Liverpool, a veritable stronghold of popular Toryism for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, stands apart from the mainstream narrative of Conservative party history. Caradog Jones was struck by the ‘independence’ of Liverpool Toryism and the absence of national party leaders among its representatives: ‘It is remarkable that few eminent members of the Tory and Conservative parties have ever sat for a city so staunch in its adherence to those faiths’. Beneath the national leaders, personalities and politicians, the electoral success of popular Toryism depended on the organisational and rhetorical skills of ‘culture-brokers’, political activists who could forge alliances among heterogeneous (but exclusively male) social groups, adjusting the language according to audience and context. No study of popular Toryism in Liverpool can ignore the demagogic oratory – ‘eloquent even beyond Irish eloquence, Protestant even beyond Irish Protestantism’ – of the Rev. Hugh McNeile and his ‘Irish Brigade’ of stridently sectarian Ulster in-migrant Protestant preachers. However, I want to draw attention to a less dynamic and more prolix orator, Samuel Holme – or Samivel Loquitur as he was known in the satirical press – a local builder and first president of the Liverpool Tradesmen's Conservative Association. A talented organiser, Holme helped to construct a popular Tory identity based not only on Protestantism but also on protectionism, on a progressive ‘one nation’ philosophy sensitive to material circumstances and needs. It was a tribute to Holme's efforts that temporary perception about material advantage was transformed into lasting political habit, producing what John Vincent has described as the deepest and most enduring Tory ‘deviation’ among Victorian workers.

Liverpool was an unlikely site for popular Toryism. A commercial seaport with a large casual labour market and proliferation of ‘pitch-pot’ masters, it lacked the large manufacturing plants in which Tory employer paternalism was to flourish best: ‘In Liverpool, almost alone amongst the provincial cities of the kingdom, the intercourse between masters and men, between employers and employed, ceases on payment of wages’. As a freeman borough, however, it possessed a pattern of liberties and endowments which sustained the Tory allegiance of riverside artisan trades, a continuous alignment from the early years of George III, perhaps best explained in terms of ‘the autonomy of the political’.