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Benjamin Disraeli (1804‒1881): His Lives and Afterlives (Colloque de la SFEVE 25-26 février 2024)
Part 1: Political Lives and Afterlives

Successes and Failures of Benjamin Disraeli’s Rhetoric and Heresthetics: Corn Laws, Franchise, and Empire

Grandeurs et misères de la rhétorique et de la manipulation politique disraélienne : les Corn Laws, La Franchise et l’Empire
Iain McLean

Résumés

Il n’est plus à démontrer que Benjamin Disraeli était un homme politique téméraire et changeant. Cet article affirme qu’il était l’un de ces rares métamorphes qui pratiquaient ce que l’on a appelé « heresthetics », à savoir l’art et la science de transformer une position perdante en une position gagnante. Ses manœuvres en 1846 (Corn Laws), 1867-68 (Reform) et 1876 (Royal Title Bill) le montrent à son meilleur. Bien qu’il lui ait fallu 30 ans, il a à la fois détruit et reconstruit le Parti conservateur.

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Texte intégral

Three Core Concepts: the Median Voter, Issue Dimensionality and Heresthetics

1Throughout his career, Benjamin Disraeli was one of the few politicians who could recognize when he was on the losing side of an issue and convert that loss to a win by changing the issue dimensions. He brought about the downfall of Sir Robert Peel in 1846, destroying the first programmatic Tory Party in Parliament. In the 1850s he ditched the policy on which he had overthrown Peel, namely protection of agriculture, and continued to explore how to reinvent the Tory Party. He finally succeeded in 1874. An important step on the road was the Second Reform Act in 1867.

2To frame Disraeli’s actions we need some concepts from formal political science. First: the median voter theorem (MVT). Often, politics is essentially one-dimensional. Possible outcomes lie along some dimension that most voters use and recognise. In modern politics, this is often labelled ‘left to right’ where left-wing policy involves egalitarian redistribution and high taxation, and right-wing policy involves less redistribution and low taxation. In Disraeli’s time, the main dimension of English politics was urban-rural or, more exactly, food consuming v. food producing. Scotland was somewhat different, and Ireland was entirely different, as will be discussed later in this chapter. But, in general, people living in cities and towns, which were food consuming, had an interest in cheap food. People living in rural areas, at least arable ones, had an interest in dear food. Of course, they ate food too (much of which was imported), but their material interest differed from that of urban dwellers. However, the rural vote was a diminishing share of the electorate, except in the House of Lords, where it remained at 100%. True, not all peers owned land when ennobled, but to an approximation all of them either owned land or acquired it. Hence the cataclysmic event of Disraeli’s early political career. A Tory government headed by Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington violated the interest of its core voters with the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. This reduced the price of food and aimed to mitigate the Irish famine, both at the expense of cereal producers. Although the Repealers Peel and Cobden both insisted that their actions were also in the interests of the countryside (Howe 1997, 2015; McLean 1999, 2001), Repeal was carried on the votes of the Liberal and Irish opposition. Only a third of Peel’s own party voted for it. Research on rollcall voting in the 1841‒47 Parliament (Aydelotte 1954; McLean and Bustani; Schonhardt-Bailey) has shown that the more urban Tories were likelier to support Peel. Disraeli engineered Peel’s resignation by organising a coalition of Irish members and Protectionists to defeat him on an Irish coercion bill a month after Repeal passed the Commons.

3Given the pattern of enfranchisement in 1846, the median voter was more rural than the median adult male citizen. According to the MVT, the median voter (the one whose ideal issue position is exactly half-way from the most pro-Corn Law to the most anti-Corn Law stance) will usually prevail because any winning coalition, in a majoritarian parliament, must include the median parliamentarian. This can sometimes lose to a coalition of the extremes such as Disraeli achieved in 1846. But such a coalition is unstable. The Irish bloc, whichever party it belonged to, voted in the interest of Ireland. Disraeli frequently courted it for individual votes but it could not be a stable partner. The Tory leaders of the revolt—Disraeli and Lord George Bentinck—were a disparate pair. Bentinck, generally regarded as not very bright, represented his class and rural interest. Disraeli was different. By 1852 he had both dropped protection with the support of his party leader Lord Derby (Hawkins 2‒4, 19, 36‒37), and abandoned the Bentincks after they had bought Hughenden Manor for him (Buckle 1914: 150).

4If the MVT (Black) is valid, how had Repeal happened? Although the third of the Tory Party who voted with Peel were more urban, the median MP represented a rural seat. In earlier work (McLean and Bustani, McLean 2001; McGillivray et al.), I argued that Peel and Disraeli were both herestheticians. I now need to introduce that term.

5The American political scientist W. H. Riker (1921‒93) coined the word heresthetics in 1986 (cf. also Riker 1982, McLean 2002) to denote the art and science of political manipulation. He correctly formed his new word from the Greek middle voice of the verb hairein, meaning ‘to find out for oneself’. The root also gives us the English heresy.

