by Roy Jenkins
Nonetheless the long-running dispute about the respective rights of protection over the Christian holy places in Palestine enjoyed by the Greek and the Latin faiths, which was as much the trigger of the Crimean War as the Sarajevo assassination was of the First World War (although with a slower-acting mechanism) was a subject which might have been expected, by virtue both of its religious content and of its geographical location, to excite Gladstone’s interest and imagination.
This dispute entered a dangerous phase early in 1853. There is, however, little evidence that the issue engaged Gladstone’s mind until after a long Scottish holiday visit from 17 August to 1 October, and not seriously until after the outbreak of war between Russia and Turkey later in that October and the destruction of much of the Turkish fleet off Sinope on 30 November. This was partly because, although it was a good period for Gladstone with more sense of political momentum, less financial or family worries and less sexual frenzy than in at least the four preceding years, he was heavily occupied with two half-connected subjects. The first was the reform of the University of Oxford and the second was the reform of the British civil service.
The report of the Oxford Commission had been published in the spring of 1852, but it was only a year later, with Gladstone’s first budget behind him and with his authority enhanced by the reputation which it gave him, that he began to take the lead in University reform. Bitterly though he had opposed the setting up of the Commission in 1850, denouncing it as illegal as well as undesirable, he had been impressed by its deliberations and report, and decided that the Oxford’s best chance of preserving as much as possible of its traditional and clerical pattern was to seize the opportunity of guiding its own reform. In the Queen’s Speech of November 1852 the Derby government had envisaged legislation after the University had been allowed a year for reflection on the recommendations. The Aberdeen government could have repudiated the undertaking, but under guidance from Gladstone it decided not to do so, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, acting more in a constituency than a Treasury capacity, took responsibility for devising a government measure and for piloting it through Parliament.
This bill was not ready for introduction to the House of Commons until 17 March 1854, but it had been central to Gladstone’s thoughts for much of the preceding twelve months and dominating, more so indeed than the 6 March budget of that year, since the beginning of January. Not only did he engage in the vast correspondence already cited; he also immersed himself in detail, carefully studying, for example, the statutes of the individual colleges. On 8 March, only two days after the budget, Gladstone’s presentation of which, with unusual restraint, was confined to two hours, he was up until 4.30 in the morning working on the Oxford bill. It was formally introduced by Russell as the leader of the House of Commons, but Gladstone made the substantive speech replying to the debate, which moved A. P. Stanley, who had been the secretary of the Commission and was to become Dean of Westminster in 1864, to describe it as ‘a superb speech . . . in which, for the first time, all the arguments for our report were worked up in the most effective manner’. Stanley produced two penetrating comments on Gladstone’s parliamentary style. First he criticized him for a vain endeavour to reconcile his new with his old position: ‘with this exception I listened to the speech with the greatest delight’. And then he praised him with an unusual slant. ‘One great charm of his speaking is its exceeding good humour. There is great vehemence but no bitterness.’2
The Oxford bill then ground its way through committee, report stage and third reading until it went to the Lords in early July, where it was not greatly mutilated, in spite of the opposition of Derby (who had become Chancellor of the University in 1853 following the death of Wellington). What did it do? Essentially it broke the Anglican monopoly and opened the way for Dissenters to matriculate and proceed to bachelors’ degrees. There were supporting changes. The Hebdomadal Board, hitherto confined to Heads of colleges, was replaced by an elected council. This may sound a somewhat technical change, but when seen against the background of the vast oligarchic powers which the Heads of Houses (who never retired even if, as in the case of Dr Routh of Magdalen, they reached the age of ninety-nine and had occupied the post for sixty-five years) had presumed to exercise in the 1830s and 1840s, it was a change of significance for the tone of Oxford. The elected and more heterogeneous body never attempted to exercise the absolute powers which were epitomized by its predecessor’s 1843 action of forbidding Pusey, then Regius Professor of Hebrew and a canon of Christ Church, to preach in the University for two years, or their 1845 action of reducing W. G. Ward, Fellow of Balliol, to the status of an undergraduate, and being frustrated in their attempt to condemn Newman’s Tract 90 only by the veto of dedicated High Church proctors. It is now a long time since the formula of proctorial veto – Nobis Procuratoribus non placet – has rung around the Sheldonian Theatre in opposition to the Vice-Chancellor.
