BRITISH CONSERVATISM AND THE PRIMROSE LEAGUE ... - ideals

This chapter will focus on two principal areas: the political
circumstances which contributed to the formation of the Primrose League
12
and the organizational
growth and development.
features characteristic of the association's
The increased role accorded Salisbury and
official party leaders over the operations of the League by the end of
1884 will also be addressed.
The Primrose League was an outgrowth of the political
transformations influencing late Victorian society.
The reforms of
1832 and 1867 had succeeded in gradually expanding the male electorate
to include members of the middle class and a significant portion of the
urban working class.1
However, the basis of power in mid-Victorian
society had not fundamentally altered. 2
The aristocracy still
continued to dominate the political and social
institutions in the
1
The 1832 Reform Act, traditionally viewed as having extended
the franchise to the urban middle class, only increased the United
Kingdom electorate from 435,000 to 813,000 in an adult male population
of approximately six million. The limited nature of the reform was
reinforced by the overwhelming representation of seats in the counties
and small boroughs where aristocratic influence was predominant.
Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1969), pp. 313-14. The principal beneficiaries of the
1867 Act were urban male workers who paid an annual rent of ten pounds
or above. Approximately sixty-three to sixty-six percent of adult men
were thereby made eligible to vote. Martin Pugh, The Making of Modern
British Politics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982), p. 5. The
legislation effectively added 938,000 voters to an electorate of
1,056,000 in England and Wales. Perkin, p. 318.
2
H.J. Hanham, Elections and Party Management (Hassocks:
Harvester Press, 1978), p. xviii; a reprint of the 1959 Longmans, Green
and Company edition. F.M.L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the
Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1980), pp. 1-2,
48, 62-63; a reprint of the 1963 edition. W.L. Guttsman, The British
Political Elite (New York: Basic Books, 1963), pp. 60, 74, 82-83, 89­
90. David Cannadine, Lords and Landlords (Leicester: Leicester
University Press, 1980), pp. 21-25.