In the wake of the corruption and expense of the 1880 general election, Sir Henry James, attorney general in Gladstone’s Liberal government, oversaw a landmark piece of legislation which aimed to clean up Britain’s elections: the 1883 Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act. When this measure was first introduced in 1881, The Times remarked that

if passed in its present form, it can scarcely fail to effect something like a revolution in the mode of conducting Parliamentary elections.

Although James accepted several amendments as the bill passed through the Commons, its core principles remained intact. It restricted how much candidates could spend at elections and what they could spend it on; increased the penalties for corrupt practices, including bribery and ‘treating’ voters with food and drink; and introduced the new category of illegal practices, which including illegal employment and illegal payment.

The first English contest under these new rules, the November 1883 York by-election, suggested that the Act would indeed transform the practice of electioneering. In keeping with its limits, York’s candidates spent just over a tenth of what the 1880 contest had cost, and the number of paid election workers and rooms hired for electioneering fell dramatically. However, some small-scale bribery and treating persisted.

The Third Reform Act of 1884-5 had made major changes to the electoral system by the time the first general election under the 1883 Act’s terms was held in 1885. The extension of the franchise meant that the electorate grew from 3,152,000 in 1883 to 5,708,000 in 1885, while the redistribution of seats into largely single member constituencies completely redrew the electoral map. This major overhaul of the electoral system – particularly the removal of small boroughs and the increased electorate – made its own contribution to diminishing corruption. The 1883 Act was, however, crucial in providing the framework within which candidates – increasingly with the assistance of professional agents overseeing local constituency associations – had to cultivate the votes of this mass electorate.

Election expenditure by candidates declined significantly following the 1883 reform. Candidates’ declared expenditure in 1885 was over £700,000 less than in 1880, despite a longer period of election campaigning and a far larger electorate. The average cost per vote polled fell by three-quarters, from 18s. 9d. to 4s. 5d., and never exceeded this in the period before the First World War, as the table below shows. Assisted by the Act’s restrictions, candidates did away with unnecessary expenditure on vast numbers of election workers or decorative items such as flags and banners.

_{Source: Kathryn Rix, ‘“The elimination of corrupt practices in British elections”? Reassessing the impact of the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act’, English Historical Review, cxxxiii (2008), 77}

One of the problems revealed in 1880 had been that the total declared in candidates’ election accounts did not always reflect their true expenditure. The 1883 Act made a false declaration of expenses an illegal practice, which undoubtedly encouraged more accurate accounting. However, it remained the case that these official returns did not always present the full picture. One leading Liberal agent claimed in 1907 that

every agent has heard of cases where it has been necessary to “fake” the accounts in order to make it appear that no illegal expenditure has been allowed.

Such falsification of accounts broke the law, but there were also growing concerns about other expenditure which infringed the spirit, if not the letter, of the 1883 Act. Spending at elections by pressure groups such as the Tariff Reform League or temperance organisations – who held meetings, hired committee rooms and distributed leaflets and posters – might benefit particular candidates, but did not have to be included in their accounts.

At the 1892 election the Liberals were particularly concerned about the £100,000 allegedly spent by members of the drink trade in support of Conservative candidates, while in the early years of the twentieth century it was the greater spending power of the pro-Conservative Tariff Reform League in comparison with the pro-Liberal Free Trade Union which sparked most anxiety. The matter was raised in the Commons in February 1908 when 133 Liberal and Labour MPs (and one Liberal Unionist) backed an amendment regretting ‘the way in which large sums, derived from the secret funds of the Tariff Reform League and other similar societies, are spent in electoral contests without being returned in the candidates’ expenses’. A few months later the 1883 Act’s author Henry James corresponded with the lord chancellor about possible legislation to restrict such spending.

These were not the only ways in which the 1883 Act’s aim of curbing the electoral influence of wealth was apparently being evaded. James raised concerns about spending between elections by local party organisations and associated bodies such as the Primrose League on social activities and entertainments. This would have been classed as treating if undertaken in support of the candidate during the election. Yet James argued that

the corruption which causes a man to profess a political faith is as injurious as that which induces him to fulfil it by recording his vote.

In 1892 Conservative MPs at Hexham and Rochester were unseated by petitions because they had subsidised entertainments provided by the local Conservative association or Primrose League, raising hopes that such social activities might be curtailed. These were dashed by the 1895 Lancaster petition, which saw the Conservative MP retain his seat, despite the local party’s extensive programme of ‘politics and pleasure’, from dances to potato pie suppers. Crucially though, the MP had not subsidised these events.

