Department of History, Durham University, Durham, UK
This essay is an introduction to politics in nineteenth-century Scotland and Wales. It surveys major electoral trends and political questions, exploring the reasons for the Liberal party’s dominance. It also considers the political issues that both made Scotland and Wales distinct and situated them in pan-British political contexts. It argues against an Anglocentric reading of British politics and asserts the importance of a comparative model that recentres Scotland and Wales within a more dynamic picture of overlapping polities, rather than relegating them to a ‘Celtic fringe’.
Introduction
Politics in nineteenth-century Britain was polycentric – its history should be likewise. Yet it is often implicitly Anglocentric: many of the major narratives in modern British history are English ones that have no parallel in the Scottish or Welsh literature, scholarships historians of England engage with only infrequently. Historians have profitably compared Scotland and Ireland, but Scotland and Wales far less so, and too few histories take a holistic view of the four United Kingdom or three British nations. Greater dialogue between often disparate historiographical traditions is therefore needed. For instance, if the nineteenth century has been seen as the Liberal century, it is remarkable that so few histories of Liberalism have taken a pluralist approach to an ideology and party that was fundamentally pan-British. A core-periphery model is reductive, falsely homogenising the non-English nations: Scotland and Wales were not Liberalism’s ‘Celtic fringe’. Each was an integral component of a party that was simultaneously local, national, and ‘British’, and which made claims to represent opinion at each of these layers – claims that could be mutually compatible or antagonistic. Paying attention to the political cultures, identities, and historical contexts of each nation – and to their sites of interaction and divergence – and acknowledging the multidimensionality of the United Kingdom enhances the study of modern British politics. Two of these nations, Scotland and Wales, are discussed here. Scotland and Wales have distinct national political histories, but these did not operate in a vacuum, and both contributed to the making of British politics.
This essay provides an overview of governing structures and electoral trends in Scotland and Wales. The United Kingdom has been described as a ‘pluri-national state’ and a ‘state of unions’ (Mitchell 2014). The asymmetrical ‘territorial dimensions’ and relationships of this United Kingdom state – and of its electoral systems – should be seen as ‘an essential, rather than incidental, feature of its composition and history’ (O’Leary 2018, p. 75). The essay also examines three major political issues: land, religion, and nation, which in both Scotland and Wales were intimately linked. Liberals, politically dominant in this period, were instrumental in establishing and politicising these connections, helping to shape Scottish, Welsh, and also British political cultures. Mobilising these issues generated political capital but also raised the expectations of those they claimed to represent. Conservatives fared better with ‘nation’, and to an extent land and religion, in Scotland than Wales, where the party was depicted as on the wrong side in such debates. In the late eighteenth century, English dominance was the prevailing mood in relations between the constituent parts of the United Kingdom. By the late nineteenth century, the distinctly ‘national’ demands of Scotland and Wales had become major issues of political debate. However, the United Kingdom, and its dominant political parties, remained fundamentally asymmetrical. At the outbreak of World War One, Ireland’s future within the United Kingdom preoccupied politicians, and it was not until after the Second World War that Scottish and Welsh questions again assumed a more central role within ‘British’ politics.
Governing Scotland and Wales
Governing structures
Wales had been united with England since the reign of Henry VIII, meaning its governing structures were more intertwined and incorporated with those of England than Scotland’s were at the start of our period. Political, strategic, and economic considerations led to formal Acts of Union with Scotland in 1707 and Ireland in 1801, creating first Great Britain and then the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The four nations together comprised a larger polity, represented in a single Parliament, based at Westminster, between 1801 and 1921, when Ireland was partitioned to create Northern Ireland. However, the Unionisation of the state concealed considerable differences in terms of status, law, parliamentary representation, social structure, and religion – and of political culture and allegiance.
The 1707 Anglo-Scottish Union abolished the Scottish Parliament but maintained Scotland’s legal, religious, and education systems. Scotland continued to be ‘treated as a unit for political purposes’ (Mitchell 2014, p. 25). The Lord Advocate and Solicitor General effectively formed a Scottish executive, responsible to the Home Secretary. The post of Scottish Secretary was abolished in 1746, following a Jacobite rebellion. After a high-profile campaign, it was re-established in 1885 – and made a Cabinet position in 1892 – with a department in London and former Home Office responsibilities. Yet its impact on governance is debatable: the Lord Advocate and local autonomous supervisory boards retained key controls, which could cause administrative tensions and legislative complications. The Office was increasingly criticised as inadequate, even from within (Devine 2000; Fry 1991; Cameron 2010a).
