High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Most MPs – all indeed except the Cabinet and Gladstone’s intimates – only heard of the dissolution when they read of it in their newspapers on Saturday 24 January, after more than five months of recess. ‘It was at first believed to be a hoax,’ wrote Richard Cross, who was staying at Knowsley with the Earl and Countess of Derby and was brought the news over his breakfast by his hostess.6 The Duke of Devonshire, who also read it in The Times, was furious, believing Gladstone – one of his oldest political friends – should have taken him into his confidence.

  The Tories regarded Gladstone’s plan to abolish the income tax as a bribe to voters, and one to be paid for by a sacrifice of national security. It seemed especially to bribe the newly enfranchised classes, who had understood hitherto that taxation went with their privilege of representation. However, many radical Liberals saw it as a bribe to the rich who, with tax avoidance then being in its infancy as an art, paid the most income tax. Joe Chamberlain called the proposal ‘simply an appeal to the selfishness of the middle classes’.7 The country had a surprise for Gladstone: he lost the election by forty-eight seats, thanks mainly to the development of a centralised campaigning machine by Disraeli that set the pattern for Conservative organisation for more than a century ahead. His party, which he had instructed to fight on a platform opposing class conflict, won outright for the first time since 1841.

  Many Liberal MPs had seen the defeat coming: Gladstone, as usual uninterested in the trivial, human side of politics, appears not to have done. He blamed the 1872 Licensing Act for his defeat. It had restricted the hours during which alcohol could be served, and the notion of a closing time had been especially unpopular with the working classes. It had also restricted which premises could be licensed and created the offence of being drunk in public. However, there is no evidence that Gladstone was the victim of a concerted putsch by brewers and publicans.

  The election marked another advance in British democracy. Gladstone, despite the heavy losses, was determined to meet Parliament, until his colleagues talked him out of it. He felt it was the job of Parliament, not electors, to dismiss governments. As with Disraeli in 1868, he should, they said, accept the decision of the people. He saw that times had changed, and did. When Gladstone lost, one who could hardly conceal her delight was, inevitably, the Queen. She crowed to her daughter, the Crown Princess of Prussia: ‘Did you ever see such a universal and overwhelming result of a Dissolution against a Minister as there is against Mr Gladstone? It shows how little he is trusted and how unpopular he is! What you used often to say to me about him and his talented colleagues is most true.’8

  III

  Disraeli, however, was deeply unpopular with many Conservatives by halfway through Gladstone’s first ministry, his party demoralised by legislation that had diminished religion and advanced democracy. ‘When Mr Mill calls us “the stupid party”, is he so far wrong?’ asked the anonymous author of Shall We Give It Up? in 1871.9 Having talked of the purposes of Conservatism – ‘the projection and development of the Church of England . . . the defence of the Throne, the maintenance of the House of Lords, the integrity of endowments . . . the arrangement of the franchise so as to guard against the tyranny of mere numbers, the preservation of our colonies, the efficiency of our army and navy, the promotion of proper and not cheese-paring economy in the public expenditure, the diminution of pauperism, the improvement of the dwellings of the labouring classes, the gradual amendment and codification of our laws, and generally, the adoption of a policy at once tolerant of reasonable change, and impervious to restless innovation’ – the writer asks his correspondent: ‘Can you look me gravely in the face, and tell me that these ends are likely to be advanced, especially those of them that are more distinctly Conservative, by our again putting the author of “Lothair” in the position of Prime Minister?’10 He added: ‘Mr Disraeli’s leadership of the Conservatives is a great practical joke . . . That the chief originator of the most democratic measure that ever received the sanction of the English parliament should lead the gentlemen of England against democracy is in itself more remarkable than the wildest combination in his own works of fiction.’

