by Roy Jenkins
Nothing is more difficult in the chemistry of politics than to bridge the time gap and to think how two men who served together in a senior-junior relationship would have adjusted had the age of the junior moved upwards while that of the senior remained constant so that they had to coexist as near equals. Asquith and Churchill (between whom the age gap was exactly the same as that between Peel and Gladstone) got along thoroughly well so long as Churchill could regard Asquith as a great if somewhat detached judge and Asquith could regard Churchill as a talented but amusingly impetuous young minister. What balance would have been struck had they been in a competitive position is another matter.
When Peel died in 1850 Gladstone’s reaction was surprisingly cool. This was the more striking because of the dramatic nature of the tragedy, with the former Prime Minister lying poised between life and death for eighty hours in the heart of the capital, with the street outside his house thronged not only with the carriages of a stream of enquiring callers but also with a sympathetic concourse of the general public. Official and popular London hung upon his fate, and when he eventually succumbed he was mourned as the greatest statesman of his time and the nation operated at half-mast for several days. The House of Commons suspended effective business, except for tributes, for two days. Gladstone seconded the motion for the adjournment on the first, the moving of which apparently took him by surprise, and he spoke no more than a few sentences, recalling however Walter Scott’s lines in memory of Pitt,10 and adding to them the comment, at once measured and convoluted, that these words had been addressed ‘to a man great indeed, but not greater than Sir Robert Peel’.14
Yet Gladstone did not attend the funeral, which took place at Drayton (Peel’s house outside Tamworth in Staffordshire) six days later, although Aberdeen, Graham, Goulburn and three other prominent political supporters acted as pall-bearers, and Sidney Herbert was also present. ‘I mourn to be absent,’ he wrote in the diary,15 but without explanation. He spoke in the House of Commons late that night, although on what was hardly a compelling occasion. There is also the impression that he had come to regard Peel as something of an incubus. On the day of Peel’s death he wrote to Sir John Gladstone: ‘I thought Sir R. Peel looked extremely feeble during the debate last week [that is, immediately before the accident]. . . . I observed that he slept during much of Lord Palmerston’s speech, that he spoke with little physical energy. . . .’16 Then, a week later, he wrote again to his father: ‘People feel, I suppose, that Sir Robert Peel’s life and continuance in parliament were of themselves powerful obstacles to the general reorganisation of the conservative party,’17 of which, still counting himself a Conservative, he pronounced himself in favour. And in 1876, just over a quarter of a century later, reflecting on this period Gladstone wrote: ‘I do not, therefore, think, and I did not think, that the death of Sir Robert Peel at the time when it occurred was a great calamity so far as the chief question of our internal politics was concerned.’18
All these criticisms were immediately qualified by protestations of how great a man Gladstone nonetheless thought Peel to be. Indeed, even in the case of his 1876 retrospect he was at pains to make it clear that he was referring only to the key contemporary issue of whether or not the ‘protectionists’ could in 1850 be trusted with office (Gladstone thought yes, Peel thought no). ‘In other respects it [the calamity of his death] was indeed great; in some of them it may almost be called immeasurable. The moral atmosphere of the House of Commons has never since his death been quite the same. . . .’19 Yet the impression of emotional detachment given by the about-to-be-qualified comments cannot be erased, particularly when taken in conjunction with the remark of the somewhat forgotten George Cornewall Lewis (Chancellor of the Exchequer for three years and Home Secretary for two years, 1855–61) that ‘upon Gladstone the death of Peel will have the effect of removing a weight from a spring’.20 Lewis’s aphorism caught an echo nearly ten years later when Aberdeen, contemplating the apparent collapse of Gladstone’s political prospects after the débâcle of his unsuccessful six months as Commissioner in the Ionian Isles, said: ‘Ah, but he is terrible in the rebound.’21
Weight released or rebounding, Gladstone’s reaction to Peel’s departure was not straightforwardly that of a loyal lieutenant. It may be that he was crushed throughout that summer of 1850 by the harrowing death of his five-year-old daughter Jessy from meningitis on 9 April, and had no emotion to spare for even the most revered political chief. Yet this is not wholly convincing, for Gladstone’s morbidity made him at home with death. There is some truth in Professor Shannon’s flippancy that ‘he was a connoisseur of nineteenth-century death-beds’.22 He dwelt on them, his mother’s, his sister’s, in particular his father’s (which occurred in December 1851) and constantly contemplated his own mortality. When he became thirty-five (at the end of 1844), a young and highly successful Cabinet minister, it was reasonable for him as a Dante enthusiast to temper a sense of the great opportunities which lay before him with an awareness that he was ‘nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita’, but to add to that, as he did, ‘Now commences as it were the downhill of my life . . . I am older than was the Redeemer in the flesh,’23 might be regarded as a striking combination of his morbidity and religiosity.
