Historian AJP Taylor wrote 1923 General Election “The only election in British history fought solely on protectionism.” The 1847 general election is one of the few to have been a candidate.
The Reform Act of 1832 gave the urban middle class the right to vote. The Tories opposed the act, but some of their members realized they had to adapt to new political realities. Traditionally the party of the landed aristocracy, the Tories needed new allies. Robert Peel, one of the most thoughtful Tories, thought he could find allies among the urban working class, who often found themselves at odds with the Whig middle class. In the 1835 election, Peel published the “Tamworth Manifesto,” which reconciled the Reform Act and became the creed of the new Conservative party. “One Nation” Toryism was born.
Aristocrats and workers quickly united in opposing the Poor Law Reform Bill, a key Whig policy that sought to cut welfare spending, and which the Conservatives, feeling the intense indignation of workers, also opposed: the radical Tory and factory law reformer Richard Oastler denounced the Act as “abominable, infernal, abominable, tyrannical, unchristian, unconstitutional and unnatural”.
Peel’s Conservatives won a landslide victory in 1841, but tensions grew between Peel’s “One Nation” Conservatives and the Tory aristocracy. Richard Cobden’s Anti-Corn Law LeagueHe sought to repeal the Corn Laws, tariffs that had prevented foreign wheat from entering Britain, driving up food prices and harming the working class, and to replace the lost revenue with a new income tax. Justified on the grounds of “food security,” these laws financially benefited the landowning Tories. Denounced by Queen Victoria as “abominable, shortsighted, and unpatriotic,” these protectionists, whose leaders included Benjamin Disraeli, resisted Peel to the end and beyond.
The Corn Laws were repealed on 25 June 1846. The Protectionists retaliated the same night, splitting off and forming an alliance with the Whigs and the Irish Abolitionist Party. Peel resigned and never held public office again. Cobden paid tribute to him.
He may have lost his job, but he has gained his country, and I would rather see him return to private life by his last resort than ascend by any other means to the highest summit of human power.
Peel’s supporters, the “Peelites”, supported the Whig government of Lord John Russell, but this unstable situation collapsed in July 1847 and elections were held.
“The election of 1847 was fought in an atmosphere of confusion, disorder, and recrimination,” the historians write. Robert BlakeNot only were the Whigs against the Tories, but the Tories were against each other, and the Pro-Irelanders were against them all. Feelings ran high. In Marlow, “bands of bloodthirsty ruffians” were reported to be “attacking any respectable person who did not sympathize with the (Protectionist) cause.” In Berkshire, Times “Currently, there is an agreement among the influential members of the constituency to retain the recently elected councillors in office, in the name of not disturbing the peace of the county,” he wrote. Only 44% of the seats were contested.
The result was hardly a solution: the Whigs gained a few seats but not a majority, Peel gained a few seats, and the Protectors lost about 50. One of the Protectorate’s unsuccessful candidates scolded the Essex audience, saying, “We have laboriously endeavoured to penetrate your foolish heads, or you will go home as ignorant as you came.”
On the other side, the protectionists, led by Lord Stanley (later Earl of Derby) and Disraeli, embraced free trade, much like Peel had convinced the Conservatives to accept the Reform Act. When Britain held another election in 1852, Disraeli argued that “the spirit of the times is one of free intercourse, and no statesman can with impunity ignore the genius of the age in which he lives.” Derby, on his return to power, announced that the Conservatives would “submit to the determination of the country” and pursue free trade “as if we ourselves were the architects of its policy.” As historian Thomas Babington Macaulay pointed out, Toryism was merely a defense of the achievements of the previous generation of Whigs.
The struggle over the repeal of the Corn Laws cast a long shadow. The Peelites, led by Peel’s protégé William Ewart Gladstone, joined the Whigs to form the Liberal Party in 1859, and the rivalry between Disraeli and Gladstone dominated British politics until Disraeli’s death in 1881. By that time, Queen Victoria had come to love Disraeli and hate Gladstone. But as Britain rose to the height of its empire, all sides remained committed to the belief in free trade. Only when the country felt its relative position weakened did the old protectionist ideas resurface.
John Phelan is an economist. The heart of the American experiment.