  Once Disraeli had become Prime Minister in 1867 traditional forces went to work: Clarendon referred to him as ‘the Jew’ in two letters of the autumn of 1868 in which he exposed Disraeli’s misunderstanding of diplomacy following a gaffe in his Mansion House speech about relations between France and Prussia.11 Distrust of him, not based entirely on incipient racism, was profound in his own party. When he won the election in February 1874 almost his first priority was to square Salisbury, who had not forgiven 1867, was a leading figure on the Tory benches in the Lords, and had the power to make Disraeli’s life a misery. The two were reconciled, but only after a ‘severe mental struggle’ by Salisbury and the intervention of his stepmother, the Countess of Derby.12 His view of Disraeli did not improve, at least for the moment. ‘D is sublimely ignorant,’ Salisbury told his wife on 18 February 1874, just as he accepted office.13 Four days later he told her: ‘We did not discuss policy at all, but my impression is that D’s mind is as enterprising as ever and therefore the experiment will be a trying one.’

  Disraeli was a prime manipulator. Earlier in his career he had used wit to get others on his side, as is often the way with unpopular boys in any playground. His lavish ingratiation with Queen Victoria was the supreme example of his cynical use of those whose compliance he needed to advance himself. He had got off to a bad start with the Court in the 1840s. Prince Albert had been close to Peel, whose assassin Disraeli in part was. The Queen, under Albert’s influence, had been a committed free-trader, and had held Disraeli in suspicion for his opposition to the creed. Disraeli won her round with the elaborate courtesy and chivalry he displayed towards women of a certain age; all the more efficacious in the Queen’s case, as no man had ever dared treat her so. He gossiped with her and kept nothing from her. They became, effectively, partners in crime. His greatest achievement, however, was that he was not Gladstone. Before he went to kiss hands in 1874 one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting had told him that ‘my dear Mistress will be very happy to see you again’.14 There is no record of such a sentiment ever being conveyed to Gladstone.

  Her unequivocal support meant he could do what he liked. He even conducted a winsome correspondence with her about his gout, to deepen their intimacy. It had, he told her, ‘broken out late in life, but which, now understood, may be conquered with care and diet. What details for a servant of the Crown to place before a too gracious mistress! His cheek burns with shame. It seems almost to amount to petty treason.’15 As he told Matthew Arnold shortly before he died, he did this absolutely consciously, to achieve his ends. ‘You have heard me accused of being a flatterer. It is true. I am a flatterer. I have found it useful. Every one likes flattery; and when you come to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.’16 He flattered Arnold too, almost as if he could not help it: ‘The young men read you; they no longer read me. And you have invented phrases which everyone quotes – such as “Philistinism” and “Sweetness and Light”.’17

  The prelude to Disraeli’s administration of 1874 were two speeches he, as Leader of the Opposition, made in 1872, at Manchester and at the Crystal Palace. It was almost four years since his defeat. The Tories had been accused of being bankrupt of policy and, therefore, unable to offer the expanded electorate a real choice. On 3 April Disraeli spoke at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. With his usual chutzpah he took head-on the claim that he had no ideas. ‘Gentlemen, if a political programme is a policy to despoil Churches and plunder landlords, I confess that the Conservative party has no political programme. If a political programme is a policy which attacks or menaces every interest and every institution, every class and every calling in the country, I confess that the Conservative party has no political programme.’18 He described his creed as ‘the same and unchangeable . . . a policy that would maintain the monarchy limited by the co-ordinate authority of the Estates of the R
ealm’. He insinuated that the recent outbreak of republican sentiment was inspired and fed by the Liberal party.

  Disraeli trotted out a defence of the Monarchy culled almost verbatim from Walter Bagehot’s The English Constitution, published five years earlier. He pointed out the wisdom of a long-serving Sovereign (the Queen was about to mark thirty-five years on the Throne) and how England being a ‘domestic country . . . where home is revered and the hearth is sacred’ it would be a country ‘properly represented by a family – a Royal Family.’19 He dismissed the complaints about the Royal Family’s expenses with a reference to the ‘becoming dignity’ that should characterise the institution, and the importance of the Queen’s not having a standard of living inferior to that of some of her grandest subjects. The Queen, he said, could live well enough had she not made the Crown estates’ revenues over to the Exchequer; and since she had, it was only fair to use part of those revenues to support her and her family adequately.

