Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Palmerston had spoken from dusk to dawn on the second night of the debate, and Gladstone on the third night was almost as late if not as long. It was nearly two o’clock before he sat down. His speech was not a sur place triumph comparable with that of Palmerston, who not only secured the division but in Gladstone’s description, ‘through the livelong summer’s night [made] the British House of Commons, crowded as it was, hang upon his words’.2 There was some straying of attention during Gladstone’s second hour, to which he responded with pained rebuke. Despite this mixed reception the speech extended Gladstone’s range into foreign affairs, made a considerable outside impact and contained some remarkable passages which presaged the distaste for chauvinism which was to inform the four Gladstone administrations. He took Civis Romanus sum head on:

  [The noble Viscount] vaunted amidst the cheers of his supporters, that under his administration an Englishman should be, throughout the world, what the citizen of Rome had been. What then, Sir, was a Roman citizen? He was the member of a privileged caste; he belonged to a conquering race, to a nation that held all others bound down by the strong arm of power. For him there was to be an exceptional system of law; for him principles were to be asserted, and by him rights were to be enjoyed, that were denied to the rest of the world. Is that the view of the noble Lord as to the relation that is to subsist between England and other countries?

  More surprisingly, Gladstone then contested and mocked the doctrine of Britain as a universal moral arbitrator:

  Does he make the claim for us that we are uplifted upon a platform high above the standing-ground of all other nations? It is, indeed, too clear, not only from the expressions, but from the whole spirit of the speech of the noble Viscount, that too much of this notion is lurking in his mind; that he adopts in part that vain conception that we, forsooth, have a mission to be the censors of vice and folly, of abuse and imperfection, among the other countries of the world; that we are to be the universal schoolmasters; and that all those who hesitate to recognise our office, can be governed only by prejudice or personal animosity, and should have the blind war of diplomacy forthwith declared against them. And certainly if the business of a Foreign Secretary properly were to carry on such diplomatic wars, all must admit that the noble Lord is a master of the discharge of his functions. What, Sir, ought a Foreign Secretary to be? Is he to be like some gallant knight at a tournament of old, pricking forth into the lists, armed at all points, confiding in his sinews and his skill, challenging all comers for the sake of honour, and having no other duty than to lay as many as possible of his adversaries sprawling in the dust? If such is the idea of a good Foreign Secretary, I, for one, would vote to the noble Lord his present appointment for his life. But, Sir, I do not understand the duty of a Secretary for Foreign Affairs to be of such a character. I understand it to be his duty to conciliate peace with dignity. I think it to be the very first of all his duties studiously to observe, and to exalt in honour among mankind, that great code of principles which is termed the law of nations. . . .

  Very near the end Gladstone sustained this argument with a subtle and sensitive piece of national self-criticism:

  Sir, I say the policy of the noble Lord tends to encourage and confirm in us that which is our besetting fault and weakness, both as a nation and as individuals. Let an Englishman travel where he will as a private person, he is found in general to be upright, high-minded, brave, liberal, and true; though with all this, foreigners are too often sensible of something that galls them in his presence, and I apprehend it is because he has too great a tendency to self-esteem – too little disposition to regard the feelings, the habits, and the ideas of others. Sir, I find this characteristic too plainly legible in the policy of the noble Lord.

  Gladstone’s speech, as well as these fine excursions on to the high moral ground, also and less characteristically contained some brilliant pieces of raillery against the extravagance of Pacifico’s claims. It is an interesting comment on mid-nineteenth-century values that Pacifico was thought to be broaching the top end of the market when he specified £170 for a couch, £53 for a chest of drawers, £60 for a carpet, £150 for a bed, £24 for a card-table, £120 for a pair of mirrors, £170 for a dinner service and £64 for tea and coffee services. Yes, said Gladstone, you could find such articles at such prices in shops in London, but the only people who bought them were those who, apart from their possessions, had incomes of £20,000, £50,000 or £100,000 a year. Yet Monsieur Pacifico, ‘who thus surpassed nearly all subjects and equalled almost any prince, according to his own account, in many articles of luxury, who had £5,000 worth of clothes, jewels and furniture in his house, had not outside of it, except plate pledged to the Bank of Athens for £30, which he had not been able to redeem, one single farthing! So, Sir, having his house crammed full of fine furniture, fine clothes and fine jewels, Monsieur Pacifico was in all other respects a pauper.’3

  Gladstone in this speech may not have rivalled Palmerston. But he probably made the next best speech of the great debate, better than Disraeli’s, whom he recorded as ‘being below his mark though he seemed in earnest’, better than Russell’s, whom he allowed as being ‘about par’, and stronger than what proved to be Peel’s swan-song. It was, however, the result not the speeches which aroused his anger. ‘The division was disgusting, not on account of the numbers simply but considering where they came from.’4 The ground for this bitter complaint was that with the exception of Cobden, Bright and Joseph Hume, the Radicals as well as the entire Whig party voted for Palmerston, for jingoism (a word not then invented) and for the big stick, thus giving the Foreign Secretary a Commons majority of forty-six to compensate for the Lords defeat which Stanley had inflicted upon him. And an equal irony was that the restrained internationalism outlined in Gladstone’s speech was one of the few issues of the day in favour of which the scattered parts of the Conservative party, protectionists and Peelites alike, united in a single lobby. The debate also fortified Gladstone’s hostility to Palmerston. Hitherto he had mildly disapproved of his character. Henceforward he deeply distrusted his policy.

