When then-Liberal Party Leader, William Gladstone, decided to support the creation of a devolved parliament for Ireland after the election of 1885, fateÂfully splitting his party, a firestorm of debate ensued.
Could the Irish be trusted to govern themselves justly? Would Westminster remain sovereign over the new Irish parliament? Was it even legal to create a separate parliament for IreÂland? These questions captured the attention of Victorian Britain’s best and brightest, who for all their disagreements generally agreed that home rule imÂplicated the constitutional essence of the Kingdom and the unity of the EmÂpire.
For all this importance, this subject still manages to fall through the gaps created by contemporary disciplinary lines. Still the most thorough treatment of the home rule crisis, Cooke and Vincent’s The Governing Passion (1974) was in fact meant to exemplify the so-called â€?high politics’ approach to political history that focused on internal parliamentary machinations as the pertinent locale of political activity rather than public campaigns and parliamentary speeches.[1165] Accordingly, Cooke and Vincent disregard the extensive debate carÂried out in parliament, periodicals, and pamphlets over the weighty constituÂtional implications of home Rule: all this was a sideshow. The two intellectual heavyweights on the Unionist and home rule sides, Albert Venn Dicey and James Bryce - the subject of this paper - received no treatment. It was ChristoÂpher Harvie, writing two years later, who turned attention to Bryce and Dicey, although by taking Cooke and Vincent’s revisionist account as his starting point Harvie created a problem for himself: if the ideological campaign for home rule was an â€?amateur sideshow’ that had no bearing on the genesis and ultimate fate of the home rule bill, then how was it to be explained?[1166] Most, heKoninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2020 | Doi:io.ii63/978900443i249_oi8
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claims, were �agnostic about Home Rule as such’ but had loyalties to �external political groups’ that informed the positions they took.[1167] Bryce, for example, is said to have supported Gladstone in the hopes of gaining a seat in government and to please his American friends, having long been hopeful of an �Anglo- American entente’.
Constrained by these commitments, Bryce’s arguments for home rule, according to Harvie, were naturally incoherent: it was only â€?out of despair’ that he assumed his â€?lonely, pessimistic, constitutionally illogical supÂport for Gladstone’s policy’.[1168]The methodological pre-commitment against ideology came under fierce attack, famously, by Quentin Skinner in the 1960s and 70s. In an essay on Bolingbroke, Skinner repudiates Lewis Namier’s assumption that, because poÂlitical actors are motivated solely by the desire for power, their ideological utÂterances are epiphenomenal and therefore irrelevant. Like the â€?high politics’ school of Cooke and Vincent, â€?Namierism’ was not wrong in a fundamental way: Skinner grants the premise about motive but suggests that it does not bear the conclusion that ideology is irrelevant.[1169] Rather, linguistic and ideologiÂcal norms determine the range of acceptable argumentative strategies for a given course of political action, and the intellectual historian’s job is to explain how actors navigate these constraints, conditioned as they often are by the inÂtellectual traditions of which they are a part. Skinner’s intervention, alongside the resonant critiques of John Dunn and J.G.A. Pocock, revolutionized the study of early modern political thought and to a lesser extent that of the nineÂteenth century.
The so-called �imperial turn’ of the last twenty-five years or so represents a renewal of attention to the ideology of British politics in the nineteenth cen- tury.[1170] Even among historians of nineteenth-century political thought working in a more Skinnerian Weltbild, however, the constitutional debate over Irish home rule is still neglected.[1171] For one, it is not straightforwardly an imperial topic. Ireland had a liminal status between kingdom and empire, formally part of the United Kingdom but with many marks of a colony including a distinct ethnicity, a distinct albeit increasingly disused language, its own religion, and a comparatively underdeveloped agrarian economy.
Furthermore, in its most substantive dimension it is not straightforwardly a topic of political as opposed to legal thought.[1172] [1173] One of the goals of this chapter is therefore to demÂonstrate that the distinction between the legal and the political can be unhelpÂful when studying certain periods, especially in the British context where parÂliamentary sovereignty makes constitutional law a matter of politics.This chapter will broaden the scholarly perspective on Gladstone’s home rule campaign by focusing on its intellectual and jurisprudential dimensions. What Colin Reid has recently done for the home rule controversy during the revolutionary period, focusing on the Irish debates, this chapter will attempt for the earlier home rule controversy, focusing on the English debates.[1174] Spe- cifically,James Bryce’sjustification of Gladstone’s Irish home rule scheme - developing a conceptualisation of constitutional flexibility by calling upon his own jurisprudential scholarship as Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford - is brought into view here. By arguing for the importance of moral character in flexible constitutions, Bryce relies upon a specific reading of Roman constituÂtional history. Just as his political arguments cannot be understood apart from his jurisprudential scholarship, it is argued here that the latter, in turn, must be read in light of his historical thought, particularly given the influence upon Bryce of E.A. Freeman’s idea of the â€?unity of history’ and the legacy of Rome in European history. This chapter suggests that, insofar as the disciplinary boundÂaries between law, politics, and history were porous in Victorian Britain, thereÂfore the study of political and legal thought cannot be isolated from the study of historiography.
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