–6, 306, 316 ‘Newtownbarry Massacre’ 89–90, 92–3 Prevention of Crimes Bill (1848) 343–4 public works 79–80, 88, 90, 93, 94, 320, 324 yeomanry 21, 78, 84, 89, 90, 91–3, 103, 105 Irish Farmer’s Gazette 414 Isabella, Queen of Spain 323

500

Index

Isle of Man 7

Knox, John (1788–1872) 168

Jackson, General Andrew (1767–1845) 40, 41 Jackson, Dean Cyril (1746–1819) 19 Jamaica 129, 214, 215, 225, 227, 237, 251, 263, 370, 371 Jeffrey, Francis (1773–1850) 22 Jelf, Dr Richard (1798–1871) 16 Jewish disabilities Baron Rothschild’s election (1847) 335 Jewish Disabilities Removal Bill (1847) 334–40, 342, 346 Jockey Club, The 8, 415 Johnstone, Sir John (1799–1869), MP for Yorkshire 1830–2 and Scarborough 1832–7 and 1841–69: 175, 181, 195 Jolliffe, Sir William (1800–1876), cr. Lord Hylton 1866, MP for Petersfield 1837–66: 347 Juvenal (c.60 –c. 130 AD) 21

Labouchere, Henry (1798–1869) cr. Lord Taunton 1859, MP for St Michael’s 1826–30 and Taunton 1830–59: 68, 194, 216, 259, 360, 381, 399 friendship with Stanley at Christ Church 20 accompanies Stanley to North America (1824–1825) 34 Lafayette, Marquis de (1757–1834) 41, 42 Lambert, Sir Henry (1792–1872), MP for Co. Wexford 1831–5: 342 Lancaster 8, 119, 172, 225, 333, 334, 350 Lansdowne, 3rd Marquess of, Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice (1780–1863), s.1809: 31, 34, 37, 38, 40, 44, 45, 48, 57, 58, 59, 69, 109, 114, 140, 141, 148, 152, 176, 194, 291, 330, 344, 348 character 22 the Bowood salon 23 directs Stanley’s reading 23–8 supports Stanley’s entry into the Commons 29 encourages communication with liberal-Tories 43, 49–53 joins Canning coalition ministry 55 secures Stanley’s appointment to the Colonial Office 56 declines membership of Wellington’s ministry (January 1828) 57 presses for Catholic Emancipation (1828) 62 President of the Council under Grey 71 opposes creation of peers (September 1831) 96 favours giving office to O’Connell (October 1831) 99 proposes payment of Catholic clergy (January 1832) 105 heads Lords Tithe Committee (February 1832) 107 hopes to preserve association with Stanley (January 1835) 163

Kauffmann, Angelica (1741–1807), painter 9 Keane, Richard (1780–1855) 123 Keate, Dr John (1773–1852), headmaster of Eton 16, 17, 18, 19 Kebbel, Thomas Edward (1826–1917), journalist 2 Keble, Revd. John (1792–1866) 138, 208, 210 Kelly, Sir Fitzroy (1796–1866), MP for Harwich 1837–41, borough of Cambridge 1843–7, Solicitor-General 1845–6: 298, 389 Kentucky 38, 39, 40 Kenyon, Richard, Knowsley gamekeeper 414 Kildare Place Society 78, 92, 94 Kirkdale 6, 413 Knatchbull, Sir Edward (1781–1849), MP for East Kent 1819–45: 67, 71, 146 Knight, Gally (1786–1846), MP for North Nottinghamshire 1834–46: 182

Index dislike of alliance with O’Connell (February 1835) 166 on strength of Peel’s position (December 1845) 301 on Stanley’s anti-Repeal speech (May 1846) 312 on Irish Poor Law Extension Bill (1847) 324–5, 327 on commercial crisis (December 1847) 338–9 on restoration of diplomatic relations with the Papacy (January 1848) 342 on repeal of the Navigation Acts (May 1849) 362–3 on Don Pacifico (June 1850) 381 Lathom House 7, 33, 35, 150, 206, 219, 267, 289, 300, 310, 391, 395 Law, Revd. George Henry (1761–1845), Bishop of Bath and Wells 1824–45: 212 Law, Charles (1792–1850), MP for Cambridge University 1835–50, brother of the Earl of Ellenborough 347 Lawrence, Sir Thomas (1769–1830), painter 10 Lear, Edward (1812–1888), writer and painter 13, 207–8 Lefevre, Charles Shaw (1794–1888), Speaker of the Commons 1839–57, cr. Lord Eversley 1857: 127, 129, 347 Leinster, 3rd Duke of, Augustus Frederick Fitzgerald (1791–1874), s.1804: 77, 94 Le Marchant, Denis (1795–1874), cr. Baronet 1841: 109, 113, 123, 124, 129, 134, 142 Lemon, Sir Charles (1784–1868): 175 Leveson-Gower, Lord Francis (1800–1857), assumed surname Egerton 1833, cr. Earl of Ellesmere, 1846, MP for Bletchingley and Co. of Sutherland prior to 1832 and South Lancashire 1835–6: 16, 56, 171, 194, 216, 283

501 friendship with Stanley at Christ Church 19–20 serves in Wellington’s ministry (January 1828) 57 appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland 62 urges Catholic Emancipation 62 elected for South Lancashire (January 1835) 161 Lexington 39 Lichfield, 1st Earl of, Thomas George Anson (1795–1854), cr. 1831: 135 Lichfield House Compact 144, 165–6, 169, 172, 175, 182, 192 Lieven, Princess Dorothea (1785–1857) 122 Limerick Chronicle, The 191 Lin, Tse-hsu 239 Lincoln, Lord, Henry Pelham-Clinton (1811–1864), s. as 5th Duke of Newcastle 1851: 159, 190, 197, 291, 305, 313, 318, 402, 410 Lingard, John (1771–1851), Catholic historian 26 Littleton, Edward (1791–1863), cr. Lord Hatherton 1835, MP for South Staffordshire 1812–35: 49, 80, 102, 122, 124, 128, 133, 136, 137, 138, 139, 148, 149 Liverpool Agricultural Society 184, 317 Liverpool-Manchester railway 51, 52, 66, 70 Liverpool, 2nd Earl of, Robert Banks Jenkinson (1770–1828), prime minister 1812–27: 50, 57, 60 Liverpool’s government in 1822 30 financial crisis (1825) 49 economic depression (1826) 51–2 stroke and resignation (1827) 53–5 Livy (59BC –AD17) 17 Locock, Dr Charles (1799–1875), physician 185 Locke, John (1632–1704), philosopher 25 Locke King, Peter (1811–1885), MP for East Surrey 1847–74: 399, 400, 408

502 Londonderry, 3rd Marquess of (1778–1854), s.1822: 126, 154, 172, 331, 388, 395, 396 Long, Col. Samuel (1800–1881), m. Lady Louisa Stanley 1825: 44, 203 Lonsdale, 2nd Earl of, William Lowther (1787–1872), s.1844: 403, 404, 408 Lopes, Sir Ralph (1788–1854), MP for Westbury 1814–9, 1831–7 and 1841–7 and South Devon 1849–54: 169, 175, 187, 195 Louis Philippe, King of France (1773–1850): 323 Louisville 38, 39 Lyndhurst, Lord (1772–1863), cr. 1827: 110, 152, 155, 157, 191, 194, 288, 313, 314, 316, 318, 331, 388, 389, 410 Lytton, Edward Bulwer see Edward Bulwer Lytton Maberly, Capt. William (1798–1885) 32 Macaulay, Thomas (1800–1859), cr. Lord Macaulay 1859, MP for Calne 1830–2, Leeds 1832–4 and Edinburgh 1840–7 and 1852–6: 68, 125, 216, 222, 223, 254, 264, 277, 380, 420 MacHale, John (1791–1881), Bishop of Tuam 1834–81: 275 Mackintosh, Sir James (1764–1832) 26, 31, 154 MacNaghten, Sir William (1793–1841) 244 Mahon, James (1803–1891), MP for Clare 1831–2 and Ennis 1847–52: 87 Malmesbury, 3rd Earl of, James Howard Harris (1807–1889), styled Lord Fitzharris 1820–41: 291, 298, 311, 356, 360, 362, 364, 387, 405, 409, 416, 418 on Stanley 5, 418, 419 meets Stanley (September 1837) 203–4 character 204