The Vice-Chancellor was empowered to open private halls. This was a provision to which Gladstone attached considerable importance and carried in committee by 205 votes to 113. It could be described as a Christ Church man’s attempt half to democratize the University without endangering the privileges of the House. It was a two-tier solution. Let the core colleges continue to be mostly the preserve of the rich, but let there be a periphery around them through which those of more modest means could get Oxford degrees and participate (to some extent) in the life of the University. It has proved an effective even if somewhat condescending provision. Permanent private halls (which has become the term of art) continue to exist today, although many of the earlier ones have graduated into full colleges of the University, as have the five women’s foundations, to which it also opened the way.
In the wake of legislation there were other significant changes. College statutes were reformed, non-resident clerical sinecures were weeded out and tutorial supervision much improved. The honours examinations, hitherto restricted to Literae Humaniores and Mathematics, were widened to include Schools of Law and Modern History and later Natural Science, English and other faculty subjects.3
There are several points, some of them contradictory, to be made about Gladstone’s role in promoting this bill. First, his performance was heroically self-reliant. He did it nearly all himself. Russell, without whom the Commission and therefore the bill would never have existed, faded after the early stages. This was as well, for there was great mutual prickliness, exacerbated by a long-running row which escalated into a major cause of Cabinet dissension over Gladstone’s determination to dismiss for general maladministration the Commissioner of Woods and Forests, T. F. Kennedy, who was senior enough to be a Privy Councillor, and whom Russell was equally determined to protect. Gladstone was assisted on the Oxford bill in the House of Commons by the Solicitor-General, Richard Bethell, later the first Lord Westbury and Lord Chancellor under Palmerston, and outside it by his old friend Robert Phillimore, who was a good draftsman. He also received a lot of often self-cancelling advice from Oxford. But the responsibility which he himself undertook, not only for sustaining the bill in the House of Commons but for the detail of its provisions, was something which no minister would contemplate today.
It also showed remarkable courage on his part. He was always a controversial member for the University. He had been opposed when he first stood in 1847 and again in 1853 at the ‘technical’ bye-election made necessary by his appointment as Chancellor of the Exchequer and was to be so yet again on reappointment to the Exchequer in 1859. This was very unusual in the history of the Oxford seat. After Gladstone was defeated there in 1865 there was no contested election in the constituency until 1918. And that 1865 defeat (the surprising thing was that it did not occur earlier) was made almost inevitable by Gladstone embracing the dangerous issue of University reform in the 1850s. Yet he did so, when convinced that it was necessary, against his earlier views, and against the wishes of many of his former supporters, with a determination which was as complete as was his clear
-sightedness about the risks that he was running.
On the other hand one of the most important provisions of the bill was carried against his opposition. He spoke and voted against the matriculation (admission) of Dissenters. He did not do so with great passion, for he had got himself into one of his convoluted positions. He was at least half in favour of such liberalization, but thought it should be a reserved question, and dealt with, if by Parliament at all, in a separate measure. Fortunately the House of Commons was less convoluted and defeated Gladstone and the government by a decisive 251 to 162. He did not seem to take it tragically and wrote to various Oxford dignitaries saying that ‘Parliament having unhappily [so] determined’, they had better make the best of the matter. In the course of the further stages of the bill the freedom at matriculation was extended to the bachelors’ degree, and then, seventeen years later and under Gladstone’s first premiership, religious tests were removed for all except the strictly ecclesiastical appointments.