By contrast, there were few institutional markers of Welsh nationhood. Wales’s last remaining separate legal institution was abolished in 1830. It was not until the passage of Wales-only temperance legislation in 1881 that ‘a distinct legislative principle’ applied to Wales. Yet the idea that Wales should be treated separately from England, legislated for as a national unit, remained contentious. Advocated by Welsh Liberals, it was resisted by Conservatives (Morgan 2002). Echoing calls from Scotland and arguing that Scotland was treated more favourably, some Welsh MPs from the late 1880s sought a Welsh standing committee. In 1907, separate committees were established for the consideration and debate of Scottish and Welsh legislation in the Commons – in Scotland’s case, rebooting a set-up that briefly existed in the mid-1890s. There were also attempts to obtain a Welsh Secretary and department (not achieved until the 1960s) and a national council to oversee local government in Wales. Some administrative devolution was granted to Wales at a departmental level between 1907 and 1912, largely as a result of the Liberal government’s welfare reforms (J.G. Jones 1990; Griffith 2006). Nonetheless, by 1914 neither Wales nor Scotland were, in any real sense, ‘self-governing’ nations.
Parliamentary reform
As a result of the 1707 Union and Scotland’s distinctive legal and landholding systems, Scotland had a different electoral system from England and Wales for much of the long nineteenth century. Although England and Wales shared the same franchise, the Welsh system of parliamentary representation had many unique features. When it came to parliamentary reform, England and Wales were legislated for together in 1832 and 1867. Scotland and Ireland were each handled separately. They each had different levels and criteria of enfranchisement from England and Wales until 1884, when franchise measures were applied uniformly across the four nations for the first time. Scotland’s 1832 and 1868 Reform Acts were shoddily drafted, using English legal terms and taking little account of Scots law.
Table 1 The Scottish and Welsh electorates
| Scotland | Wales | |
| Electorate pre-1832 | 4,500 | 21,000 |
| Electorate 1832 | 65,000 | 42,000 |
| Electorate 1867/8 | 231,000 | 127,000 |
| Electorate 1884/5 | 560,000 | 282,000 |
Note: Figures approximate to nearest 1,000
Table 2 Scottish and Welsh seats at Westminster
The 1707 Union largely transferred the franchises of the old Scottish Parliament to Westminster. The number of MPs then allocated to Scotland stayed the same until 1832. Burgh seats grouped together burghs in a series of districts, a system that remained largely intact throughout our period. In 1832, the burgh franchise, formerly in the hands of self-appointing town councillors, shifted to a system of direct voting based on property qualification, as in England. Reform also introduced open nominations and polls on the English model and their associated electoral rituals. Wales’s county franchise had remained unchanged since the sixteenth-century Acts of Union. Most Welsh borough seats were comprised of collections of ‘contributory’ towns, which, as in Scotland, were often geographically non-contiguous. This apparatus was extended in 1832, when a host of towns were enfranchised as contributories, but it was dealt a blow in 1885 when several smaller boroughs were disfranchised. The pre-Reform Scottish electorate had been especially tiny. Whereas in 1832 the number of voters rose by around 80 per cent in England and doubled in Wales, in Scotland the figure was 1,400 per cent. The Scottish county franchise, however, remained more restrictive than England and Wales’s in both 1832 and 1867/8. The 1885 redistribution legislation and move to single-member constituencies reshaped the electoral map. For example, the borough of Glasgow became seven separate seats and the county of Glamorgan five. Discrepancies remained, however. In Wales, populous seats like Cardiff had only one MP until 1918, while in Scotland the system was biased toward the east and rural areas (Cragoe 2004; Cameron 2010a; Craig 1977; Dyer 1983, 1996a; Devine 2000; Ferguson 1966; Fry 1991; G. Hutchison 2020; I. Hutchison 2003, 2020; J.G. Jones 1961; Pentland 2006; Wager 1974; Wallace 1982, 1991).