  Gladstone’s next burst of political (although not parliamentary) activity could be regarded as somewhat incompatible with the high nonassertiveness which he preached in the Don Pacifico debate. Before he left for Italy he had little intention of political involvement during his Naples winter of 1850–1. The object was an improvement in the health of his daughter Mary, a rest for his wife after the strains of pregnancy, illness and death in the family, and perhaps some repose too for his own uncalm nervous system. The chief vacation task which he set himself, that of translating the three Italian volumes of L. C. Farini’s history of Lo Stato Romano 1815–1850, was half a help and half a hindrance to this end. In the first place it involved him in sustained work, sometimes on his own and sometimes with L. J. Barber, the British vice-consul in Naples, as an assistant. When they were working together he recorded that they had done 303 pages in seventy-one and three-quarter hours, a considerable pace at which to copy let alone probe Italian meanings and search for appropriate English words and phrases. Given his energy, however, this task probably provided a more steadying influence than sightseeing alone could have given. On the other hand the work he had chosen tempted him towards Italian politics. It was perhaps for him the equivalent, in another context, of lingering in front of a bookshop window. Farini was a very moderate liberal, but his history of the post-Napoleonic exercise of papal temporal power was highly critical and could not fail to set the mind of his translator on to the question of whether post-1848 conditions in Naples were not even worse.

  Gladstone’s interest in what went on under the regime of King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies,25 ‘King Bomba’ as he was derisively known in England, had been aroused in London by (Sir) Anthony Panizzi, then deputy keeper of the British Museum and the creator of the Round Reading Room, who although of Lombard origin kept Neapolitan affairs very much under his eye. As soon as Gladstone arrived in Naples Pani
zzi’s influence was fortified by that of another and almost equally remarkable Anglo-Italian knight-to-be (Sir) James Lacaita, later Professor at King’s College London, and secretary to Gladstone on his Ionian Isles mission in 1859. Lacaita was at that time a Neapolitan subject and legal adviser to the British Legation, which was headed by William Temple, Palmerston’s younger brother.

  Through Lacaita, Gladstone became much involved with the case of Baron Carlo Poerio, who had been briefly a Neapolitan minister in the frightened days of 1848 but who by 1850 was put on trial for subversion and sentenced to twenty-four years in irons. Gladstone attended with deep disapproval some of the court proceedings, and then visited Poerio at the Bagno di Nisida prison. The conditions in the dungeons where Poerio was habitually confined were of the classic quality of operatic incarceration. Chained prisoners lay in foetid darkness and were occasionally handed out a portion of filthy food. On the day of Gladstone’s visit a veritable Fidelio scene was enacted.

  For half an hour before noon on Thursdays perhaps rather more the prisoners may come out to see their friends, or rather relations. About ten of the political prisoners came out two and two. . . . My conductor signified to Poerio in part who I was, and he then came aside to me. We conversed most of the time: for the rest of it I spoke with Pironti to whom he was chained and Braico the nephew of Madame Dekker as whose friend or escort I went in.26

  Gladstone recorded in great detail the conditions in which the prisoners were held, and in Poerio’s case had been held for sixteen months before trial. He recorded the length and heaviness of the chains which were never taken off night and day, observed the ‘stinking soup’ which was taken in as food, ascertained that the dungeons were damp and hardly lit, and noted that the political prisoners were forced to wear the rough dress of ‘common malefactors’ including ‘the felon’s red cap’. These facts whipped up Gladstone’s indignation, but the main purpose of his visit was to get assurance from Poerio that public intervention would not do more harm than good. Gladstone had been warned against this a few days before by the Prince San Giacomo, who had been ambassador to London in the false Neapolitan dawn of 1848 and of whom he thought highly. And Poerio himself was at first somewhat hesitant. He told Gladstone that he feared ‘his case had been made worse by Mr Temple’s intervention: not in the least blaming Mr T or considering it officious. But he said to speak without reserve the Kings [of Naples] had a great hatred of the English generally.’5

  Gladstone then asked Poerio a question which, as a protesting man of courage, it would have been very difficult for him to answer other than as he did. ‘Matters standing thus,’ Gladstone said,

  I saw no way open but that of exposure; and might that possibly exasperate the Neap. Govt. & increase their severity? His reply was ‘as to us, never mind – we can hardly be worse than we are – but think of our country for which we are most willing to be sacrificed. Exposure will do it good. The present Govt. of Naples rely on the English Conservative Party. . . . Let there be a voice from that party showing that whatever Govt. be in power in England, no support will be given to proceedings such as these – it will do much to break them down.’6