On the other issues which produced a government defeat in the House of Commons Gladstone was on the advanced side and the majority of the House of Commons on the reactionary side, and he responded to this with more dismay than he had to the defeat on Dissenters. On 16 June a new clause moved by Roundell Palmer (as Lord Selborne one of Gladstone’s future Lord Chancellors) to protect closed scholarships and traditional school–college links (Winchester–New College and Westminster–Christ Church, to take the two most powerful Oxford examples) was carried against the government: ‘a great blow’ for the Oxford bill, Gladstone noted. None of this, however, much detracted from the unusual phenomenon of a considerable nonfinancial legislative triumph for the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Gladstone’s parallel efforts to produce a civil service recruited on the basis of talent rather than of patronage were less immediately fruitful, but it may be that this acorn eventually led to a more important tree than did the Oxford changes. To some extent, however, Gladstone saw the two issues as linked, and both placed him in somewhat surprising alliance with the liberal Erastian Benjamin Jowett, who was anxious to turn Oxford (and Balliol in particular) from a mixture of Anglican seminary and gentlemen’s finishing school into a serious forcing house for those who governed Britain and the Empire. And certainly Jowett himself, when he became Master of Balliol in 1870, was a superb practitioner of the art of turning out young men who were well qualified for the best jobs, and then making sure, through a network of college influence, that they got them. Thus in a sense a new patronage came to replace the old one of aristocratic connection and political jobbery, but it interposed a hurdle of intellectual merit over which the applicant had to be able to jump.
Despite Jowett’s very different religious approach this was much in accordance with Gladstone’s evolving views about how he wanted to see the public service recruited. He by no means wanted it democratized in the sense of being open to those who had not been burnished with a classical education in the most privileged academies. He was eager that the public service should be staffed by ‘gentlemen’, and that their fine minds should not be wasted on the mechanical aspects of the work, which should be separated as rigidly as possible from the intellectual aspects, thereby foreshadowing the administrative grade and its mandarin denizens which was to be such a feature of British public administration for a hundred years. But he was equally keen that they should be educated gentlemen able to surmount any test of merit. It was a modified version of the ‘clerisy’ approach, although now with much less religious restriction, which fifteen years before he had hoped could run the whole polity of Britain.
The running was made in the Indian public service, which was thrown open to competition for any British-born applicant in an 1853 bill, sponsored by Charles Wood, President of the Board of Control, and assisted by Robert Lowe, then at the beginning of his career, later to be Chancellor of the Exchequer under Gladstone, a difficult, uncompromising, brave man. Partly inspired by this Indian example, Gladstone in April of that year commissioned Sir Stafford Northcote and Sir Charles Trevelyan to produce a report dealing with the home civil service, including the Colonial Office but not the Foreign Office, in which latter department Palmerston had introduced a very limited measure of meritocracy, based mainly on the possession of a clear bold handwriting, a few years before.
Northcote, who had succeeded to a baronetcy in 1851 and was to go on to become both Chancellor and Foreign Secretary, as well as Conservative leader in the House of Commons, where he was a somewhat over-awed vis-à-vis to Gladstone in his second premiership, before ending up as Earl of Iddesleigh, was then thirty-five years old and Gladstone’s private secretary at the Treasury. He had been with him in that capacity at the Board of Trade in 1842 and had been urgently summoned back in Gladstone’s Carlton Club letter on the night of the latter’s great defeat of Disraeli in 1852.
Trevelyan was ten years older than Northcote and had served for the first fifteen years of his adult life in India (during which time he had married Macaulay’s sister) before spending the two middle decades of the century as an assistant secretary (the equivalent today of a second permanent secretary) in the Treasury. He had administered Irish famine relief, perhaps with more logic than humanity, in 1845–7, and he was to go back to India in 1859, first as Governor of Madras and then as finance member of the Viceroy’s Council. He was the epitome of a mid-Victorian public servant.