Index opposes Corn Law repeal 306–8 appointed Protectionist whip in the Lords (March 1846) 307 opinion of Edward Stanley 333 encourages Stanley to exert leadership (November 1847) 336 alarm over Chartist protests 345 urges for active opposition (February 1849) 359 on Stanley’s Don Pacifico speech (June 1850) 380 close friendship with Stanley 387 prepares local taxation proposals (December 1850) 395 failed attempt to form Conservative government (February 1851) 403 Malta 228, 293, 370 Malthus, Revd. Thomas (1786–1834) 28, 46, 48, 358 Mandeville, Lord, William Montagu (1823–1890), s. as 7th Duke of Manchester 1855, MP for Bewdley 1848–52, Huntingdonshire 1852–5: 352 Manners, Lord John (1818–1904), s. his brother as 7th Duke of Rutland 1888, MP for Newark 1841–7, Colchester 1850–7 and North Leicestershire 1857–85: 315, 316, 340, 341, 352, 356, 395, 403, 405 Mansfield, 3rd Earl of, David William Murray (1777–1840) 65 Mansfield, 4th Earl of see Lord Stormont Maria, Dona (1819–1853), daughter of Dom Miguel, King of Portugal, Queen Maria II of Portugal 137 Marlborough, 6th Duke of (1793–1857), styled Lord Blandford 1817–40, MP for Woodstock 1826–31, 1832–5 and 1838–40: 67 Marsland, Major Thomas (1777–1854), MP for Stockport 1832–41: 168 Martin, John, MP for Sligo 1832–7: 175 Mary, Queen (1516–1558) 7

Index Maule, Hon. Fox (1801–1874), styled Lord Panmure 1852–60, s. as 11th Earl of Dalhousie 1860, MP for Perthshire 1835–7, Elgin 1838–41 and Perth 1841–52: 161 Mauritius 68, 129, 228 Maunsell, Thomas (1781–1866), MP for North Northamptonshire 1835–57: 372 Maynooth College 272, 292 Maynooth grant see Ireland Meath, 10th Earl of (1772–1851), s. 1797: 79 Melbourne, 2nd Viscount, William Lamb (1779–1848) 15, 69, 75, 78, 79, 84, 87, 92, 99, 103, 107, 109, 114, 115, 116, 132, 135, 137, 151, 152, 154, 158, 163, 164, 173, 180, 182, 185, 186, 196, 201, 217, 220, 223, 224, 225, 248 joins Canning’s ministry (1827) 55 joins Grey’s cabinet (November 1830) 71 presses for reforms in Ireland 77 predicts Stanley will become premier 145, 187 become prime minister (July 1834) 145, 148–9 favours Stanley as his Commons leader (November 1834) 149 abuses his former ministerial colleagues (December 1834) 156 dislike of alliance with O’Connell (February 1835) 165–6 becomes prime minister (April 1835) 176–7 on Irish Tithe Bill (May 1837) 193–4 sends Durham to Canada 199 resigns, then resumes, premiership (May 1839) 213–5 favours fixed duty on Corn imports (1846) 312 Memphis 39 Merchant Taylors’ Hall 179 speech by Stanley (May 1838) 211–2 speech by Stanley (April 1851) 409

503 Metcalfe, Sir Charles (1785–1846), Governor of Jamaica 1839–42, Governor-General of Canada 1843–6: 237, 251, 254, 255 Metternich, Prince (1773–1858) 323 Miguel, Dom, (1802–1866), King of Portugal 137 Miles, Philip (d.1881), MP for Bristol 1837–52: 309, 346, 352 Miles, William (1797–1878), MP for East Somerset 1834–65: 340, 350 Mill, John Stuart (1806–1873) 229, 233, 320 Milton, Lord see 5th Earl Fitzwilliam Milton, John (1608–1674), poet 27 Minto, 2nd Earl of, Gilbert Elliot (1782–1859), s. 1814, Lord John Russell’s brother-in-law 312, 330, 391, 393 Mitchel, John (1815–1875), leader of Young Ireland 348 Molesworth, Sir William (1810–1855), MP for East Cornwall 1832–7, Leeds 1837–41 and Southwark 1845–55: 200, 201, 233, 370, 371 Molyneux, Lady Louisa (1797–1855), daughter of 2nd Earl of Sefton 135 Monroe, President James (1758–1831) 35, 41 Monteagle, Lord see Thomas Spring Rice Montesquieu, Baron de (1689–1755) 25 Montreal 36, 37, 250 Montrose, 3rd Duke of, James Graham (1755–1836) 16 Montrose, 4th Duke of, James Graham (1799–1874), s.1836: 307, 388 Moore, Tom (1779–1852) 23, 170, 417 Morning Chronicle, The 68, 157, 160, 294, 320, 351 Morning Herald, The 157, 317, 318, 352 Morning Post, The 157, 318, 322 Morpeth, Lord see 7th Earl of Carlisle Mosley, Sir Oswald (1785–1871), MP for North Staffordshire 1832–7: 168, 169, 175, 195, 196

504 Moult, William, Knowsley estate accountant 413 Mulgrave, Earl of (1797–1863), cr. Marquess of Normanby 1838: 129, 131, 149, 184, 214, 216, 291, 310 Municipal Corporation Reform 123, 159, 187, 190, 212 Municipal Corporation Reform Bill (1835) 181–2 Murray, Charles (1818–1882), MP for Buckinghamshire 1841–5: 309 Murray, Gen. Sir George (1772–1846), Master General of the Ordinance 252 Musgrave, Sir Richard (1790–1859), MP for Co.Waterford 1830–2 and 1832–7: 117 Naas, Lord (1822–1872), s. as 6th Earl Mayo 1867, MP for Kildare 1847–52, Coleraine 1852–7 and Cockermouth 1857–67: 383 Napier, Sir Charles (1786–1860), Admiral in 1858, MP for Marylebone 1841–7: 237 Napier, Sir Charles (1782–1853) 246 Naples 28, 358, 402 Napoleon I, Emperor of France (1769–1821) 18, 191, 416 Napoleon, Louis (1808–1873), President of the French Republic 1848–52; Napoleon III, Emperor of France 1852–70: 204, 345 Nash, John (1752–1835), architect 128 Natal 247, 262 Nation, The 275 National Association for the Protection of British Industry and Capital 355 National Freehold Land Society 371 Navigation Acts 341, 355, 356, 358, 363, 364, 365, 370, 372, 387 repeal of the Navigation Acts (1848) 346, 358 repeal of the Navigation Acts (1849) 360–2

Index Nelson, 3rd Earl, Horatio Nelson (1823–1913), s. 1835: 389 New Brunswick 227, 251, 253, 261 Newcastle, 4th Duke of (1785–1851), s.1795: 65, 293, 309, 312, 313, 352, 356 Newcastle, 5th Duke of, see Lord Lincoln Newdegate, Charles Newdigate (1816–1887), MP for North Warwickshire 1843–85: 309, 316, 318, 321, 326, 339, 341, 342, 343, 349, 355, 367, 375, 386, 389 Newfoundland 36, 227, 250, 251 Newman, Revd. John Henry (1801–1890): 63, 138, 208, 210 Newmarket 2, 8, 9, 139, 180, 308, 335, 340, 349, 350, 361, 367, 411, 416, 418, 419, 421 New Orleans 39, 40 Newry, Lord (1815–1851), eldest son of the Earl of Kilmorey, MP for Newry 1841–51: 331 New South Wales 228, 234, 235, 236, 294, 370 ‘Newtownbarry Massacre’ see Ireland New York 36, 38, 45, 251, 252 New Zealand 205, 228, 230, 232–6, 262, 293, 294 New Zealand Company 233, 234, 293 Niagara Falls 36 Niger 248 Norbury, 2nd Earl of, Hector Graham-Toler (1781–1839), s.1831: 214 Normanby, Lord see Earl of Mulgrave Nott, General Sir William (1782–1845): 244 Nova Scotia 227, 261 O’Brien, Augustus Stafford see Augustus Stafford O’Brien, William Smith (1803–1864), MP for Ennis 1830–5 and County Limerick 1835–49, convicted of high treason in 1849: 348

