V - The destruction of Liberal unity

Summary

‘If the government stand or fall by dual voting, they and their bill are doomed; but I fear, when it comes to the point, they will conform to the Jew's opinion in all things…and yield to [his] arguments for the sake of keeping the party together.’

Sir Rainald Knightley to Cranborne, n.d. [but March 1867]. Salisbury MSS

THE ESTABLISHING OF THE CONSERVATIVE BILL

The policy of March 2 was adopted because no other policy was available, because dependence on the Whigs and the Cave was to be rejected, and because the ‘unenviable and humiliating position’ in which the Conservative party found itself made it seem so ‘contemptible’ that it had to make the bravest show possible. Nevertheless it transformed the situation. The outcome of the events it set in motion was victory over Gladstone, not so much on the second reading of the bill, though that passed without a division on March 26, but in the Tea-Room revolt of April 8, in the withdrawal without a division of the second half of Coleridge's Instruction on going into committee on April 10, and in the defeat of Gladstone's first amendment to clause 3 of the bill on April 12, when the split which had been threatened, and averted, in the Conservative party was carried to the point of actuality in the Liberal party and the Cave. The question we have to ask is: how did this happen?