A History of England

This episode picks up Ireland’s story again, just as the English establishment turned its guns on Charles Stewart Parnell. Round 1 of its attack was launched through the Times newspaper, in a series of articles entitled ‘Parnellism and Crime’. It set out to show that, despite his public commitment to the parliamentary road to achieving Ireland’s aspirations, in reality and in the background he was...

This episode looks at the strange behaviour of Captain William O’Shea, the husband of Katharine. She was in one of the great love relationships of their time, with Charles Stewart Parnell. O’Shea wanted to get back into parliament and Parnell, to indulge Katharine, perhaps even to deflect O’Shea’s hostility if not blackmail, went to great lengths to make sure he did. And yet, once he had, O’Shea s...

Before we return to the sorry tale of British rule in Ireland, this episode looks at some of the many other issues that Lord Salisbury addressed during his second ministry. What emerges is the portrait of a man of his class, moulded by the outlook of the aristocratic landowner, convinced that his peers were the men best positioned to lead without being ‘defiled by the taint of greed’ and therefore...

It was a bad time for Gladstone, defeated in an election held just a few months after the previous poll which he’d won. It was a bad time for Charles Stewart Parnell and his Irish Parliamentary Party who’d felt Home Rule for Ireland was within their grasp only to see themselves cheated of the prize. But it wasn’t an easy time for Salisbury either who had to approach building his second government...

It was heartbreak time for Parnell. He’d spent eleven years in parliament, leading to the emergence of a powerful Irish Parliamentary Party that eventual won the balance of power. That put Home Rule, the restoration of a Dublin parliament, apparently within his grasp. Yet all that culminated in defeat and disappointment when Gladstone’s bill was thrown out. The loss led to the fall of Gladstone’s...

The storm that had been building for years over Ireland broke just as soon as Gladstone, with Irish support, finally brought down the Salisbury minority administration. His problem was that quite a few of his own Liberal MPs were unenthusiastic about Irish Home Rule, a policy to which he was now firmly committed, especially as he was dependent on the votes of Irish MPs. Both the Whig tendency with...

Salisbury, who’d secured his position in the Conservative Party by his clever political work over Gladstone’s 1884 Reform Act, was now Prime Minister. But only at the head of a minority government. That wasn’t something he could live with for long, since it meant that the Liberals had a Commons majority hanging over his head, ready to kick him out whenever they decided it was time to use their str...

After nearly five years in power, the strains inside the second Gladstone government were beginning to show. Indeed, both main parties were having trouble, above all with their respective awkward squads. The Radicals in the Liberal Party were always demanding more and greater reform. Meanwhile, the ‘Fourth Party’ launched inside the Conservatives by Lord Randolph Churchill (father of the more famo...

As the second Gladstone government approached its end, it had little enough to point to as major successes. Some measures had been passed to try to pacify Ireland, but that sad country was still far from reconciled to British rule. There’d been colonial disasters in South Africa and Sudan. There’d been the Labouchère amendment, not perhaps seen as all that significant at the time, but something th...

After the Phoenix Park murders, there was a bit of a hiatus in Parnell’s campaign for Irish Home Rule, while he consolidated his grip on the movement, guiding it firmly into the path of constitutionalism and away from violence. Meanwhile, Gladstone brought in an act to relieve tenant arrears in Ireland, the counterpart to Parnell’s work for pacification within the context of the tacit agreement th...

The passage of the Land Act for Ireland provided many tenant farmers with a wonderful way of getting their rents reduced. Sadly, that benefit had a downside, as it undermined the enthusiasm for continuing the campaign Parnell wanted to guide into increased pressure for Home Rule. It was by no means the only unintended consequence of measures taken at this time and which made the relations between...

Disraeli didn’t last long after losing power for the last time, dying within a year. That ended a remarkable era, of the long battle between him and Gladstone. Next, the survivor, Gladstone, had to build a second government, made up of both Whigs and Radicals, the two great wings of his Liberal Party. The relations between them were becoming tense, with friction, between the more conservative view...

