Lord Randolph Resigns, December 1886, Part I
“He resigned.” Sir Winston Churchill has written of his father, “at the wrong time, on the wrong issue, and he made no attempt to rally support.” By Robert Rhodes James.
Great quarrels, it has been said, often arise from small occasions, but never from small causes. The Ministerial crisis that was precipitated on December 23rd, 1886, by the announcement of the resignation from Lord Salisbury’s second administration of Lord Randolph Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons, was a logical—indeed inevitable—outcome of the events of the previous four months.
In a longer perspective, it was the culmination of the struggle between Churchill and Salisbury for the leadership of the Tory party that had continued since the former had emerged as the champion of “Tory Democracy” in 1882.
The conflict between the two men had grown increasingly harsh since the accession of the Ministry in the August of 1886, when, relying upon the Parliamentary support of the Liberal Unionists, it had taken office on the morrow of the defeat of the first Gladstonian Home Rule Government at the hands of the electorate.
There was little in common between the Prime Minister and his brilliant but erratic lieutenant save perhaps in background.
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