How important was Gladstone to the success of the Liberal Party up to 1865?

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How important was Gladstone to the success of the Liberal Party up to 1865?

Naturally, Gladstone made an important contribution to the Liberal Party’s maintaining power in his role as the Chancellor of the Exchequer.  However, Gladstone was not the only factor that contributed to this success.  The weakness of the Conservative Party certainly aided the Liberal Party in that there was no viable alternative to replace it as the ruling party.  In addition to this, Palmerston’s leadership and popularity is doubtlessly an extremely important part of the Party’s success.  Finally, the changing social forces of the time added to the popularity of the Liberal Party through such changes as the rise of the provincial press and non-conformism.

John Vincent argues that the success of the Liberal Party up to 1865 was due to the changing social forces of the time.  The Party had gained a reputation for more industrialist frontbenchers, due to such characters as Cobden and Bright and also its faction of radicals, and was therefore gained popularity with trade unions and the middle and working classes.  Although, though this may have been the reputation, in reality over forty per cent of Liberal MPs were landowners and over a quarter were relations of peers.  However, those MPs who were more like the archetypal northern industrialist would often achieve much greater political and social eminence.  There was, in addition to this, the reputation of the Liberal Party having a much more tolerant religious stance and was therefore appealing to the growing non-conformism in Britain, an 1851 census had revealed that over fifty percent of the church-going population was non-conformist.  This reputation therefore gained the Liberals a powerful support base – even though, once again, this reputation was mostly unfounded as an overwhelming majority of MPs were Anglican and the second largest group in the Liberal Party was the Catholics.  Another important part of the generation of support for the Liberal Party was the rise of the provincial press, such as the Mercury in Leeds.  These papers often took a Liberal stance due to them being made possible by Gladstone’s repeal of the paper duties.  These papers again motivated support for the Liberal Party from the working class, which was gradually getting more power due to continuing parliamentary reform.  Therefore, the changing social forces of the time were most certainly important in generating support for the Liberal Party and therefore in contributing to its success, though these were also affected by outside factors – not least by Gladstone’s general appeal to the masses.

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Of course it is natural to argue that Gladstone’s contribution to the success of the Liberal Party was an important one.  As Chancellor of the Exchequer, he brought in such popular policies as the repeal of the ‘tax on knowledge’ and Post Office savings.  Meritocracy was also promoted through such actions as the creation of the Public Accounts Committee.  All of these policies were naturally popular with the masses and not only generated support for the Liberal Party but gave it the reputation of being a Party of good financiers and efficient administrators.  More support was also generated through ...

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