Index O’Connell, Daniel (1775–1847), MP for County Clare 1828–32, Dublin 1832–6, Kilkenny 1836–7, Dublin 1837–41, County Cork 1841–7: 54, 63, 68, 72, 75, 77, 79, 80, 82, 84–6, 87, 92, 93, 103, 105, 106, 108, 112, 113, 114, 119, 120, 126, 127, 132, 133, 138, 139, 141, 152, 158, 162, 164, 167, 169, 173, 174, 181, 182, 183, 188, 190, 196, 197, 198, 200, 217, 219, 221, 223, 348 forms Catholic Association 31 calls for a new Boliva to champion Irish grievances 43 wins County Clare by-election (1828) 62 proposes ballot (1830) 67 generates ‘a moral electricity’ in Ireland 74 arrested (January 1831) 78 prosecution lapses 88–9 denounces Arms Bill (July 1831) 89 attacks Irish Reform Bill 90–1 attacks on Stanley (August 1831) 93 considered for the Irish Attorney Generalship 99 agitates for repeal of the Union (January 1832) 104 labels Stanley ‘the worst enemy of Ireland’ (February 1833) 121–2 supports Irish Temporalities Bill (February 1833) 123 Commons humiliation over Irish Coercion Bill (February 1833) 124–5 calls for enquiry on the Union (April 1834) 138 carries amendments to Tithe Bill (July 1834) 148–9 attends first Lichfield House meeting (February 1835) 165–6 dubs the Stanleyites the ‘Derby Dilly’ (February 1835) 170–1 not given office by Melbourne (April 1835) 177, 180 influence on Melbourne’s government 180, 184 visit Liverpool (January 1836) 186

505 launches National Association for Repeal of the Union (April 1840) 219–20 on rioting in Jamaica (February 1842) 237 Repeal agitation (1843) 272, 274–5, 277 arrested (October 1843) 277 trial (1844) 278–9 Liverpool speech (March 1844) 281 O’Connor, Feargus (1794–1855), MP for Nottingham 1847–52, Chartist leader 345 O’Ferrall, More (1797–1880), MP for Co. Kildare 1830–47, Co. Longford 1851–2 and Co. Kildare 1859–65: 139 Oliver, Peter (1594–1648), miniaturist painter 206 Ossulston, Lord, Charles Bennet (1810–1899), s. as 6th Earl of Tankerville 1859, MP for North Northumberland 1832–58: 291 Owen, Robert (1771–1858), social reformer 41 Oxford Movement 16, 138 Paine, Thomas (1737–1809) 24 Pakenham, Richard (1797–1868), British minister plenipotentiary to Mexico 1835–43: 252 Pakington, Sir John (1799–1893), MP for Droitwich 1837–74, s. as 2nd Lord Harrington 1880: 403, 417 Palmerston, 3rd Viscount, Henry John Temple (1784–1865), MP for Newport 1807–11, Cambridge University 1811–31, South Hampshire 1832–4 and Tiverton1835–65: 3, 22, 103, 125, 134, 204, 245, 246, 255, 265, 276, 277, 283, 301, 334, 383, 384, 392, 398, 405, 421 remains in office (January 1828) 57 resigns from Wellington’s cabinet (June 1828) 60 supports call for retrenchment (May 1830) 68

506 Palmerston, 3rd Viscount (cont.) censures government’s policy on Portugal (March 1830) 68 negotiations with Wellington (October 1830) 70 appointed Foreign Secretary (November 1830) 71 fears extensive parliamentary Reform (February 1831) 80 opposes creation of peers (September 1831) 96 negotiation with ‘waverers’ (October 1831) 97–8 favours giving O’Connell office (October 1831) 99 on Dutch loan (January 1832) 105 remains opposed to creation of peers (January 1832) 109 opposes Ebrington’s proposed motion (May 1832) 111 welcomes Durham’s departure from cabinet (March 1833) 125 favours intervention in Portugal (January 1834) 137 urges Stanley and Graham not to resign (May 1834) 140–1 defeated in South Hampshire election (December 1834) 161 taunts Stanley (March 1838) 201 supports Stanley’s vote of thanks for victories in China (February 1843) 242 decries Ashburton-Webster Treaty (1843) 251–4 attacks Peel’s government (July 1842) 266–7 foreign policy attacked by Stanley (July 1842) 267 attacks Peel’s policies (July 1843) 268 Stanley denounces Palmerston’s diplomatic record (July 1843) 268–9 favour fixed duty on corn imports 308 possible Commons leader under Stanley (May 1846) 311–2 foreign policy attacked by Stanley (January 1847) 323–4

Index possible association with Disraeli 352 foreign policy attacked by Stanley (February 1849) 358–9 scuttles Russell’s parliamentary Reform plans (November 1849) 372 the Don Pacifico issue 378–82 opposes Russell’s parliamentary Reform proposals (January 1851) 399 ‘Papal Aggression’ 391–6, 407 Parker, Rear-Admiral Sir William (1781–1866) 239, 241 Parkes, Joseph (1796–1865) 165 Parliamentary Reform, England 264–5 Russell’s Reform motion (April 1823) 31 East Retford Disfranchisement Bill (1828) 60 Lord Blanford’s Reform plan (February 1830) 67 Russell’s Reform proposals (February 1830) 67 O’Connell advocates ballot (1830) 67 Wellington rejects Reform (November 1830) 70 popular protest (1830–2) 65, 79, 132 England and Wales Reform Bills (1831–2) 81–3, 95–8, 101, 102–3, 109–10, 111–2, 127, 146, 195, 211 Russell proposes parliamentary Reform (June 1848) 345 Russell advocates parliamentary Reform (November 1849) 371–2 Russell draws up Reform Bill (January 1851) 399 Parliamentary Reform, Ireland Irish Reform Bill (1831–2) 83–4, 86, 90, 112–3, 114 Irish Voters Registration Bill (1840) 218–9 Irish Voters Registration Bill (1841) 221–2 Parliamentary Voters (Ireland) Bill (1841) 222 Stanley advocates extension of county franchise (1844) 278, 282

Index Irish Parliamentary Voters Bill (1850) 376–8 Parnell, Sir Henry (1776–1842), cr. Lord Congleton 1841, MP for Queen’s Co. 1805–32 and Dundee 1833–41: 71 Parry, Col. Love (d.1853), MP for Horsham and Malmesbury prior to 1832 and Carnarvonshire 1835–7: 161, 169 Patten, John Wilson (1802–1892), cr. Lord Winmarleigh 1874, MP for North Lancashire 1832–74: 119, 223, 289, 305, 389 Paxton, Sir Joseph (1803–1865), architect 410 Pechell, Sir George (1789–1860), MP for Brighton 1835–60: 175, 187 Pedro, Dom (1798–1834), Emperor of Brazil, King of Portugal 137 Peel, Gen. Jonathan (1799–1879), MP for Huntingdon 1831–68: 389 Peel, Sir Robert (1788–1850), prime minister 1834–5, 1841–6: 2, 19, 48, 60, 61, 64, 65, 66, 67, 80, 84, 88, 101, 102, 103, 106, 107, 109, 111, 123, 130, 134, 141, 144, 145, 148, 149, 158, 162, 179, 180, 181, 182, 187, 194, 196, 198, 201, 202, 213, 214, 216, 221, 222, 226, 229, 231, 232, 233, 236, 242, 243, 249–54, 259, 266, 267, 329, 331, 336, 361, 362, 365, 373, 387, 388, 389, 392, 400, 401, 403, 409, 410, 419 disciple of Pitt and Liverpool 30, 32 opposes Catholic Emancipation (1825) 49–50 declines to serve in Canning’s cabinet (1827) 55 on repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) 58 proposes Catholic Emancipation (1829) 62–3 resigns office (November 1830) 70–1 declines to oppose introduction of English Reform 81–2 attacks Irish Arms Bill (June 1831) 89

507 adopts opposition strategy of ‘neutrality’ (February 1833) 122, 126 speaks highly of Stanley (1833) 122, 133 confidential communication with Stanley 131, 138 conversations with Graham (July 1834) 147 forms government (December 1834) 152–7 publishes ‘Tamworth Manifesto’ (December 1834) 159–60 hopes to adhere moderate support (January 1835) 163 sends Stanley and Graham a copy of the King’s Speech (February 1835) 167–8 appoints Ecclesiastical Commission (February 1835) 169 defeat on Morpeth’s amendment (February 1835) 171 resigns premiership (April 1835) 176 City speech (May 1835) 183 on Whig Irish Tithe Bill (July 1835) 183 on Irish Church Revenues Bill (May 1836) 188–90 holds Ultra Tories at arm’s length 191–2 address as Lord Rector of Glasgow University (January 1837) 192 relationship with Stanley (January 1837) 192 announces union with Stanley (December 1837) 192–3 on revolt in Canada (January 1838) 199–200 Merchant Taylors’ Hall speech (May 1838) 211–2 attempts to form government (May 1839) 215 favours vote of no confidence (December 1839) 217 forms government (1841) 223–5 believes Ellenborough’s policy in India unjust 246–7