Another continued source of spending to secure political influence was the ‘nursing’ of constituencies by candidates and MPs, who made charitable donations and subscribed to local clubs and institutions, in the hope of winning favour. The Conservative MP Frederick Milner complained in 1897 that

no pig, or cow, or horse dies in the constituency without the member being … asked to contribute towards another. He is expected to assist in the building or repair of each church and chapel … , to subscribe to all the cricket and football clubs, friendly societies, clubs, agricultural shows, and various worthy charities.

Some MPs spent hundreds of pounds annually in this way and the future Liberal prime minister Henry Campbell-Bannerman warned in 1901 that ‘the spending of money for the purposes of electoral influence’ was ‘one of the great dangers now affecting our political system’. It raised the spectre of wealthy ‘carpet-baggers’ effectively buying their way into seats where they had no local connections. It also had implications for the electoral chances of labour candidates, who could not afford such expenditure. However, suggestions that ‘nursing’ should be prohibited came up against the belief that, as MPs were often prominent local employers or landowners, philanthropy was a natural part of their social duties, irrespective of any political ambitions. Private members’ bills on the question in 1911 and 1912 failed to progress beyond their first reading.

The 1883 Act had clearly done much to curb election spending, but had not eradicated the electoral influence of wealth. A similar pattern emerges when assessing its impact on corruption. The number of MPs unseated by election petitions fell dramatically. Eighteen MPs lost their seats because of bribery and other corrupt practices at the 1880 election. In contrast, despite the law’s increased stringency, there was no election after 1885 which saw more than five MPs unseated. In total, 25 MPs were unseated for corrupt or illegal practices between 1885 and 1911. Cases such as the 1906 Worcester election petition, where around 500 individuals were involved in corruption, demonstrated that the 1883 Act had not been entirely successful.

Moreover, as with election accounts, the fall in petitions indicated a relative decline in corruption, but did not tell the full story. The significant costs and uncertain outcome of petitions deterred petitioners. So too did the unpopularity of petitions among voters, which might prove damaging to future election prospects. Petitioners also had to be sure that the election had been pure on their own side, or risk recriminatory charges. Where both parties had been involved with corruption, it might be better to collude to cover matters up, avoiding the potential threat of the constituency being disfranchised.

There continued to be rumours of corruption in constituencies which escaped petitions. The Liberal election agent for Thanet published a detailed account of the electoral misdeeds of Harry Marks, who won the seat for the Conservatives in 1906. He alleged that Marks had exceeded the 1883 Act’s limits, falsified his election accounts and funded treating and other forms of corruption. Marks had only narrowly survived an election petition against him in another constituency in 1895 and his involvement in commercial fraud was notorious. Thanet’s Liberals did not, however, petition against him, deterred by the expense and the difficulty of securing reliable witnesses who would not be ‘got at’ by Marks.

The complicity of both parties in corruption at Penryn and Falmouth, where it was alleged that ‘every man in the place was bought’, apparently prevented a petition after the 1900 election. Electoral malpractice continued: John Barker, Liberal MP from 1906 until his January 1910 defeat, later admitted to having spent thousands of pounds more than the Corrupt Practices Act’s limits during his two contests.

Yet while corrupt practices were not eliminated, The Times’s forecast of a revolution in electioneering remained accurate. Electoral contests after the 1883 Act were far purer and less costly than before this landmark reform. Sir Harry Verney, a veteran MP who first entered the Commons in 1832, and sat intermittently until 1885, summarised the transformation in 1892 when he reflected on

the great improvements I have lived to see in elections, when I remember the bribery, the drunkenness, and the extravagance of the old political contests.

Further reading:

For the first two articles in this series, see here and here.

On 25 August 1883, the final day of the parliamentary session, the Corrupt and Illegal Practices Prevention Act received royal assent. This landmark legislation, designed to tackle the corruption and expense which were still such a prominent feature of 19th century parliamentary contests, transformed the conditions under which elections were held. For the first time, it placed limits on how much candidates could spend on their election campaign, with the amount fixed according to the type and size of constituency. It increased the penalties for the corrupt practices of bribery, treating (the provision of food and drink), undue influence (the use of intimidation or coercion) and personation (impersonating another voter). It also created the new category of illegal practices, which included illegal employment and illegal payment. Payments for the conveyance of voters to the poll, on which candidates had spent £273,000 at the 1880 general election (the equivalent of over £18,000,000 today), were prohibited, and the number of paid election workers and committee rooms was strictly limited.

