Conservatism and Liberalism

It is noteworthy just how often the nineteenth century is still seen as the Liberal century. While this period may have marked the ‘golden age of Liberalism’ in the mid-Victorian decades, the fact remains that the Liberals were out of power for longer than were the Conservatives: the Tories were in office, either on their own or as part of a coalition, for nearly 58 years of the nineteenth century. For reasons explored in this essay, this is not surprising given the differences and divisions within the Liberal coalition. The Liberals were always much more of a coalition of interests than were the Conservatives, while the latter were, perhaps surprisingly, often much more skilful in the arts of democratic politics. This essay provides an introduction to the evolving ideologies of Conservatism and Liberalism, and their relationship to party and electoral politics.

Introduction

Conservatism and Liberalism were the two main rival political ideologies of the nineteenth century, and map reasonably well on to the two corresponding major parties of the period: the Tory and later Conservative and Unionist parties; and the Whig and subsequent Liberal parties. There were, however, conservative elements in the Liberal party, notably the Whig aristocrats who dominated Liberal cabinets down to the end of the nineteenth century and who acted as a major barrier against the rising power of radicalism. Conversely, some Tories harboured liberal sentiments, such as the liberal Tories of the 1820s, a current that produced one of the greatest Conservative prime ministers of the last two hundred years, Sir Robert Peel (prime minister 1834–35, 1841–46). Thus, it is important to note at the outset that political ideologies are neither static nor fully coterminous with political parties. This explains, in part, why party splits occur, as they did in 1846 when Peel’s decision to repeal the Corn Laws split the Conservative party into the Peelites and Protectionists. A profound rupture in the two-party system occurred again in 1886 when the Liberal prime minister W. E. Gladstone’s commitment to Irish Home Rule split in two the already fractured Liberal party, with those opposed to Gladstone seceding to form the Liberal Unionists, who eventually coalesced with the Tories to form the Unionist party.

The meaning of Conservatism

Conservatives have traditionally presented themselves as non-ideological, pragmatic, and opposed to political theory. But it is important to recognise that such statements are themselves ideological and serve party purposes. The redefinition of ideology as a more expansive and inclusive term by political scientists and historians has led to a rediscovery of a distinctive Conservative value and belief system (or ideology). Modern Conservatism traces its origins to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, drawing on thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, Viscount Bolingbroke, and pre-eminently Edmund Burke (Jones 2017). Tories, Conservatives, and later Unionists invoked memories of these and other founding fathers, such as William Pitt the Younger, as they sketched out their ideology, legitimated their positions, and attacked their enemies. Pitt Clubs were established in the years after the eponymous prime minister’s death (1806), while the Primrose League was established in 1883 to commemorate the Tory prime minister Benjamin Disraeli (d. 1881) and his ‘Tory democratic’ celebration of imperialism, patriotism, and monarchy (Pugh 1985).

The Tory worldview was based on a cluster of key assumptions, values, and habits of mind: tradition, the imperfectability of human nature, hierarchy and inequality, a Christian pessimism as well as pragmatism. This cluster underpinned the party’s resistance to radical innovation and change, although the party also prided itself on not being simply reactionary in resisting all change, mindful of Burke’s dictum that ‘A state without the means of some change is without the means of its conservation’ (Burke 1790, 29). The constitution, according to this view, had been inherited from a wise and provident ancestry, and it was incumbent on those in the present to protect it from subversive forces and hand it down unimpaired to future generations. These subversive forces were variously defined as radicals, infidels, Catholics, the French, Irish nationalists, busy-bodies such as puritanical, parvenu Liberal Nonconformists, and later socialists. The belief in the moral and intellectual imperfection of mankind was also evident. As the early Victorian Tory radical Richard Oastler put it, ‘Every Christian believes that man has fallen from perfection, that he is selfish, covetous, and that he needs the unerring teaching of the Almighty’ (Driver 1948, 468). Acceptance of human frailties – rooted in part in the relaxed Anglicanism of the Church of England – translated into tolerance of human weaknesses and vices, such as the sinful pleasures of drinking and gambling which the Tories defended against temperance fanatics in the Liberal party. This won the party valuable support from working-class men in the later Victorian era (Lawrence 1993). As for intellectual imperfection, when on the public platform Tories lost no opportunity to ridicule opponents for their erroneous attachment to abstract ideas and naïve faith in the perfectibility of human nature. Christianity – via the Church of England and paternalism through to the bountiful rural squire and the caring factory owner – was needed as a social bond to prevent society from disintegrating into anarchy and violence.

