V. Free Fooders, Balfourites, Whole Hoggers. Factionalism within the Unionist Party, 1906–10

Abstract

The unity of the Unionist party had been destroyed by Joseph Chamberlain's momentous speech at Birmingham on 15 May 1903, a speech described by one of his disciples as ‘a challenge to free thought as direct and provocative as the theses which Luther nailed to the church door at Wittenberg’. It was a particularly apt simile. Chamberlain's speech demanded a new Reformation and men soon found themselves ‘hating Free Trade with all the intensity with which any Calvinist ever hated the Church of Rome’.