Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  The Ecclesiastical Titles Bill further enhanced Gladstone’s reputation as a dominant parliamentary figure, and marked an important stage in his move towards liberalism, although not towards the leaders of the Whig party. It also underlined the slightly self-righteous separateness of the Peelites – ‘a limited but accomplished school’ as Disraeli mockingly called them. But it did not begin to provide Gladstone with any firm moorings for his political future. He looked powerful but idiosyncratic and isolated rather than on the verge of the glorious blossoming of his career which was to come in 1852–3.

  PART TWO

  A MIDDLE-AGED MID-VICTORIAN STATESMAN

  1852–1868

  THE CHANCELLOR WHO MADE THE JOB

  THE RUSSELL GOVERNMENT staggered on for another seven months, with Parliament in recess for most of them, after the sad farce of the passage into law of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill in July 1851. It had tried to divest itself of office, for which it had lost all appetite, in the late winter of 1851. But Stanley, the alternative Prime Minister as the leader of the majority of the Conservative party which had opposed Peel in 1846, took one look at his followers and decided that, when he had failed to add Gladstone or Graham to them, they were simply not up to constituting a government. ‘These are not names I can put before the Queen,’ Disraeli recorded him as dismissively concluding the attempt to create an administration.1

  For Disraeli the lesson was clear. He noted: ‘every public man of experience and influence, however slight, had declined to act unless the principle of Protection were unequivocally renounced’.2 He therefore redoubled his efforts to get rid of the old policy for the sake of which he had broken Peel and on which he had elevated himself to the Conservative leadership in the Commons. Stanley was a little less ruthless, but equally aware of the weakness of a protectionist party.

  The unsettling effect which, after 1846, Peel had upon British politics (‘former Prime Ministers’, Gladstone said, with Peel very much in mind, ‘are like great rafts floating untethered in a harbour’) was spectacularly illustrated by the fact that nearly a year after his death the leaders of neither party had faith in their own ability to govern with confidence, although Russell was in general fond of office. Stanley’s awareness of his own party’s unfitness could not, however, prop up the Whigs for long. In December 1851, Russell decided under considerable pressure from the Queen and Prince Albert that he must make a desperate effort to recover his authority against the overt insubordination of his Foreign Secretary, who had unilaterally congratulated Louis Napoleon on his coup d’état. As is often the case in such circumstances, he overreached himself.

  Palmerston was dismissed and became determined to have his ‘tit-for-tat with Johnnie Russell’. He effectively if blatantly achieved that within a few weeks of the reassembly of Parliament on 4 February 1852. He united with Disraeli to defeat Russell on the Militia Bill and the five-and-a-half-year Whig government came to an end. Stanley this time had no other choice than to form an administration or contract out of serious politics.32

  The government which Derby formed was not much better than that which he had declined to present a year before. It contained only three members (Derby himself, Lonsdale and J. C. Herries) who had ever held office before, and consequently only three Privy Councillors. The rest had to be sworn in as part of a mass baptism which Robert Blake compared with the installation of the first Labour government in 1924; and, Blake suggested, there was an almost equal feeling of the arrival of the barbarians within the gates, which was unmitigated by the Cabinet (of thirteen) containing one duke, one marquess and four earls. The sense of the backwoodsmen taking over was captured for posterity by the deaf and declining Duke of Wellington having the glory of the list explained to him by Derby in the Lords chamber and responding to most names with an increasingly penetrating and incredulous ‘Who? Who?’