Little has been written on reform politics in Wales in the period 1790 to 1832, but there has been recent interest in their Scottish dimensions. Inspired by events in France, local reform societies sprang up across Scotland from mid-1792 and correspondence networks were established with English reformers. A Scottish Association of the Friends of the People held two Scottish conventions and a third, ‘British’ event. The movement suffered as a result of high-profile sedition trials, which handed down harsh sentences. Five men transported between 1792 and 1794 became the ‘Scottish martyrs’, invoked during the 1820 ‘Radical War’ and the 1830–32 reform movement. New martyrs were made in the spring of 1820, when an abortive rising took place outside Glasgow and there was widespread stoppage of work, in the name of ‘equality of rights’. Given this context, the parliamentary reform movement in 1830–32 was generally expressed through constitutional channels, with political unions, mass meetings, processions, petitions and illuminations (Harris 2005; Pentland 2004, 2005, 2008). Similarly, in Wales during the reform crisis, unions were formed, meetings held and petitions prepared, usually making moderate demands. Developments often coincided with parliamentary debates on the enfranchisement/disfranchisement of towns. In both Scotland and Wales, as in England, there was episodic disorder after Parliament rejected Reform and around the 1831 election (D. J. V. Jones 1966; Wager 1974).
The extra-parliamentary contexts of the 1867–68 reforms in Scotland and Wales are also under-researched, perhaps even more so. Local activists established a handful of Reform League branches in Wales, among which there was little cohesion and whose support fluctuated. Their membership overlapped with that of the pro-disestablishment Liberation Society. Founded in England in 1844, the Society focused increasingly on Wales and was more successful than the Reform League in establishing itself as a national organisation there, giving the Welsh reform movement a religious flavour. A Scottish National Reform League was established in 1866, growing rapidly in strength, particularly in the west, and organising mass meetings. A few League candidates stood in 1868, one winning thanks to an electoral pact, but it collapsed shortly thereafter (I. G. Jones 1961; Wallace 1991; Hutchison 2003).
Election trends
For much of the long nineteenth century, Liberalism was the dominant political force in both Scotland and Wales, going ‘with the grain’ of Scottish and Welsh political opinion (Devine 2000). In Scotland, Liberals captured a majority of seats at every general election from 1832 to 1895 and again between 1906 and 1910. At every election between 1832 and 1885, Liberals took a higher percentage of seats in Scotland than in England. At only one (1841) did Conservatives secure more than 40 per cent of Scottish seats; in 1880 and 1885, they won only one-tenth. The Unionist alliance – comprised of Conservatives and Liberals who left the party over Irish Home Rule – was more successful. Liberal Unionists shouldered the burden in 1886–92 but were increasingly outnumbered by Conservatives. Unionists won their first majority in 1900, but these gains were wiped out in 1906 and, unlike in England, the ground was not recovered in 1910 (I. Hutchison 2003, 2020). In Wales, Conservatives took a majority of seats between 1835 and 1859, their strongest performances coming in the period 1841–52. In sharp contrast, Liberals won every general election in Wales between 1865 and 1910, benefitting from an association with Nonconformity and tenant farmers and the advocacy of ‘Welsh’ issues. They took at least 70 per cent of seats in three-quarters of cases. On four occasions, they captured all but four seats. The Conservatives lost seats even at the ‘khaki’ election of 1900 and were left without representation in 1906. Liberal Unionists were electorally unpopular, their tally never rising above one (Cragoe 2004; Morgan 2002).
Some historians argue that the Liberal party became more dependent on its ‘Celtic fringe’ after it split over Ireland in 1886 (Morgan 1991; Parry 1993). Between 1886 and 1910, Liberals won a greater proportion of seats in Scotland and Wales than in England, but as the results outlined above indicate, this was nothing new. Excepting Scotland in 1900 and Wales in December 1910, Liberals secured a majority of votes there. This should surely make Scottish and Welsh Liberal politics more interesting, not relegate it to the periphery.
Major political issues
Land
Having considered the electoral landscape of Scotland and Wales, this essay will now explore the distinctive issues that helped to shape their politics. Landholding was a long-standing concern in both Scotland and Wales, but achieved greatest prominence in the later nineteenth century, due to changing socio-economic circumstances and the increasing politicisation and mobilisation of those living and working on the land. This gave rise to campaigns for reform that demanded recognition of grievances specific to the agricultural populations of Scotland and Wales. There was also an important pan-British dimension to the land question. The Irish land war of the 1880s provided both a context that reformers could exploit and possible legislative solutions, but also coloured how governments viewed events in Britain, while the extension of the county franchise in 1884 made the agricultural labourer a target for English political appeals.