508 Peel, Sir Robert (1788–1850) (cont.) revision of the Corn Laws (1842) 248, 255–6 Customs Duties Bill (1842) 257–8 style of oratory 263–4, 269 reinstatement of income tax (1842) 263 on factory legislation 269–70 believes O’Connell desires martyrdom 272 on Irish education 272–4 against repressive measures in Ireland (1843) 275–6 agrees to arrest of O’Connell (October 1843) 277–8 proposes constructive Irish measures (1843) 278–82 on Maynooth grant 278 relationship with Stanley 283–8 accepts Stanley’s request to go the Lords (July 1844) 289 on Bishoprics of St. Asaph and Bangor (1845) 292 Maynooth grant (1845) 292 defends Stanley’s policy in New Zealand (1845) 294–5 Conservative resentment against Peel (1845) 295 proposes repeal of Corn Laws 297–301, 306–12 contempt for his backbenchers 298, 304–5 offers resignation to the Queen (December 1845) 301 appoints Gladstone to Colonial Office (December 1845) 302 view of ministerial authority 304, 314, 406 defeat over Irish Coercion Bill (June 1846) 313 supports Whig’s Sugar Bill (July 1846) 315 refuses to act as party leader in opposition 321–2, 327, 330 supports Sugar Duties Bill (February 1848) 346 commitment to Free Trade (1849) 356

Index support for repeal of the Navigation Acts (1849) 360 letter to The Times (December 1849) 371 disgust for Gladstone and Goulburn (April 1850) 374 Commissioner for the Great Exhibition 374 on Don Pacifico issue (June 1850) 381–2 death (July 1850) 383 Pembroke, 12th Earl of, Robert Henry Herbert (1791–1862), s. 1827: 283 Penang 228 Perceval, Spencer (1762–1812): 14, 15 Philadelphia 38, 253 Philips, Mark (1800–1873) 169, 187 Phillips, Samuel (1814–1854), leader writer for the Morning Herald 317, 352 Phillpotts, Revd. Henry (1778–1869), Bishop of Exeter 1830–69: 154, 392 Pigot, David (1796–1873), MP for Clonmel 1839–46: 219 Pitt, William (1759–1806) 30, 53, 73, 311, 390 Pitt, William (1708–1778), Earl of Chatham 202 Pittsburgh 38 Pius IX, Pope (1792–1878) 343, 391, 392, 393, 394, 396, 397 Plato (429–347BC) 21 Plumptre, John (1791–1864) 181 Plunket, William (1764–1854), cr. Lord Plunket 1827: 32, 43, 49, 92, 99, 104, 127 Pollock, General George (1786–1872) 244 Ponsonby, 2nd Lord, John Ponsonby (c.1770–1855), s. 1806: 407 Pope, Alexander (1688–1744), poet and essayist 416 Portman, Edward (1799–1888), cr. Lord Portman 1837 19, 21 Portugal 62, 68, 137, 328, 380

Index Pottinger, Sir Henry (1789–1856), Governor of Hong Kong 1843–4, Governor of Cape Colony 1846–7: 239, 243 Powis, 2nd Earl of, Edward Herbert (1785–1848) 292 Price, Rose Lambert 19 Prince Edward Island 227 Protection see Corn Laws Prussia, King of, Frederick William IV, (1795–1861) reigned 1840–1861: 232 Pugin, Augustus (1812–1852): 327 Pusey, Revd. Edward (1800–1882), Regius Professor of Hebrew, Oxford, and leader of the Oxford Movement 15, 17, 208, 210, 392, 393 opinion of the young Stanley 16 Quarterly Review, The 271, 318, 329, 334, 390 Quebec 37, 249, 251, 253, 261 Ramsbottom, John (1780–1845), MP for Windsor 1810–45: 86, 95 Redesdale, 2nd Lord, John Freeman-Mitford (1805–1886), s.1830: 315, 322, 330, 331, 353, 377, 387, 389, 395 Reeve, Henry (1813–1895), editor of the Edinburgh Review 2, 288 Reid, George (1823–1852), MP for Windsor 1845–52: 331 Repeal of the Union Association see also Daniel O’Connell 77, 78, 99, 104, 124, 220, 221, 272, 274, 275, 277, 348 Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723–1792), painter 9 Richardo, David (1772–1823), economist 28, 48 Richard III, King (1452–1485) 7 Richards, John, MP for Knaresborough 1832–7: 171 Richmond, 5th Duke of, Charles Gordon-Lennox (1791–1860), s.1819: 98, 103, 104, 109, 117, 118, 119,

509 126, 132, 135, 137, 149, 151, 153, 154, 155, 156, 157, 158, 188, 289, 314, 356, 372, 386, 398, 409 Postmaster General under Grey 71 opposes creation of peers (September 1831) 96 objects to giving O’Connell office (October 1831) 99 believes Anglesey should be removed (August 1832) 115 Goodwood meeting (December 1833) 136 dissatisfaction with cabinet discussion (May 1834) 140–1 resigns from cabinet (May 1834) 141 regrets Stanley’s ‘Thimblerig’ speech (July 1834) 148 analysis of party alignment (February 1835) 161–2 declines Governor-Generalship of India (April 1835) 180 favours Melbourne to Peel (January 1836) 186 heads Central Agricultural Protection Society (1844) 305 hosts meeting of Protectionist peers (March 1846) 307 presides at Protectionist meeting (May 1846) 309 chairs Protectionist dinner (July 1846) 313 acrimonious meeting with Bentinck (January 1847) 319 recommends formation of ‘shadow cabinet’ (January 1849) 352–3 chairs Protectionist meeting (March 1849) 360 doubts about forming a Conservative cabinet (March 1849) 361–2 chairs Protectionist meeting (December 1849) 369 calls for restoration of Protection (January 1850) 373 declines to become Commissioner for the Great Exhibition 375 relationship with Stanley (1850) 387

510 Ridley, Sir Matthew (1778–1836), MP for Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1812–36: 166, 171, 175, 179, 182, 196 Ripon, 1st Earl of see Lord Goderich Robinson, Frederick see Lord Goderich Roden, 3rd Earl of, Robert Jocelyn (1788–1870), s.1820: 159, 292, 293, 375, 376 Roebuck, John (1801–1879), MP for Bath 1832–7 and 1841–7, Sheffield 1849–69 and 1874–9: 122, 139, 196, 254, 256, 264, 285, 286, 287, 381, 382, 394 Romney, George (1734–1802), painter 9 Ronayne, Dominick (d.1836), MP for Clonmel 1832–6: 139 Roscoe, William (1753–1831): 13, 206 Rosebery, Lord (1847–1929), prime minister 1894–5: 3 Rushworth, John (1612–1690) 25 Ross, Charles (1799–1860), MP for St Germains 1826–32 and Northampton 1832–7: 154, 159 Rosslyn, 2nd Earl of, Sir James St. Clair Erskine (1762–1837) 67 Rothschild, Baron Lionel de (1808–1879), MP for London 1847–68 and 1869–74; takes Commons seat in 1858: 335, 336, 337, 339 Royal Agricultural Society 224, 267 Rugby School 205 Russell, Charles (1786–1894), MP for Reading 1830–7 and 1841–7: 187, 195 Russell, Lord John (1792–1878), cr. Earl Russell 1861, MP for Tavistock 1813–7 and 1818–9, Huntingdonshire 1820–6, Bandon Bridge 1826–30, Devon 1831, South Devon 1832–5, Stroud 1835–41 and the City of London 1841–61: 22, 26, 61, 65, 68, 69, 70, 72, 80, 81, 88, 91, 95, 102, 104, 115, 117, 124, 125, 131, 139, 140, 144, 145, 148, 158, 160, 164, 167, 169, 171, 177, 178, 180, 181, 182, 184,

Index 185, 187, 196, 197, 198, 210, 212, 214, 216, 217, 219, 220, 234, 243, 266, 268, 283, 285, 286, 287, 303, 306, 310, 311, 320, 321, 322, 326, 327, 330, 334, 335, 342, 348, 354, 357, 369, 383, 396, 398, 410, 419 advocates parliamentary Reform 1823: 31 opposes Canning coalition 55 opposes Goderich’s ministry 57 proposes repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) 58–9 invites Stanley to join a committee for the promotion of religious liberty 62 proposes enfranchisement of Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds (February 1830) 67 drafts Reform measure 79 supports lay appropriation 101 threatens resignation over appropriation (November 1832) 118 presses for further Irish Church reform (January 1834) 121 calls for reform of Irish Church revenues (May 1834) 132–8 encounters Stanley prior to ‘Thimblerig’ speech (July 1834) 147 prospective Commons leader under Melbourne (November 1834) 152 call first Lichfield House meeting (February 1835) 165–6 calls second Lichfield House meeting (March 1835) 172–3 brings forward appropriation (March 1835) 173–6 calls third Lichfield House meeting (March 1835) 175 quashes radical proposals (June 1835) 182–3 denounces Stanley over Irish Church Revenues Bill (May-June 1836) 189 introduces Irish Corporation Bill (March 1837) 193 on revolt in Canada (January 1838) 199–200

