The Victorians

by Jacob Rees-Mogg

  Matthew 5.28 would have been well known to Gladstone: ‘But I say unto you, that whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’ This verse may explain why Gladstone would have referred to ‘days of impurity’ and embraced the need for self-mortification of the flesh. St Thomas More wore a hair shirt and there is a long Christian tradition of physically atoning for sins which would have seemed much less unusual to Gladstone’s contemporaries than it does today.

  Of some Christian ideals, however, it is clear that Gladstone was a fine example. He was an impressively charitable individual, believing with his friend Andrew Carnegie that people ought to give money away while alive because it was then that the act of giving made a tangible difference to the life of the giver, whereas once they were dead it did not. Indeed, he believed that such charity was a true moral imperative and he gave away £114,000 in the course of his lifetime. Translated in the value of gold sovereigns, this sum is equivalent to over £25 million.fn1

  Gladstone’s religion was real. It was not a hypocritical confection and it influenced his life considerably. He was, as he himself noted, an emotional man. He wrote on one occasion to the unfortunate Helen Gladstone saying, ‘The only thing I really dread is the fierceness of internal excitement, and that from experience as well as anticipation, I do dread. May God pour upon it his tranquilising influence.’ On his 69th birthday, he confided to his diary that his good health ‘appears to me to carry all the marks of the will of God’. And this was the problem. It is not easy to debate or reason with an individual who believes they are speaking with the voice of God. The Liberal politician Henry Labouchère mockingly said that, although he did not mind Gladstone’s assumption that he always had an ace up his sleeve, he objected to his claim that it had been put there by Almighty God.

  William Gladstone began his political life as a Tory in line with a pattern in which Victorian politicians sail from one political grouping towards another in the course of their careers. He began his parliamentary career in 1832 as the Member for Newark in Nottinghamshire and it is worth noting that in the Commons he opposed the abolition of slavery and reform of the factories laws. The early Gladstone was, in other words, not quite the liberal hero of popular lore.

  He was quickly elevated to a ministerial rank, holding a position with responsibility for war and the colonies in Peel’s first ministry. By 1835, however, he was out of government and now we begin to see the form of a more familiar Gladstone take shape. He was a vigorous opponent of the Opium Wars with China, condemning Palmerston for the role he played in the first conflict and deploring the immoral trade in opium in general in language that listeners would soon find all too familiar. He lived in dread, he said, ‘of the judgments of God towards England for our national iniquity towards China’.

  In Peel’s second administration, Gladstone returned to ministerial office and busied himself with improving labour legislation, before resigning in 1845 in protest at the ‘Maynooth Grant’, the decision by the government to increase the annual grant paid to the principal Catholic seminary in Ireland. Here Gladstone’s political morality is at its most mysterious … or dogmatic. The citizen Gladstone deplored the grant in and of itself, believing that a Protestant Britain should not have to pay for the training of priests in Catholic Ireland, but the politician Gladstone nevertheless voted in support of his government before promptly resigning. Peel was perplexed and cross. ‘I really have great difficulty,’ he told a friend, ‘in exactly comprehending what he means.’ With the Conservative rupture following the repeal of the Corn Laws, Gladstone followed Peel away from the Conservatives and with his patron’s death in 1850 he emerged as a potent leader of the Peelite faction in the Commons.

  Certainty and divine providence remained constant companions in his life and one example of their influence now emerged. In 1850, the Gladstone family travelled to Naples on holiday, principally for the sake of his daughter Agnes. Her health was poor and it was felt that the benign climate of southern Italy would do her good.fn2 Few politicians can travel abroad without finding interest in the local political scene and Gladstone was pushed in this direction by some existing acquaintances. His particular concern was for Baron Carlo Poerio, who had been a minister in the revolutionary government of Naples and Sicily for a short time in 1848, a year during which revolution stalked the continent of Europe. Poerio was found guilty of subversion in 1850 and received a sentence of twenty-four years in chains and Gladstone took it upon himself to visit Poerio in gaol. He was appalled by what he found. As always, he made a detailed note of what he observed in the course of his visit. The chains that were kept on the prisoners twenty-four hours a day; the dark, damp dungeons which served as a prison; and the ‘stinking soup’ fed to the prisoners. He established that there were between fifteen and thirty thousand political prisoners in the state, an astonishing number although a figure disputed by the Neapolitan authorities, who claimed that no more than two thousand prisoners were held. It is difficult to criticise Gladstone’s righteous indignation and of course even two thousand would be a shocking number. Nonetheless, he did what he could to keep his indignation in check and established from Poerio that his intervention would not simply make matters worse. Assurance received, Gladstone exploded into action.