Between them they produced for Gladstone by late November 1853 what became known as one of the great state papers of the nineteenth century. Gladstone read it, interlaced with a report on decimal coinage, some of Horace Walpole’s letters and a few chapters of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, at Hawarden on 30 November. The two central recommendations were competitive examinations and a central board for recruitment to all the home departments. He reacted with enthusiasm to both, although later he became somewhat impatient with signs of tactical backsliding on the part of the authors. They thought it wiser to exclude (for the moment at any rate) the Treasury satraps of Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue, although as Gladstone correctly pointed out it was in precisely these two departments that the largest number of posts lay. And they also suggested that, between those who had passed the examination, the First Lord of the Treasury should be allowed to choose after giving ‘due weight to the recommendations of his colleagues and also of his Parliamentary supporters’. As Gladstone again pointed out, this would be to pretend that patronage had been slain while allowing it to wriggle back. ‘Pray let this disappear,’ he magisterially wrote to Trevelyan on 3 December.
Yet Trevelyan and Northcote had a more lively sense of political realities than did the famous politician at the head of their department. The Queen grumbled and, unusually in this phase, was not brought into line on Gladstone’s side by Prince Albert. ‘Where is the application of the principle of public competitions to stop?’4 she asked apprehensively, perhaps influenced by Lord John Russell’s view that the ‘harshly republican scheme was as hostile to the monarchy as it was to the aristocracy’. Russell’s extreme Whiggery made him fairly indifferent, except for purposes of argument, to the former aspect, but he certainly cared about the latter, and proved a jagged rock of opposition which Gladstone could not bulldoze out of the way. On 20 January 1854 he wrote Russell a powerfully argued, but not wholly tactful, letter which concluded with a 115-word sentence. In it he claimed that the Glorious Revolution had marked the change from prerogative to patronage, that since then there had been a movement from bribery to influence, and that this was a process which must continue. This was peculiarly rash ground, for Russell regarded himself as the keeper of the bones of the Glorious Revolution and also believed that, occasional limited extensions of the franchise apart, it had settled constitutional issues for all time. It did not require upsetting by the moralizing son of a Liverpool merchant, with dangerous religious enthusiasms and no adequate respect for the Whig cousinage. His reply to Gladstone’s ten pages was dismissively brief: ‘I hope no change wi
ll be made, and I certainly must protest against it.’5
Gladstone’s error was that he did not make an obvious deal with Russell, who was currently engaged in promoting one of his Reform Bills. It found little favour within the government, let alone on the other side of the House of Commons. Palmerston was opposed to the extent of threatening to resign, Aberdeen was lukewarm, and Gladstone wholly unhelpful. He deployed a ‘too clever by half’ argument, ‘This is my contribution to parliamentary reform,’ he wrote on 3 January to Graham (First Lord of the Admiralty) about his civil service plans. It would have been much more sensible for Gladstone to have moved more quickly to the position on the franchise which he was to occupy within less than a decade and to have at least tempted Russell with a pact of mutual support for each other’s pet reforms.
As it was, Gladstone ran into a wall of Whig hostility at the crucial Cabinet on 26 January. The Peelites were mostly content to go along with what he wanted, although Graham was cool, but with the exception of Granville the Whig half of the coalition, which provided most of the votes in the House of Commons, was unanimously hostile. As a result 1854 was much less productive for civil service than for Oxford reform. It was not until after the fall of the Aberdeen government that Gladstone was able to make his trio of notable parliamentary speeches on open entry to the public services, two in the summer of 1855 and one in the spring of 1856. Nevertheless the seed which he had sown in 1853 was an unsuppressible one which, like so many other burgeoning mid-Victorian reforms, came to full fruition during his first and most fructuous 1868–74 premiership. This 1854 dispute illustrated the capacity for mutual irritation between Gladstone and Russell, and the incompatibility of both provenance and instinctive political attitudes which lay behind it. It was within a year to prove fatal to the Aberdeen government.