It was the events of 1880 which made tackling electoral corruption a priority. Gladstone’s famous ‘Midlothian campaign’ during this election used platform speeches and the press to appeal to voters on the basis of reason and opinion. However, the election petitions which flooded in from numerous constituencies after the contest revealed that many voters were still under the influence of bribery and beer. Disappointing hopes that electoral morality was improving, the 1880 election was followed by the third highest number of successful election petitions since 1832, with 18 MPs unseated on grounds of corruption. Before the year was out, four more MPs had been unseated after petitions following by-elections, and eight royal commissions – the highest ever number – were appointed to inquire further into the worst allegations of corruption. Contemporary concerns were heightened by the strong suspicion that the number of successful petitions represented only the tip of the iceberg, with The Times suggesting that for every constituency exposed as corrupt, another existed.

The royal commission reports confirmed the extent of the problem, listing 9,000 individuals who were guilty of corrupt practices in the eight constituencies they investigated. This electoral immorality could not simply be attributed to the venality of poorer voters, since, as one observer remarked, ‘we find magistrates, mayors, aldermen, and councillors, professional men, merchants, and manufacturers grovelling together in this mire of corruption’. While Gladstone had blamed Liberal defeat at the 1874 election on a Conservative ‘torrent of beer and gin’, the inquiries which followed the 1880 election showed that both parties were complicit in corruption, with 14 Liberals – including a Cabinet minister – and 8 Conservatives unseated. Among the worst constituencies was Gloucester, where well over a third of the electors were found to be guilty of corrupt practices, and one local councillor had personally distributed £1,382 in bribes. Existing corrupt practices legislation, passed in 1854, was clearly insufficient, and while the 1872 Ballot Act had helped to curb intimidation, its effects on bribery were less certain.

Introducing the Liberal government’s corrupt practices bill on 7 January 1881, the attorney general, Sir Henry James, declared that ‘we have sat long enough on the bank; but the stream of corruption flows on, and it seems useless to hope that it will cease to flow unless something is done to stop it’. Although the measure also had the support of the Conservative front bench, and of MPs generally, pressure on parliamentary time – caused in part by the obstructionist tactics of Irish MPs – meant that it failed to progress. When the bill was reintroduced in 1882, The Times remarked that ‘the constituencies take but a languid interest … the scandalous disclosures of Election Commissions are soon forgotten’. MPs, however, continued to take a keen interest in reform, another factor which prolonged the debates, as the conduct of elections was a subject on which every member of the Commons could speak from experience. The bill was discussed for 23 nights at the committee stage when it was brought in for the third time in 1883, and it finally passed that session after being given priority over other government measures.

MPs’ careful attention to the bill’s details stemmed in part from their awareness of how much the measure would affect them personally, particularly in terms of its stringent regulations and the strict penalties for breaking the law. While there was clearly an element of self-interest in this, there were genuine concerns that if the law was too draconian, it would create public sympathy for those convicted. James did make some concessions in this respect, such as reducing the punishment for treating from his proposed two years’ imprisonment with hard labour (or a £500 fine) to one year with hard labour (or a £200 fine). MPs also feared that some of the restrictions on election expenditure might impede participation in elections, notably the ban on payments for the conveyance of voters to the poll, which it was felt could have an adverse impact on elderly and infirm voters, those in remote areas of Scotland and working-class voters, who might find it more difficult to poll quickly during their dinner hour.

There was, however, much for MPs to welcome when it came to the introduction of election spending limits. Although a small number of candidates had taken a stand against excessive expenditure in 1880 (and before), it was difficult for MPs to resist pressure from their supporters and constituents to open their pockets at elections. Candidates’ total declared expenditure at the 1880 election was £1,737,300 – approximately £750,000 higher than in 1874 – and the true amount spent was reckoned to be somewhere between £2,000,000 and £3,000,000. The Times was not alone in arguing that ‘no election which sweeps away a fortune in legitimate expenses can be said to be free and independent’. Much of this expenditure – such as the £2,000 spent on flags and banners at Sandwich – was unnecessary, and was done simply to put ‘the candidate’s money into circulation among the electors’. A particular problem in 1880 was the employment of ‘crowds of clerks who wrote nothing, and of messengers who never carried messages except from one public-house to another’, who were effectively being bribed under the pretence of doing election work.