  So the ‘Who Who’ ministry was born, and Disraeli began his official career, which was to be so intertwined, symbiotically if without much mutual sympathy, with that of Gladstone. The symbiosis was immediately to the fore. Disraeli, who was the only possible choice to lead the House of Commons, became Chancellor of the Exchequer. Although Pitt had progressed from the Exchequer to his great premiership and Althorp had led the House of Commons from the Treasury in both the Grey and the first Melbourne governments, it was then by no means the second post or the most natural one from which to lead in the Commons if the Prime Minister were a peer – as he was for just over half the nineteenth century. Both the Home and the Foreign Offices were more likely bases. But each of these ministers saw much more of the Queen than did the Under-Treasurer, the clerkly title which the Chancellor is significantly given in Court documents, and this was thought to preclude Disraeli’s appointment as a Secretary of State. The Queen had indeed specifically registered such an objection during the previous year’s abortive attempt to form a Conservative government, pegging it to Disraeli’s treatment of Peel in 1846. So he became Chancellor (Derby brushing aside his demurral that he had no knowledge of the Treasury with ‘You know as much as Mr Canning did. They give you the figures’). By so doing Disraeli not only made himself a target which brought out the full force of Gladstone’s parliamentary wrath but also increased the status of the post which that rival was soon to occupy.

  This time round it was Palmerston rather than the Peelites whom Derby tried to capture for his government. But here too he was inhibited by royal disfavour, for the Queen, although for different reasons, was as unwilling to see Palmerston as Disraeli at the Foreign Office (at this stage her prejudices were remarkably similar to those of Gladstone). And, as Palmerston was tempted by no other post, that settled the matter. Without such independent Whig adherence, Derby had no alternative but to accept the Peelite terms for support from outside, which were that there should be a general election in the summer (of 1852) followed by a late-autumn session of Parliament during which the government must bring forward its fiscal proposals and thus show its hand on how thoroughly it was abandoning protection.

  These arrangements led to an indecisive result in a July election, and to the unusual and inconvenient event of a December budget, which proved fatal for the government and triumphant for Gladstone. The election, as already indicated, led to a secure return for Gladstone from Oxford, and to the ‘Derbyites’ gaining some seats but not enough to give them a dependable majority. In a House of 654 their strength was varyingly interpreted as between 290 and 310. The rest were about 270 ‘Liberals’ as they were coming loosely to be called, 35 to 40 Peelites, and about the same number of variegated Irish. (The numbers are imprecise because MPs were often imprecise about the labels they wished to attach to themselves.)

  The December budget fell unhappily for Disraeli as a neophyte Chancellor. He was due to present it on the 3rd, and he had had a wretched November. When the new Parliament met at the beginning of the month it was necessary for the government quickly to declare where it stood on the Corn Laws. Charles Villiers had put down a provocative motion which stated that repeal had been ‘a wise, just and beneficial measure’. The protectionists of 1846 were anxious to be rid of their albatross but to ask them to vote for this motion was to ask them to canonize Peel, to the revolt against whom they owed their origin and their leadership. Gladstone and Sidney Herbert then drafted a compromise motion which, through the agency of Palmerston, Disraeli was glad to accept. But he had to go through three uncomfortable nights of debate to get it carried and to avoid the government being washed away before he could even present his budget in the following week. He was suffering from severe influenza, which meant that he spoke only with difficulty, and he had to sit and listen to a scornful indictment of himself from Herbert, who, as a loyal Peelite, pilloried Disraeli for his shameless opportunism in first destroying Peel and then adopting his policy.

  Perhaps aided by his illness, Disraeli listened with the pallid impassivity which was to become his stock-in-trade. But his maintenance of such dignity was not aided by ot
her circumstances. The Duke of Wellington had died between the election and the meeting of Parliament, and one of Disraeli’s early duties as leader of the House of Commons was to pronounce an encomium upon him. His words were noble, but by what Blake charitably calls ‘a curious trick of memory’ they turned out to be a word-for-word translation of those which Thiers had used for an obituary of Maréchal St Cyr in 1829. The exposure of this coincidence caused much mockery at the Chancellor’s expense. In addition, far from finding that, in Derby’s reassuring phrase, ‘they give you the figures’, he found himself bereft of a private secretary, who had caught his own influenza, and grubbing around in desperation and solitude to make his budget add up.