Scotland had several land questions. These were broadly regional, but conditions and agitations were also locally diverse. The Highland land question was the most prominent, centring on precarious crofting communities. It peaked in the 1880s, with high-prolife acts of resistance, including rent strikes and land occupations, and connected popular and parliamentary campaigns. Crofter protests – like the 1882–84 disturbances on Skye, to which the military were dispatched – were publicised by an expanding Highland press. So too were the activities of proliferating land reform associations and events in Ireland. This helped the movement gather momentum and created the impression of a region in crisis. Yet the demands were moderate: the crofters sought a redefined landlord–tenant relationship, not an end to landlordism. A Royal Commission sat from 1883 to 1884, but its recommendations fell short of crofters’ aspirations. The frustrations of newly enfranchised crofters were reflected in the election of five ‘Crofters’ Party’ MPs in 1885.
A Crofters Act was the only major measure passed by the 1886 Liberal government and was justified on historical and cultural grounds. It established a system of ‘dual ownership’: crofters remained tenants of proprietors, but gained security of tenure and compensation for improvement, and could appeal to a Crofters’ Commission for fair rents. Crofters did not obtain freedom of sale or the desired redistribution of land but could bequeath a croft to an heir at law. The Act was criticised as inadequate and 1886–87 saw the return of unrest and the military. However, it gained in reputation. The Commission recommended rent reductions and cancelled arrears, and the Act was believed to recognise crofters’ historical ‘title’ to the land – something that helps to explain later disinterest in land purchase schemes.
In the 1890s, Conservative governments turned to developing the Highland economy through infrastructure and agricultural support projects. They hoped to encourage crofters away from part-time agricultural work supplemented by other earnings and toward reliance on a single activity. A Congested Districts Board (CDB) followed in 1897, modelled on an Irish scheme but poorly funded and lacking compulsory purchase powers. It appeared inefficient: crofters were generally not persuaded to migrate or purchase land and lacked the capital for development programmes. Edwardian Liberal governments changed direction, looking to extend a version of the dual ownership principle to Scotland as a whole. Their legislation was widely condemned: few saw the rationale for introducing the 1886 tenurial regime to the Lowlands, Highlanders argued their issues were overlooked, and dropping land purchase hamstringed the CDB. A 1911 Act swept away the existing machinery and gave a new Board of Agriculture power to enlarge holdings and compel landowners to create new ones. Protests continued, but the Act had little impact in the Highlands or Lowlands (Cameron 2005, 2009, 2010a, 2010b; Newby 2007).
By contrast, the land question in Wales was predominantly cultural and social in make-up, not economic. Landowners were portrayed as culturally, socially, linguistically, politically, and often racially alien to their tenantry, whom they were supposedly prone to exploit and ill-equipped to represent. This also made the land question ‘national’, in a way that it arguably was not in Scotland. While everyday landlord–tenant relations were seldom as dire as villain–martyr stereotypes suggested, this narrative was vital to the rhetorical positioning of Wales as a nation.
The 1868 election, which was followed by a spate of evictions involving Liberal-voting tenants, helped embed these narrative fault lines. Allegations of politically motivated reprisals were not new but assumed notoriety and gave ‘1868’ mythical status, thanks to criticism from Welsh Liberal MPs and the press and public fundraising. However, it was not until the 1880s that something resembling an organised land reform campaign emerged and the land question achieved prominence outside Welsh radical circles – albeit remaining overshadowed by its Irish and Scottish counterparts in degree of both agitation and attention from Westminster. The key demands were security of tenure, compensation for improvement, and fair rents, on which a land court should adjudicate – none of which were achieved during the period before 1914. The 1881 Irish Land Act was an inspiration, and Irish comparisons were invoked to bolster the profile of Welsh grievances and gain leverage. While land and anti-tithe leagues were established in the mid-1880s and north-west Wales experienced anti-tithe riots, there was little appetite for agrarian violence or demands for land purchase or nationalisation.
Welsh Liberals kept agrarian issues before Parliament through motions and bills, but often disagreed over tactics and priorities, particularly if disestablishment’s prospects were affected. Responding to Welsh pressure, William Gladstone’s final Liberal administration established a Royal Commission in 1893. It reported in 1896, when the Conservatives, comparatively uninterested in Welsh land issues, were in power; they did not act on its recommendations, and attempts by Liberal backbenchers to do so were unsuccessful. More research is needed on the early twentieth-century land question in Wales. It is thought to have lost its urgency by the mid- to late 1890s, thanks to tithe and local government reforms, improving economic conditions, and changing demography, and the 1893 Commission offering a ‘safety valve’ for the airing of grievances (Cragoe 2004, 2010; Howell 2013; J. G. Jones 1994, 1997; Morgan 1991, 2002).
