Going out of office, in 1846, with the fall of the Peel ministry, Mr. Gladstone continued to occupy a prominent place in Parliament, acting with the group of Peelites, so called, who kept alive the name and principles of the lost leader. Though still accounted as of the Tory party, Mr. Gladstone's alert and open mind led him to make fresh and independent studies of current political questions and to decide them according to his own enlightened judgment. The result was to weaken by degrees the ties which bound him to the Tories and to knit more closely the bonds which were to unite his fortunes with the Liberals. In 1852, the Peelites having joined the Liberal coalition to overthrow the Derby-Disraeli ministry, Mr. Gladstone's services were rewarded with the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, in which office he delivered the first of the many budget speeches for which he was so celebrated. From 1855 to 1859 he was again out of office, and without party affiliations, "a roving iceberg," to use his own description. The latter year found him again at the head of the Exchequer, this time in the Liberal Cabinet of Lord Palmerston, where he served with distinction, becoming, in 1865, the leader of the House of Commons, when the death of Palmerston raised his colleague, Lord John Russell, to the premiership. With his chief--one of the heroes of the first successful struggle for parliamentary reform--he now drew up the Reform Bill of 1866 which was intended so to modify the qualifications for the franchise as to admit four hundred thousand new voters to the electorate. Though the government was defeated and went out of office on the question, the principle scored a singular victory, for in the following year Disraeli, bidding high for democratic support, carried by Tory votes an even more liberal measure of reform. By this bill, which some one called his "leap in the dark," Disraeli boasted that he had "dished the Whigs." The taunt was thrown at him which he had cast at Peel "that he had caught his opponents bathing and run off with their clothes." Rumor imputed to him the boast that by this move he had got the best of Gladstone and "would hold him down for twenty years," yet, within a twelvemonth, Gladstone had attacked and defeated the government in the Commons, and before the end of the next year was himself Prime Minister, backed by a powerful majority of the Reformed Parliament.