James considered this lavish expenditure to be ‘so near akin to corruption that it was almost the very father of corruption’. Curbing it was fundamental to the 1883 Act, offering MPs the opportunity to renounce the corruption and expense in which many of them, whether willingly or unwillingly, had previously been complicit. The anticipated extension of the franchise before the next general election, which would increase election costs as the electorate grew, made it all the more important to address this issue.

By the time of the next general election, in 1885, the conditions of electioneering had been completely transformed by three major reforms: the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act; the extension of the franchise in the counties in 1884; and the redistribution of seats into mostly single-member constituencies in 1885. The 1883 Act certainly succeeded in curtailing candidates’ election spending: total expenditure at the 1885 election was £1,026,646, over £700,000 less than in 1880. The average cost per vote polled fell by three-quarters, from 18s. 9d. in 1880 to 4s. 5d. in 1885. Only three election petitions succeeded on grounds of corrupt or illegal practices in 1885, unseating four MPs. However, just as in 1880, election petitions alone did not necessarily reveal the full extent of electoral malpractice. The question of how far the 1883 Act achieved its aim of tackling corruption will be the subject of another blog.

KR

Further reading:

C. O’Leary, The elimination of corrupt practices in British elections, 1868-1911 (1962)

Kathryn Rix, ‘“The elimination of corrupt practices in British elections”? Reassessing the impact of the 1883 Corrupt Practices Act’, English Historical Review, cxxxiii (2008), 65-97

Sir Roderick Floud’s magisterial ‘An Economic History of the English Garden’ revealed for the first time to the general public and to his fellow historians the importance of gardens and gardening to the economy over the last five centuries. Nowadays, gardening supports an industry with a turnover of £11 billion a year, the gardens of the National Trust attract 16 million visitors a year and hands on gardening is a much-loved hobby for a large part of the population. In the nineteenth century gardening was just as important, perhaps more so than now, particularly for the upper echelons of society for whom gardening was at the heart of their cultural and social life, especially so amongst parliamentarians.

The relative importance of gardening in the nineteenth century compared with the twentieth can be seen from an examination of the preferences of the political elite in the two centuries. In 1880 a cabinet of 13 led by Disraeli was replaced by a cabinet of 14 led by Gladstone. Every single member of the two administrations occupied a country seat with an ornamental garden and a fully productive kitchen garden with a gardening staff of about 20, but sometimes many more. Their involvement in gardening went much further than being responsible for a large estate. At Hawarden, it was a fixture of Gladstone’s calendar to host the annual horticultural society show in his garden, giving an address on horticulture, which was later published as a pamphlet. Disraeli coined his famous aphorism ‘The palace is not safe when the cottage is not happy’ at a meeting of the Wynyard Horticultural Society, correlating happiness with the cultivation of a garden and adding ‘A woman is never seen to greater advantage than in the garden’. John Bright, a commoner member of Gladstone’s cabinet, would practice his House of Commons speeches on his gardener Benjamin Oldham and would sometimes quote him in support of his patriarchal opinions. Another member of Disraeli’s cabinet, the newsagent W.H. Smith, developed the magnificent gardens of Greenlands at Henley where he employed 30 gardeners and was a frequent winner in the local horticultural shows.

One hundred years later, in 1980, Mrs Thatcher’s cabinet had 22 members of whom only one, Michael Heseltine, owned a country seat of the kind occupied by the members of the Disraeli and Gladstone administrations. One other, Lord Carrington, owned a garden of great merit, the Manor House at Bledlow, but this was on a much smaller scale. Of his colleagues, three expressed an interest in gardening in their Who’s Who entry, but none of those possessed a garden of any importance. There were several cabinet members from old money backgrounds, notably Lord Hailsham and William Whitelaw, but Hailsham had sold his ancestral home as the cost of upkeep was too great, and Whitelaw lived in a mansion house with a garden of relatively modest size.

When Disraeli became a rising star of the Tory party his supporters provided him with the money to buy Hughenden, as it was considered essential for him to have a country estate. A mansion in Mayfair would not do; if he was to conform with the norms of upper class society he had to have the sporting and recreational facilities of an estate with an ornamental garden to enable him to entertain in style. Similar motives impelled Joseph Chamberlain, who was President of the Board of Trade in Gladstone’s cabinet, when he built a mansion which he called Highbury, together with accompanying parkland and garden on virgin land outside Birmingham. Chamberlain’s closest neighbour was Richard Cadbury, the enlightened Bournville factory owner, who marked his entry into society by creating an estate similar to Highbury.