Index on national finances (1841) 222–3 supports Stanley’s emigration legislation (1842) 234 China war 240–1 Niger expedition 248 Canada Act (1840) 249 criticises Ashburton-Webster Treaty 254 favours fixed duty on Corn imports 255 hostile motion on Canadian Corn Bill (May 1843) 260 on Irish disorder (May 1843) 275–6 on Irish disturbances (February 1844) 279–81 publishes ‘Edinburgh Letter’ (November 1845) 300 fails to form government (December 1845) 301 supports Corn Law repeal (May 1846) 312 becomes prime minister (June 1846) 313 reluctance for Irish coercion measures (1848) 343–4 proposes parliamentary Reform (1848) 345 on national finances (1848) 346 dependence on Peelite support 356 on repeal of the Navigation Acts 358–60, 362–4 rumours of retirement (April 1849) 360–1 considers parliamentary Reform (November 1849) 371–2 Commissioner for the Great Exhibition 374 Irish Parliamentary Voters Bill (February 1850) 376–8 distrust of Palmerston 378 on Don Pacifico 379–82 Papal relations 391–2 ‘Durham Letter’ and Papal Aggression crisis 392–4 Ecclesiastical Titles Bill 397, 399, 408–9

511 on Locke King’s motion (February 1851) 399–400 considers parliamentary Reform (1851) 386 resigns, then resumes, the premiership (February/March 1851) 400–6 Russell, Lord William (1790–1846): 171 Russia 18, 105, 172, 243, 244, 249, 323, 324, 328, 378, 380 Rutland, 5th Duke of, John Henry Manners (1778–1857), s.1787: 290, 307, 308, 315, 316, 340, 341, 361 St.Germans, 3rd Earl of see Lord Edward Eliot Sadler, Michael (1780–1835) 45 Saintsbury, George (1845–1933), man of letters 2 Salisbury, 2nd Marquis of, James Cecil (1791–1868), s.1833: 308, 372 Salisbury, 3rd Marquis of (1830–1903), styled Lord Robert Cecil 1830–65; Lord Cranborne 1865–8 s.1868: 2 Sandon, Lord see 2nd Earl of Harrowby Saxe-Weimar, Ernest, Grand Duke of (1818–1847) s.1844, elder brother of Prince Albert 328 Saye and Sele, 16th Baron, Frederick Twistleton-Wykeham-Fiennes (1799–1887) 16 Schiller, Friedrich von (1759–1805), poet 20, 37 Scott, Sir Edward (1793–1851), MP for Lichfield 1832–7: 195 Scott, John (1794–1871), horse trainer 416 Scott, Sir Walter (1771–1832), novelist 206, 416 Sefton, 2nd Earl of, William Philip Molyneux (1772–1838) 11, 135 Sefton, 3rd Earl of, Charles Molyneux (1796–1855), s.1838: 212 Selwyn, Revd. George (1809–1878), primate of New Zealand and Bishop of Lichfield 230 Senior, Nassau (1790–1864) 23, 134

512 Sephton, Henry (1686–1756), architect 7 Seychelles 228 Shaftesbury, 7th Earl of see Lord Ashley Shakespeare, William (1564–1616), playwright and poet 4, 10, 206, 416 Shaw, Frederick (1799–1876), MP for Dublin 1830–2 and Dublin University 1832–48: 147 Sheil, Richard (1794–1851), MP for Louth 1831, Tipperary 1832–41 and Dungarvan 1841–51: 107, 132, 139, 190, 219, 260, 263, 285 Sheppard, Thomas (d.1858), MP for Frome 1832–47: 181 Sheridan, Richard (1751–1816), playwright and politician 10 Sherborne, 2nd Lord, John Dutton (1779–1862), s.1820: 322 Short, Revd.Thomas (1790–1872), Bishop of Sodor and Man 1841, Bishop of St Asaph 1847 opinion of Stanley at Christ Church 21 Shrewsbury, 16th Earl of, John Talbot (1791–1852), s.1827: 322 Sibthorp, Col. Charles (1783–1855), MP for Lincoln 1826–32 and 1835–55: 374 Sidmouth, 1st Viscount, Henry Addington (1757–1844) 30, 40 Sidney, Sir Algernon (1622–1683), essayist and Whig martyr 25 Sierra Leone 227, 238, 239 Sinclair, Sir George (1790–1868), MP for Caithness 1811–41: 161, 181, 187 Sindh annexation 246, 262 Singapore 228 Skelmersdale, Lords, see Bootle-Wilbraham Slavery, Abolition of 5, 87, 127–30, 133–4, 145, 153, 156, 197, 214–5, 229, 232, 238, 247 Smith, Adam (1723–1790), philosopher 22, 28, 48, 154, 268, 358, 363

Index Smith, Sir Lionel (1778–1842), Governor of Jamaica 1836–9: 214 Smith, Peter, Chief Clerk of the Colonial Office: 229 Smith, Robert Vernon (1800–1873), cr. Lord Lyveden 1859: 16, 216, 245, 246, 268 Smith, Rev Sydney (1771–1845) 22 Smith, Thomas (1795–1866), Attorney-General for Ireland 1842: 278, 279 Somerset, 11th Duke of, Edward Seymour (1775–1855), s.1793: 261 Somerton, Lord (1818–1896) s. as 3rd Earl of Normanton 1868, MP for Wilton 1841–52: 331 Southampton, Lord, Charles Fitzroy (1804–1872), s.1810: 372 Spain 36, 137, 204, 294, 323, 358 Spectator, The 290, 406 Spencer, 2nd Earl (1758–1834) 95, 151 Spencer, 3rd Earl see Lord Althorp Spring Rice, Thomas (1790–1866), cr. Baron Monteagle 1839: 50, 55, 56, 62, 63, 78, 79, 89, 117, 144, 151, 152, 164, 165, 167, 174, 215, 216, 229, 327 Spooner, Richard (1783–1864), MP for Birmingham 1844–7 and North Warwickshire 1847–64: 339 Stafford, 2nd Marquess of, George Granville Leveson-Gower (1758–1833), s. as Duke of Sutherland 1833: 20 Stafford, Augustus (1811–1857), known as Augustus Stafford O’Brien prior to 1847, MP for North Nottinghamshire 1841–57: 309, 340, 350, 359, 361, 364, 370, 372 Standard, The 318 Stanley, Charlotte (née Hornby), Countess of Derby (1776–1817) 13 Stanley, Lady Charlotte (1776–1805), m. Edmund Hornby 1796: 13, 14 Stanley, Lady Charlotte (1801–1853), m. Edward Penrhyn 1823: 14, 70, 213

Index Stanley, Hon. Charles (1808–1884), m. Frances-Augusta Campbell 1836: 207 Stanley, Edward, 3rd Earl of Derby (1509–1572): 7 Stanley, Edward, 12th Earl of Derby (1752–1834): 34 character 8, 10, 11 passion for horse racing and cock fighting 8, 9 marriage to Lady Elizabeth Hamilton 8 courtship and marriage to Elizabeth Farren 10 Whig politics 11–12 advice to Stanley on speaking in the Commons 31 objects to Stanley’s engagement to Emma Bootle-Wilbraham 33 agrees to Stanley’s engagement 43 disgust at Hunt’s election for Preston (December 1830) 72 applauds Stanley’s resignation (May 1834) 141 death and funeral (October 1834) 150–1 Stanley, Edward Geoffrey (1799–1869), Lord Stanley 1834–45, Lord Stanley of Bickerstaffe 1845–51 and 14th Earl of Derby 1851–69: 1. Personal details: birth and childhood 5, 15 education –Eton 15–18,–Christ Church, Oxford 19, 22 appearance 14, 417 personality, character and qualities 3–5, 29, 135–6, 417, 419–20 religion 18, 46–8, 208–10 courtship, marriage and family life 33, 44, 46–8, 128, 202–3, 204–8, 332–3 death of his grandfather 150–1 reading, translation and poetry 23–8, 416 writing, Conversations on the Parables 46–8, The Miracles of Our Lord Explained 135–6