While Conservatism often presented itself as the defender of particular interests, there were limits to this. The state should not be abused by special interests which governed in ways that benefited themselves at the expense of others. This was the mindset that underpinned Peel’s conversion to Corn Law repeal, although it was also justified on pragmatic grounds of removing the worst excesses of privilege to ensure the survival of the aristocratic order. Fundamental to the Tory worldview was hierarchy and inequality. True, this might have a hard exterior in its unapologetic justification of class hierarchy, but it could have a ‘soft centre’ in terms of its inclusiveness. The working class played no less a vital part in society than did aristocrats in positions of power. A place for everyone, but everyone in their place, to paraphrase Oastler. Paternalism from above and deference from below furnished the social glue which bonded together the classes. Although class division was worrying, class difference was not. Thus, late Victorian Conservatives did not apologise about class; rather, they attempted to cast hierarchy and inequality ‘in a bold, appealing light’, not least through the mock medieval hierarchy and pageantry adopted by the Primrose League (Pugh 1985, 141).

The Conservative party and electoral politics

The term ‘Conservative party’ was first used in 1830 and gradually began to be used alongside, though never fully displacing, the earlier label ‘Tory’, which is still used interchangeably with ‘Conservative’. The Conservative party was in a perilous state at the moment of its birth. The granting of full political and civil liberties to both Protestant Dissenters in 1828 and Roman Catholics in 1829 along with the passage of the 1832 Reform Act weakened the Anglican and aristocratic edifice of the English constitution, which the Tory party had hitherto pledged itself to preserve. Indeed, the crisis of the constitution between 1828 and 1832 brought to an end a long period of Tory rule, which but for brief interludes – and, even then, mainly in the form of coalition governments that included Tories – stretched back as far as 1783, if not 1760, although party labels were much more ambiguous before 1832. Despite this decidedly unpopular birth, the party soon established itself as one of the most successful and popular political parties of modern times. Originally a party of landed wealth, the political arm of the Church of England, and pockets of vested interest, the party gradually began to widen its support, especially in urban England with the middle classes as it came to present itself as the party of all property, strengthened by pockets of working-class Toryism. Both received a boost with the Second Reform Act of 1867, passed by the Derby–Disraeli government. Once seen as a ‘leap in the dark’ – into the unknown and potentially dangerous world of democracy – the 1867 Reform Act was a calculated response by the Tories to shape the electoral system in ways that benefited them: by giving more seats to the Tory shires (rural, county constituencies) and by giving extra seats to the largest towns where there was potential for electing Tory MPs.

From the vantage point of 1880, very little of this expanding popular Conservatism had translated into electoral success. Between the general elections of 1832 and 1880, there were only two occasions – in 1841 and 1874 – when the Tories won a majority of seats in the House of Commons. To some extent, this was a legacy of the split of 1846: the Protectionists remained wedded to a lost cause, notwithstanding the competent stewardship of the fourteenth Earl of Derby and Disraeli as party leaders, while the Peelites were gradually absorbed into the Liberal party, thus denuding the party of ministerial talent and enabling that party under the aegis of the most able of Peel’s disciples, Gladstone, to capture for the Liberal party the Pittite–Peelite tradition of disinterested and pragmatic executive rule. Derby and then even more so Disraeli were able to demonstrate, when the Liberal coalitions disintegrated, that Conservatives were still fit to govern, not least by embracing some of the Peelite heritage, such as fiscal responsibility and fairness when it came to balancing the competing interests of agriculture, industry, and labour. Disraeli’s great achievement was to personify these Peelite traditions (despite his opposition to Peel in 1846) and package them in the rhetoric of patriotism, monarchy, and imperialism in ways that resonated with popular audiences.

