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Lord John Russell, speaking in the 1835 debate, said the House of Commons was under no obligation in a new Parliament to re-elect the Speaker, unless he had won for himself the confidence and esteem not of his own Party alone, but of the general body of Members. Even so, no attempt has since been made to depose a Speaker on Party grounds, even when a General Election has upset the balance of Parties in the House of Commons. On the retirement of Abercromby in May 1839, the Whigs, being still in office, nominated Charles Shaw-Lefevre; the Tories ran Henry Goulburn, and the former was elected by a majority of 18, or by 317 votes against 299. The General Election of 1841 resulted in a change of Government. The Melbourne Administration, which elected Shaw-Lefevre to the Chair, was overthrown at the polls, and the Tories came back with a large majority. Many of the victors in the electoral contest were disposed to follow the example set by their opponents in 1835, and make a Party question of the Speakership of the new Parliament. But their leader and Prime Minister, Sir Robert Peel, refused to countenance this line of action. “I do not think it necessary,” said he, in a speech supporting the re-election of Shaw-Lefevre in August 1841, “that the person elected to the Chair, who has ably and conscientiously performed his duty, should be displaced because his political opinions are not consonant with those of the majority of the House.” The re-election of Shaw-Lefevre was, accordingly, unanimous. Peel’s wise view of the Speakership has since prevailed. The continuity of the office has not been broken since the dismissal of Manners-Sutton in 1835. John Evelyn Denison was unanimously chosen to succeed Shaw-Lefevre in 1857, Henry Bouverie Brand to succeed Denison in 1872, and Arthur Wellesley Peel to succeed Brand in 1884. The Whigs, or Liberals, were in office on each occasion that the Speakership became vacant by resignation in those years. And the Conservatives, on their return to power, reappointed Denison in 1866, Brand in 1874, and Peel in 1886.
The circumstances attending the election of William Court Gully as Speaker gave both to the principle that the Chair is above the strife and the prejudices of Party, and the precedent of its occupant’s continuity of office, an accession of strength which perhaps makes them stable and decisive for all time. Gully had sat in the House as a Liberal for ten years when, on the retirement of Peel in May 1895, he was nominated for the Chair by the Liberal Government. The Unionist Opposition proposed Sir Matthew White Ridley, a highly respected member of their Party, and a man of long and varied experience in parliamentary affairs. On a division Gully was elected by the narrow majority of 11. The voting was: Gully, 285; White Ridley, 274. It was publicly declared at the time that, as the Unionists had disapproved the candidature of Gully, they held themselves free to put a nominee of their own in the Chair should they have a majority in the next new Parliament. A few weeks later the Liberal Government was defeated in the House of Commons, and a dissolution followed. It is the custom to allow the Speaker a walk-over in his constituency at the General Election. But Gully’s seat at Carlisle was on this occasion contested, and his Unionist opponent received from Arthur Balfour, then Leader of the Unionist Party, a letter warmly endorsing his candidature and wishing him success. In his address to the constituents Gully made no reference to politics. As Speaker of the House of Commons, he could have nothing to say to Party controversy. Like his predecessors, he recognized that a Speaker cannot descend into the rough strife of the electoral battle, not even to canvass the electors, without impairing the independence and the dignity of the Chair of the House of Commons. The contest ended in his re-election by a substantial majority.
The Unionists came back triumphant from the country. There was still a feeling in the Party, though not, indeed, prevailing to any wide extent, that the Speaker of the new Parliament should be chosen from its ranks. It was pointed out that for sixty years there had not been a Conservative Speaker—Manners-Sutton having been the last—and, apart altogether from the legitimate ambition of the Conservatives to have a Speaker of their own way of thinking, it was argued that in building up the body of precedents which guide, if they do not control, the duties of the Chair, Conservative opinion ought to have its proper share, if these precedents are truly to reflect the sense of the House generally. But tradition and practice in the House of Commons were too powerful to be overborne. At the meeting of the new Parliament, in August 1895, Gully was unanimously re-elected to the Chair. The aloofness and supremacy of the Speakership has one fine effect. It gives to the House, despite its Party divisions, an ennobling sense of national unity.