Whiggery and Reform: 1830-41, The Politics of Government.

At no point during the Victorian period was the identity of the Liberal party (Gladstonian or otherwise) devoid of problematic elements. For analytical purposes, those elements can be assigned to one of two categories: that which chiefly concerns the bonding agents and fissiparous forces at work among those in parliament occupying some portion of the non-Tory political spectrum; and that which chiefly concerns the relation between party within parliament and politics without. Of the books reviewed here, those by Newbould and Steele, each of which addresses a discrete block of time between the First and Second Reform Acts, may not reduce to manageable proportions the difficulties posed by the first category. They do, however, conspicuously add to our understanding of their complexity. The third, by Biagini, endeavours to comprehend the sources, substance, and dimensions of popular liberalism in the age of Gladstone. In doing so, it advances appreciably our understanding of the elements associated with the second category.

Readers in search of the origins of popular liberalism will want to look elsewhere than to the Whiggery examined by Newbould. Those familiar with Newbould's important series of articles on the politics of the 1830s will be surprised by neither the argument of Whiggery and Reform nor by the wealth of archival research and telling detail by which that argument is supported. He contends that the Whig governments of the 1830s, whether led by Grey or by Melbourne, were primarily interested in strengthening and preserving aristocratic political influence. The Whigs alone, so they believed, possessed the political temperament and good sense required to hold at bay both the executive (Tory) excesses that threatened the liberties of the people, and the reckless radicalism whose demotic delusions could not be reconciled with the maintenance of social order. The intransigence of Wellington on the reform question in 1830 compelled the Whigs to take office and tackle the issue. Only a bold move on parliamentary reform, one that recognized the legitimate claims of the middle classes, could give to rank and property the firm and durable political footing that Tory obstinacy jeopardized. The unexpected turmoil to which that commitment gave rise, however, emphasized the need for caution after 1832. The sundry reforms of the 1830s were authored by men of conservative disposition who would propose nothing deemed incompatible with the containment of radicalism and the enhancement of aristocratic political control. Although some of this line of argument respecting the Whigs is at odds with a portion of the established historiography on the subject, and is certainly at variance with the interpretation constructed by Peter Mandler in his excellent Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform, (1) it will not seem especially peculiar to those well-acquainted with the literature on Whiggery.

Where Newbould does strike out on a course pretty much of his own making, and one that merits close consideration, is in his treatment of party during the 1830s. In his articles and in his monograph, Newbould has vigorously assaulted the proposition (a proposition emphatically identified with the work of Norman Gash) that a two-party system took shape in the aftermath of the dismissal of Melbourne's government by William IV in November of 1834. Notwithstanding the fact that their survival as a ministry in the late 1830s depended upon Radical and Irish votes, the Whigs scarcely saw themselves as the leaders of a "party," if the term be meant to imply doctrinal and/or organizational coherence. It was not programmatic unity that kept together the ministerial side of the House on questions of confidence, but rather a shared aversion to the prospect of a Tory administration. Whigs joined with Tories in resisting Radical initiatives on the ballot and the corn law, regardless of the ever-increasing majority of non-Tories in the House endorsing these initiatives. The actual business the Whigs did as a government rested on a tacit understanding with Peel, without whose assistance measures could not be got through the House of Lords. Peel's predicament had something in common with …