2 - The old radicalism and the new: David Urquhart and the politics of opposition, 1832–1867

Summary

Few enigmas have survived intact from as much study as David Urquhart (1805–77). Despite being the subject of a biography, a doctoral thesis and several monographs, it is still the eccentric side of Urquhart's character and the irrational and obsessive nature of his following which continue to constitute his chief historical significance. Studies of Urquhart himself have tended to concentrate on his Russophobia, his lifelong preoccupation with the ‘secret’ diplomacy of Lord Palmerston and his messianic aspirations towards leading an enlightened working class. Accounts of the movement which Urquhart inspired – the ‘working-men's’ foreign affairs committees of the 1850s – have faithfully reproduced this particular focus, emphasising, inter alia, their proliferation during the Crimean war, their doctrinal belief in Palmerston's diplomatic duplicity and their complete subservience to Urquhart's Tory demagoguery. In a few of these studies there has been some attempt to offer a more structural explanation for the Urquhart movement – as a response to the anomie of a ‘complex industrialising society’ (Salt); as a form of natural religion (Shannon); and, most persuasively, as an integral part of a backward-looking radicalism peculiar to the 1850s (Anderson). However, the overall effect has been one of isolation. Historical fashions come and go, yet Urquhart and the ‘working-men's’ foreign affairs committees remain a phenomenon set apart from and almost immune to the historiography of mid nineteenth-century England.

One of the main sources of this puzzle has been Urquhart himself.