High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Gladstone tried to keep his party together, because with its majority the bill would pass through the Commons if discipline were maintained. To avoid any charge that the irresponsible were being given the vote, Gladstone stressed how ‘there is not a call that has been made upon the self-improving powers of the working community which has not been fully answered.’19 He cited working men’s free libraries and institutes, which had grown up throughout the country, the high take-up of the services of the Post Office Savings Bank, which he himself had introduced in 1861 in the interests of thrift, and which now had 650,000 depositors. ‘Parliament has been striving to make the working classes progressively fitter and fitter for the franchise,’ he said, taunting his opponents; ‘and can anything be more unwise, not to say more senseless, than to persevere from year to year in this plan, and then blindly to refuse to recognize its legitimate upshot—namely, the increased fitness of the working classes; for the exercise of political power? The proper exercise of that power depends upon the fitness of those who are to receive it. That fitness you increase from day to day, and yet you decline, when the growing fitness is admitted, to give the power.’20

  Gladstone claimed that five-twelfths of the national income belonged to the working classes: and argued that if this disconnection between economic and political power was to continue, the burden of taxation should be shifted radically on to landed property. He also dismissed the notion that if the working classes were enfranchised they would vote as a class, reading out a letter from a self-professed working-class Tory who was bemused not to have the vote, and to be denied it by those he notionally supported.

  There were already eight seats where a majority of voters were members of the working classes. Between them they returned five Liberal and nine Conservative MPs. Gladstone observed, ironically, that this ‘revolutionary character’ was ‘the result, as far as our narrow experience goes, of having the working classes in the majority.’21 With his customary pragmatism, Gladstone ruled out a great transfer of power from the shires to the towns: an assurance aimed at gaining parliamentary support that further dismayed the League, who saw such a shift as democratically right and proper, given the greatly depopulated nature of the countryside.

  Henry Layard typified the moderate Liberal view, saying that, as Member for Southwark, he probably had more registered working-class voters than any other MP. It was self-evident that the working classes were not adequately represented, and discussion of matters affecting them would be far better informed and more useful if they were. On their supposed moral unfitness he suggested – in an obvious reference to Lowe – that those who dismissed the lower orders as susceptible to venality should admit that ‘until this House is prepared, until society itself is prepared, to condemn and punish him who corrupts, it has no right to condemn and punish him who is corrupted.’22 He concluded that if the franchise were extended the working classes ‘will give you even greater proofs than they have hitherto given of the love they bear to the Throne, the institutions, and the greatness of their country.’23

  Thornton Hunt of the Daily Telegraph – then the leading Liberal newspaper – wrote to Layard praising him for this speech, but echoed the residual fears of the educated classes:

  I cannot tell you how strong a sympathy I feel for the direct and earnest manner in which you speak out for our unenfranchised countrymen. I regard that voluntary fulfilment of the ‘patron’s’ duty, on behalf of the still excluded portion of the plebs, as an invaluable service to this country; not only expediting the day when the claimants shall be admitted, but sparing us the chance of violence, and possibly of bloodshed . . . there is no country in the world where every class can speak its mind and exercise its influence so openly and earnestly as in England; no country where there is so little practicable separation between the several classes, who are all dovetailed together by blood, marriage, and business connexions; none where the freedom of the individual is so absolutely secured; and none where social rank and personal influence enjoy a stronger sway over every class.24

  Lowe remained unaffected by such arguments. He said that what was proposed was ‘the government of the rich by the poor,’ which he found ‘utterly subversive’.25 He attacked Mill, prominent in his support of Gladstone, by quoting back a line of Mill’s from his Political Economy of 1852 about the ‘unprepared state of mankind in general, and of the labouring classes in particular; their extreme unfitness at present for any order of things which would make any considerable demand on either their intellect or their virtue.’26 He conceded that Mill might have changed his mind in the intervening fourteen years, but not that the labouring classes might have shown by example that they were more suited to responsibility. However, he quoted from On Representative Government, written just five years earlier, in which Mill had said that ‘I regard it as wholly inadmissible that any person should participate in the suffrage without being able to read, write and, I will add, perform the common operations of arithmetic. Universal teaching must precede universal enfranchisement.’