6Riker mostly had in mind manipulation to increase or diminish the number of issue dimensions in politics. If the number of dimensions is two or more, the median voter theorem does not apply, and cycles in majority rule (defined in the next paragraph) are possible. Therefore, politics may lead to surprising outcomes. Herestheticians are politicians who can glimpse such possibilities and perhaps achieve such an outcome. Riker (1982, 1986) and his followers (Nagel; McLean 2001) have claimed the title for a number of politicians, including (in the USA) Gouverneur Morris and Abraham Lincoln; (in New Zealand) ‘King Dick’ Seddon and David Lange; and (in the UK, besides Disraeli) Sir Robert Peel and David Lloyd George. Lloyd George had a motto over his bed from the Book of Job, ‘There is a path which no fowl knoweth and which the eye of the vulture hath not seen’ (Job 28:7; Jones 103).

7Why does the MVT fail in more than one dimension? Suppose that there were in fact two latent dimensions in early Victorian politics: urban v. rural and Irish pacification v. coercion. Ireland was a most reluctant member of the United Kingdom, a majority-Roman Catholic country in which only a few Protestants, and no Catholics, had the vote when Prime Minister Pitt the Younger incorporated it by the Act of Union 1800. In order to get the Irish Parliament to vote itself out of existence, Pitt promised Catholic emancipation, on which George III reneged. The UK Parliament was therefore never legitimate in the eyes of most Irish people who knew and cared about it. In 1828‒29, and 1845‒48, the Irish dimension became more prominent with the shocks of Catholic Emancipation (civil and political rights), the 1845 grant to a seminary at Maynooth, and the potato blight first appearing in the same year. If, say, the rural British party had always favoured Irish coercion and the urban British party had always favoured Irish emancipation, the two dimensions would have collapsed into one and the MVT would apply. But that did not happen. In 1845, Peel brought the most important figurehead of the landed interest, his colleague the Duke of Wellington, round to his side. Wellington was leader of the Lords where the median voter was almost by definition landed (and often, like Wellington, Irish-landed). For Wellington, Ireland was a problem of social order. He brusquely told his peers that ‘we cannot avoid their [Irish people] being Roman Catholics’ and that if Irish Catholic priests were to be educated anywhere, it had best be in Maynooth, in the UK, where the UK government could keep an eye on them (Hansard, Lords, 02.06.1845, 1160‒74). In the autumn of the same year, when the first news of the failure of the potato crop reached London, Peel seized an opportunity to link Irish relief and Repeal. After Lord John Russell had tried and failed to form a government, Peel persuaded his reinstated cabinet that it was unacceptable to give food aid to the starving Irish while keeping cereal prices high by maintaining the Corn Laws. Again, he carried Wellington, and Wellington carried the Lords (McLean 1999).

8When there are two or more issue dimensions, the MVT may fail catastrophically: there may be no majority winning position at all. In the simplest case, with three voters and three options, the following is possible:

Table 1A Majority-Rule Cycle: the Simplest Case.

Voter 1

Voter 2

Voter 3

Best

a

b

C

Middle

b

c

A

Worst

c

a

B

9Here, a beats b by 2 votes to 1. b beats c by 2 votes to 1. But c beats a by 2 votes to 1! There is no such thing as a majority winner. A heresthetic politician is one who can exploit this by introducing a new dimension, possibly by extending the franchise in order to appeal to a new class of voters with new politics. This, I maintain, is what Disraeli did between 1852 and 1874. If he had stuck with the Bentincks and protection, his side of politics would become smaller with any franchise extension. If a new, and almost certainly more urban, group were to enter the electorate, the Tory Party must be saved by introducing a new dimension. That dimension would be imperialism: arguably a new dimension that has never gone away as it has mutated into arguments about migration and Europe in our time. Peel’s heresthetics introduced free trade, mitigated the Famine, and destroyed his party. Disraeli’s heresthetics destroyed Peel and eventually (but not until 1874) rebuilt his party. Which was the greater heresthetician? The answer depends on the weight the analyst gives to party building versus policy transforming.

Disraeli’s Rhetoric and Heresthetics in 1867

10The making of the Second Reform Act in 1866‒67 is one of the most exhaustively analysed events in British political history. Four notable monographs (Smith, F. B.; Cowling; Smith, P. 1967; Feuchtwanger) came out on the centenary. Important newer discussions include Paul Smith’s (1996, 1998) further thoughts on Disraeli; Saunders 2011 on previous abortive reforms; Hawkins 2008 on the role of Lord Derby, and Steele on Palmerston and reform. I have no startling discoveries to add to these standard sources. But I consider the main attempts at reform in the light of the models introduced above.