The tables below record the current status of the 28 landed estates of the Disraeli and Gladstone cabinet members (there are 28 as one of the 27 cabinet members, the Duke of Richmond, occupied two estates). Three no longer exist, as the houses have been demolished, and the land redeveloped. Of the remainder, 12 of the gardens have been listed and are open to the public, two of which are run by the National Trust, and a further three are also open to public view. Most of the other houses have found an alternative use, as a hotel, a wedding venue or as flats, with a private garden attached on a much smaller scale than formerly. Of the kitchen gardens most have been destroyed or built on, but nine are either fully or partially cultivated. Of those gardens which survive, most have a skeleton workforce; at Belvoir, there is a single head gardener and a team of volunteers. This reflects the reduced scale of the gardens and the fact that the beating heart of the garden, the kitchen garden with its array of hothouses and forcing pits, no longer exists. Visitors to those gardens which survive will admire their beauty without knowing just how much more magnificent they were in the past, or their significance in the social and cultural lives of their former owners.

JD

Look out for the second part of Jonathan’s series, for a closer comparison of two great parliamentary gardeners!

Jonathan Denby holds a D.Phil in Economic and Social History from Oxford University and an MA in Garden History from Buckingham University. His research interests are gardens, gardening and economic and social conditions in the C19th. Find out about Jonathan’s own garden here.

William Ewart Gladstone (1809-1898), four-time Prime Minister of the United Kingdom during the later Victorian era, is today perhaps best remembered as a financial reformer and advocate of Irish home rule. Historians have seldom sought to explore the relationship between these two political commitments, yet they were, in fact, closely related. 

From the 1840s, Gladstone was a proponent of ‘sound’ finance: that combination of fiscal policies involving low taxation, minimal government expenditure, balanced budgets and free trade which he claimed to have learned from his ‘great teacher and master’, Sir Robert Peel.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Aberdeen, Palmerston and Russell ministries (1852-55, 1859-66), Gladstone sought to extend ‘sound’ finance to Ireland. This involved eliminating Irish tax exemptions through the imposition of the British income tax and the augmentation of the spirit duty, approving tariff reforms that exposed Irish farmers to international competition on the British market, and working to constrain Irish civil government expenditure.

Large claims have been made for ‘sound’ finance in the British context where, historians maintain, Gladstone’s policies established a durable consensus on taxation and fostered widespread acceptance of the state as legitimate. But their reception in Ireland—an agrarian, sparsely populated and economically laggard region of the United Kingdom—was quite different.

In Ireland, conservatives and nationalists alike associated Gladstonian finance with over-taxation, chafed at the regressive structure of the Irish tax code, and expressed scepticism about the supposedly beneficent effects of free trade. Many Irish commentators came to advocate an active, managerial state in preference to the minimal state embraced by Gladstone, seeing increased public expenditure as the best hope for Irish economic development.

As Liberal Prime Minister between 1868 and 1874, Gladstone was hostile to Irish demands for exceptional financial treatment. He associated equality of taxation with the rights of full citizenship, insisted that free trade benefitted both Irish consumers and Irish producers, and doubted the government’s ability to pump prime the Irish economy.

His policy preferences served as an unintentional stimulus to Irish nationalism, convincing politicians and opinion-makers that a reform of public finance tailored to Irish economic needs would only be possible if Ireland received self-government. Fiscal grievances, then, were near the heart of the home rule movement when it was launched in 1870.

During Gladstone’s second premiership (1880-85), ‘sound’ finance foundered on the exigencies of Irish economic crisis. A run of poor harvests, accompanied by collapsing commodity prices, resulted in severe hardship for Irish farmers, particularly in the west.

Distress stimulated rural discontent, which found an outlet in the Land War of 1879-82. Irish expenditure, which had been increasing since the 1860s, escalated rapidly, as Gladstone’s government responded to unrest by making money available for land improvement, land purchase, arrears of rent, seed, labourers’ dwellings, fisheries and emigration, while also enhancing the sums spent on policing. Attempts to offset this spending by augmenting Irish taxation failed, with the ministry’s proposal to raise the Irish spirit duty over the objections of Conservatives and home rulers contributing to the government’s resignation in 1885.  

For Gladstone, home rule offered an escape from the Irish fiscal vice. Here, as in other areas of his mature Irish policy, colonial parallels were important. As early as 1848 he had supported ‘responsible government’ in the colonies, in part, because it enabled the Treasury to shift costs to local legislatures. Though colonial precedents did not necessarily apply to Ireland, they came to seem increasingly relevant to the Prime Minister as Irish expenses mounted. As in the colonies, so in Ireland, self-government provided an opportunity to constrain the growth of the British state.