513 shooting, hunting and horse racing 25–6, 56, 135–6, 213, 328, 335, 349, 364, 384, 415–6, 418–9 travels, continental Europe 1822: 28–9–North America 1824–5: 33–43–Scotland 1837: 197 illness 4, 128, 130, 132, 192, 199, 200, 231, 260, 275, 283, 298, 319, 337, 342, 348, 350, 391, 395, 420–2 estates, Knowsley 5–6, 412–3 –Ballykisteen 44–6, 332, 414–5 oratory 31–2, 419–20 historical reputation 1–5 2. Political beliefs: parliament and the constitution 24–5, 59–60, 286–7, 385–7, 391 political parties 22, 26, 304–5 extra-parliamentary organisation 356–7, 369–70 political economy 28, 48, 311–2, 338–9, 363 the Established Church 31, 50, 208–10 opposition strategy as Conservative leader 316–7, 321, 329, 330, 331, 334, 354, 356–7, 359, 367, 373, 393–4, 396 relations between the Commons and the Lords 346–7, 364 3. Political career: education under Lansdowne 22–8 enters Commons (1822) 29 maiden speech (1824) 31 votes against enquiry into the Church of Ireland (1824) 32 Catholic Relief Bill (1825) 49 Canadian land reform (1825) 50 commercial crisis (1825) 51 Liverpool-Manchester Railway Bill (1826) 51–2 Corn Law reform (1826) 52 Preston election (1826) 52–3 Canadian Clergy Reserves (1827) 53–4 Corn Law reform (1827) 54 Catholic Emancipation (1827) 54–5 declines office in Canning’s coalition 56

514 3. Political career: (cont.) accepts Under-Secretaryship of the Colonies 56 resigns from Colonial office 57 looks to become Canning’s political executor 58–9, 68 Corn Law reform (1828) 59 East Retford Disfranchisement Bill (1828) 58–9 Sir James Graham becomes supporter 61 Catholic Emancipation (1828–9) 62–4 speaks on Irish ecclesiastical corporations and Canada 64–5 views on parliamentary Reform (1829–30) 67 speaks on colonial affairs (1830) 68–9 introduces Irish Ecclesiastical Leases Bill (1830) 69 Preston election, July 1830 69 becomes Chief Secretary for Ireland under Lord Grey 72 defeat at Preston and election for Windsor 72 his diagnosis of Ireland’s ills 75–6 confronts O’Connell 77–8 advocates parliamentary Reform 81–2, 102–3 proposes Irish parliamentary Reform 83–4, 86, 90, 112 presses for prosecution of O’Connell 79, 84–5 martial law in Ireland 85–6 re-election for Windsor (April 1831) 86 Irish elections (April 1831) 86–7 enters Grey’s cabinet (June 1831) 88 charges against O’Connell dropped 88–9 yeomanry and ‘Newtownbarry Massacre’ 89 Irish Arms Bill fails (July 1831) 89 cabinet discussion of Irish reforms (August 1831) 92

Index proposes Irish education plan 93–4, 108 speaks on English Reform 95–7 negotiations with ‘the waverers’ 97–8 proposes reform of the Irish tithe 99–102, 106–8, 113–4 differences with Angelesey 76, 85, 91, 105–6, 114–5, 118–9 the ‘Days of May’ crisis 110 Irish Church Temporalities measure 116–8, 122–3 elected for North Lancashire (December 1832) 119 proposes Irish Coercion Bill (February –March 1833) 123–5 moves to the Colonial Office (April 1833) 125 proposes Abolition of Slavery measure 127–8, 129–30 debate on Irish Church Temporalities Bill 130–1 abandons Clause 147: 131–3 debate on Portugal (February 1834) 137 ministerial crisis over Irish Tithe Bill (May 1834) 139–40 resigns office (May 1834) 140–1 the ‘Thimblerig’ speech 147–8 declines office under Peel 151–3, 154–7 election as Rector of Glasgow University 153–4 the ‘Knowsley Creed’ 157–9 election for North Lancashire (January 1835) 160–1 looks to form centre party 161–3 election of Commons Speaker 163–4, 165–6 first meeting of Stanleyite supporters 168–9 announces ‘Derby Dilly’ (February 1835) 170–1 rejects approaches by Howick, Wood and Peel (February–March 1835) 167–8, 173

Index marginalised by Russell’s appropriation motion (March –April 1835) 173–4 municipal corporation reform debate 181–2 crosses to opposition side of the Commons 182 contempt for Melbourne’s ministry 184 acknowledges failure of the ‘Derby Dilly’ 185–6 relations with Peel established 187–8 debate on Irish Municipal Corporation reform and Irish Church Revenues Bill 188–90 agrees opposition strategy with Peel (January 1836) 192–3 cross-bench brokership over Irish legislation 193–4 re-elected for North Lancashire (July –August 1837) 194 defeat of ‘Dilly’ MPs at 1837 election 194–6 obliquely criticised in Henry Taylor’s The Statesman 197–8 attends meeting of Conservative MPs (November 1837) 198 revolt in Canada 199–200 speech at Merchant Taylor’s Hall (May 1838) 211–2 debate on Jamaican crisis (April –May 1839) 214–5 attempt to form a Conservative ministry (May 1839) 215 English education debate (June 1839) 215–6 introduces Irish Voters Registration Bill (February 1840) 218–9 introduces Irish Voters Registration Bill (February 1841) 221–2 debate on Whig budget (March –June 1841) 222 Conservative no-confidence motion (June 1841) 222–3 re-elected for North Lancashire (July 1841) 223

515 Conservative no-confidence motion (August 1841) 224 appointed Colonial Secretary under Peel 225 re-elected for North Lancashire (September 1841) 225 Colonial Office administration 227–30 Colonial preference and resistance to territorial expansion 230 policy in New Zealand 232–3 emigration legislation 233–4 opposes systematic colonisation 234–5 Fitzroy appointed Governor of New Zealand 235 Van Diemen’s Land 236–7 proposes West Indian Clergy Bill (February 1842) 237 rioting in Jamaica 237 West Indian sugar trade 238–9 first Opium War in China 239–42 Crown Colony of Hong Kong established 242 discouraging the opium trade 242–3 crisis in Afghanistan 243–5 defends Ellenborough’s policies 245–6 annexation of Sindh 246 annexation of Natal 247 failure of Niger expedition 248 constitutional arrangements in Canada 248–9 appoints Bagot Governor-General of Canada 249–50 reform of constitution in Newfoundland 250–1 appoints Metcalfe Governor-General of Canada 251 diplomatic crisis with the United States 251–2 Ashburton’s mission to Washington 252–4 defends Ashburton-Webster Treaty 254–5 Canadian tariffs 255–6 Corn Laws Bill (1842) 256

516 3. Political career: (cont.) Defends Customs Duties Bill (1842) 257–9 Canadian Corn Tariff Bill (1843) 259–61 Falkland Islands 262 Income Tax Bill (1842) 263–4 speaks on parliamentary Reform (April 1842) 264–5 speaks on economic distress (July 1842) 265–6 attacks Palmerston’s foreign policy (July 1842) 266–7 defends government policy (July 1843) 268–9 on Graham’s Factory Bills 269–71 Irish education 372–3 views on the Maynooth grant 273–4 refutes Russell’s attack on government’s Irish policy (June 1843) 275–6 refutes Palmerston’s attack on government’s Irish policy (July 1843) 276–7 defends prosecution of O’Connell (February 1844) 278–9 speaks against Russell’s motion for an enquiry into the state of Ireland (February 1844) 279–81 advocates extension of Irish county franchise 282 sense of political marginalisation 283–6 constitutional views aired during Canadian debate (May 1844) 286–7 success in Sugar Import Duties Bill debate (June 1844) 287 elevated to the House of Lords 287–90 adapts to the less partisan atmosphere of the Lords 290–1 Bishoprics of St. Asaph and Bangor debate (April –May 1845) 292 Maynooth grant legislation 292–3 political embarrassment over New Zealand 293–5