11The Peelites collapsed as a governing force after the failure of the Peelite Aberdeen to run the Crimean War efficiently. Lord Palmerston, who remained Prime Minister for ten years apart from a brief Derby-Disraeli interlude in 1858‒59, succeeded Aberdeen in January 1855. Palmerston was nominally a Whig, but was most notable for his aggressive foreign policy. Although his administration proposed an abortive reform bill in 1860 (Saunders, 118‒27), Palmerston’s heart was not in it (‘it would be a good thing to get a bill passed’. he said without taking any active steps to save it—Steele 1991, 100‒04); and he was on chronically bad terms with his Liberal rival Lord John Russell. Disraeli took up the issue of reform as a possible means of restoring the fortunes of the Tories. He had written to Derby:

I suggest to you whether a juster apportionment of M.P.s may not be the question on which a powerful and enduring party may be established.  . . . [T]he present arrangement, which leaves the balance of power in small boroughs, which are ruled by cliques of Dissenters, seems fatal to the maintenance of the present aristocratic and ecclesiastical institutions.  . . . But the question of the suffrage may be dealt with extensively, but in an eminently conservative manner. If fifty members were added to the counties, by reducing the small boroughs to one member, and every ten-pound householder in the county population were annexed to a borough constituency, you would . . . greatly increase the Conservative power at the same time. . . . Our party is now a corpse, but in the present perplexed state of affairs, a Conservative public pledge[d] to Parliamentary Reform, a bold and decided course might . . . put us on our legs. (BD to Lord Derby, 21.04.1857, in Buckle 1916, 79. Original italics)

12Derby preferred ‘a safer course’ of tacitly supporting Palmerston against Russell. When the Derby-Disraeli government prepared a reform bill in 1858, it tried to follow Disraeli’s bold and decided course. A ministerial committee drafted a bill adopting the principle of assimilating the county franchise with the borough franchise. It would have reallocated urban freehold voters to the boroughs, to reduce their influence in the more Tory county seats. For Derby, the ‘keystone of the whole [was]. . .  “making freeholders in boroughs voters for the boroughs and not for the counties as at present”’ (Derby to Disraeli 25.08.1858, quoted by Hawkins 187). The bill also introduced a £10 rating qualification for the counties, redistributed fifty-two seats to the counties away from the boroughs, and disenfranchised between sixty and ninety small boroughs with their alleged cliques of Dissenters (Saunders 110). Disraeli wrote to many Conservative agents for further information on the effect that lowering the rating qualification would have for Conservative electoral strength.

13The bill was defeated on a motion by Lord John Russell:

that this House is of the opinion, that it is neither just nor politic to interfere in the manner proposed in this Bill, with the Freehold Franchise as hitherto exercised in the Counties of England and Wales; that no re-adjustment of the Franchise will satisfy this House or the Country, which does not provide for a greater extension of the suffrage in Cities and Boroughs that is contemplated in the present measure. (Hansard, Commons, 21.03.1859)

14This motion was heresthetic. It was designed to attract both ends of the spectrum: the radicals and the Palmerstonians. Palmerston had described Disraeli as ‘un démocrate recouvert de la peau d’un conservateur’ (Buckle 1916, 205). Derby and Disraeli resigned and Palmerston resumed office until the next election was legally required, in August 1865. As noted above, the Liberal reform bill of 1860 also failed (Saunders 108‒27).

15The Commons majority elected in 1865 in support of the anti-reformer Palmerston, who died before Parliament met, rejected a Reform Bill introduced in 1866 by the ensuing Russell-Gladstone ministry. The ministry resigned, to be succeeded by another minority Tory administration under Derby and Disraeli. The same House as had rejected Gladstone’s bill passed Disraeli’s much more radical one in 1867; it then passed almost unhindered through the House of Lords. This summary implies that at least one heresthetician was at work. The median member of the 1865 Commons was a Palmerstonite, opposed to reform. Any reform would entail some reduction in the authority of the Lords, whose median member therefore had an interest in opposing reform. Redistribution would also deprive some sitting MPs of their seats, creating a bloc of opponents to any scheme. Gladstone failed to introduce reform while leading a majority government, whereas Disraeli succeeded while leading a minority government. Both the failure and the success must therefore be analysed.

16All franchise reformers in the 1860s, including Gladstone and Disraeli, shared a mental map of the British population. In the social orders below those who already held the franchise lay some men who were respectable and some who were not. The respectable held enough property to give them a stake in society. Owning property had two consequences. First, it was associated with higher standards of morality. The property-owner was less likely to be bribed than the propertyless. (There was no objective evidence for this, nor is there a good a priori reason why it should be so, but all reformers at the time believed it). Second, if the propertyless were enfranchised, they would expropriate the assets of the propertied and seize them for themselves. This was a fear as old as Aristotle (Politics Book IV, esp. 1292a;). All contemporary commentators, from J. S. Mill on the left to Robert Lowe and Lord Cranborne (later Lord Salisbury) on the right, shared it. Therefore, all attempts at electoral reform from 1832 to 1867 attempted to find some legally defensible line to draw between the propertied and the propertyless. An obvious criterion was freehold ownership of a house or other real estate. But this was too narrow. Most even of the middle class were tenants, not freeholders. Liability for poor rates (local property tax) at some minimum annual level, and payment of a certain minimum annual rent, were the two marks of property that reformers sought. Both were hopeless bases for drawing a line between voters and non-voters. Property and rateable value are stocks; rent and rate payments are both flows. Reformers wanted to enfranchise just those who had enough of the stock—of property. But the only information available was unreliable, and it concerned flows. Even in an administratively perfect world, it would be very hard to deduce the size of a stock from the annual flows related to it. The market with all its local peculiarities determined rent levels. Annual rate payments varied according to local practice, especially with regard to compounding. A compounder was a tenant who paid a single bill, covering both rent and rates, to his landlord. The landlord then paid on the rates to the Poor Law authorities, usually at a concessionary rate. The landlord’s, not the compounder’s, name would appear on the rating list. Therefore, if the rating list remained the eligibility criterion, most compounders were ineligible for the vote. Politicians’ guesses as to how many people would be enfranchised by any given rent or rate threshold were subject to wild variations. As there were no central records of ratepayers nor of compounders, modern academics are in no better a place. Therefore, an amendment to substitute ‘ratal’ for ‘rental’ or vice versa, or to raise or lower a rate or rent threshold, could leave even well-informed politicians floundering, quite unable to guess how it would affect the franchise. And the rate/rents route made no sense in Scotland, where property law was different, nor in Ireland, where most of the population were too poor to qualify. No wonder Disraeli called franchise reform a ‘Serbonian bog’ (Hansard, 18.03.67). This made for ideal heresthetic conditions.