When Gladstone returned to the premiership and drew up his first home rule bill in 1886, the fiscal provisions of the measure were a major concern. Though some historians have argued that the legislation offered Ireland a financially generous settlement, this contention does not stand up to scrutiny.

Under the bill’s fiscal terms, the Irish legislature would have continued to contribute substantial sums to the Treasury. In the first three decades of home rule, it is certain that a self-governing Ireland would have contributed more to the Exchequer than Ireland under the Union. The British Parliament would have retained control of the rates of Irish customs and excise, ensuring the maintenance of free trade despite nationalist misgivings about laissez-faire.

The Irish government’s working budget would have been modest, inhibiting the ability of Irish politicians to develop an economically interventionist state. The home rule bill was thus designed to augment Ireland’s imperial contribution, limit Irish spending, and secure British-Irish free trade—in short, to safeguard ‘sound’ finance.

Though the fiscal details of the second home rule bill, introduced by Gladstone in 1893 during his fourth and final premiership, differed considerably from those of its predecessor, the intent was the same. This provoked nationalist objections and ensured that the financial scheme was admittedly provisional when the bill left the House of Commons in September, on its way to defeat by the Lords.

A financial approach to Gladstone’s Irish policy is important both for what it reveals about Gladstone, and for what it suggests about the nature of British-Irish relations in the nineteenth century. Gladstone’s engagement with Irish affairs has often been described in terms of dramatic disjuncture, variously attributed to a ‘conversion’ experience, political opportunism, anxieties about Irish political instability, or a growing sensitivity to Irish historical and cultural distinctiveness.

Yet the stubborn persistence of Gladstone’s commitment to ‘sound’ finance indicates that there were significant continuities in his attitude to Irish governance, which had a meaningful impact on policy decisions throughout much of his career. This assessment also reveals some of the material underpinnings of Irish hostility to the Union, as fiscal grievances were channelled into the home rule movement by nationalist politicians.

More positively, it may be noted by way of conclusion, Gladstone’s decision to extend the income tax to Ireland in 1853 modernised Irish finance, which was decades ahead of other early adopters of income taxation in Europe, North America and the Pacific. And while Victorian nationalists denounced ‘sound’ finance, their twentieth-century successors acted more pragmatically—as Gladstone had anticipated—when faced with the responsibilities of self-government.

After independence, Ireland’s first post-revolutionary government embraced ‘sound’ finance as an emblem of political maturity, and Gladstonian nostrums imbued Ireland’s Department of Finance into the 1950s. Therefore, despite the failure of the first and second home rule bills, Gladstone’s fiscal legacy gives him some claim to be considered an architect of the modern Irish state.   

DK

To find out more, Douglas’s full-length paper ‘Gladstone and Ireland: A Financial Approach’ is available here. Douglas will be taking questions about his research between 5.15 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. on Tuesday 7 December 2021.

To register for this virtual seminar, please follow this link and click on ‘Book now’. If you cannot attend this session but wish to submit a question to Douglas, please send it to seminar@histparl.ac.uk.

Theresa May’s remarkable appearance in the House of Lords on 20 February, at the beginning of the debate on the bill triggering the Brexit process, raised eyebrows all round. A number of newspapers and others referred to it as unprecedented: May was said by some to have been the first prime minister to have sat on the steps of the throne during a debate in the Lords.

In fact, it has been pointed out by Matthew Purvis at the House of Lords Library that there are a number of precedents, including Clement Attlee in 1947, Margaret Thatcher in 1988 and David Cameron in 2013, though the latter two visits – to honour particular peers – were of small political significance. But one previous visit to the Lords by a serving prime minister took place in circumstances that have many more resonances with the debate around the Lords’ role in relation to the Article 50 bill, albeit a century and a half ago.

