Outline of Events

No sooner had Benjamin Disraeli savoured victory over William Gladstone with the passage of the 1867 Reform Act than he was confronted by a resurgent Gladstone formulating plans to heal the wounds of Ireland by disestablishing the Irish Church. Unable to resist a Liberal party reunited behind its leader, Disraeli called a general election – an election which saw Gladstone crush Disraeli's Conservatives and win a hundred-seat majority. The moment was assuredly propitious for the simultaneous apotheosis of those two great forces of the mid-Victorian age: liberal reformism and Gladstone's ethical vocation in the united form of ‘Gladstonian Liberalism’. Yet there in fact was the rub. In 1868 these two great rivers of energy converged, but they did not combine and within a few short years their courses were diverging again. At first Gladstone's government did great liberal work – reforming the civil service, the judiciary, the education system, Irish Church and Land, the armed services and local government. Yet each of these reforms, however meritorious, inflicted a series of cuts upon the body of the Liberal Party – cuts which by 1872 had become seriously debilitating. For the Liberal Party was a coalition of interest groups which, if they agreed on some matters, disagreed on still more. The legislation that emerged from this creative tension increasingly failed to satisfy the full range of Liberal interests. It also failed to satisfy Gladstone, who became more and more detached from the policies being implemented in his name. As the government's tribulations mounted, Disraeli, who had responded to defeat by writing a novel, stirred himself during 1872 to deliver a series of speeches lambasting the Liberals for their dysfunctional restlessness and weakness in international affairs, and staking out a new Tory rhetoric of social reform and imperial prestige. With pressure upon the government intensifying and Liberal divisions widening, the prime minister called a snap election in January 1874 on a platform of abolishing income tax. But far from uniting his party, he only heightened its disarray and played into the hands of Disraeli, who assumed the agreeable Palmerstonian pose of promising to restore Britain's reputation as a major power while bringing stability to a nation harassed by Liberal activism. The result was the first Conservative majority since 1841 and Gladstone's withdrawal from the Liberal leadership – for now.