17In 1866, Gladstone found himself battling on two fronts: Bright and the reformers to his left, the Palmerstonians to his right. His bill introduced a rent threshold of £7, and addressed the problem of compounders by directing rating books to declare their names. In the counties, new voters must demonstrate £50 in savings or occupancy of a household valued at £14 per annum rental (Matthew 1999: 139‒42). Gladstone stressed the importance of propertied respectability when he said:

[T]he number of persons [in county seats] properly belonging to the working class and having £14 rental  . . . will be so small  . . . as not to be worth taking into calculation. Or at least  . . . that portion of the newly enfranchised  . . . as may belong to the labouring class, will be tenants of small holdings of land in immediate connection with the landed class. (Hansard, 13.03.66)

18Disraeli let Gladstone’s opponents on the Government side make hostile amendments and then fell in behind them. Bright nicknamed the anti-reform Whigs ‘the Cave of Adullam’ (Hansard, 12.03.66; 1 Samuel xxii. 1, 2). The Adullamite Earl Grosvenor introduced an amendment that he claimed ‘has not been framed or worded by a Tory hand’ (Hansard, 12.04.66). It called for franchise extension to be delayed until ‘the entire scheme’, including a redistribution bill, had been proposed. Redistribution would inevitably make enemies of all who stood to lose their seats, and might lose the government its majority. The Grosvenor amendment was lost by only five votes. 35 Whigs voted for it, balanced only by one Tory who hoped to become a baronet and voted for the government in the hope of being noticed (Smith, F. B. 90, 255-6; Hansard 27.04.66). The government contemplated resigning, but decided to soldier on. It introduced a redistribution bill, which (as the Adullamites hoped and expected) was furiously attacked by the ‘dying swans’ who stood to lose their seats. (as one of them, F. D. Goldsmid, labelled himself: Hansard 31.05.66). Any redistribution bill created as many new issue dimensions as the number of seats it abolished, and therefore greatly increased the prospects of multidimensional chaos. Each MP had a distinct issue dimension—his own survival. A series of amendments was lost by narrow majorities, each time with about 25 Adullamites voting for it. Meanwhile, Derby drew up a list of Whig peers who were likely to vote against the Bill in the Lords and kill it there (F. B. Smith 108). Finally, the Adullamites triumphed in the Commons with another ’ratal for rental’ amendment, which they won by 315 votes to 304 (Hansard 18.06.66). As Gladstone recorded, this was done with ‘violent flourishing [of] hats and other manifestations which I think novel and inappropriate.’ (Gladstone, diary for 18.06.66, in Matthew 1978). The Russell Administration resigned, despite urgent requests from the Queen that they should stay on.

19The Adullamites may have expected to lead the next administration, as their group contained the median Commons voter. Derby, Disraeli and the Queen would have none of that. The Queen sent for Derby, who formed a minority Tory government. The Adullamites refused office, after not being offered the premiership. Although without a majority, Derby and Disraeli were under no immediate pressure, as Parliament adjourned in July to shoot grouse until November.

20On 29 July 1866 Disraeli wrote to Derby,

Suppose, instead of discharging the order of the day on the Reform Bill, you took up the measure where it stops: £6 rating for boroughs; £20 rating for counties, to be brought up on report; the northern boroughs to be enfranchised; no disfranchisement of any kind.
You could carry this in the present House, and rapidly. It would prevent all agitation in the recess; it would cut the ground entirely from under Gladstone; and it would smash the Bath Cabal [i.e., anti-reform Tories led by the Marquis of Bath], for there would be no dangerous questions ahead. (Buckle 1916, 452‒53)

21This would have continued the Liberal bill. But Derby was more cautious. He proposed not a new or amended bill but a series of resolutions. His thinking, too, was tactical. If MPs voted down the resolutions, they would face huge pressure from reformers at the ensuing general election. On the other hand:

If we get the House pledged to our principles, we shall be in a much better position for hereafter discussing details; and it will be difficult for the Radicals, either to escape from Amendments, or so to frame them as not to clash with moderate Liberals, and widen the existing breach. (Derby to Disraeli, 09.10 66, Disraeli Papers ‘14 Derby’, quoted in Smith 1966, 135)

22Disraeli agreed, noting that,

if the House then gets involved in the discussion, the Liberal party will probably be broken up. If as is more likely, Mr Gladstone meets the Ministerial motion by a general resolution in favor [sic] of immediate legislation, it is not impossible he may be defeated, which will establish the Government. But if he succeeds it will probably be by a narrow majority, and the dissolution will then take place on an issue between Bright’s policy and our programme. (Disraeli to Derby, 18.11.66, in Buckle 1916, 460)

23Derby’s resolutions, introduced to the Cabinet on 8 November 1866 against the background of massive Reform demonstrations in Birmingham, Leeds, Manchester, and Glasgow, offered enfranchisement for rated householders tempered by a ‘fancy franchise’ of plural votes for the landed classes, to head off a confiscatory working-class majority. The resolutions were presented to the Commons on 14 February 1867, with the promise of a £6 rating for boroughs. The next day Disraeli checkmated Gladstone, who had come to the House prepared with a motion to vote down the resolutions, by withdrawing them (F. B. Smith 158). The Derby resolutions turned out, too late for Gladstone, to be entirely smoke and mirrors. In their place, Disraeli introduced the Reform Bill, offering a £6 rating, providing ‘personal payment of rates’, plural votes for the landed classes, and a three-year residency requirement.

24Disraeli designed his introductory speech (Hansard, 18.03.67) to counter Gladstone’s desire for a £5 rating to be the dividing line for compounding/personal payment, as well as placating those who feared that the Bill was a step toward democracy. He implausibly lauded personal payment of rates as a fundamental part of the British constitution.

25Gladstone immediately pointed out flaws in the bill, including its incongruence with the 1832 ‘Great Reform’ Act. Rather than counter these attacks directly, Disraeli conceded nothing to Gladstone while in the same breath conceding to other Liberals and Reformers. Disraeli’s longstanding friend (Blake 1966, 62‒71) and spy among Radical MPs, James Clay, advised a meeting of Liberal and Radical MPs that their interest lay in keeping the Tories in office, because they would get a better deal from them than from Gladstone (F. B. Smith 166).

26The problems embodied in the Bill were becoming increasingly evident through debate, including incomplete record keeping in the parishes and boroughs, the exclusion of compounders, and the seeming unworkability of the fancy franchises of education and plural voting. As Gladstone offered up a number of amendments, Disraeli announced that the government would resign if any were passed.

27Disraeli’s first dilemma was over Ayrton’s (Lib.) amendment seeking to reduce the residency requirement from two years to one. Disraeli agreed to this amendment as it would bring on side the Radicals and independent Liberals, but he knew it would split the Cabinet. However, he could placate his own side with the knowledge that the amendment did not emanate from Gladstone. The amendment was passed with no debate. Only specialists would be able to guess, and then not necessarily accurately, how many extra voters this would add.

28Neither Derby nor Disraeli could manage the Cabinet as effortlessly as Disraeli managed the Commons. Three ministers including Cranborne (the later Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury) resigned in protest at the increasing radicalism of the bill. Cranborne had done his homework, and worked out that Disraeli’s proposals would enfranchise far more lower-class people than Disraeli had assumed (Roberts 90‒91). Nevertheless, Disraeli carried the Tory backbench MPs, who endorsed the bill at a meeting in the Carlton Club. Even though by then it embodied household suffrage in the boroughs, the Tory MPs were placated by the supposed counterweights of plural voting, or by the thrill of the chase, or both. One by one, the counterweights fell off, as it became clear that there were no acceptable lists of taxpayers, nor personal ratepayers, nor savings account holders, on which to base the plural franchises. Disraeli pressed on regardless, leaving his followers with only the thrill of the chase.

29Nowhere was this more notable than on the Hodgkinson amendment. Grosvenor Hodgkinson (Lib., Newark) moved that ‘no other person other than the occupier shall  . . . be rated to parochial rates in respect of premises occupied by him within the limits of a Parliamentary borough, all Acts to the contrary now in force notwithstanding’ (Hansard 17.05.67). The Hodgkinson amendment purported to solve the problem of compounding simply by repealing all the legislation that permitted it (thus throwing local government finance into chaos). Politically, it enabled Disraeli to claim blandly that he could now at last implement the principle of personal payment of rates. In a thin house, which Gladstone had left for dinner, Disraeli simply accepted the Hodgkinson amendment. He then withdrew the fancy franchises and the bill passed its third reading without a division (F. B. Smith 207). The best clue as to why Conservative MPs accepted Disraeli’s extraordinary manoeuvres lies in the toast proposed to him at the Carlton Club on 12 April, even before Hodgkinson: ‘Here’s [to] the man who rode the race, who took the time, who kept the time, and who did the trick!’ Disraeli then went home to ‘a raised pie from Fortnum & Mason’s and a bottle of champagne, and he ate half the pie and drank all the champagne’, his wife later recalled (Buckle 1916, 533).