Religion
Religion, like land, was also a long-established point of political contention. This was a period of schism within Scottish Presbyterianism and by the mid-nineteenth century Scotland had three major religious bodies each claiming to be a ‘national church’. Although institutionally Presbyterianism was fractured, spiritually it remained the religion of the majority. By contrast, in Wales the majority were chapel-going Nonconformists, yet the established Church was Anglican. Nonconformists denied it was the church of the nation. The distinctive religious complexions of Scotland and Wales made church-state relations a major political issue in both. But this was also a pan-British problem. These were national churches, but the state was British. English radicals also demanded an end to the state recognition of the Church of England (in England), and the minority Anglican Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1869.
Scotland’s Presbyterian inheritance shaped how Scots saw themselves, with values of independence, thrift, and hard work highly prized. These Scottish values became increasingly intertwined with Liberalism – voting Liberal gave them political expression (Devine 2000). However, this was also a turbulent time for Scotland’s churches. Responses to religious controversies did not map neatly onto the party spectrum, and church questions both made possible and disrupted political allegiances.
The established Church of Scotland (also known as ‘the Kirk’) split in 1843. The ‘Ten Years Conflict’ which culminated in this ‘Disruption’ centred on patronage, whereby lay patrons ‘presented’ candidates to vacant church posts within their gift. Patronage was abolished in the 1690 religious settlement that followed the ‘Glorious Revolution’ – a settlement protected by the Union – but was restored by Westminster in 1712. Patronage was a major grievance for evangelicals, who favoured a ‘purified’ establishment, and who dominated the Church by the 1830s. In 1834, the Kirk gave congregations a veto over patrons’ appointees, but this was overruled by an 1838 test case and House of Lords judgment, which effectively meant the Church possessed only those rights conferred by statute. Evangelicals rejected ‘intrusion’ by patron and state, and insisted on the Church’s spiritual independence, preferring divine to state authority. The British state stood accused of infringing the spiritual sovereignty of Scotland’s national Church. The Kirk’s repost, the 1842 Claim of Right, rejected the English doctrine of the absolute sovereignty of Parliament. Sir Robert Peel’s Tory government insisted the non-intrusionists submit to the rulings of the civil courts and Peel rejected legislation aimed at resolving the patronage dispute. In 1843, two-fifths of the clergy and 40 per cent of the laity seceded, forming the Free Church. There had previously been secessions – the departure of ‘voluntaries’, opposed to the principle of an establishment, meant that, by the 1820s, one-third of Scots no longer belonged to the Kirk – but nothing on this scale. Tory intransigence was seen as partly to blame, and the party suffered electorally. Tories were further damaged by Disraeli’s abolition of patronage 30 years later. It was resented by those who felt their sacrifices disregarded and, rather than shoring up the establishment, it pushed the Free Church towards disestablishment (Fry 1991; I. Hutchison 2020).
From 1875, the majority of the Free Church joined the dissenting, voluntaryist United Presbyterian Church in calling for disestablishment. Pressure on the Liberals, now politically dominant, grew, although many Scottish Liberals remained opposed to the policy. As party leader, Gladstone repeatedly hedged, insisting that Scots must pronounce upon disestablishment before the party would. The party in Scotland nearly split in 1885 over disestablishment: a record number of Liberal candidates stood against each other, and a breakaway party organisation was formed, as disestablishment interacted with a grassroots desire for more say in policy issues (I. Hutchison 2003; Kellas 1964). Disestablishers were on both sides when the Liberal party did split over Ireland in 1886. The strength of Scottish radical Liberal Unionism made disestablishment a sticky subject for the Unionist alliance, especially in the west. Agreeing upon local territory and candidatures was often difficult, as was convincing electors to vote for a candidate with opposing views on the Church. This speaks to a broader problem. The Liberalism of Liberal Unionism was initially a boon, but the desire, given the Scottish political context, to appear distinct from the Conservatives, caused tension, while a growing disparity in strength between the two parties rankled the Tories (Burness 2003). The Scottish and then the British Liberal leaderships ultimately declared for disestablishment, but it was neither electorally popular – nearly costing Gladstone his Scottish seat – nor prioritised. It was hard to argue that Scotland had provided a mandate for the policy, and the issue declined in political significance. The Edwardian period saw a further crisis over the limits of state and Union, when the House of Lords ruled in a dispute over church property caused by the merger of the Free and United Presbyterian churches. Interest in the reunification of the Scottish Church grew: in 1921, Westminster recognised the Church’s independence in spiritual matters, and by 1929 reunification was complete.