  Having got the assurance,27 and boiling with indignation against the Neapolitan government, Gladstone was anxious to be back in England and to have the opportunity to rally the Conservative party against the iniquities. This at first was his limited objective. Palmerston, he assumed, could be got to fire off a protest at the drop of a hat, but the Foreign Secretary had devalued such démarches by their too frequent use, and it was conservative opinion, both with a large and a small ‘c’, that Gladstone thought was likely to be most effective in Naples. It was also the case that he still instinctively thought of himself as a Conservative and that what most aroused his ire against the tyranny of the Neapolitan government was that it was specifically directed against the bourgeoisie: ‘The class persecuted as a whole is the class that lives and moves, the middle class, in its widest acceptation, but particularly in the upper part of the middle class which [it] may be said embraces the professions, the most cultivated and progressive part of the nation.’7

  These considerations may have persuaded him to couch his anti-Bourbon manifesto in the form of a letter to Lord Aberdeen, who was the last previous Conservative Foreign Secretary and was looked to as the leader of the Peelites after the death of the former Prime Minister. Aberdeen had also long been looked upon as having a special position in Austria, which was rightly regarded as the paramount power in Naples. Gladstone wrote the letter (more a pamphlet) in one of his ‘white-heat’ moods, and had it ready for despatch on 7 April (1851), despite the distractions of a major, difficult and unpopular speech in the House of Commons on 25 March,28 the final arguments with Manning on the 30th and with Hope-Scott on 3 April, and the news that they had both made the fateful break on the 6th. Gladstone pronounced himself ‘smitten’ by this last event. He was also irrepressible. ‘One blessing I have is total freedom from doubts.’ And later on that same evening of the despatch of the letter to Aberdeen he wrote: ‘Dined at the Palace: when I had most interesting conversations especially with the Queen about Naples.’8 The still young Sovereign obviously had an early experience of enjoying Gladstone’s lecturing style.

  Aberdeen liked Gladstone but he also liked a quiet life and a quiet pattern of politics in Europe. This for him meant the upholding of as much as possible of the 1815 settlement of Vienna, which had been rudely enough shaken by the events of 1848, and he saw Gladstone’s activities as a likely source of future trouble. Nevertheless his sense of justice and humanity made him accept the horror of the evidence put before him, and his sense of caution made him tremble at the signs of movement in the ‘tremendous projectile’ and desire to exercise some influence over its ‘curves and deviations’. Accordingly he had a friendly meeting with Gladstone on 13 April, offered one or two suggestions for small changes to the letter, and promised to make a private approach to Prince Schwarzenberg, the Chancellor of the Austrian Empire.

  He was not however in a hurry and it was nearly three weeks before he wrote a gentle letter to Schwarzenberg pointing out the disadvantages to conservative Europe of a conservative statesman of Gladstone’s repute feeling he was forced to make public remonstrance. Aberdeen’s dilatoriness was minor compared with that of Schwarzenberg, who took another seven weeks to reply. Maybe the Ballhausplatz officials needed these weeks to polish the insolent ripostes with which the Chancellor embellished his cold reply. The British government’s treatment of political prisoners in Ireland, Ceylon, the Ionian Islands and even in England (the case of Ernest Jones the Chartist was specified) was recriminatingly deployed. Finally, throwing a bone to a dog, Schwarzenberg told Aberdeen that, as it had not been formally requested (if it had he would have refused), he would pass Gladstone’s statement to His Sicilian Majesty.

  The sheer efflux of time (it was four months since his return from Naples) quite apart from the dismissive nature of the reply had severely tried Gladstone’s patience by this date, and he decided to publish and to do so under the title of Letter to the Earl of Aberdeen. Immediately before the event, but after he had written to his publisher, John Murray, giving instructions to go ahead, which instructions presumably embraced the title of the pamphlet, he had at least four meetings with Aberdeen, and at his request agreed to postpone publication by a few days to 15 July. Aberdeen subsequently complained that he had never given his consent to publication. Gladstone’s response was that it had been implied in conversation, and it is difficult to believe that this was not so in view of Gladstone’s agreement to postpone. But it may be that Aberdeen felt he was confronted with an unnegotiable position so far as a decision to publish was concerned, with room for discussion only on the exact date.

  What is certainly the case is that Gladstone inappropriately associated Aberdeen’s name with a polemical publication of vast impact. And what is probably the case is that Aberdeen only became seriously embarrassed and somewhat (but not lastin
gly) resentful when he discovered how much Gladstone made his (Aberdeen’s) name resound throughout Europe and how strongly conservative opinion across the Continent disapproved of Gladstone’s content wrapped in Aberdeen’s flag. Even the friendly and anglophile Guizot wrote a letter of courteous rebuke. Others were less courteous. An unconnected and (so far as is known) inoffensive Gladstone was blackballed for a Paris Club on account of his name alone.

  On the other hand Gladstone aroused enormous enthusiasm in liberal circles, particularly but not only in Italy. At home Palmerston expressed his support, allied to pleasure at being able to stir a party political pot, by distributing copies of the Gladstone pamphlet to all British heads of mission in Europe with instructions that it be communicated to the governments to which they were accredited. And when the Neapolitan minister in London countered by asking for the distribution of an exculpation which his government had produced Palmerston dismissed it as ‘a flimsy tissue of bare assertions and reckless denials mixed up with coarse ribaldry and commonplace abuse’.9