  What he had determined to do, perhaps more for reasons of politics than of justice, was to accept free trade, but to ease by taxation concessions the position of the principal groups which were alleged to have suffered from it. These were thought to be the landed, the sugar and the shipping interests. To be able to do something in these directions in what looked a tight budgetary situation (in fact the out-turn for the financial year was more favourable than he expected and he would have done better to wait for a spring budget) required some imaginative juggling, and Derby congratulated him on having successfully ‘doctored’ his figures.

  Disraeli presented these results in a five-hour speech, which Macaulay said he himself could have done more clearly in two. The debate did not begin until a week later and lasted over four nights. Disraeli and his proposals were heavily battered. On the first night (a Friday) Gladstone spoke on the house and income tax aspects of the budget (it was taken in parts), and was in the Commons until ‘12¾’. Then, having got home, ‘I sat up for the night: and fell to work on my arrears of letters and papers’ until, as he recorded for the next morning, ‘off by six o’clock train to Birm. & Hagley which I reached before one: falling in with a nice boy on the road [that is, on his twelve-mile walk from Birmingham station], Nanny’s grandson. Saw Griffiths [an agent, probably on Oak Farm business] in evg. but was sleepy enough.’3 It is a comfort to know that his energy was subject to at least that degree of human limitation.

  Gladstone was back in London on the Monday evening and at the House later that night and on the Tuesday for the continuation of the budget debate. On the Thursday (16 December) he spoke in ‘the very exciting debate early in the evening’ about a procedural question, and then, after going home to Carlton Gardens for dinner, returned to the House for Disraeli’s reply to the whole debate, which lasted from 10.20 until 1.00. Gladstone thought Disraeli’s speech brilliant, even if insolent and at times vulgar. The drama of the occasion was increased by the noises off of a violent thunderstorm, an almost unique December event. Towards the end Disraeli employed what became one of his most quoted aphorisms. He was faced, he said, by a coalition of opposition: ‘The combination may be successful. A coalition has before this been successful. But coalitions although successful have always found this, that their triumph has been brief. This too I know, that England does not love coalitions.’4

  When Disraeli sat down, exhausted by two and a quarter hours of mordancy, the House, collectively tired by that time, assumed an immediate division. It was an hour after midnight and the Chancellor of the Exchequer had just wound up four days of budget debate. But they reckoned without Gladstone who, amazingly as it now seems and uninhibited by having already spoken twice in the four days, decided that a full-scale reply could and should be imposed upon the House. He accordingly stood in his place on the opposition side below the gangway, which was where the Peelites then sat, and the chairman (the House being in Committee, which meant there was no rule against multiple speeches) had reluctantly to call him.33

  The House was at least as reluctant to hear him, and to begin with he spoke through considerable noise. ‘It was a most difficult operation . . .’, he informed his wife. Although he defined his ‘great object [as being] to show the Conservative party how their leader was hoodwinking and bewildering them’, he himself began with a fair piece of sophistry. ‘I am reluctant . . . to trespass upon the attention of the Committee, but it appears to me that the speech we have just heard is a speech which ought to meet with a reply, and that, too, on the moment.’ This impression of spontaneity provoked by affront might have been more convincing had he not written to his wife (she was at Hagley) thirty-six hours before: ‘I am sorry to say that I have a long speech fomenting in me, and I feel as a loaf might in the oven.’5 In addition he had for much of the morning ‘worked up the Exchequer loan business34 and made notes for speaking’.

  In other words the speech counted for him as a more than usually prepared one, and there can be little doubt that his deliberate intention had been to trump Disraeli’s ace and to seize from the government its normal right to the last word. From the moment of Disraeli’s rising Gladstone confessed himself ‘on tenterhooks, except when his [Disraeli’s] superlative acting and brilliant oratory from time to time absorbed me and made me quite forget that I had to follow him’.6 Earlier in the evening, when he had been in his own house between seven and nine, he had dined alone, read Travels in Tartary, Thibet and China by E. V. Huc and ‘actually contrived . . . to sleep in the fur cloak for . . . quarter of an hour’. Despite these attempts at relaxation he described his brain as being ‘strung very high’7 for his own speech.