William Gladstone laconically recorded in his diary his visit to the House of Lords on 15 June 1869; what he did not record was that it was on the second day of the second reading debate of the Irish Church Bill, the major measure of the new liberal government elected the previous year of which he was the head. The disestablishment of the Anglican Irish Church had risen to the top of the British political agenda over the period following the Fenian rising of March 1867. The circumstances of the first half of 1868 were extraordinary. Benjamin Disraeli had replaced the ailing Lord Derby in February as prime minister of a minority conservative government. Though embattled, he managed to avoid resigning until new electoral registers could be prepared on the basis of the greatly enlarged electorate created by the Second Reform Act of 1867. The period enabled Gladstone to gather together the fissiparous liberal party to secure the passage through the Commons of the Irish Church Suspensory Bill, a measure that would pave the way to full disestablishment. During the debates in the Commons conservatives protested that so major a step could hardly be taken without the sanction of an election: Palmerston, who had led the liberal party at the last election in 1865, had, they pointed out, made no reference to the Irish Church at the time. Any decision on the issue must, they argued, be left to the new Parliament.

In the Lords, those points were reiterated in the debate (25/26 June 1868) on the bill’s second reading. Liberal spokesmen responded by insisting that if the Lords did not accept the Commons’ will – and public opinion – on such major issues, the consequences might be dire. The earl of Clarendon, for example, argued:

I think it undesirable that on the hustings men should be tempted to speak, and pledge themselves to act, against the House of Lords, as they will if you reject this measure. I am the last man to wish that the independence of this House should in any respect be abridged; but I think we might exhibit our independence by marching with and not lagging behind the House of Commons.

The peroration of the previous Prime Minister, Lord Derby, on the other hand, amounted to a passionate defence of the peers:

Your Lordships are perfectly well able to judge for yourselves what course will be most consistent with your principles, your position, and your dignity as an independent branch of the Legislature; and I do not think that your Lord ships will be affected by the declaration that by rejecting this measure you will be seeking a cause of quarrel with the other House… if you were … simply to register the opinions of the House of Commons, it would be better not to be than to exist under such a slavery.

The bill was rejected at the end of three nights’ debate, on 29 June 1868.

Parliament was dissolved in November. In the subsequent election the Irish Church was a major issue. The liberal victory was clear enough for Disraeli to take the highly unusual step of resigning the premiership before the new Parliament met. Gladstone was famously at his estate at Hawarden, chopping trees, when he heard that the Queen’s private secretary was on his way to discuss forming a new government with him: after a period of silence he pronounced that ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’, and then resumed chopping.

A new Irish Church bill, disestablishing and disendowing the Church from 1871, was introduced into the Commons on 1 March 1869 and passed the lower House by the end of May. Gladstone was well aware of the possibilities of trouble in the Lords, though it would come not so much from the official opposition, as from the conservative backbenches. Earl Granville moved the second reading of the bill on 14 June. On the next day, 15 June, Gladstone visited the Lords. Some of the most important speeches, though, were made on the 17th, the third day of debate. One of them was Lord Derby’s, in which he spoke of the bill as a ‘revolution’, and argued that it was tantamount to a dissolution of the 1800 Union with Ireland. He muttered darkly about a renewal of rebellion in Ireland. The other was the marquess of Salisbury’s. Salisbury (who would become conservative prime minister in 1885) conceded that the election had been decisive as far as the principle of the bill was concerned. He expanded his remarks into a summary of what he regarded as the proper role of the House of Lords in the constitution more generally:

It has been represented that, in admitting it to be the duty of this House to sustain the deliberate, the sustained, the well-ascertained opinion of the nation, we thereby express our subordination to the House of Commons, and make ourselves merely an echo of the decisions of that House. In my belief no conclusion could be more absolutely inconsequential. If we do merely echo the House of Commons, the sooner we disappear the better. The object of the existence of a second House of Parliament is to supply the omissions and correct the defects which occur in the proceedings of the first. … In ninety-nine cases out of 100 the House of Commons is theoretically the representative of the nation, but is only so in theory … because in ninety-nine cases out of 100 the nation, as a whole, takes no interests in our politics, but amuses itself and pursues its usual avocations … In all these cases I make no distinction—absolutely none—between the prerogative of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. Again, there is a class of cases small in number, and varying in kind, in which the nation must be called into council and must decide the policy of the Government. It may be that the House of Commons in determining the opinion of the nation is wrong; and if there are grounds for entertaining that belief, it is always open to this House, and indeed it is the duty of this House to insist that the nation shall be consulted … But when once we have come to the conclusion from all the circumstances of the case that the House of Commons is at one with the nation, it appears to me that—save in some very exceptional cases, save in the highest cases of morality—in those cases in which a man would not set his hand to a certain proposition, though a revolution should follow from his refusal—it appears to me that the vocation of this House has passed away, that it must devolve the responsibility upon the nation, and may fairly accept the conclusion at which the nation has arrived.

