ABSTRACT
The passage of the Second Reform Act was soon followed by the retirement of Lord John Russell and the succession of Gladstone to the Liberal leadership. The Parliamentary Liberal Party which thus came into existence in the 1860s bore all the marks of its origins. The meeting at Willis’s rooms, however, and the development of the Parliamentary Liberal Party, is only one side of the story of Liberalism in the 1860s. One of the major causes of Liberal disunity was the opposition of the nonconformists to Forster’s 1870 Education Act. The year 1873 was in fact a turning point in the history of the first Liberal administration. The origin of the Liberal Party is usually found in the famous meeting held in Willis’s rooms on 6 June 1859, when the Whig, Peelite and Radical leaders in Parliament, drawn together by a common sympathy with Italy, agreed to combine together to expel the minority Conservative government of Derby and Disraeli.