  This was a reasonable point, and it addressed a pressing issue: but it did not constitute a programme for the Conservative party that would have any immediate appeal to the voters; any more than would Disraeli’s next remarks, about the importance of maintaining the hereditary House of Lords and the Established Church. However, something more subtle was at play. Disraeli was delineating a country of old and serviceable institutions that worked and were benign, and that provided security and continuity within which consolidations and improvements could take place. This was a land, unlike France, free from repeated revolution; it had an aristocracy ‘open to all who deserve to enter it’; it might have a class system, but all were ‘equal before the law’.20

  He contrasted the Manchester he had first seen forty years earlier with the one he saw now; and proclaimed there had been ‘immense results’ for the working classes in that time. ‘Their wages have been raised, and their hours of daily toil have been diminished – the means of leisure, which is the great source of civilisation, have been increased’. And, above all – and thanks to the last Conservative government – political participation by working-class men had been increased. It almost seemed that the pursuit of perfection had been concluded. He praised ‘the revolution in locomotion, which has opened the world to the working man, which has enlarged the horizon of his experience, increased his knowledge of nature and of art, and added immensely to the salutary recreation, amusement and pleasure of his existence.’21

  The cheap postage since 1840 had had ‘moral benefits . . . which cannot be exaggerated’. And there was now an ‘unshackled press’, since the stamp duty had come off newspapers in 1855, ‘which has furnished him with endless sources of instruction, information and amusement, and has increased his ideas, elevated his self-respect, and made his life more varied and delightful.’ The result was a ‘vast increase in the intelligence, happiness, general prosperity and self-respect of the working classes.’ Neither of these important reforms had been the work of Tory ministries: but then even in adducing the support of history, Disraeli was a chancer. He also sought to be all things to all men. Sensing his remarks, in that setting, would be interpreted as applying to the industrial working classes, he argued that the agricultural labourer had benefited too: but wages were lower in the countryside, and Britain was on the verge of an agricultural depression because of the growing efficiency of the North American grain producers.

  This roseate picture did not prevent Disraeli from saying there was still more that could be done: and his emphasis was on ‘sanitary legislation’. He said that ‘pure air, pure water, the inspection of unhealthy habitations, the adulteration of food, these and many kindred matters may be legitimately dealt with by the legislature.’22 He made a joke about it, adapting the Vulgate’s ‘vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas’ to ‘sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas’ – but did so to emphasise that ‘it is impossible to overrate the importance of the subject.’ He said that ‘the first consideration of a Minister should be the health of the people’ because ‘if the population every ten years decreases, and the stature of the race every ten years diminishes, the history of that country will soon be the history of the past.’

  He had said he had not come to make a party speech: but proceeded to attack the government. Institutions such as he had defended were ‘impugned’; he said this was not least because this had been ‘the first instance in my knowledge of a British Administration being avowedly formed on a principle of violence’.23 This was a reference to a laxity of policy in Ireland, which he said had led to ‘sedition rampant and treason thinly veiled’, with new MPs now being ‘pledged to the disruption of the realm’. It was an outrageous claim, for there had been no sign that a Conservative response to the situation in Ireland after the Fenian conspiracy would have been any better at avoiding these consequences than the Liberal one had been.

  Disraeli cited as an example of Liberal destruction the Cardwell reforms, which would have far-reaching benefits for the professionalisation of the Army: but he could offer no explicit criticism. ‘They took in hand the Army. What have they done? I will not comment on what they have done. I will historically state it, and leave you to draw the inference.’ He led up to the joke for which this speech is best remembered. ‘As I sat opposite the Treasury Bench, the Ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very unusual on the coasts of South America. You behold a range of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers on a single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the deep rumbling of the sea.’24 This was not only a party speech, but a weak one – it contains little evidence of what he would do with power if he had it, and no disabling proof of the damage supposedly done by the Liberals.