As the end of the parliament elected in 1874 approached, Gladstone confirmed that his re-emergence from retirement hadn’t been a one-off. He was ready to launch himself once more into full-time politics. The result was the Midlothian campaign, ostensibly intended to win him a new parliamentary seat in Edinburgh, though in fact assisting the Liberal Party to a national majority and re-establishing...

It had all been going so well. The Congress of Berlin had been a huge success, allowing Disraeli (and Salisbury) to bring back peace with honour. Things should have been flowing the Conservatives’ way. But then there were a couple of bad military adventures, launched by over-powerful and out-of-control colonial administrators. Both ended up costing a lot of money and a lot of lives, for little gai...

We start this episode with a Russian army north of Constantinople ready to invade the city, and a British naval squadron in the waters to its south ready – or at least apparently ready – to resist it. In the end, it was the Russians who blinked. With war avoided, the Berlin Congress of all the European Great Powers met and left Russia with a much reduced list of gains from its war against Turkey,...

Here’s the episode where we learn where the word Jingoism was born. After talking last time about the remarkable achievements on the domestic front of the second Disraeli government with its social reform, this week we start to look at what interested him far more: foreign affairs. And the biggest affair of them all was the ‘Eastern Question’, precipitated by yet another war between Russia and Tur...

Disraeli’s second government was an administration of progressive conservatism, a strange moment in a general history of the Conservative Party as essentially, well, conservative. Partly that was politically expedient, looking for support among the working class, but partly it was sincere, based on a deep revulsion at the conditions in which most of it lived. Much of the reforming legislation was...

We've reached the point where the political pendulum has at last swung the Conservative way, giving it a working parliamentary majority for the first time in three decades. Despite all his efforts to get that majority in 1874, Disraeli seems to have been surprised by the extent of his success. He took power without a properly worked-out set of policies to apply. In particular, since he was more in...

A sea change took place at the 1874 British general election. The previous year, Gladstone and his government, exhausted by its searing pace of reform, lost a parliamentary vote on what he saw (and many of his colleagues didn’t) as the essential third leg of his tripod of measures to pacify Ireland, the foundation of a Catholic university in Ireland. They resigned but Disraeli, in a brilliant poli...

“My mission is to pacify Ireland,” Gladstone had declared when he took office as Prime Minister. This episode looks briefly at Disraeli’s behaviour as he left power, including the peerage he sought for his wife (rather than for himself). Then we move on to Gladstone’s attempts to secure peace in Ireland, first through disestablishment of the Church of Ireland, then through new legislation concerni...

The Liberals are back, and they're being liberal. Gladstone followed Disraeli into Downing Street, and led a reforming government. So Disraeli with the Conservatives managed to reach the top of the greasy pole first, but he got only ten months before being kicked out unceremoniously by Gladstone and the Liberal Party.  Oddly, though, Gladstone didn't too well personally, losing his parliament...

We're reaching the moment when Disraeli, fresh from outwitting Gladstone over electoral reform, climbed, in his own words, to the top of the greasy pole. Indeed, becoming Prime Minister after Derby resigned, was the first major milestone in a political career that Disraeli had hit before his rival. And it was the big one. Meanwhile, Gladstone had followed John Russell into the leadership of the Li...

It’s time for a master class in opposition by the man who said that the role of the Opposition is to oppose. Disraeli and Gladstone, both now leaders in the House of Commons of the Liberal and Conservative parties respectively, faced off over electoral reform. And Disraeli displayed real genius in outflanking Gladstone, first to defeat him by opposing reform when the Liberals proposed it while the...

The American Civil War, like the war led by Prussia against Denmark, showed that Britain was no longer the superpower that had emerged from the Napoleonic wars. In both those conflicts, Britain had views – rather changeable ones, switching from one side to the other, in the American case – but couldn’t influence the outcome. Instead, Palmerston’s government could do little more than watch events t...

After talking last week about wars in China and Italy, and potentially with France, in this episode we turn to the United States where one of the biggest wars of the nineteenth century was just breaking out. That was the American Civil War. We’ll see how the secessionist southern, slaveholding states, soon to call themselves the Confederate States of America, made a disastrous miscalculation, by b...