On May 15 Mr. Gladstone announced ... that they proposed to continue what he described as certain clauses of a valuable and equitable description in the existing Coercion Act.
No Parliamentary situation could be more tempting to an astute Opposition. The signs that the Cabinet was not united were unmistakable.... The key to an operation that should at once, with the aid of the disaffected Liberals and the Irish, turn out Mr. Gladstone and secure the English elections, was an understanding with Mr. Parnell.... Lord Salisbury and his confidential friends had resolved [previous to the defeat of the Government], subject to official information, to drop coercion, and the only visible reason why they should form the resolution at that particular moment was its probable effect upon Mr. Parnell. [Meanwhile] the policy of the Central Board [for Ireland], of which Mr. Gladstone so decisively approved, had been killed.... When it came to the full Cabinet it could not be carried. [June 6. Government defeated on an amendment to the Budget by 264 to 252.] The defeat of the Gladstone Government was the first success of a combination between Tories and Irish that proved of cardinal importance to policies and parties for several critical months to come.... The new Government were not content with renouncing coercion for the present. They cast off all responsibility for its practice in the past.... In July a singular incident occurred, nothing less strange than an interview between the new Lord-Lieutenant [Lord Carnarvon] and the leader of the Irish party. To realize its full significance we have to recall the profound odium that at this time enveloped Mr. Parnell's name in the minds of nearly all Englishmen.... The transaction had consequences, and the Carnarvon episode was a pivot. The effect on the mind of Mr. Parnell was easy to foresee.... Why should he not believe that the alliance formed in June ... had really blossomed from a mere lobby manœuvre and election expedient into a policy adopted by serious statesmen?
[In Midlothian, on November 9, Mr. Gladstone said:] "It will be a vital danger to the country and to the empire, if at a time when a demand from Ireland for larger powers of self-government is to be dealt with, there is not in Parliament a party totally independent of the Irish vote." ... Mr. Gladstone's cardinal deliverance in November had been preceded by an important event. On October 7, 1885, Lord Salisbury made that speech at Newport which is one of the tallest and most striking landmarks in the shifting sands of this controversy.... Some of the more astute of the Minister's own colleagues were delighted with his speech, as keeping the Irishmen steady to the Tory party.... The question on which side the Irish vote in Great Britain should be thrown seems not to have been decided until after Mr. Gladstone's speech. It was then speedily settled. On November 21 a manifesto was issued, handing over the Irish vote in Great Britain solid to the orator of the Newport speech. The tactics were obvious. It was Mr. Parnell's interest to bring the two contending British parties as near as might be to a level, and this he could only hope to do by throwing his strength upon the weaker side. It was from the weaker side, if they could be maintained in office, that he would get the best terms.... Some estimated the loss to the Liberal party in this island at twenty seats, others at forty. Whether twenty or forty, these lost seats made a fatal difference in the division on the Irish Bill a few months later.... But this was not all, and was not the worst of it.... Passions were roused, and things were said about Irishmen that could not at once be forgotten; and the great task of conversion in 1886, difficult in any case, was made a thousand times more difficult still by the antipathies of the electoral battle of 1885. Meanwhile it was for the moment, and for the purposes of the moment, a striking success.
[THE NEW ELECTORATE (1885).]
Source.—The Times, December 11.
From a carefully prepared statistical abstract of the election it appears that in the English counties, out of a total electorate of 2,303,133 voters, 1,937,988 votes were recorded, in the proportion of 1,020,774 Liberal votes to 916,314 Conservative.