  Lowe feared that the organisation now to be found for industrial purposes among the trades union movement would be used for political purposes: as, indeed, it one day would. He made a powerful argument about unions being a weapon against capital, and a coercive force against those who exercised an individual right not to join them. This was not, however, so much an argument against extending the franchise as against the dangers of allowing unions to have unfettered powers, or what Lowe called a ‘system of terrorism that lurks behind these trades unions’.27 Talking of the sort of people the working class would be likely to send to Parliament to represent them, he adduced the example of America, then recovering from its ruinous Civil War. ‘We see in America, where the people have undisputed power, that they do not send honest, hardworking men to represent them in Congress, but traffickers in office, bankrupts, men who have lost their character and been driven from every respectable way of life, and who take up politics as a last resource.’28 He recalled that when France tried universal suffrage in 1848, the consequent administration had been overthrown in a coup d’état after three years. ‘Uncoerced by any external force, not borne down by any internal calamity, but in the full plethora of our wealth and the surfeit of our too exuberant prosperity, with our own rash and inconsiderate hands, we are about to pluck down on our own heads the venerable temple of our liberty and our glory. History may tell of other acts as signally disastrous, but of none more wanton, none more disgraceful.’29

  Disraeli was careful not to express outright hostility to reform. Such opposition would have done incalculable damage to his party and left him with no room for manoeuvre, room he would subsequently need. Instead, he criticised the speed with which the legislation had been brought forward, its poor draughtsmanship, the unknown quantity of the redistribution bill. ‘The course they are going to pursue is most unjust and injurious to the landed interest—that is to say, to England, because I say the legitimate interest of the land is the interest of England.’30 He uttered phrases that would return to haunt him within a year or so, when he pushed through his own measures. Some showed an unbroken thread of thought going back to Young England.

  The moment you have universal suffrage it always happens that the man who elects despises the elected. He says, ‘I am as good as he is, and although I sent him to Parliament, I have not a better opinion of him than I have of myself.’ Then, when the House of Commons is entirely without command over the Executive, it will fall into the case of those Continental popular assemblies which we have seen rise up and disappear in our own days. There will be no charm of tradition; no prescriptive spell; no families of historic lineage; none of those great estates round which men rally when liberty is assailed; no statesmanship, no eloquence, no learning, no genius. Instead of these, you will have a horde of selfish and obscure mediocrities, incapable of anything but mischief, and that mischief devised and regulated by the raging demagogue of the hour.31

  The result would be
a rebuilding of the constitution ‘on the American model’.32

  Disraeli, as always, was most concerned with his own place and his own prospects. Gladstone’s views were, by contrast, suffused with a sense of history and of destiny. ‘We are now about the process what is called “making History”. We are now laying the foundations of much that is to come. This occasion is a starting-point from which I presume to think the career we have to run as individuals and parties will in many respects take its character and colour.’33 He continued: ‘Let us try and raise our views above the fears, the suspicions, the jealousies, the reproaches, and the recriminations of this place and this occasion. Let us look onward to the time of our children and of our children’s children. Let us know what preparation it behoves us should be made for that coming time. Is there or is there not, I ask, a steady movement of the labouring classes, and is or is not that movement a movement onwards, and upwards? . . . from day to day, from hour to hour, the heaving forces are at work, and after a season we discern from actual experience that things are not as they were.’34

  His peroration, quoting a provocative line from the Aeneid, represented not only his finest oratory, but also a sense of destiny that, whatever the present tribulations, would be fulfilled.

  Perhaps the great division of to-night is not the last that must take place in the struggle. At some point of the contest you may possibly succeed. You may drive us from our seats. You may bury the Bill that we have introduced, but we will write upon its gravestone for an epitaph this line, with certain confidence in its fulfilment—Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor [May you arise from our bones, you unknown avenger]. You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side. The great social forces which move onwards in their might and majesty, and which the tumult of our debates does not for a moment impede or disturb—those great social forces are against you; they are marshalled on our side; and the banner which we now carry in this fight, though perhaps at some moment it may droop over our sinking heads, yet it soon again will float in the eye of heaven, and it will be borne by the firm hands of the united people of the three kingdoms, perhaps not to an easy, but to a certain and to a not distant victory.35

  The bill had its second reading by five votes: 318 to 313. Lowe persuaded thirty-one other Liberals to vote with him, and so almost defeat the government. He regarded this as a great triumph. At four o’clock in the morning Gladstone had tea with colleagues in the Commons’ dining room, wrote to the Queen, and had three hours’ sleep. With such a narrow margin, he and Russell now had no choice but to consider a compromise.

  III

  After his sleep Gladstone wrote some letters, did some reading, and saw some people, including Hunt of the Telegraph. At 1.30 p.m. there was a three-hour Cabinet meeting, at which it was discussed whether the ministry should resign: it had expected victory by fifteen votes. However, Russell and Gladstone hoped the opposition was ‘disjointed’, and could be divided further.36 On 7 May Gladstone brought in a bill to propose a redistribution of seats. It passed its second reading without a vote, though provoked bickering about where the new seats were going. The Reform Bill went into committee on 28 May, and the government was defeated on an amendment to restrict bribery and corruption. Gladstone argued against the amendment because he felt it complicated the principle of reform, and should be taken separately. The defeat, by 248 votes to 238, he described as the culmination of ‘an ominous evening’.37 The committee spent several days on the redistribution of seats, a debate that included another mordant speech by Lowe that seemed further to demoralise his party. On the third day in committee – 1 June – Gladstone indicated that the session of Parliament would, if necessary, be extended into the autumn so long as it took to get the bill enacted: he feared the Adullamites and the Conservatives planned to talk it out.

