ABSTRACT
The Conservative split on the Corn Law question was attended with exceptional bitterness, sometimes even within families. Party politics, which had seemed so ordered in the late 1830s and early 1840s, lapsed into confusion. Robert Peel, out of office from 1846, did not help. He refused to lead any party of Peelites – or any other grouping – and took upon himself the awkward role of 'a non-party statesman in a party parliamentary system'. Between 1846 and 1859, the steady work of grass-roots party organisation continued and local issues still generated fervent two-party debate. Peel's Indian summer had predictably unsettling consequences. Russell's government was a typical Whig confection of interrelated great families. Though Lord John Russell's party was in no worse case than its opponents, its good fortune could not indefinitely run ahead of its manifest mediocrity. Russell and Palmerston, though they disliked one another, disliked opposition more, and knew that their protracted feud was harming the Whig cause.