  At this time in Westminster, Lord Stanley was trying to form a Tory government, and, as Gladstone had not yet made an irrevocable break with the Conservatives, he was offered the position of Foreign Secretary. This was a temptation. In such a powerful post he would be in an ideal position to deal with Naples. Instead Gladstone urged Lord Aberdeen by both letter and speech to use his contacts as a past Foreign Secretary to do something. This ‘something’ turned out to be a letter to the Austrian Chancellor, Prince Felix of Schwarzenberg, asking him to let Gladstone’s concerns be made known to King Ferdinand II of Naples. Austria held considerable sway in southern Italy, not least because Ferdinand was married to Austrian archduchess Maria Theresa.

  Gladstone published his letter to Aberdeen and it proved to be fairly clear in its condemnation of Naples. ‘The present practices of the Government of Naples,’ he wrote, ‘in reference to real or supposed political offenders, are an outrage upon religion, upon civilisation, upon humanity and upon decency.’ He went on to call the conduct ‘inhuman and monstrous’, adding for good measure that the authorities through the police ‘watches and dogs the people, pays domiciliary visits, very commonly at night, ransacks houses, seizing papers and effects and tearing up floors at pleasure under pretence of searching for arms, and imprisons men by the score, by the hundred, by the thousand, without any warrant whatever’.

  This letter in turn led to his public report on the prisons of Naples, compiled from first-hand observations. He told Aberdeen,

  as is well known [they] are another name for the extreme of filth and horror. I have really seen something of them, but not the worst. This I have seen, my Lord: the official doctors not going to the sick prisoners, but the sick prisoners, men almost with death on their faces, toiling upstairs to them at that charnelhouse of the Vicaria [the central courts complex of Naples], because the lower regions of such a palace of darkness are too foul and loathsome to allow it to be expected that professional men should consent to earn bread by entering them. As to diet, I must speak a word for the bread that I have seen. Though black and coarse to the last degree, it was sound. The soup, which forms the only other element of subsistence, is so nauseous, as I was assured, that nothing but the extreme of hunger could overcome the repugnance of nature to it. I had not the means of tasting it.

  Such language shows the extent of Gladstone’s shock and the strength of his moral outrage and not only concerning the quality of Neapolitan soup. It incidentally places Palmerston’s meddling tendencies in the shade. It was directed, moreover, at a not-unfriendly nation, which did not react well to the criticism. Nor did its Austrian ally. When Prince Schwarzenberg replied, some months later, he dismissively imp
lied that the situation in Naples was in fact no worse than that in an Ireland still emerging from its trauma of famine. The affair distressed Gladstone’s Conservative and Peelite colleagues but it was manna to Palmerston, whom Gladstone had scolded roundly in the House on account of his interventionist leanings, especially in relation to the Don Pacifico affair.

  There were political repercussions to the whole incident and they were of assistance to Gladstone, for they raised his profile immeasurably and placed him in pole position for leadership of the modern Liberal Party, which duly came to pass upon Palmerston’s death in 1865. It must be emphasised, however, that Gladstone’s Neapolitan agitation was by no means cynical. This was not the well-thought-through product of political calculation, it was instead an emotional response to the deep repugnance he felt towards the horrors he had seen in the bowels of the prisons of Naples. According to Magnus’s formula, it matters who Gladstone was, not what he did. The events at Naples met this test in that what he did arose out of who he was, an emotional and driven man who, once certain of a course, would follow it regardless of friends or political calculation. Poerio, incidentally, reaped no immediate benefit as a result of Gladstone’s championing of his case. He was released only in 1858 and immediately deported to South America. En route, the ship docked in Ireland and from here Poerio made his way back to Italy, where he would in due course play a part in the Risorgimento.