On the surface he had taken with Christian resignation his daughter’s death after nearly two weeks of fluctuating struggle and anguish. ‘It is all over and all well,’ he wrote. ‘The blessed child was released at two o’clock in the morning compassionately taken by her Saviour into the fold of his peace.’24 Three days later he subjected himself to taking her small coffin with him in a compartment from Euston to Fasque. He had her nine-year-old brother with him to Blisworth Junction, from where he was consigned to a Northamptonshire school. Then he ‘closed my blind to have no other company than the thought of her’ until he reached Fasque and its family vault just over twenty-four hours later. But the journey was not satisfactorily uninterrupted. Intermingling a railway legislator’s acumen with a parent’s grief, he noted that ‘notwithstanding precautions and assurances I had to pay in five parts and to make three changes of carriage’.25
This experience was certainly a major contributory cause of Gladstone’s being around the middle of the century in a state of what Morley described as ‘extreme perturbation’ and what others might regard as nearly unhinged. But this hardly explains the relative coolness of his reaction to the death of Peel. On the contrary it might have been expected to make his reaction the more extreme. He was in general inclined to overreact to bad news. In the 1880s Lord Granville (his Foreign Secretary at the time) wrote a splendidly comic description of Gladstone, at a dinner, receiving the news that the Duke of Argyll could not come because he had a cold and throwing up his arms in horror as though he had just received news of a new Bulgarian atrocity.
The paradox (one of the many in Gladstone’s life) therefore is that the foremost Peelite had some reserve about Peel. It is reminiscent of the remark about Captain Alfred Dreyfus that, had he not been Dreyfus, he would have been a natural anti-Dreyfusard. Gladstone would never have been a natural anti-Peelite. But he had his reserves, which may well have dated from his continuing resentment of Peel’s treatment of him in 1841.
That year’s general election was spread over the end of June and the first ten days of July. Gladstone was returned at Newark on 29 June, but it was 9 July before Stephen Glynne, despite strong Gladstone assistance, was defeated by forty votes and faggotry (the artificial splitting of estates to give owners extra votes), against which Gladstone was to fulminate for decades. On 18 August Gladstone went to London by railway from Chester. ‘Arrived well, thank God,’ he wrote.26 A safely completed rail journey still deserved the applause of relief, rather like a safe trans-Andean aircraft landing. On the 21st he was summoned to a conclave of ten at Peel’s house, to determine the form of the amendment to the Address which ended the Melbourne government. He assumed from this that he was to be in the Cabinet. He had some but not complete justification.
Two of the others, Lord Granville Somerset and Sir Thomas Fremantle, had to wait like himself a few years for this. But the rest were all included. When, on the 21st, Peel offered him the vice-presidency of the Board of Trade – or ‘a post in the Admiralty’ – he was bitterly disappointed. He was dismayed by both the rank and the department in which he was required to perform. He had set his eye in particular upon the chief secretaryship for Ireland. The Board of Trade he regarded as pedestrian. It provoked his cri du cœur that, while he had hoped to concern himself with the affairs of men, he found himself set ‘to governing packages’. Nor was he assuaged by Peel’s assurance that Lord Ripon, who was to be his chief and as Goderich had been an unsuccessful and short-lived Prime Minister between Canning and Wellington in 1827–8, was pre-eminent in the management of packages.