30The Bill now went to the House of Lords, where Derby repeated Wellington’s feat of 1845 and 1846: he persuaded a majority of voting peers to vote against their material (landed) interests and pass the bill. His threat was the same as Wellington’s: if the Lords rejected the bill, he would resign, which would threaten social order (Hawkins 351). There was no co-operation between the Tory and Adullamite rebels. About 20 to 30 backwoods Tories who never normally came to the House turned up for the rare pleasure of supporting a Tory government (F. B. Smith 209).

31The Lords inserted two constitutional amendments and one political one. The first ended the automatic dissolution of Parliament when the sovereign died. The second ended the requirement for Commons ministers to resign their seats and fight by-elections on appointment. The third was the much-misunderstood (even by F. B. Smith 212, and Cowling 226‒27) Cairns amendment that instituted the ‘limited vote’. The limited vote amendment created three-member seats in the big cities, but gave each elector only two votes. The idea was to give the Conservatives a toehold in the overwhelmingly Liberal cities. Most historians believe that it failed to work, because Joseph Chamberlain’s Liberals organised their Birmingham caucus so effectively that the Liberals won all three seats there in the general elections of 1868 to 1880. He divided the city into thirds and in each third told his followers to vote for a different pair of Liberals. But that is merely the rational strategy for an informed and disciplined party. Considering the Cairns amendment from a game-theoretic perspective, as Lewis Carroll was the first to do (McLean, McMillan, and Monroe), it may be seen as a surprisingly effective device for proportional representation. The Liberals won all three seats in Birmingham despite and not because of the Cairns amendment, because they controlled over two-thirds of the vote there. The only politician to understand this was Lord Salisbury in 1884, and he rescued the Tories not by proportional representation but by careful attention to district boundaries (Salisbury; McLean 2001, 79‒81).

32Disraeli accepted the Lords amendments, and proceeded to a redistribution bill. He minimised the dying swan trap. Only 30 seats were abolished—seven of them from boroughs that had been disenfranchised for corruption, and therefore had no defenders in the House. The other 23 were in small boroughs, reduced from two seats to one each. The boundary commissioners he appointed to oversee the redistribution were Tories, and they secretly reported to the Tory agents before reporting to parliament (Blake 473; F. B. Smith 219). Disraeli’s ways of business differed from Gladstone’s. Parties controlling state legislatures in the USA, where partisan gerrymandering has become a fine art, have emulated them.

Disraeli and Political Realignment

33As with the Repeal of the Corn Laws, a majority of each House voted against its interests. Disraeli let the Adullamites destroy Gladstone and then scooped the resulting winnings. As with Peel and Wellington in 1846, the heresthetics of 1867 represented a double act. Derby commanded the Lords while Disraeli commanded the Commons. He did it by smoke and mirrors, or, as he called it, ‘all the black devices  . . . I applied’ (to working men’s meeting, Edinburgh, 31.10.67, quoted by Cowling 311). Even the experts—let alone Disraeli—could not calculate the electoral effects of amendments as they were considered and moved. Did a £5 rating threshold enfranchise more or fewer people than a £5 rental threshold? Clay probably realised how far Disraeli was going, and saw that the radicals’ interest lay in keeping the Tories in, so that they would get more from Disraeli than they would have done from their own leader. The Tories, in both houses, seem to have responded simply to the thrill of the chase, without paying attention to the substance of the legislation. It is usually unsatisfactory to attribute differential information levels to different members of the legislature. But here the empirical evidence is strong. Clay was a master of statistics. So was Cranborne. Disraeli was not. He blithely accepted the Hodgkinson amendment with no care for its huge consequences. And his followers loved him for it. In the short term, it was brilliant heresthetics.

34But was it part of a grander plan? For that, it would have to lead to electoral success. But Disraeli had not yet considered Scotland or Ireland. The Act of 1867 concerned England & Wales only.

35The Scottish Law Officers and Parliamentary counsel must have drawn up what became the Representation of the People (Scotland) Act 1868 c.48, and the Irish Law Officers the similarly titled Ireland act (c.49). The Lord Advocate introduced the Scottish Bill, which applied the Cairns amendment to Glasgow and substantially widened the burgh franchise. Disraeli declined to be drawn on Scottish redistribution: ‘We have no interest whatever in the propositions which we have made for the distribution of seats. I mean no personal or party interest’ (Hansard 17 Feb. 1868, col. 843). One suspects that he had not canvassed the Conservative agents in Scotland because there were none. He took no part in the Second Reading of the Irish Bill (Hansard 7 May 1868). The Scottish and Irish bills receive minimal attention even in the six-volume Monypenny & Buckle biography; half a sentence in Blake 1966, 495; and a single phrase in brackets in Smith 1996, 147. They both provided for a broader borough/burgh franchise than in England. In neither territory was there an issue with compounding, and therefore no Hodgkinson amendment. Importantly, neither was there a network of Conservative agents. In November 1867, Disraeli had paid his first visit to Scotland since 1825 (Buckle 1916, 554‒58; Blake 481‒82). There, his speech, presumably unbriefed by Conservative agents, praised the Hodgkinson amendment, which can have meant nothing to his audience (Buckle 1916, 556).

36Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but neither the Parliamentary record nor any of the three principal lives of Disraeli provides any evidence that he was engaged with Scottish or Irish representation. The predictable result of the two Acts was a clean sweep for the Liberals in Scotland and in what is now the Republic of Ireland in the 1868 General Election. The Liberals under Gladstone formed the government and immediately disestablished the (Anglican) Church of Ireland. The Liberals in Ireland would soon succumb in turn to the Irish Party, which controlled every seat in Catholic Ireland from 1885 to 1918. In England & Wales, the Conservatives lost six seats: doubtless fewer than they would have done without the 1867 Act. But the Liberals won the majority of seats even there.

37To complete his heresthetics, Disraeli therefore had to rebuild the electoral base of the Tory Party that Peel and he had destroyed in 1846. As the old alignment with the rural vote was destined to lose by greater and greater margins at every election, he needed to find a new dimension on which to appeal to the new urban electorate. Despite much oratory and his early novels, this was not really the material interest of the urban working class. Rather, it was the Empire, with which Ireland became conflated.

38Disraeli neither initiated nor consummated the identification of the Tory Party with imperialism and nativism. The Derby-Disraeli government was in power in 1858 when, after the so-called Indian Mutiny, the directly-ruled part of India was transferred from the East India Company to the British government in the shape of the Viceroy of India. But it was only during Disraeli’s ministry of 1874‒80 that he capitalised on this. Likewise, Disraeli took little interest in the founding constitution of the Dominion of Canada, which happened on his watch in 1867 (McLean 2001, 74).

39The high imperialist phase of Disraeli’s career began with his initially secret purchase of Suez Canal shares in 1875. He justified this in terms of protecting the shipping route between Britain and India. This led to his administration throwing itself into the ‘Eastern Question’, which meant supporting the Ottoman Empire against Russia, and against the furious opposition of Gladstone. The sarcastic Lord Salisbury (the former Lord Cranborne, who had never trusted Disraeli) said in the Lords:

Whatever the Empire of Russia may be, there is no doubt whatever as to what the frontier of British India is. It is perfectly well known. I cannot help thinking that in discussions of this kind, a great deal of misapprehension arises from the popular use of maps on a small scale. As with such maps you are able to put a thumb on India and a finger on Russia, some persons at once think that the political situation is alarming and that India must be looked to. If the noble Lord would use a larger map—say one on the scale of the Ordnance Map of England—he would find that the distance between Russia and British India is not to be measured by the finger and thumb, but by a rule. (Hansard 11.06.77)

40This did not prevent Salisbury from becoming Foreign Secretary the following year, succeeding Disraeli as Tory leader in 1881, and pushing Tory imperialism to its most successful phase (see, e.g., Pugh 1985).

41Disraeli took deep and manipulative interest in the wish of Queen Victoria to become an Empress. Through the mouth of Coningsby, he had said in 1844: ‘the only power that has no class sympathy is the Sovereign’ (Disraeli 1844, III, 99). Young Benjamin Disraeli wanted an enlightened monarchy, a dream which he admitted took a dent with the death of the Prince Consort (Richmond and Smith 1999, 173). Victoria in the 1870s was neither enlightened nor classless, but she was putty in Disraeli’s hands. Initially she wanted to be Empress of the whole British Empire, but Disraeli tactfully steered her towards the title of ‘Empress of India’, while writing sardonically to one of his ministers that ‘The Empress-Queen demands her Imperial Crown’ (D. to Cairns 07.01.76 in Buckle 1920, 457; D. to V. 11.01.76 and 21.01.76; Buckle 2014, 439‒40). She followed the progress of the Royal Titles Bill closely, rejoicing in herself and Disraeli and angrily attacking opponents of the bill (her Journal in Buckle 2014, 451‒52). She wrote, in the third person as she customarily did, ‘The Queen must insist on Empress of India as she has been constantly styled so + it suits Oriental ideas’ (QV to H Ponsonby, 19.2.76, in Taylor 2018, 168). The bill was enacted in April 1876, to the total surprise of the Secretary of State for India who knew nothing about it (Knight 493).

42Disraeli’s dealings with Victoria, as also with Peel, Derby, and Salisbury, show what an asset his reckless cynicism turned out to be, although it could have led to disaster. In 1846, Disraeli denied ever having asked Peel for a government job, although Peel had carried his letter of 1841 asking for just that into the Corn Law debates. Mystifyingly, Peel did not produce the smoking gun (McLean 2001, 60‒61). Neither Disraeli’s predecessor nor his successor as Tory leader trusted him, with good reason. In 1858 he leaked Derby’s draft Cabinet list to The Times (Hawkins 166). He almost certainly did it again in 1859, this time leaking the government’s Reform proposals, and came as near as he ever did to being sacked by Derby (Hawkins 205). His very recklessness is a key to his success. He was constantly looking for support wherever he could find it.

