ABSTRACT
The brief reign of Edward VII, from 1901 to 1910, was, politically speaking, a time of transition: recognisably Victorian in certain respects; in others suggesting more clearly the shape of things to come. The sense of change was partly symbolic. The death of Queen Victoria in 1901, at the beginning of a new century, was bracketed by the passing of two giants of the late Victorian political scene: Gladstone in 1898 and Lord Salisbury in 1903, the latter shortly after his resignation of the premiership the previous year. More substantively, at the general election of 1906, twenty years of Unionist supremacy were brought to an end in the Liberal landslide and the Labour party made its first significant breakthrough as a parliamentary force. But there was continuity as well as change. New issues – social welfare, tariffs, the problems of imperial and national defence – were coming to the fore, but older controversies – over religious education, Ireland or the House of Lords – still exerted a pull. The political structures of Edwardian Britain, though undergoing internal modification and responding to external pressure, were essentially those that had evolved in the course of the nineteenth century. The parliamentary and electoral conflicts of the Edwardian period represented a final flourishing of the late Victorian party system before it was plunged into a crisis of deepening severity after 1910. In order to understand the origins and nature of that crisis it is necessary first to examine the workings of the Edwardian political system in more detail, to consider the previous history of the Edwardian political parties and to survey the main trends of party politics prior to the two general elections of 1910 and the more serious conflicts of 1910-14.