  In 1859, Palmerston formed a new government. The composition of this new administration is more than usually significant, for it marked the first time that Peelites, political liberals, Radicals and the remnant of the Whig faction coalesced to form something resembling a liberal – or, rather, Liberal – government. Gladstone put his quarrels with Palmerston aside to serve as Chancellor of the Exchequer and while history naturally tends to focus on his achievements as Prime Minister, it is the case that Gladstone achieved much of lasting value during his time at the Treasury. He is credited, indeed, with giving the ancient post of Chancellor its current character and authority, in effect creating the powerful role that exists today.

  He also set about delineating the realms of public and private in a way that stands to his lasting credit. Where materials, paper, ink and so on, were for his private use, they were paid for out of his own pocket even though the distinctions were rather less clear-cut at this point. We have Gladstone to thank for the introduction of today’s ethical rules of behaviour within government departments. In his own words, ‘it is the mark of a chicken-hearted Chancellor when he shrinks from upholding economy in detail [author’s emphasis] … if he is not ready to save what are meant by candle ends and cheese parings in the cause of the Country.’

  His aim was to limit the burdens that fell on the least well-off and with this in mind he continued Peel’s policy of reducing tariffs. In his first Budget, of 1853, as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Aberdeen, he had exempted 123 articles of goods from tariffs altogether and reduced the rate on a further 135. He left only 48 items subject to tariffs in his 1860 Budget. In his first Budget, he had further proposed the abolition of income tax, although in the end he satisfied himself with reforming it and extending its provision to Ireland. His decision on income tax was grounded on principles of morality. Income tax, deeply unpopular though it was, had shielded Britain from the rigours of the Napoleonic Wars, and it remained necessary in times of peace. ‘The public feeling of its inequality,’ he conceded in the course of his longest House of Commons speech, which lasted four and three-quarter hours, ‘is a fact most important in itself [but] Sir Robert Peel, in 1842, called forth from repose this giant, who had once shielded us in war, to come and assist our industrious toils in peace … The second income tax has been the instrument by which you have introduced … the effective reform of your commercial and fiscal system’.

  In the end, rather than abolish the tax Gladstone actually extended it for another seven years, albeit in terms which steadily reduced its impact on the individual pocket. It was still meant to be temporary but it has not yet been abolished. He recognised that the demands for public expenditure could only be met by such a levy, particularly if tariffs, which he felt were an unfair imposition on the least well-off, were to be reduced and trade encouraged. Later measures were equally founded in morality and in the case of an emergency levy to pay for the Crimean War guided, it was implied, by God Himself. Gladstone informed the House of Commons on this occasion that ‘the expenses of war are a moral check, which it has pleased the Almighty to impose upon the ambition and lust of conquest that are inherent in so many nations’.

  As Chancellor, Gladstone also developed the practice of putting all financial and Treasury matters into an annual Finance Bill. This was by accident rather than design and came about in the aftermath of a decision by the House of Lords to reject a bill abolishing duties on paper. This tax raised £1.25 million annually but was resented as a levy on knowledge, in that it made it more difficult for cheap newspapers or pamphlets to be published. At that time every tax had its own bill and the Lords convention was that it could only reject but not amend such a bill. In response, Gladstone began the practice, continued ever since, of putting all his Budget measures into one bill. This included in this instance the previously rejected abolition of the paper tax. It was understood that the Lords would not throw out a complete Budget and this was the case until 1909, when it rejected Lloyd George’s ‘People’s Budget’, with devastating consequences for its authority. This made Gladstone’s innovation a constitutionally useful way of marking the Commons’ supremacy over the Lords. That Gladstone’s Budget box was used by Chancellors of the Exchequer until it became too fragile was a suitable reminder that he set up the system which, for all its growth, is still in essence the same today.