  The denouement came in the early hours of 19 June, when the government was defeated on a technical motion by the Adullamite Lord Dunkellin. Gladstone warned that an adverse vote would mean the government would have to resign. It lost by 315 votes to 304, 42 Liberals voting with the Opposition. Gladstone was not impressed by the spectacle: ‘With the cheering of the adversary there was shouting, violent flourishing hats, and other manifestations which I think novel and inappropriate.’38 Next morning, having written to the Queen, he found solace in the works of Cobden, which he read for a while. The Cabinet met at 3 p.m. and decided to resign, even though the Queen, to whom this course had been intimated, telegraphed from Balmoral asking them not to. She refused to leave Scotland in the hope that Russell would carry on. The House was adjourned pending more communication with the Sovereign. The Cabinet had included a minority (notably Russell and Gladstone) who wanted a dissolution, which would mean the matter would be put to the country. A larger faction wanted resignation, to hand the problem to Derby and Disraeli, to see what they made of it. This was the better plan, since it would force a reform measure of a sort uncontemplated by the Liberals in its radicalism, and help assure the election of the first Gladstone ministry in 1868.

  The Queen returned to Windsor, and saw Russell and Gladstone there on 26 June. Gladstone admitted that ‘I have had a great weight on me in these last days and am glad the matter draws near its close.’39 When the audiences occurred – he and Russell had them jointly and separately – he found the Sovereign ‘showed every quality required by her station and the time’. At Gladstone’s audience there occurred the sort of episode that made the Queen loathe him. She was unhappy that the government, which she wished to continue, had not withdrawn the bill, or postponed the matter ‘to another year’ (which year exactly she did not specify).40 ‘I reminded HM’, Gladstone wrote, ‘that She had early expressed to me her hope that if we resumed the subject of the Reform of Parliament we should prosecute it to its completion.’ The Queen did not like being reminded of her caprice or inconsistency, whereas Gladstone’s ultra-logical mind could not help but do so.

  She asked both men to go to London, meet the Cabinet, and see whether some course other than resignation might be practicable. They followed her command, but the Cabinet felt it had no alternative. A telegram was sent to the Queen, and Gladstone made a statement to the Commons. A crowd thronged around Westminster, and Gladstone was hailed as the champion of the ordinary man. He explained to the House the impossibility of having a rating rather than a rental franchise, saying that in five boroughs it would have meant enfranchising people with less than a £4 rateable value, for the government to enfranchise the numbers it had intended. Then, able to relax at last, Gladstone went to dinner, looked in at a ball, and ended the day with rescue work of two prostitutes.41

  IV

  Derby accepted the Queen’s commission to form a government on 27 June 1866, with Disraeli leading in the Commons. The latter had hoped to be Foreign Secretary, but Derby gave that post to his son, Lord Stanley. Clarendon, the outgoing incumbent, was relieved. Stanley was ‘an immeasurably better man than Disraeli, who coveted this office in the exact ratio of his unfitness for it.’42 There had been a brief dalliance with the Adullamites over a formal coalition, until it became clear they wished to choose both the Prime Minister (Clarendon) and the Leader of the Commons (Stanley); at which point Derby, with Disraeli’s full support, bade them farewell. The Queen wanted some Whigs to serve, and Derby sought to indulge her. However, Clarendon refused the Foreign Office, and Lowe declined a place in the Cabinet, and soon it was clear no Adullamite would serve.

  The new ministry was formed against a background of widespread unrest. The League organised demonstrations, the most important of which was in London, and culminated in a riot in Hyde Park. On 29 June, while Derby was trying to form his ministry, 10,000 people marched from Trafalgar Square to the Carlton Club, to hoot at those who had killed Gladstone’s bill. The previous evening a crowd had assembled outside his house in Carlton House Terrace to cheer him and Mrs Gladstone. The London Working Men’s Association unanimously invited him to address a meeting they intended to hold, thanking
him for ‘his manly and generous defence of the working classes from the calumnies heaped upon them during the Reform debate . . . by members of the Tory party and apostate Liberals’.43

  Fearing a breakdown of public order, the police tried to ban the Hyde Park meeting. On 18 July, five days before it, Sir Richard Mayne, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, told Beales that it ‘cannot be permitted’.44 He acted on Derby’s authority.45 Mayne trusted that Beales, whose name was mentioned in the posters advertising the rally, ‘will exert his influence to prevent any attempt to hold this meeting’. Beales replied, thanking Mayne for his ‘courtesy’, but told him that ‘I am unable at present to recognise your power or right to issue any such notice, or to take upon yourself to declare that the meeting cannot be permitted.’ He demanded Mayne show him ‘under what statute or law, or principle of law, you are acting, for I am at present ignorant of any law or statute empowering or authorising you thus to attempt to prohibit the people from exercising one of their most important and most constitutional rights.’