  This speech lasted another two hours until after three o’clock in the morning. During the first quarter of an hour or so, while he was rebuking Disraeli for his cheap personal attacks, there was a lot of interruption. Then, as he gradually got control of the House, there was a change of pace. He was, as usual, somewhat periphrastic with occasional dark pools of obscurity as he piled negative upon negative and one subordinate clause upon another. Yet the whole is curiously easy to read. He proceeds throughout on the assumption that he knew more about government than did Disraeli. This was supplemented by frequent appeals to the authority of Sir Robert Peel, compared with whom Disraeli was treated as a lightweight charlatan. The result, Gladstone suggested, was a decline in the conscience and repute of the Conservative party, which filled him more with sorrow than with anger.

  This did not prevent his delivering some good dismissive jokes. He gradually built up a picture of Disraeli as a frivolous fellow who lacked clarity of execution, consistency of purpose, or the honesty to admit that his surplus was fictitious. Gladstone’s peroration was powerful and not too florid. He did not however go in for understatement. He would vote against the budget because it was ‘the most subversive in its tendency and ultimate effects which I have ever known submitted to this House’.8He would vote in support of Conservative principles, and particularly those which were enshrined in the great name and the great days of Sir R. Peel.

  In voting for Conservative principles, however, he took good care to do so on a motion and in circumstances which would give him plenty of Whig and Radical allies. That was the point of Disraeli’s jibe about coalitions. When Gladstone left the House at four o’clock in the morning he may have proclaimed Conservative principles but he had destroyed the only flicker of a Conservative government between 1846 and 1858. It was therefore surprising and perhaps insensitive that on his way home he went into the Carlton Club (as now exclusively Conservative and then in Pall Mall) to write a letter.35

  That visit provoked no reported reaction – the club was presumably fairly empty at 4.30 in the morning, even after a critical division – but when Gladstone next went into the club, after dinner on 20 December, and was sitting reading, he was mildly harassed by a baying group of young members who threatened to throw him across the road into the Reform Club, where, they insisted, he properly belonged. However, he clung on to his Carlton membership for another seven years, despite or perhaps because of the fact that in 1855, when he had turned against a continuation of the Crimean War, the Duke of Beaufort tried to have him expelled. Eventually, in 1860 when he had passed over most watersheds away from Conservatism, he allowed his membership to lapse. It was proba
bly the only club in which he ever felt at home. He had been a member for a long time, and it was very convenient for his various residences in Carlton Gardens and Carlton House Terrace. At the end of his life he was a member of the Athenaeum and of the United Universities Club, as well as being the literal founder – he laid the foundation stone – of the National Liberal Club. But he never belonged to the Reform Club or to the Whig citadel of Brooks’s where, however, he was frequently entertained by his private secretaries in his later governments.

  When he got home from his Carlton Club letter-writing he managed only two hours’ sleep: ‘My nervous system was too powerfully acted upon by the scene of last night. A recollection of having mismanaged a material point (by omission) came into my head when I was half awake between 7 and 8 and utterly prevented my getting more rest.’9 Then he was agitated by the fact that The Times that morning contained only ‘a mangled abbreviation’ of his speech. (It might be thought a feat far beyond modern technology that it contained even the semblance of a report of a speech delivered in the middle of the night.) He was somewhat mollified by the following day’s edition containing a laudatory comparison between his style and that of Disraeli.

  In the subsequent days Gladstone could contemplate with increasing satisfaction the repercussions of his oration. Indeed, one reason the atmosphere had been so charged in the Carlton Club on the evening of Monday 20 December was that the government had that afternoon announced its resignation, Derby with petulance in the Lords and Disraeli with good humour in the Commons.