Nevertheless, one should not underestimate the extent of popular Conservatism prior to 1886. Taking the period of Conservative electoral dominance between 1886 and 1900, the Tories won 49 per cent of the popular vote; yet in the allegedly lean early and mid-Victorian years, the party still averaged 41 per cent between 1832 and 1885. What stands out is the underlying stability of Conservative support across the period 1832 to 1910, which averaged 43 per cent (Crowson 2001). Neither should one underestimate the breadth of popular Conservatism prior to 1886. While the party’s electoral support was concentrated in the English counties and small boroughs, invariably dominated by agricultural interests, there were few boroughs without a Tory interest during this period. Although Scotland proved to be unfertile soil for the Conservative party for much of this period (only in the late 1880s and 1890s was there a discernible growth in Scottish popular Conservatism, which was largely due to the alliance with the Liberal Unionists), in Ireland and Wales the party enjoyed considerable electoral support between the 1830s and 1870s. It was only in the later nineteenth century that the Conservative party became the party of England.

If the existence of popular Conservatism serves to highlight the limits of the early and mid-Victorian Liberal hegemony, the opposite was true in the late Victorian period when the Tories dominated government. While Disraeli won the 1874 general election, the Tories’ resounding defeat in 1880 by Gladstone’s moral populism, embodied in his ‘Midlothian Campaign’, did not suggest that the Conservatives were set for a period of electoral dominance. In the aftermath of Disraeli’s death in 1881, the party was beset by problems of leadership, party unity, organisation, and the perceived disintegration of Conservative values. Worse still, the party was further disadvantaged by the Franchise Act of 1884, which gave the vote to more than one and three-quarter million rural electors, thus creating an electorate dominated by those without property and whose support could no longer be ‘bought’ following the Corrupt Practices Act of 1883. These problems culminated in the Conservative party’s defeat at the 1885 general election. The environment that late Victorian Tories were forced to operate in was seemingly less hospitable than the mid-Victorian years. Economic depression, growing public awareness of acute poverty, renewed threats to the Established Church, nationalism in Ireland, socialist agitation, and the growth of trade unionism all threatened the fabric of the existing order. Small wonder that Lord Salisbury, who had emerged as the new leader of the party by 1885, apocalyptically concluded in 1882: ‘It will be interesting to be the last of the Conservatives’ (Roberts 1999, 262). For all that Salisbury presided over the Conservative electoral ascendancy in the 1880s and 1890s, he never ceased to be amazed by the party’s success, and nowhere more so than in suburban ‘villadom’ – the large tracts of residential housing found on the urban fringes of towns and cities.

But it turned out that Salisbury and the Conservatives were overly worried about democratisation, not least because the Tories had always been great organisers ever since Peel’s injunction to ‘register, register, register’ (close attention to the electoral register by ensuring that all eligible supporters were enfranchised, while striking off opponents). In fact, a strength came from this perceived weakness: little was left to chance. Even in ‘middle-class’ villadom, the Tories had to work hard for their electoral successes, which were based on their ability to construct cross-class coalitions of support, mainly on a platform of defence of property, patriotism, imperialism, and social reform (Roberts 2006). As Luke Blaxill has recently underlined, there was more than ‘beer and empire’ to popular Conservatism, and this reflected the party’s skilful use of rhetoric and its politicisation of issues and denigration of its opponents (Blaxill 2020, 233). Yet the Tory meridian of the late Victorian era could not last forever: at the 1906 general election, the Tories were reduced to a mere 157 seats, having won 334 in the ‘Khaki’ election of 1900, when they swept back to power on a wave of patriotic and imperialistic sentiment in response to the Boer War. Divided between protectionists and free traders, the party would not win another general election outright until 1922, and despite an electoral resurgence in 1910, they were kept from power by a coalition of Liberal, Labour, and Irish MPs (Green 1995).