As with landowners, the Anglican Church in Wales was depicted as ‘alien’, out of step with and incapable of meeting the spiritual and social needs of the Welsh people. Religion became central to definitions of Wales, christened from mid-century a ‘nation of Nonconformists’. It more straightforwardly determined political allegiances than in Scotland and was the major fault line in Welsh politics.
The ‘Blue Books’ controversy of 1847 – when the Welsh were painted as immoral and ignorant in a report by the education commissioners – was a landmark in the development of political Nonconformity, which was mobilised in defence of the Welsh national character and language. A major stimulus in the 1850s and 1860s was the pro-disestablishment Liberation Society, which organised meetings and committees, employed lecturers, and attended to the electoral register. Also important were post-election evictions in 1859 and 1868 and the 1868 campaign for Irish disestablishment, during which parallels with Wales were drawn. Nonconformists were prominent in the increasingly active, opinion-forming Welsh-language press: several editors became influential campaigners on ‘Welsh’ issues and established relationships with key Welsh Liberals. Chapels, important sources of community, provided an organisational network into which Liberationists and Liberals could plug. Whereas Liberals alleged landowner oppression, the Conservative bogeyman was the supposedly coercive preacher, policing the consciences of his flock and keeping them ignorant of political realities (Cragoe 2004; I. G. Jones 1961, 2000). Conservatives simultaneously denied Wales had a distinct case for disestablishment and claimed that Welsh electors cared for it alone, to the point where they would – misled by preachers – vote Liberal. The strength of Welsh Nonconformity made Unionist cooperation near impossible at times, harder even than in Scotland. Liberal Unionism was seen as a betrayal of Welsh opinion and a stooge for Toryism, and it was difficult to persuade electors that there were issues more important than disestablishment (Lloyd-Jones 2015).
Unlike in Scotland, Welsh Liberals generally united behind the cause of disestablishment. Yet it also created friction within the wider party: Welsh Liberals prioritised disestablishment, but the British leadership did not. When disestablishment got second billing in the 1891 Newcastle Programme, the first ‘modern’ party programme, it defused threats from Welsh Liberals to withhold support from the party. But it also raised expectations, the programme being interpreted as a pledge to Wales and the Liberal election victory in 1892 as a mandate for disestablishment. The Programme has been seen by historians as the epitome of Liberal ‘faddism’, yet for many in Wales disestablishment represented not a fad but bona fide national opinion. The Liberal government’s preoccupation with another Irish Home Rule bill in 1893 prompted cries of betrayal and warnings of independent action from Wales (Lloyd-Jones 2015). After Home Rule was defeated, the more radical Welsh MPs kept up the pressure, insisting Wales would hold the ministry to account, but their methods were controversial. Four even withdrew from the Liberal whip. The government’s precarious position meant its disestablishment bills of 1894 and 1895 stood little chance, the latter causing acrimonious parliamentary wrangling both between Welsh Liberals and the government and among Welsh Liberals, precipitating the government’s collapse. Welsh divisions partly explain why the threatened revolt came to little, but the disestablishment crisis reveals that Liberalism could not always rely upon its ‘fringe’. Yet it was not Welsh and Scottish Liberals that were responsible for throwing the party into faddism. On this and other issues, they revealed the limits of the party’s responsiveness and exposed within official Liberalism a disinclination to pander to them.
Disestablishment remained the top priority for Welsh Liberals, but they were never again in a comparable position of strength relative to the British party to exert their demands. A new ‘Welsh revolt’ erupted over the Conservative government’s 1902 Education Act, helping to rejuvenate political Nonconformity and extra-parliamentary activism. By late 1903, all but a handful of Welsh county councils were refusing to operate the new system. Attempts by the government to enforce it were denounced as ‘coercion’. The situation seemed to be getting out of hand but was dampened by the Liberals’ return to power in 1905 (Morgan 1991, 2002). The Liberal government’s Edwardian disestablishment measures got caught in its conflict with the Lords in 1909–11, but legislation finally passed in 1914, taking effect in 1920.
Nation
In both Wales and Scotland, questions of nation and nationhood were at the heart of politics, although in each case it developed according to distinct trajectories. This dynamic was generally absent from English politics, but it is too simplistic to suggest that this was due to a straightforward, consistent conflation of Englishness with Britishness.