This assurance, perhaps fortunately, proved false. Ripon, if he knew anything about packages, had largely lost interest in them and was happy to let Gladstone do all the work and even take some of the credit. But his under-promotion in 1841 (in contrast with his over-promotion in 1835) rankled with Gladstone as did his subordination to Ripon. On his famous eight-day visit to All Souls College, Oxford, in 1890, Gladstone was recorded as saying: ‘The man who knew least about finance who was ever head of the Treasury was the first Lord Ripon.’27 As Ripon, Robinson when he was Chancellor, before becoming first Lord Goderich and then Earl of Ripon in 1833, was by 1890 thirty-one years dead and sixty-three years away from the Exechequer, this was a striking indication both of the sweep of Gladstone’s memory and of his resentment at being given a subordinate post in 1841.
Where Peel was powerfully right, however, was in seeing that Gladstone would take to the details of customs reduction, commercial treaties and the intricacies of railway legislation with almost as much enthusiasm as he had hitherto reserved for liturgical disputes. It was of this period that James Graham, who was then Home Secretary, noted that ‘Gladstone could do in four hours what it took any other man sixteen to do and that he [nonetheless] worked sixteen hours a day’. Contrary to his own expectations, the Board of Trade fascinated Gladstone. Until he himself in the next decade infused the Treasury with a new authority and made the budget into a great annual national event, the presidency of the Board carried with it at least an equal responsibility for the fiscal regime. Of a total tax revenue in 1840 of no more than £47 million, £35 million came from custom and excise duties. Sugar, tea, tobacco, wine, spirits, timber and coffee made the principal contributions, but there were about 750 separate and mostly wholly illogical duties. Gladstone quickly became the master of this haphazard pattern and of the conflicting special-interest lobbies which it spawned. In the course of acquiring this mastery the relentless logic (and extremism) of his mind, which applied in different fields had led him to the romantic intolerance of The State in its Relations with the Church, brought him near to a rational utilitarianism, which disposed him towards free trade and made him more than ready for each step in this direction which Peel took between 1841 and 1845.
The other major subject with which Gladstone concerned himself at the Board of Trade was providing a legislative framework for the avalanche of railway construction which was the major socio-economic development of the decade. His 1844 Railway Act put the equivalent of a finely arched train-shed roof over the hitherto uncoordinated mass of private railway bills. It stipulated that on each line there had to be what became known as a ‘parliamentary train’ at least once a day, with a fare of no more than one penny a mile. It also reserved to the state powers of nationalization should private enterprise fail to provide an adequate system.
This absorption in departmental business did not prevent Gladstone being frequently on the brink of resignation. In May 1843 Ripon was shunted to the Board of Control (the forerunner of the India Office in pre-Mutiny days) and Gladstone became President of the Board of Trade in his place. In one sense this did little more than regularize the authority which he had already been exercising. But in another it enabled him, awkwardly but logically, to make fresh difficulties about whether he was sufficiently in accord with all aspects of government policy to be able to accept. As a junior minister, he held, he could just keep his head down on issues beyond the purview of the Board of Trade. Even within this limitation, however, he had incurred what he described as Peel’s ‘sulky displeasure’ by threatening at the beginning of 1842 to resign (or ‘retire’ as he at the age of thirty-two a little prematurely put it) when he got out of step with and in advance of Peel in the move away from the protective duty on corn. But once he had achieved what he regarded as the overdue offer of a Cabinet seat, all sorts of wider concerns became open to him.
At a meeting with Peel on 13 May, so far from expressing a simple enthusiasm and gratitude for the offer, he raised difficulties about the opium trade (which Peel said was the responsibility of the East India Company rather than of the government), about certain education clauses, which Peel said he did not think could pass the House of Commons, and about the proposed amalgamation of the North Wales bishoprics of Bangor and St Asaph in order to make room for a new see of Manchester. This had been provided for by Parliament in 1836, but its implementation depended on the death of the Bishop of St Asaph, which in 1843 appeared to be imminent, but which was providentially postponed until 1846 and a Whig ministry.