  *

  Gladstone’s career was beset by two difficult relationships. The two banes of his life were Disraeli and the Queen herself who had a profound effect on his work. The dysfunction of these relationships has amusing moments but it also indicates the distinction between the moral and the more clearly political Gladstone.

  William Gladstone had met Benjamin Disraeli for the first time at a dinner in 1835 and this marked the beginning of a decades-long relationship of mutually assured detestation. Put simply, Gladstone’s moral passion and Disraeli’s detached cynicism left no possibility of common ground. They were oil and water. Moreover, Disraeli’s later harrying of Peel did nothing to endear him to Gladstone while his ability to run rhetorical rings around Gladstone almost drove the latter mad but Gladstone did not lose every round.

  The 1867 Reform Bill provides an excellent example of how the tricky relationship between these two British political leaders leached into national politics, with remarkable results. Disraeli has been accused of taking decisions on the scope and scale of the reforms based solely on what would most annoy Gladstone. Although this is exaggerated, he did seem to refuse any amendment that Gladstone backed. This was a point made explicit by Disraeli himself. In a leaked letter, he wrote, ‘If any Gladstone amendment were accepted a dissolution would follow.’ In the Commons itself, he said that because Gladstone’s amendments were essentially partisan when he ‘comes forward with a counter-proposition to the main proposals of the government … I must say … that I cannot in any way agree’.

  It was in this mischievous spirit that Disraeli accepted one amendment when Gladstone was not in the chamber purely to stop a better amendment drawn up and tabled by Gladstone himself being accepted. In a sense, each side saw dividends flowing from this rivalry, which added something of piquancy to the usual political debates. It did Britain’s expanding democracy no harm either. In an age of increasing popular involvement, by means of the extension of the franchise, the growth of newspapers and the extension of the railways, this personification of political differences made it clearer to a newer and better-informed electorate that there were serious divergences of opinion.

  If the Gladstone/Disraeli rivalry had its benefits, the antipathy between
Sovereign and subject most certainly did not. The relationship had begun smoothly enough, thanks to Prince Albert. He had helped to overcome Victoria’s hostility to Sir Robert Peel, for whom the young monarch held a deep loathing on account of the Bedchamber Crisis. Albert’s solicitous diplomacy had resolved this issue and made the Peel faction, which included Gladstone, an acceptable even encouraged presence at Court and Albert and Gladstone were both acolytes of Peel and liked each other. This was no surprise. After all, Albert’s moral certainties mirrored those of Gladstone himself.

  With the death of Albert and the onset of Victoria’s long widowhood, however, the relationship disintegrated. At first, the Queen described her minister as ‘very kind and feeling’ in his commiserations but this period did not last long. The perceived wisdom is that Gladstone tended to treat Victoria as his Sovereign and failed to acknowledge her human grief in the black period following Albert’s death. After the Queen wrote to thank Gladstone for a tribute he had paid to Albert, remarking that ‘Mrs Gladstone whom the Queen knows is a most tender wife, may, in a faint manner, picture to herself what the Queen suffers’, Gladstone responded with a letter that, while clearly well meant, was essentially a theological and deeply insensitive tract on the mysteries of the Divine Will. Victoria was far from gruntled.

  As time went on, the Queen became steadily more disgruntled. Her complaint that he delivered political speeches during private audiences was acknowledged by Gladstone himself, who reflected that ‘unhappily my manner turns every conversation into a debate’. His precise financial accounting almost manufactured a row with the Queen over the issue of the gun metal needed for the Albert Memorial in London. As Chancellor, he would not authorise a small additional expenditure on top of the amount already agreed as it was ‘contrary to the rules of good administration … to ask for more for the same purpose’. In 1866, once Disraeli took over as Chancellor, the House of Commons proved less unbending, smoothing Victoria’s ruffled feathers by readily agreeing to the modest amount of additional spending.