512Chapter 26
from domestic issues and aimed for British success in
foreign and colonial affairs.
Gladstone returned to his reform agenda in a sec-
ond ministry (1880–85) after shocking conservatives by
introducing campaigning to British politics; he toured
the nation and appealed directly to the voters. This
time Gladstone sought democratization and Irish home
rule. His Representation of the People Bill (1884) ex-
tended the vote in rural Britain and brought the king-
dom closer to the universal manhood suffrage that
existed in France and Germany (see table 26.1). Do-
mestic servants were still denied the vote, as were all
women.
The Irish question presented greater difficulties.
Home rule had become the objective of Irish politicians
in the 1870s when Isaac Butt, a lawyer and the son of a
Protestant clergyman, had formed a coalition of
Catholics and Protestants to seek it. When Butt’s move-
ment won the support of most Irish M.P.s in 1874, it
became the Irish Home Rule League. A few years later,
the league found a popular successor to Butt in Charles
Stewart Parnell, a Protestant landowner who had en-
tered Parliament in 1875 at twenty-nine. Parnell man-
aged to unite Irish nationalists, including the more
militant and republican Fenians; the British increased
his popularity by imprisoning him and watching while
he organized a farmers’ rent strike from his cell. Parnell
denounced revolutionary violence in 1882, after the as-
sassination in Dublin of the two leading cabinet mem-
bers for the government of Ireland, an act known as the
Phoenix Park murders. Parnell and his followers devel-
oped nonviolent tactics such as the boycott of uncoop-
erative landlords; the name of that tactic came from a
campaign in which no servants, no farm workers, no
shopkeepers, not even a postman would acknowledge
the existence of a landlord in County Mayo named
Charles Boycott.
Gladstone adopted the cause of home rule in 1886
and introduced the first Home Rule Bill with a three-
and-one-half-hour speech at the age of seventy-seven.
This issue shattered the Liberal Party. Ninety-two Lib-
eral M.P.s, led by the prominent Liberal spokesman of
the 1840s, John Bright, and Bright’s protégé, a wealthy
manufacturer from Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain,
left the party and formed their own faction, the Union-
ists. Gladstone strove to build a majority in favor of
home rule but suffered another setback when Irish
M.P.s were divided by a scandal over Parnell’s love affair
with the wife of another M.P. Gladstone defended Par-
nell, observing that “I have known eleven prime minis-
ters, ten of whom were adulterers,” but Parnell’s career,
and the chances for home rule, were ruined. Gladstone
obtained the prime ministry for the fourth time in- He introduced a second Home Rule Bill a few
months later (1893), and his Liberal majority carried it
through the House of Commons. A decade of debate,
however, had entrenched conservative opposition to
home rule. An aggressive Tory M.P. who had once led
the progressive wing of the party, Lord Randolph
Churchill, fought Gladstone under the slogan “Home
Rule Means Rome Rule.” This campaign encouraged re-
sistance in the Protestant population of northern Ire-
land, where militants warned that “Ulster will fight.”
Such passions led the conservative majority in the
House of Lords to crush the second Home Rule Bill,
419–41.
England and Wales Scotland Ireland United Kingdom
Percentage Percentage Percentage Percentage
Eligible of total Eligible of total Eligible of total Eligible of total
Year voters population voters population voters population voters population
1831 435,000 3.1 5,000 0.2 76,000 0.9 516,000 2.1
1833 656,000 3.5 64,000 2.7 92,000 1.2 812,000 3.4
1866 1,054,000 5.3 105,000 3.4 205,000 3.5 1,364,000 4.7
1868 1,960,000 9.8 236,000 7.7 222,000 3.8 2,418,000 8.4
1883 2,618,000 10.1 310,000 8.3 224,000 4.3 3,152,000 9.0
1885 4,380,000 16.9 551,000 14.7 738,000 14.3 5,669,000 16.3
Source: Compiled from data in Chris Cook and Brendan Keith, British Historical Facts, 1830–1900(London: MacMillan, 1975), pp. 115, 232–33.TABLE 26.1The Democratization of the British Electorate, 1831–86