Index warns Peel of potato blight in Ireland (October 1845) 297 opposes Corn Law repeal in cabinet 298–300 resigns from Peel‘s government (December 1845) 302 welcomes Gladstone as his successor at the Colonial Office 302 depression following resignation 303 hopes for Conservative unity 305–7 appointed Protectionist leader in the Lords (March 1846) 307 opposes Corn Law repeal in the Lords (May 1846) 311–2 hailed as Protectionist leader in both Houses (July 1846) 313–4 looks to Conservative reunion after next election 314 tempers anti-Catholicism 316–7 speaks to Liverpool Agricultural Society (September 1846) 317 the Quarterly Review 318 clash with Bentinck (January 1847) 319 increasing famine in Ireland 320–1 advocates passive opposition (December 1846) 321 opposes Palmerston’s foreign policy (January 1847) 323–4 defends Irish landlords 324–5 affirms his party leadership 325–6 debate on Irish Poor Law Extension measure (April 1847) 326–7 difficulties of Commons leadership 327–8 1847 general election 328–9 difficulty in determining party numbers 329–30 thinking on party alignments 330–1 objections to Whig policy (September 1847) 330 response to financial crisis (November 1847) 335–6, 338 continuing crisis in Ireland 336 the Jewish disabilities issue and Baron Rothschild 336–7, 339

Index lack of effective Commons leadership 339–42, 346–7, 350–4 diplomatic relations with the Papacy (February 1848) 342–3 Irish legislation 343–4 Chartist protest 344–5 Bentinck’s death and the Commons leadership 349 agricultural distress and the revival of Protectionism 355–7 opposition to repeal of the Navigation Acts (1849) 358–64 prospective cabinet appointments (March–May 1849) 361 Disraeli’s proposed fiscal reforms 365–8 holding popular Protectionist agitation at arm’s length (December 1849–January 1850) 369–70 objection to Grey’s colonial policy 370–1 the campaign for fiscal reform 372–4 Commissioner for the ‘Great Exhibition’ 374–5, 410 debate on the ‘Dolly’s Brae affair’ (February 1850) 375–6 opposition to the Irish Parliamentary Voters Bill (February–June 1850) 376–8 ‘Don Pacifico’ and the attack on Palmerston’s foreign policy (June 1850) 378–83 the death of Peel (July 1850) 383–4 Stanley’s deep political gloom 384–7 his network of political relationships 387–91 the Papal Aggression crisis 391–9 attempt to form a government (February 1851) 399–406 realignment with the Whigs 407 Merchant Taylors’ Hall speech (April 1851) 409 Aberdeen’s overtures (May 1851) 411–2 Stanley, Edward Henry (1826–1893), Lord Stanley 1851–69, 15th Earl of

517 Derby 1869–93: 208, 296, 310, 381, 396, 398, 403, 409, 410 birth 46, 53 illness 150, 185, 205 education 204, 205 Trinity College, Cambridge 205–6 birthday celebrations (1847) 332–3 contests constituency of Lancaster 333 serves as special constable during Chartist demonstrations 345 elected MP for King’s Lynn 349–50 friendship with Disraeli 365, 390 tour of the West Indies 371 maiden speech 386 continental tour 390 visits Ballykisteen 415 Stanley, Edward Smith (1775–1851), Lord Stanley 1776–1834, 13th Earl of Derby 1834–51: 141, 151, 206–7, 213, 219, 267, 310, 333, 412 character 12 passion for ornithology and zoology 12–13 Whig politics 12 marriage to Charlotte Hornby 13 Stanley, Elizabeth (née Farren), Countess of Derby (1762–1829), m. 12th Earl of Derby 1797: 10, 34, 65 Stanley, Elizabeth (née Hamilton), Countess of Derby (1753–1797), m. 12th Earl of Derby 1774: 8–9, 10 Stanley, Lady Ellinor (1807–1887), m. Revd. Frank Hopwood 1835: 14,70,183, 213 Stanley, Emma (née Bootle-Wilbraham), Countess of Derby (1805–1876) m. Edward Geoffrey Stanley 1825: 125, 213, 310 courtship with Stanley 33, 43–4 marries Stanley (1825) 44 delicate health and pregnancies 46, 53, 104, 150, 185, 204, 206 Stanley, Lady Emma (1835–1928), m. Sir Patrick Chetwynd Talbot 1860: 46, 185, 204, 206, 310

518 Stanley, Hon. Frederick (1841–1908), 16th Earl of Derby 1893–1908: 206, 310, 402, 415 Stanley, Hon. Henry (1803–1875), m. Anne Woolhouse 1835: 14, 119, 161, 183–4, 203 Stanley, James, 7th Earl of Derby (1607–1651) 7 Stanley, James, 10th Earl of Derby (1664–1736) 7 Stanley, Hon. James Stanley (1800–1817) 14, 15, 18 Stanley, Sir John (c.1340–1414) 7 Stanley, Lady Louisa (1805–1825), m. Col. Samuel Long 1825: 14, 44, 46 Stanley, Lady Lucy (1799–1809) 14, 18 Stanley, Lady Mary (1801–1858), m. 2nd Earl of Wilton 1821: 14, 28, 150 Stanley, Sir Thomas (c.1405–1459) 7 Stanley, Thomas, 1st Earl of Derby (c.1433–1504) 7 Stanley, William, 9th Earl of Derby (c.1655–1702) 7 Statter, Robert Knowsley estate steward, father of Thomas Statter 413 Statter, Thomas (1816–1891), Knowsley estate steward 413 Staunton, Sir George (1781–1859), MP for Portsmouth 1838–52, translator of the Chinese penal code 242, 243 Stephen, James (1789–1859), knighted 1847: 129, 130, 134, 198, 228, 229, 230, 231, 233, 251 Stephenson, George (1781–1848), railway engineer 66 Stewart, Dugald (1753–1828), philosopher 22, 27, 28 Stewart, Patrick (1791–1846), MP for Lancaster 1831–7 and Renfrewshire 1841–6: 172, 234 St. Helena 227, 239 St. Kitts 227 St. Lucia 227 Stockbridge 29, 31, 52

Index Stormont, Lord, W.D. Murray (1806–1898), s. as 4th Earl of Mansfield 1840: 159 Stradbroke, 2nd Earl of, John Edward Rous (1794–1886), s.1827: 315, 372, 373 Stuart, John (1793–1876), MP for Newark 1846–52 and Bury-St.-Edmunds 1852–71: 361 Sugden, Sir Edward (1781–1875), MP for Ripon 1837–41, Lord Chancellor of Ireland 1841–6, Lord Chancellor in 1852 and raised to the peerage as Lord St Leonards: 403 Sumner, Revd. John (1780–1862), Bishop of Chester 1828, Archbishop of Canterbury 1848–62: 97, 394 theological writings 17 influence on the young Stanley 46, 47 Sutherland, 2nd Duke of, George Leveson-Gower (1786–1861), s.1833: 153, 161, 176, 197 Sutton, Sir Charles Manners (1780–1845), cr. Viscount Canterbury 1835, MP for Scarborough 1806–32 and Cambridge University 1832–5: 163, 164, 166 Swainson, William (1809–1883), Attorney-General of New Zealand 236 Sydenham, Lord, Charles Thomson (1799–1841), Governor-General of Canada 1839–41: 249 Talbot, Hon. Thomas (1771–1853), colonist in Canada: 50 ‘Tamworth Manifesto’ 144, 159, 160, 169, 183 Tankerville, 5th Earl of, Charles Bennet (1776–1859), s.1822: 203, 204 Tao-Kuang, Emperor 239 Taylor, Henry (1800–1886), senior clerk in the Colonial Office 1824–72: 129, 197–8, 229

Index Taylor, Sir Herbert (1775–1839), private secretary to King William IV 1830–7: 106, 111, 120, 122, 126, 131, 137, 152, 176, 177, 190, 194 Tennent, Sir James (1804–1869), MP for Belfast 1832–45 and Lisburn 1852: 153, 161, 168, 171, 175, 181, 187, 195, 215, 222 Test and Corporation Acts 138 repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts (1828) 58 Thesiger, Sir Frederick (1794–1878), cr. Lord Chelmsford 1858, MP for Woodstock 1840–4, Abingdon 1844–52 and Stamford 1852–8: 382, 389 The Times 69, 129, 138, 155, 157, 160, 165, 171, 182, 186, 189, 225, 235, 239, 251, 261, 293, 295, 301, 302, 309, 314, 328, 337, 349, 357, 359, 364, 367, 371, 373, 374, 376, 381, 384, 385, 397, 406, 415 Thomson, Charles see Lord Sydenham Thucydides (c.455-c.400BC) 21 Tierney, George (1761–1830) 55, 56, 321 Tobago 227 Townshend, Charles (1795–1817) 16 Trinidad 227, 371 Trinity College, Cambridge 8, 12, 205 Trinity College, Dublin 83, 84, 112 Tristan da Cunha 227 Trollope, Frances (1780–1863) 35 Trollope, Sir John (1800–1874), cr. Lord Kesteven 1868, MP for South Lincolnshire 1841–68: 352, 372, 373 Turner, J.M.W. (1775–1851), painter 151 Turner, Sharon (1768–1847), historian 26 Turner, William (b.1776), MP for Blackburn 1832–41: 187 Tyler, President John (1790–1862) 253 United States of America 248, 249, 251, 252, 253, 255, 256, 258, 259, 260, 267, 275, 333, 350, 355 Stanley’s visit 1824–5: 33–43 Uxbridge, Lord, Henry Paget