But it was this issue which Peel appeared to take most seriously, ostensibly on the ground that it might be the most imminent for decision, but perhaps because his patience was running out by that stage, particularly as Gladstone kept saying that it might be better if he left the government altogether. Peel then delivered a well-deserved if gentle rebuking lecture on the accommodations and sense of proportion necessary to enable any group of men to work together in a Cabinet of fourteen, and the issues were circumnavigated (as Gladstone probably always intended they should be) so that he could enter the Cabinet and stay there for twenty-one months. But at least twelve of these months were occupied with his teetering towards resignation, with the issue one on which his position made his previous hesitancies look like those of a simple man of bluff common sense.
Since the Act of Union of 1800 the British government had made an annual subvention of £9000 to the Roman Catholic seminary at Maynooth near Dublin. In relation to the major endowments of Trinity College Dublin and indeed of the whole Anglican establishment in overwhelmingly Catholic Ireland it was a drop in the ocean. Gladstone, however, in the spate of his State in its Relations with the Church intolerance had denounced it as a cowardly selling of the pass which would endanger the tradition of Bishop Berkeley, Dean Swift and every other Anglo-Irish divine of the previous 150 years. By 1842 he had recovered enough balance to vote for a renewal of the paltry grant. But in 1844 when Peel, seeking a conciliatory gesture towards indigenous Ireland, proposed to raise the subvention to £30,000, make it permanent, and incorporate the college, Gladstone was thrown into a great state.
He saw that the demands of good government pointed in precisely these directions. But he also feared that it might be a backdoor undermining of the position of the Church of Ireland; and that it might be dishonourable if he, who had written as he had done in 1838, even though he had two-thirds changed his mind in the meantime, were to remain a member of a government which implemented a policy contradictory to his previous beliefs. He therefore spent the whole of 1844 plaguing his colleagues with his conscience. As at that time the Conservative Party was racked by the issue of whether it would allow Peel to usher in the much more stable and prosperous Britain of the third quarter of the nineteenth century or whether it would respond to what became the atavism of Disraeli, Stanley and Bentinck, and as on the big issue Gladstone was wholly on the side of Peel, his obsession was totally lacking in proportion. Peel’s comment that ‘I really have great difficulty sometimes in comprehending what Gladstone means’ seems in the circumstances remarkably restrained.
Into the midst of this troubled year Gladstone threw a bizarre spanner. In July he wrote to
Peel suggesting that he should resign his Cabinet post, his parliamentary seat and almost anything else within striking distance in order to become special British envoy to the Vatican. (Peel and Aberdeen, the Foreign Secretary, were thought to be contemplating the opening of diplomatic relations.) He told Peel that if he did not like the suggestion he need not reply. Peel took him at his word and did precisely that. And fifty years later Gladstone provided his own commentary on his 1844 behaviour. ‘I have difficulty at this date [1894] in conceiving by what obliquity of view I could have come to imagine that this was a rational or in any way excusable proposal: and this, although I vaguely think my friend James Hope had some hand in it, seems to show me now that there existed in my mind a strong element of fanaticism.’28
Although diverted from this particular piece of foolishness, Gladstone continued for another six months (two and a half of them at Fasque, fortunately for ministers’ patience) to keep his colleagues on tenterhooks about whether or not he would resign on the Maynooth issue. They combined an irritated amusement at the delicate twists of his conscience with a surprisingly strong desire that he should not go – a fine tribute to his other qualities of energy, intellect and eloquence. Eventually, on 3 February 1845, he did resign, and explained his reasons to the House of Commons in an hour-long speech on the following day. No one was much the wiser at the end, but his opacity at least had the advantage that the danger of bitterness was drowned in incomprehension.