  He spoke again, eleven weeks later, on 24 June, at the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, at a banquet of the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations. As the second barrel in Disraeli’s fusillade against those who accused him of having no policy, this speech concentrated on the British Empire, and on the Conservative party’s support and defence of it. He reiterated his belief in institutions: and yet seemed to reinforce the view that the opportunity of power for him, were it to come again, would be to maintain the status quo. Sanitary reform was important: but it would not occupy a Parliament of perhaps seven years, years Disraeli seemed to expect would be distinguished by management of the Empire and the conduct of foreign affairs generally. That would be true in some measure: but the newly enfranchised classes would demand more in domestic improvements and reforms than Disraeli realised. He would have to be steered in that direction by a wiser and more practical man: and was fortunate that fate would present him with one.

  IV

  Disraeli’s most brilliant appointment was that of Richard Assheton Cross as Home Secretary. Any great initiatives would have to be designed by the ministers themselves rather than Disraeli, and few were more abundant in ideas than Cross. He wrote, in 1908, of the intense disappointment he felt when attending his first Cabinet meeting at the ‘want of originality’ in the Prime Minister, finding Disraeli had hardly any idea of what to do with the power he had won: ‘From all his speeches I had quite expected that his mind was full of legislative schemes, but such did not prove to be the case; on the contrary, he had to entirely rely on the suggestions of his colleagues, and, as they themselves had only just come into office, and that suddenly, there was some difficulty in framing the Queen’s speech.’25 Once some platitudes about foreign affairs and the marriage of the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen’s second son, had been aired, the speech was, Cross felt, ‘not much to boast of’. Only one measure raised in the speech became law, but it was indicative of Cross’s purpose and of the civilising drift of the administration: it regulated the sale of alcohol.

  Cross had been born in 1823 into the Lancashire gentry: and had been a pupil of Arnold’s at Rugby, taking into his life precisely the inspiration the Doctor would have liked. He was a notable all-rounder: he was a top-flight oarsman at univers
ity and president of the Cambridge Union. He went into the law and became one of the most successful barristers on the Northern Circuit. He was elected as Conservative MP for Preston in 1857, but left Parliament in 1862 to succeed his father as a partner in a private bank, of which he eventually became chairman. This period in his life was, however, crucial to his success as a politician when he returned to Westminster: for while working both as a banker and as a barrister he became prominent in several Lancashire charities, in his local quarter sessions, board of guardians and highway board. Unlike Disraeli, the man who would be his chief, Cross accumulated extensive first-hand experience of life on the front line in industrial Britain.

  His re-entry into Parliament was achieved in a remarkable fashion, as he defeated Gladstone at the 1868 election in the new constituency of south-west Lancashire, a victory attributed to Cross’s enormous local popularity. When Disraeli made him Home Secretary it was the first post Cross had held in government. However, Disraeli had – with help from Derby, who knew Cross well through the Lancashire connection – realised Cross’s particular experience made him invaluable to the sort of reforming administration he had promised in the Manchester and Crystal Palace speeches, but which he had little idea how to implement. That is why Cross became the commanding figure of the ministry.

  Disraeli’s election address in 1874 made little mention of the social reform that would characterise his administration, for the very good reason that it had not occurred to him.26 Over the next few years, however, Cross and his colleagues would find their talents put to work in certain distinct categories of legislation, as they identified problems bedevilling the country that required attention. Acts would be passed to give local authorities the power to improve the lot of the people, such as the Artisans’ Dwellings Act. There would be some that compelled change, such as long-overdue legislation to criminalise the use of chimney-boys. Others would address long-running arguments but, because of the continued absence of consensus, would still leave the business unfinished, as, notably, in education. And, because Disraeli’s was nothing if not a cynical ministry, there would be laws passed with the chief aim of ensuring his re-election when the time came.