519 (1797–1869), s. as 2nd Marquess of Anglesey 1854: 135 Van Diemen’s Land 228, 234, 236, 254, 370 Van Mildert, William (1765–1836), Bishop of Durham 130, 132 Verney, Sir Harry (1801–1894), MP for Buckingham 1832–41, Bedford 1847–52 and Buckingham 1857–74 and 1880–5: 168, 175, 180, 187 Vernon, Granville (1792–1879), MP for East Retford 1831–47: 160 Victoria, Queen (1819–1901) 194, 196, 212, 215, 217, 218, 224, 225, 231, 233, 249, 261, 266, 267, 289, 301, 302, 307, 312, 325, 328, 333, 360, 361, 364, 365, 374, 378, 379, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 407, 412, 413 Villiers, Charles (1802–1898), brother of 4th Earl of Clarendon, MP for Wolverhampton 1835–98: 202, 214, 255 Virgil (70–19BC) 16, 21, 350 Vyvyan, Sir Richard (1800–1879), MP for Bristol 1825–30 and 1832–7, Helstone 1841–57: 146 Waitangi, Treaty of see also New Zealand 228, 232, 235 Wakefield, Edward Gibbon (1796–1862) 233, 249, 370, 371 Walker, Richard (1784–1855), MP for Bury 1832–52: 168, 169, 187 Walpole, Horace (1717–1797) 26, 206 Walpole, Sir Robert (1676–1745) 26 Walpole, Spencer (1806–1898), MP for Midhurst 1846–56 and Cambridge University 1856–82: 347, 361, 362, 370, 382, 399, 403, 411 Warburton, Henry (1784–1858), MP for Bridport 1826–41 and Kendall 1843–7: 54, 120 Ward, Sir Henry (1797–1860), MP for St Albans 1832–7 and Sheffield 1837–49: 141, 142, 145, 179

520 Webster, Daniel (1782–1852) 42, 51, 253 Wellesley, Marquess of, Richard Colley Wellesley (1760–1842), the Duke of Wellington’s elder brother 134, 136 Wellesley, Lord Charles (1808–1858), son of the Duke of Wellington, MP for South Hampshire 1842–52 and Windsor 1852–5: 389 Wellington, 1st Duke of, Arthur Wellesley (1769–1852): 30, 50, 58, 65, 97, 109, 110, 111, 128, 131, 148, 149, 156–9, 163, 164, 170, 177, 179, 193, 198, 202, 205, 215, 217, 249, 250, 253, 261, 291–3, 297, 300, 305, 306, 307, 310, 312, 322, 323, 328, 330, 331, 334, 361, 363, 388, 402, 404, 406 scuttles Corn Law reform (1826) 54 declines to serve in Canning’s cabinet (1827) 55 becomes prime minister (January 1828) 57 ends alliance with the Huskissonites (1828) 60 on Catholic Emancipation (1828–1829) 62–4 seeks Canningite support (1830) 69 opposes parliamentary Reform (1830) 70 resigns office (November 1830) 71 hopes Stanleyites will join Peel government (November 1834) 152–5 joined by Stanley in the Lords (1845) 287–9 Western Australia 228, 235 West Indian Clergy Act 1842: 237, 263 West Indies 129, 237, 238, 239, 255, 258, 341, 370 Westminster, 2nd Marquess of (1795–1869), styled Lord Grosvenor 1795–1845: 29, 213 Westmorland, 10th Earl of, John Fane (1759–1841), s. 1774: 55 Weyland, Major Richard (1780–1864), MP for Oxfordshire 1831–7: 168, 175, 181, 187, 195, 196

Index Wharncliffe, 1st Lord, James Stuart Wortley (1776–1845), cr. 1826: 97, 98, 109, 135, 157, 231, 288, 291 Wharncliffe, 2nd Lord, see John Stuart Wortley Whitelocke, Sir James (1570–1632) 25 William III, King (1650–1702) 202 William IV, King (1765–1837) 71, 96, 110, 111, 133, 141, 157, 179 succession (June 1830) 69 offers Stanley Windsor constituency (December 1830) 72 reluctance to grant a dissolution (April 1831) 86 supports Commons Tithe Committee report (February 1832) 106 gives assent to English Reform Bill (June 1832) 111 looks to coalition of moderate Reformers (June 1833) 131 welcomes abandonment of Clause 147 (June 1833) 132 confidential communications with Stanley 125, 131, 134, 146 appoints Wellington as temporary first lord of the treasury (November 1834) 152 hopes for Stanley coalition (April 1835) 176 death (June 1837) 194 Wilson, Henry (1797–1866), MP for West Suffolk 1835–7: 168 Wilton, 2nd Earl of, Thomas Egerton (1799–1882), s. 1814: 28, 29, 51, 56, 70, 180, 184, 212, 215, 341, 381 Wodehouse, Lord, John Wodehouse (1826–1902), cr. Earl of Kimberley 1866: 379 Wood, Sir Charles (1800–1885), cr. Lord Halifax 1866, MP for Great Grimsby 1826–31, Wareham 1831–65 and Ripon 1865–6: 69, 120, 121, 134, 164, 167, 174, 177, 219, 221, 257, 330, 346, 398, 399, 409, 410, 411 Woolhouse, Anne (b.1807), m. Hon. Henry Stanley 1835: 183

Index Worcester, Lord (1824–1899), s. as 8th Duke of Beaufort 1853, MP for East Gloucestershire 1846–53: 347 Wortley, John Stuart, 2nd Lord Wharnecliffe (1801–1855), s. 1845, MP for Bossiney 1823–32, Perth 1830 and West Yorkshire 1841–5: 97, 389 friendship with Stanley at Christ Church 20 accompanies Stanley to North America (1824–5) 34 accepts Board of Control under Wellington (1830) 67 Wrottesley, Sir John (1771–1867), MP for South Staffordshire 1820–37: 133

521 Wynn, Charles (1775–1850), MP for Old Sarum 1796 and South Montgomery 1797–1850: 60, 62 Wyse, Thomas (1791–1862), MP for Tipperary 1830–1 and Waterford 1835–47: 92 York, Archbishop of, see Revd. Edward Vernon Harcourt York, Duke of, Prince Frederick (1763–1827) 53 Young, George (1814–1870), MP for Tynemouth 1831–8 and Scarborough 1851–2: 168, 171, 172 Young Ireland 275, 348 Young, John (1807–1876), MP for Cavan 1831–55: 322

The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby Volume I: Ascent, 1799-1851

The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby: Volume II: Achievement, 1851-1869

The Prime Minister

I Love the Earl

I Love the Earl

I Love the Earl

The Minister of Evil

The Ascent Of Man

The Earl That I Marry

Curtin's Gift: Reinterpreting Australia's Greatest Prime Minister

The Ascent

The Ascent

The Ascent

The Ascent of Science

The Ascent of Unreason

The Ascent of the Spirit

The Crown Derby Plate

The Ascent of Money

The Ascent

The Ascent of Humanity

The Prime Minister and Cabinet (Politics Study Guides)

The Earl

Intentions of the Earl

Ascent

I Kissed an Earl

The Senior Minister

The Complete Yes Minister

Derby Day

Intentions of the Earl

Intentions of the Earl

The Earl

The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby Volume I: Ascent, 1799-1851

The Forgotten Prime Minister: The 14th Earl of Derby: Volume II: Achievement, 1851-1869

The Prime Minister

I Love the Earl

I Love the Earl

I Love the Earl

The Minister of Evil

The Ascent Of Man

The Earl That I Marry

Curtin's Gift: Reinterpreting Australia's Greatest Prime Minister

The Ascent

The Ascent

The Ascent

The Ascent of Science

The Ascent of Unreason

The Ascent of the Spirit

The Crown Derby Plate

The Ascent of Money

The Ascent

The Ascent of Humanity

The Prime Minister and Cabinet (Politics Study Guides)

The Earl

Intentions of the Earl

Ascent

I Kissed an Earl

The Senior Minister

The Complete Yes Minister

Derby Day

Intentions of the Earl

Intentions of the Earl

The Earl

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