It was a key formulation of what would become known as the ‘Salisbury doctrine’, the idea that the Lords’ role was that of an equal partner with the Commons, except on points where the verdict of the Commons and the verdict of the nation was clearly the same.

That view did not necessarily extend to the detail of any bill, and the devil, on the Irish Church bill, would indeed be in the detail. Gladstone would expend enormous energy over the next month or so on the struggle to prevent the Lords from unravelling the bill’s provisions line by line, and Salisbury, for one, would be much less cooperative than he had been on the principle. He put the government on notice in his speech that the debate on the detail would be the Lords’ chosen battleground, and that if Gladstone wanted ‘arrogantly’ to resist any amendments in the Commons, he thought the Lords, and the conservatives, would come out the better. Salisbury would make the allegation again, in the debate on 20 July on the Commons’ response to the Lords’ amendments:

Do not tell me it is the verdict of the nation. I will try it by a simple test. Suppose the Prime Minister had proposed that your Amendments should be accepted, would they have been refused by the House of Commons? It is not the verdict of the nation, it is not even the verdict of the House of Commons, it is the will—the arrogant will— of a single man to which you are now called upon to submit.

A later tradition recalled this as pure theatre: Gladstone standing on the steps of the throne while Salisbury denounced him and everyone turned to the prime minister to watch his reaction. That perhaps is a conflation of two different events; but it underlines the drama of a confrontation that helped to define the British constitution, and caused doctrines to be enunciated that are still key to our debates on democracy and the role of Parliament and its two Houses.

PS

Tomorrow former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s funeral will take place at St Paul’s Cathedral. Public funerals for Prime Ministers have been fairly rare in recent years, but Baroness Thatcher is by no means alone in receiving this honour from the state.

The first Prime Minister to have a public funeral was William Pitt the Elder (1708-1778). The Commons agreed unanimously that the funeral should take place in Westminster Abbey, despite some calls for him to be buried in St Paul’s, and the cost covered by the public. Pitt lay in state for two days at Westminster and thousands came to pay their respects. His son, William Pitt the Younger, was honoured in the same way; after his sudden death in 1806 he too lay in state before being buried with his family in Westminster Abbey. In addition to the cost of the funeral itself, the public purse also covered his debts, which came to £40,000.

Westminster Abbey was also the venue for George Canning’s funeral in 1827, again attended by huge crowds, and for that of Lord Palmerston, who died from pneumonia in 1865.  You can view an image of his hearse leaving Brockett Hall on the St Albans museums website and read a full account of his funeral from the Brisbane Courier. The four-time Prime Minister William Gladstone, who died from cancer on 19 May 1898, was also buried in Westminster Abbey after three days of lying in state; simultaneous services were held across the Empire and world to mark his death. (For a full account of his funeral, see this article from H.C.G. Matthew).

Some of the largest state funerals were reserved for Prime Ministers who were also war leaders, such as Winston Churchill (1965) and the Duke of Wellington (1852). Both lay in state for several days, Churchill in Westminster Hall and Wellington at Walmer Castle and Chelsea Hospital, and millions turned out to pay their respects to both men. Wellington’s funeral was considered ‘probably the most ornate and spectacular funeral ever seen in England’, and he was buried at St Paul’s (for a longer account of Wellington’s ceremony and several images, see this article on the Victorian Web). After his state funeral, Churchill was buried in a private family service in the village of Bladon.

Other twentieth-century Prime Ministers honoured with a public funeral include Henry Campbell Bannerman, who died in 10 Downing Street in 1908. He received generous tributes in the House (you can read these in Hansard) , an ‘impressive’ service at Westminster Abbey and, again, crowds of mourners paying their respects before he was buried in Meigle churchyard. Parliament honoured his memory with a memorial in Westminster Abbey. Andrew Bonar Law, who died in 1923 after a short period as Prime Minister, was given a service in Westminster Abbey against his wishes (he had wanted to be buried with his wife in Helensburgh). This was not an uncontroversial move, as his old enemy Herbert Asquith was said to remark ‘we have buried the Unknown Prime Minister by the side of the Unknown Soldier.’

Finally, the first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, was given a public funeral in Westminster Abbey after he died at sea in November 1937. Although his family were offered a place in the Abbey for his interment, his ashes were taken to Scotland and buried with the body of his wife. A memorial now stands in Westminster Abbey.

EP

All quotations thanks to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, and thanks to Dr Paul Seaward and Dr Kathryn Rix for links and suggestions.