ABSTRACT
The lost election of 1868 dispelled the remaining Tory illusions about the Reform Act of the previous year. It confirmed the Whig and Liberal hold on the electorate, broken so rarely since 1832. Gladstone, who had opposed household suffrage, was victorious. His popularity outside parliament gave him a position similar to that enjoyed by Palmerston. Over the next few years he dominated the Commons, holding cabinet and party together under the strain of one controversial piece of legislation after another. Disraeli, for all his parliamentary skills, was quite outclassed during the most brilliant period in his formidable rival’s career. The Tories’ dissatisfaction with their leader culminated in serious discussion of his replacement at a gathering of party notables before the session of 1872 opened. In the course of this political weekend at Burghley, Lord Cairns suggested to a representative selection of the last Tory cabinet, with the chief opposition whip, G.J.Noel, present, that Disraeli should make way for Derby, whose standing in the North West Noel thought might affect the outcome in as many as fifty constituencies at an election. The objections of Northcote and Lord John Manners, it seems, prevented any further steps in the matter for the time being.1 It was soon evident that the tide had started to run against Gladstone. In his own cabinet, fears persisted that the Irish Church and Land Acts had undermined the security of those great interests elsewhere. In Lady Derby’s drawing-room, his chancellor of the exchequer, Robert Lowe, forecast the emergence of Gladstone as “the reddest of the red”, once freed from the restraints that a cabinet imposed.2 The prediction revealed more about Lowe and the anxieties of some conservative Liberals than it did about Gladstone. The government’s decline was due rather to the reaction against a reforming administration that had exhausted its mandate. Disraeli was the beneficiary of this mood.
