Mass conservatism

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H.C.G. Matthew

Gladstone 1875-1898 is the culmination of Colin Matthew's acclaimed study of one of Britain's greatest statesmen. William Ewart Gladstone retired from politics in 1875, but returned for a further twenty years at the forefront of British politics. Gladstone 1809-1874 told the story of Gladstone's first political career; his second is examined in this volume. The book tells the story of Gladstone's last three premierships and his dramatic political campaigns as he pursued his often controversial aims, particularly his mission to bring Home Rule to Ireland. Political reform, Egypt, Gordon in the Sudan, and the 'Scramble for Africa' are other major themes. The treatment of Gladstone's political career is balanced by Colin Matthew's acute discussion of his full and active private life, including his enormous correspondence and prodigiously wide reading. The book ends with a moving account of Gladstone's death and state funeral, the last great set-piece of Victorian Liberalism. Colin Matthew's writings on Gladstone are generally acknowledged to have transformed understanding of the 'Grand Old Man' of British politics and his age. Appearing first as Introductions to his definitive edition of The Gladstone Diaries, they have been revised and made available in this volume and its predecessor.

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Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis

Essays examine Churchill's family life, foreign policy, social reforms, economic ideas, views on Zionism, and relationship with the monarchy and fellow statesmen.

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John Clive

"Macaulay's History of England stands as a classic more than a century after its completion; his parliamentary speeches and his collected Essays inspired generations of British statesmen; English and American schoolboys by the millions memorized and recited his Lays of Ancient Rome. What were the forces--familial, intellectual, circumstantial, and psychological--that shaped the life and mind of the great English historian and orator whose name became a household word on both sides of the Atlantic? In this book, based in large part on manuscript sources hitherto never fully exploited, historian John Clive shows us Macaulay the child, the youth, and the burgeoning historian and statesman--against the background of pre-Victorian England, in which he made his intellectual and political debut.^ With sympathy and skill, the varied threads of Macaulay's formative years are brought to light: his moralistic, Evangelical upbringing in the pietistic atmosphere of the Clapham Sect; his relationship with his stern, dominating father, his gentle, protective mother, and his two youngest sisters, Margaret and Hannah, who alone were to respond to his immense need for warmth and affection; his youthful oratorical and literary successes; his early preoccupation with history as the advance of civilization; his dual role as actor and spectator in the great events of the first Reform Bill battle, as well as in Whig society in London; and, finally, his years as a legal and educational reformer in India. Here is the private man: ungainly, undistinguished-looking, given to self-dramatization and fantasy and torrents of talk; enjoying his role as a social lion, but becoming disillusioned and dissatisfied with his role in politics.^ Determined to be his own man, he had no sooner achieved financial and political security--in a lucrative post on the Governor-General's Council in India--than the relationship with his beloved sisters so necessary to his emotional security was destroyed. Here is the public Macaulay: cocksure and impetuous, a parvenu lacking the specific gravity of a statesman, and yet speaking out not only for freedom as an abstraction, but concretely for the rights of Jews, Roman Catholics and blacks; envisioning a potential beauty and splendor in industrialization; almost singlehandedly writing a penal code for India; becoming embroiled in the crucial controversy over Indian education (what should be taught and in what language); and forever leaving his mark on Anglo-Indian cultural relations--just as India left its mark on him.^ And, finally, here is the Macaulay who returned at the age of 38 to a London in the grip of the impending coronation of Queen Victoria--with the idea of the History of England firmly in his mind. From Clapham, to Cambridge, to the House of Commons, to Calcutta, and back to England, Macaulay is seen not only as a man of extraordinary intellect and vision finding himself but as the product of a family, a class, a time, and a place. The man and his works are made immediate and are fully understood in this superb, full-scale portrait."--Dust jacket.

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E.A. Smith

This book is the only up-to-date survey of the history of the House of Lords, and its impact on British politics and society, in the period from Waterloo to the First World War. It shows how the Lords adapted to, and survived, the 'age of reform'; and traces their changing relationship with the House of Commons and the British people at large. It fills an important gap, for the peerage were, and contrived to remain, major actors in the politics of the age. This survey thus illuminates not only the parliamentary and constitutional history of the time, but also, much more widely, the changing character of nineteenth-century Britain itself. E.A. Smith begins his account with the House of Lords before the 'Great Reform Act' of 1832. Tracing the changing fortunes of the Lords through and after the passage of the Act, he explains how an institution founded on aristocratic privilege and landed wealth, and seeming to embody all that was anachronistic and reactionary, managed to survive into the new era of mass Parliamentary democracy and retain for itself a very substantial influence on, and voice in, the nation's political and social life. How was it done? This remarkable record of adaptation and survival is shown to have its origins in the period immediately after 1832 when, largely through the influence of the Duke of Wellington, the Lords were induced to accept the new conditions. Radical agitation for the abolition of the House declined accordingly. Moreover, as Dr Smith makes clear, Victorian politics and society remained aristocratic in character despite the extension of the franchise, and even the Liberal and Labour governments of the twentieth century have been reluctant to undertake fundamental reform. Even the Parliament Act of 1911, with the passage and implications of which the main part of the book closes, did not undermine the political foundations of the Lords in the way that is usually assumed; and the House has continued to exercise important functions as a restraining influence on policy and legislation down to our own time. As the only comprehensive treatment of this important subject, Dr Smith's book will immediately become necessary reading for scholars and students; but its lively and engaging style will also appeal to anyone interested in the development of the British Parliamentary constitution, the survival and adaptation of the British aristocracy, and the changing character of British politics and society before the First World War.