In Scotland, nationalism and unionism existed along a spectrum. They were interdependent, not mutually exclusive. Scotland was a non-state nation but, crucially, had ‘a Union not a unitary state’. . An insistence upon both Scottish nationality and the equality, and success, of the Anglo-Scottish partnership has been labelled ‘Unionist-nationalism’. It was ‘restating’, not removing, the Union that was fundamental to Scotland’s independence (Morton 1999, 2008, 2012). Recently, an alternative term, ‘nationalist unionism’, has been suggested for explaining efforts to maintain the balance between nationhood and union (Torrance 2020). According to this worldview, dominant in Scotland in the long nineteenth century, Scotland entered the 1707 Treaty an equal: its ‘autonomy’ should be recognised and secured against ‘amalgamation’. The Union, having brought Scots benefits they wanted to continue reaping, should be protected and made resilient. Union was not subservience: the British and imperial framework afforded a platform for articulating and celebrating Scottish distinctiveness (Finlay 1997).
Scottish nationality and Union were politically and rhetorically malleable, frequently finding expression in calls for improved governance. If things were flawed in 1707 or became so, the Union could be perfected. Numerous groups positioned themselves as ‘national movements’ and claimed to speak for ‘the nation’ (in Wales such claims increasingly became the preserve of Liberalism). In the early 1830s, Scottish reformers, continuing a trend seen in the 1790s, sought not a restoration of ancient rights (Scotland had none) but admittance to them. They argued that Scotland was denied in 1707 access to free institutions and fair representation; parliamentary reform would complete the Union. Customising understandings of the British constitution meant Scotland could be written into existing English narratives and an Anglo-British patriotism developed (Pentland 2005, 2006). The mid-century National Association for the Vindication of Scottish Rights, composed mainly of romantic Tories, invoked national identity to preserve the Union. It warned that ‘centralisation’ and parliamentary inattention risked violating the Union and demanded fairer financial arrangements and a Scottish Secretary, to safeguard the assured equality (Morton 1999). The successful cross-party campaign for a Scottish Office in the early 1880s argued that while Scots wanted more union, they opposed absorption. Scottish business was distinct from English business; the Union had guaranteed their separate management, which administrative devolution would reflect and protect (Torrance 2020). In the late nineteenth century, Unionists used the vocabulary of Scottish nationality to defend the Irish Union. They argued that Scots were equally proud of being Scotsmen and citizens of an empire they helped build, and that the Irish could evolve into good Unionist-nationalists, in the Scottish mould (Lloyd-Jones 2014).
An anti-Union (but not pro-repeal) sentiment emerged from the late 1880s. The Scottish Home Rule Association, active into the late 1890s, insisted that an unjust Union was not responsible for Scotland’s progress. Scottish nationality was imperilled: Scotland was at the mercy of its ‘predatory’ partner, overlooked and a minority in an overburdened Parliament, where English conservatism prevented the reforms Scots desired. The Association demanded legislatures for the management of each UK nation’s affairs, fearing Ireland-only devolution would leave Scotland more vulnerable. It had links with but became antagonistic toward Liberalism, believing Scotland was relied upon for its votes but denied the management of its affairs. Never a mass movement, it nonetheless caused division within and between Scottish and British Liberalism (Lloyd-Jones 2014). A Young Scots Society was founded in 1900, outside the official Liberal party but determined to help it recover from electoral setbacks and to inject it with a stronger sense of Scottishness. After the 1906 Liberal landslide, the Society became increasingly dedicated to securing the restoration of a Scottish Parliament. It criticised parliamentary disinterest in Scotland and the inadequate Scottish Office, seeking a federalised union. Initially electorally useful to the Liberals, it, like its predecessor, wanted Home Rule to be made a test question and attempted to block unsound candidatures. There was, however, now greater Liberal interest in Scottish Home Rule, partly to make Irish devolution more palatable. During the Irish Home Rule crisis, in 1912, Asquith’s government raised hopes of an ‘all round’ solution. When this did not transpire, federal and then purely Scottish Home Rule bills were unsuccessfully introduced by Scottish Liberals between 1912 and 1914 (Torrance 2020; Kennedy 2013).