The meaning of Liberalism

The idea of liberty was central to the ideology of Liberalism, and it was a rallying cry around which a broad spectrum of reformers were sometimes able to come together. This translated into support for civil and religious liberty. Civil liberty meant that all people, regardless of their status or beliefs, should be equal in the eyes of the law. This overlapped with religious liberty – freedom for all to worship as they saw fit and equal treatment (at least in theory) of all creeds. Notions of liberty also informed Liberal views about the role of government. Liberalism was based on the belief that individuals and groups should be free to pursue their interests, provided they did not harm others, without unnecessary interference from the state. Hence the importance that Liberals attached to values such as manly independence, self-reliance, and self-help – values which government interference, it was feared, might sap. The role of government, beyond providing order and stability and the occasional necessary exception to laissez-faire, was to preside over a disinterested state that did not identify with or reward specific interests at the expense of others. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did some Liberals begin to conceive of a more positive intervening state to promote Liberalism via social reforms, which would culminate in the New Liberalism of the Edwardian years.

This commitment to liberty can be seen as the positive expression of a more fundamental underlying negative principle of Liberalism: opposition to privilege. More than any other political movement, Liberalism eschewed class politics and sought to unite, though not always successfully, the productive classes (those who worked by hand and by brain) in opposition to the idle and selfish classes. Anti-privilege and opposition to class politics were the overarching principles of Liberalism, especially in relation to ‘vested’ interests, such as landed monopoly, the Anglican Church, self-electing local corporations, and colonial trading monopolies. Liberty was meant to create the conditions for the growth of a vibrant and inclusive civil society (i.e. the voluntary organisation of collective action in pursuit of shared interests). In turn, this fostered a sense of civic duty and communal responsibility. Debates about citizenship were central to Liberalism. For Liberals, the fundamental requisite for citizenship was independence. Only independent men had the capacity for ‘enlightened disinterestedness’. Social responsibility, moral seriousness, and personal accomplishment were the stock ingredients of active citizenship, especially for Nonconformists – the electoral backbone of the party in many constituencies – who were acutely aware of the ‘Christian duties of citizenship’: the obligation to participate in public life, as electors and representatives, and to elevate its moral tone. The ideal society envisaged by Liberals was self-regulating and composed of independent small-scale producers, in which citizens cooperated with one another on equal terms. Liberals agreed that there was to be equality of opportunity, not social equality.

When it came to translating Liberal ideology into practice, differences and divisions emerged within the Liberal coalition. Eugenio Biagini highlights the ways in which the cries of ‘Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform’ mobilised diverse constituencies of electoral support for the Liberal party, often around values and moral imperatives rather than issues per se (Biagini 1992, 2007). The very elasticity and capaciousness of these cries, which assumed many different contextual forms, helps to explain why so many different individuals and interests supported the Liberal party. It was relatively easy to champion abstract rights like religious freedom, individual liberty, equality before the law (meaning that there was not one rule for the rich, and one for everyone else), and the rights of oppressed minorities on the continent, and to be in favour of ‘reform’ (which had various meanings). On the other hand, when it came to specifics, these watchwords could just as easily divide as unite the disparate band of Liberals and radicals in terms of how they were to be defined, prioritised, and achieved.

The Liberal party and electoral politics

In conventional accounts, the Liberal party’s formal existence dated from the momentous meeting at ‘Willis’s Rooms’ on 6 June 1859 when Whigs, Liberals, and radicals came together, broadly in support of Polish independence, Italian unification, and the North in the American Civil War, along with a general feeling that a further instalment of parliamentary reform might be possible (Vincent 1966). Some of these factors certainly contributed to the growth of popular Liberalism in the 1850s and 1860s, but they were not responsible for its emergence: a recognisable Liberal party had been in existence, both in Parliament and out in the constituencies, since the 1830s (and the word ‘liberal’ dated back even earlier to the 1810s). Some historians have rejected this new chronology, which pushes the formation of the Liberal party back into the 1830s, on account of the divisions between Whigs, Liberals, reformers, and radicals in Parliament. However, to point to divisions within the parliamentary Liberal party in the 1830s and 1840s as evidence for the absence of a coherent and unified party is unconvincing since the Liberal party would always be a coalition of reformers, beset by periodic division, long before, and even during, the golden age of Gladstone (Parry 1993, 1–2).

