Page 49 - History 2020

renamed if from Tory in the 1834 election - by persuading it to accept modest

reform, starting with the 1832 Reform Act, which he loathed. His aim was to make
th
the 19 century safe for the old aristocratic order - even though he himself wasn’t a
member of it. He was the son of a northern industrialist and spoke with a Lancashire
accent (“buke” for book). His career did not end well. His repeal of the Corn Laws in
1845, removing protection for farmers, proved a bridge too far for the Tory
aristocrats and split his party so deeply that they were in opposition for two decades.

Ironically, the man the disgruntled Tory aristocrats rallied around was Benjamin

Disraeli, as brilliant as Peel, but a bohemian outsider, son of an Anglicised Italian Jew,
a dandified chancer and a novelist. He developed the idea (or at least the slogan)
“Tory Democracy”: reform when necessary, but mostly aristocracy, monarchy and
empire. His reforms were piecemeal and the work of colleagues, while empire meant
little more than his Royal Titles Act of 1876 making Victoria Empress of India. Always
the chancer, he passed the 1867 Reform Act purely to “steal the Liberal’s clothes” i.e.
nick their policies, and established British control of Egypt by getting his mate

Rothschild to put up the cash to buy shares in the Suez Canal under the noses of the
French who had built it. He became the estate-owing Earl of Beaconsfield, but
brought a unique touch of wit and theatricality to Victorian politics.

Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston (of Broadlands, in Hampshire) was Prime
Minister in the 1850’s and 60’s at the pinnacle of Britain’s global influence, which he
is seen to embody. But historian David Cannadine, author of the Penguin history of
Victorian Britain (Victorious Century: Britain 1800-1906) believes that Palmerston’s

belligerent foreign policies of “bluff and bluster” had become increasingly “ineffective
and irrelevant”, depriving Britain of allies and “little more than an ineffectual
onlooker in Europe.”

At home Palmerston blocked attempts at reform. Cannadine quotes a speech of 1850
in which he explains why. Britain almost alone in Europe avoided revolution in 1848

because “we are a nation in which every class of society accepts with cheerfulness the
lot which Providence has assigned to it; while at the same time each individual in
each class is constantly trying to raise himself in the social scale, not by violence and
illegality – but by persevering good conduct and by the steady and energetic exertion
of the moral and intellectual faculties with which his creator has endowed him.”
Cannadine rightly calls these views “complacent, self-satisfied, exaggerated and over-
simplified”. Yet Palmerston was the most popular of all the Victorian Prime Ministers
and “he never appealed to the British electorate in vain”. He was “the personification
and the embodiment of his time in a way that was true of no other political