In building a dominant political constituency, nineteenth-century Welsh Liberalism helped forge a national identity that was simultaneously homogenising and exclusionary. To define the parameters of Welshness, this identity drew on interdependent dichotomies: landowner/tenant, Anglican/Nonconformist, Conservative/Liberal, and English-/Welsh-speaking. This ‘system of shared identification’ assumed the existence of an organic gwerin (people) and disqualified from membership those who appeared to oppose its interests. The Welsh language was a medium for fostering the ‘values and culture’ of the former and attacking the latter. Expressing Welshness in politics meant voting Liberal (O’Leary 2000; Evans & Sullivan 2000). This rhetoric also made possible the portrayal of alternative political creeds, such as socialism and movements like women’s suffrage, as ‘alien’, English imports unsuited to and unnecessary in Wales (Wright 2017; Cook & Evans 2011). Unlike in Scotland, no one term has encapsulated this religio-political-cultural identity, perhaps because Welshness was not in the same sense in dialogue with a Union that constituted a defining moment in its history. Whereas Scottishness negotiated with the Union, Welshness negotiated with Liberalism. The central symbioses in Welshness mean it might productively be characterised as liberal-nationalist (Kennedy 2013).
From the 1860s, there developed a political conception of Wales as a ‘nation’, possessing unique grievances. This was achieved in part through appeals to and on behalf of ‘Wales’, the ‘Welsh people’, and the ‘Nonconformists of Wales’, and the growing sense that MPs were duty-bound to represent the Welsh nation (Cragoe 1998, 2004). Cornerstones of Liberalism were couched in the language of nationality, with land reform, temperance, education reform, and especially disestablishment justified by Wales’s national experience. This helped establish a distinctly Welsh radical programme and agitation within the Liberal party (Morgan 2002). These issues, on which Wales was said to be united, necessitated remedies specific to it. Their redress would remove impediments to the realisation of national ambitions and secure recognition of Wales’s status as a nation. Associating national identity with particular beliefs made Welshness ‘a cause to which one adhered’ (R. M. Jones 1992, p. 338).
Such projections of national identity did not, however, translate easily into campaigns for self-government, which, as in Scotland, were more divisive than unifying. The Welsh Liberal leadership was wary, recognising that ‘Home Rule’ could mean almost anything. Liberal efforts to gather opinion on the issue came with the proviso that nothing should prejudice disestablishment’s position on the Liberal programme. Extra-parliamentary collaboration with Scottish Home Rulers foundered on this prioritisation. At the same time, the Cymru Fydd (Young Wales) movement gathered momentum, its early interest in language and culture becoming secondary to self-government. The movement became bound up with the ambitions of a young David Lloyd George: his crusade in 1895–96 to reconfigure the Welsh Liberal party machinery to better prosecute a Home Rule agitation precipitated its collapse, and that of Liberal organisation more broadly. A bitter dispute arose over the composition of any national organisation. South Walians asserted an unwillingness to submit to the ‘domination of Welsh ideas’, fearing cosmopolitan, industrialising areas would be swamped by the Welsh-speaking, rural north – the latter was declared ‘Welsh Wales’ by Lloyd George. Beneath the homogenised image lay conflicting visions of what, and where, ‘Wales’ was. Regional heterogeneity had similarly caused disagreements over proposals for a national council composed of representatives from county councils. There was a renewed Home Rule campaign from 1910 to 1914, but it lacked coherence and grassroots support, and disestablishment remained the priority (Morgan 2002; J. G. Jones 1986, 1990, 1996).
Several of the major achievements of Welsh nationalism in this period are regarded as cultural rather than expressly political, although they did involve politicised campaigns. A national university was established in 1893, followed by a national museum in 1907 and a national library in 1909. All were institutional symbols of Wales the nation. The 1911 investiture of the Prince of Wales projected a more inclusionary, Celtic-British Welsh identity. Here, Welsh cultural and religious distinctiveness and national sentiment helped shape a ‘unity-in-diversity’ definition of Britishness distinct from, but related to, the Victorian unity-in-homogeneity narrative of Welshness (Ellis 1998).
Conclusion
A multi-nation perspective is essential to understanding British politics in the long nineteenth century. Historians are faced with the dual challenges of singularity and integration. In many respects, Scotland and Wales represent distinct units of analysis with discrete national histories and historiographies – but this does not mean they should be treated in isolation. They can be compared to one another and to other nations within the British Isles and British archipelago, or explored within a broader, inclusive ‘British’ structural and narrative framework. The three major political issues discussed in this essay – land, religion, and nation – reveal the value of thinking of ‘British’ history as multidimensional. They were at once pan-British and uniquely ‘national’ – understanding them requires explanations that are alternately Scottish, Welsh, and ‘British’ in nature.
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