The Liberal party is often seen as a largely incoherent and contradictory group of reformers, each preoccupied with their own ‘fad’. Precarious and transient unity was only achieved when the party’s leaders were able to rally the ad hoc group of reformers behind a transcending issue and/or the charismatic politics of leadership. One popular tribune towered above the rest: William Gladstone (prime minister 1868–74, 1880–85, 1886, and 1892–94). In recent years, popular and parliamentary Liberalism has come to be regarded as a more coherent political movement. But the fact remains that the party often struggled to remain united because of the divisions within the Liberal coalition between aristocratic Whigs, middle-class Liberals, and working-class radicals. The evolution of popular politics from the confrontational radical politics of Chartism (the popular movement for democratic reform in the 1830s and 1840s) to Gladstonian Liberalism was neither smooth nor complete. The Liberal party both inside and especially outside Parliament was ultimately a coalition of reformers who maintained their own distinct identities, and this was particularly true of the radicals. While the balance of forces may have been in favour of cooperation under the umbrella of Gladstonian Liberalism, some revisionist scholarship has either tended to exaggerate the success of popular Liberalism and its containment of radicalism or else failed to appreciate the extent to which Liberals and radicals continued to be divided by ideas, strategy, and class (Kidd 2020). Indeed, radical frustration within the Liberal coalition had the periodic effect of reinvigorating an independent radical politics.

Nevertheless, in the mid-Victorian golden age of Liberalism, popular support for the party was the most geographically dispersed, and arguably the most socially heterogeneous of all the popular movements of the nineteenth century. The party succeeded on various occasions in harmonising a wide variety of interests and social groups from all over the United Kingdom, with the rank and file being dominated by a coalition of small employers, tradesmen and shopkeepers, artisans, and, often more problematically, organised labour. Although the precise geographical distribution of popular Liberalism fluctuated during the nineteenth century, this was truly a British political movement that drew substantial support from across the four nations. Yet their electoral support was not evenly spread throughout the United Kingdom. The electoral heartland of popular Liberalism in the mid-Victorian years was to be found in the north, the midlands, and increasingly in Scotland and Wales. As Gladstone’s dominance became increasingly destructive in the late Victorian years, the party increasingly looked like a ‘gaggle of outsiders’ (Parry 1993, 306), relegated to Scotland, Wales and northern England. And even in the latter heartland, the rise of organised labour and the reassertion of an independent radicalism put further pressure on the Liberal coalition in the industrial districts. While there was nothing intrinsically incompatible between the Liberal party and organised labour – witness the election of ‘Lib-Lab’ MPs and the fruitful years of electoral cooperation – where conflict did occur, it was not the product in any straightforward way of the rise of class-based politics between a middle-class Liberalism and a working-class radicalism. Rather, as Jon Lawrence (1998), James Owen (2014), and Matthew Kidd (2020) have shown, ‘Lib-Lab’ relations were dependent on a whole range of variables from place, political tradition, the enduring strength of popular radicalism and Conservatism, the size and composition of the electorate, and the nature and strength of trade unionism, in addition to the politics of class.

Why the Liberal party declined in the early twentieth century and was replaced by Labour as the major party of the British left has generated a protracted debate and voluminous historiography (see Roberts 2009, chapters 8–9 for a summary of this debate). Following the Liberal landslide victory of 400 seats at the 1906 general election, by 1924 the party had been reduced to a rump of just 40 MPs. Put simply, the debate has been divided between ‘inevitablists’ and ‘accidentalists’: the former have emphasised longer-term structural changes, pre-eminently the rise of class-based politics; the latter have stressed short-term, contingent factors such as the far-reaching changes associated with the First World War. While the electoral map was characterised by pockets of growing Labour support before 1914, overall, the Liberal party, despite some serious difficulties, was able to contain Labour, in part because of ideological adaptation, which bore fruit in the impressive welfare reforms of the Campbell-Bannerman (1905–08) and Asquith governments (1908–15). On the other hand, as Liberalism and the Liberal party were confronted with the challenges of an advanced industrial society and total war, they looked increasingly uncomfortable and out of date. The twentieth century would prove to be the century of Conservatism and, to a lesser extent, Labour.

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