43Did Disraeli have any real ideology? Historians of thought are studying his political theory with more respect than they used to. There is a certain coherence in the views he expressed in the 1830s and 1840s (Disraeli 1835, 1844, 1845; P. Smith 1996; Richmond and Smith). Consistently, he regarded the Whigs as a remote oligarchy living off the wealth that their ancestors had despoiled from the monasteries in Tudor times. In 1832 he had run unsuccessfully against the son of Earl Grey of the Reform Act on the slogan ‘Grey and Reform: Disraeli and the People’. And he declared, ‘My politics are described by one word, and that is ENGLAND (Richmond and Smith 155, 160). The romanticized People of ENGLAND might include the Chartists and industrial workers of Sybil; but he mostly knew of them only through parliamentary Blue Books (Shrimpton ix). Once it became clear that he would not get a job in the Peel administration, he set himself and his friends up as the true Tories. Young England would uphold, against Whigs and Peelites alike, a purified aristocracy (of which Disraeli never became part); a wise monarchy (just conceivable until 1861); and a true state Church (which the self-made Jew had nominally joined). It was an oppositional, country party, ideology, drawing from the 18th-century theorist of opposition Lord Bolingbroke (Richmond and Smith). It was not capable of becoming an ideology of government.

44With Victoria, Disraeli’s recklessness was safer than with Peel, Derby, or Salisbury. She was too dim and narcissistic to realise how flagrantly he manipulated her—and boasted about it to his friends. What he really thought of his instrument is clear. As he reportedly said to Matthew Arnold in 1881, ‘Everyone likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel’ (Russell 224). It helped that Victoria, who never visited India, already described herself as Empress, having been egged on by one of her early Viceroys, Lord Ellenborough (Taylor 2004; Taylor 2018, 1, 168‒72).

45After arranging for the proclamation of Victoria as Empress of India, Disraeli wrote:

On Monday I go to Windsor to dine with the Empress of India . . . The Faery is so full of the great incident, and feels everything about it so keenly that she sent me an Xmas card and signed her good wishes Victoria Regina et Imperatrix. (D. to Lady Bradford, 28.12.1877 in Buckle 1920, 486)

46The young Victoria and Albert were Whig partisans who found Peel difficult. After 1866, the widow Victoria became a strong and intemperate Tory, who promoted Disraeli and Salisbury, and attempted to block Gladstone, at every turn. No longer held in check by Albert, she hated the concept of constitutional monarchy and preferred the role of imperial dynast (Taylor 2018, 1). Disraeli had her in the palm of his hand and made her the instrument of his final, successful, heresthetics, namely turning the Tory Party into the party of imperialism.

47The imperialism/anti-imperialism dimension facilitated the Conservative victories of 1874, 1886, 1895, and 1900. Although Disraeli started the reshaping of the Tory Party into the imperialist, and Unionist, party, Salisbury and his backroom supporters perfected it, notably through the Primrose League (Pugh). The League was named after Victoria’s (and/or Disraeli’s) favourite flower. Imperialism fell into a contradiction over Ireland, since it asserted that the people of Ireland must forever remain in the United Kingdom and Empire, a proposition which the majority of the Irish electorate continued to reject. This conundrum was not solved until 1921, and in Northern Ireland it is not yet solved.

48Disraeli never understood, and had little interest in, either Scotland or Ireland. If he believed throughout his life that his politics were described by the one word ENGLAND, these blind spots are explicable. Scotland could be reconciled to the Empire (in Salisbury’s time, not Disraeli’s), but Catholic Ireland never was. Disraeli’s successor-but-three, Andrew Bonar Law, made things much worse by yoking the Conservative Party to intransigent, paramilitary, Ulster Unionism (see, e.g., McLean 2010, 104‒27). That crisis was only resolved by the secession of most of Ireland in 1921. But Disraeli nevertheless deserves credit for his rescue of the Conservative Party from the blind alley of the landed interest.

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Iain McLean, « Successes and Failures of Benjamin Disraeli’s Rhetoric and Heresthetics: Corn Laws, Franchise, and Empire »Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 101 Printemps | 2025, mis en ligne le 10 avril 2025, consulté le 17 juin 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/15562 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/13qsy

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Iain McLean

Iain McLean is a professor of politics at Oxford University and a fellow of Nuffield College. Iain has worked in many areas of political history and political economy. In recent years he has focused on two areas: the political thought of the Scottish and American Enlightenments, and public policy in the UK. Within public policy, his focus has been on constitutional reform (including the nations of the UK and church-state relations) and on fiscal federalism.
Iain McLean est Professeur de politique à l’Université d’Oxford et Fellow de Nuffield College. Iain a travaillé dans de nombreux domaines de l’histoire politique et de l’économie politique. Ces dernières années, il s’est concentré sur deux domaines : la pensée politique à l’époque des Lumières écossaises et américaines et la politique publique au Royaume-Uni. Dans le domaine de la politique publique, il se concentre sur la réforme constitutionnelle (y compris les nations du Royaume-Uni et les relations Église-État) et sur le fédéralisme fiscal.

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