Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  On 27 March 1854 Russell had written pointedly but with apparent good humour to Gladstone, ‘I fear my mind is exclusively occupied with the war [which Britain and France had that day declared, an event unnoticed in Gladstone’s diaries] and the Reform Bill, and yours with University reform.’6 On 25 May, however, when Gladstone had unavailingly wound up a debate on a maladroit second attempt by Russell to resolve the Rothschild difficulty about the parliamentary oath, he petulantly wrote: ‘H of C 4½–7½. Spoke 1h. & voted 247:251 on Lord J R’s Oaths Bill: wh Bill was from the first a great mistake of his and his only.’7 (For a great orator reluctantly to be persuaded to give succour to a disapproved-of colleague and to fail to bring it off is no doubt an almost perfect recipe for exasperation.) Then the row about the Commissioner of Woods and Forests gathered a momentum of bitterness over the summer, and at church on Christmas morning Gladstone put first among his thoughts and self-reproaches his worry about his ‘cabinet feud’ with Russell.

  The two leading Whigs, Russell and Palmerston, badly though they often got on with each other, were united in finding the Peelite elements in the government inadequately bellicose. And with Aberdeen Prime Minister, Gladstone Chancellor, Graham First Lord of the Admiralty, Sidney Herbert Secretary at War, and Newcastle Secretary for War and the Colonies (under the curious split system which prevailed until 1857) the Peelites were very powerfully placed to obstruct a war. Palmerston resigned in December 1853 against the dilatory approach to support for Turkey, and was persuaded by Aberdeen to remain as Home Secretary only on terms which pushed the Prime Minister in a more warlike direction than he would have wished.

  After the war began, however, it was Russell who made the more trouble. The Whigs in 1852, like the Tories in the Asquith coalition of 1915, had accepted an unsatisfactory set of portfolios and retaliated for their own bad bargaining by complaining about the lack of adequate war direction. Russell, with a presumption much exceeding that of Bonar Law just over sixty years later, thought that he ought to be Prime Minister, and indeed believed that he had some sort of assurance from Aberdeen that he would soon make way for him. (‘Soon’, however, as Eden found with Churchill and Erhard with Adenauer, is not a precise contractual term.) Russell also thought that Palmerston should replace Newcastle.

  These beliefs led to growing acrimony. Already by 15 February 1854, a Cabinet dinner lasted from 7.45 p.m. to 2.15 in the morning, and it was not conviviality which accounted for the lateness of the break-up. By December of that year relations were in a permanent state of bitterness, with Russell threatening to resign on the 4th, another dreadful Cabinet dinner on the 6th, and ‘a childish scene’ at a Saturday Cabinet on the 9th. Russell’s resignation remained in a state of suspended animation over the brief Christmas holidays. When Parliament met on 23 January 1855 Newcastle had decided to resign out of honourable guilt.

  Roebuck, Radical MP for Sheffield, had put down a motion for a parliamentary committee of enquiry into the war, and Russell announced that he could not conscientiously oppose the motion and must therefore reactivate his suspended resignation. Palmerston incongruously took Russell’s place as leader of the House of Commons, but made a very weak reply to Roebuck. He was no better as an ‘air-raid shelter’ for Aberdeen than Churchill was accused of being for Chamberlain in May 1940. Gladstone tried harder three days later, and denounced the presumptions of the legislature in trying by means of the committee of enquiry to invade the functions of the executive. But denouncing the jury is rarely a wise way of winning a verdict, and the House voted by the massive majority of 304 to 148 for Roebuck. That was the end of the Aberdeen government. The Cabinet met only for ‘friendly adieus’ on the following day, 30 January.

  This collapse did not necessarily mean even the temporary end of office for Gladstone. The uncertainty which resulted from the fall of the Aberdeen coalition was extreme even by the standards of instability which marked the whole period between the end of the Peel government in 1846 and the accession of Gladstone himself to the premiership in 1868. There were at least three possible Prime Ministers, all of whom were prepared, perhaps even eager, to keep Gladstone as Chancellor. Gladstone, however, with an uncanny stubbornness, attached himself to the one manifestly impossible solution, which was the return of Aberdeen to 10 Downing Street, and did so with a sophistical ingenuity which must have infuriated nearly every other player in the game, and ended up by generally damaging his own reputation and ensuring an ignominious end for the Peelites as a collective and influential group.

  During the four weeks between the farewell meeting of the Aberdeen Cabinet and Gladstone’s surrendering the seals of the Exchequer to George Cornewall Lewis on 28 February, almost every combination was mooted or tried, and Gladstone (and some others as well) displayed a skill in thinking up difficulties which was a fine tribute to his resourcefulness. It was perhaps less of a tribute to his constructive statesmanship in the middle of a war which, while not threatening Britain’s survival, was nonetheless taking a severe toll of men and reputations.

  First Palmerston came to Gladstone with a proposition that they should both serve under Derby, for whom the Queen had sent. Palmerston was to lead in the Commons and Gladstone was to remain at the Exchequer. This meant Disraeli giving up both the posts which he had occupied in the 1852 government. He was however willing to make the sacrifice. Sidney Herbert for the Peelites was also to be included, but not Graham. Gladstone made Graham’s exclusion a sticking point, and as Palmerston was not very keen, really wanting the foreign secretaryship or indeed the premiership for himself, and Derby, who never had much thrust to office, was not enthusiastic either, the combination collapsed. Disraeli thought at the time that this was a major missed opportunity, and Gladstone came to think so later. Certainly it was the last real chance of Conservative reunion (although that might have been more coherently achieved without Palmerston), and as Gladstone subsequently told the Queen that ‘she would have little peace or comfort in these matters [stable ministries] until parliament should have returned to its old organisation in two political parties’,8 he might have done more to bring it about.

  Next, Gladstone went to see Lord Lansdowne at the latter’s request. Lansdowne, then aged seventy-four, was a trusted and moderate Whig who had served in Cabinets since that of Grenville in 1806. He might have made an acceptable although hardly dynamic Prime Minister, and had been sounded out at Windsor that morning. Gladstone and he then made a leisurely tour d’horizon in which Gladstone poured cold water on the possibilities first of Russell, then of Palmerston and finally of Clarendon as Prime Minister, and said that of the Whigs Lansdowne himself would be the best. Lansdowne then asked him if he would continue as Chancellor under him. If so, he would persevere. If not, not. Gladstone in effect said no. He was disillusioned with the previous coalition, and was not prepared to try it again under anyone other than Aberdeen. He thought it would be better if Lansdowne tried to form an homogeneous Whig government. As Lansdowne had already excluded this course it was not a constructive suggestion. Forty-two years later Gladstone more than endorsed this view. It was his second error in two days. ‘This I think was one of the greatest, perhaps the greatest, errors I ever committed.’9

  On the following day Russell came to see Gladstone. He too had been asked if he could form a government. Would Gladstone continue in his office under him? Gladstone recorded Russell’s tone as ‘low and doubtful’. It cannot have been made any less so by Gladstone’s refusal, rejecting the suggestion that he might take time to think. So, in three days’ short work, Gladstone had in effect achieved by default the solution he least wanted, which was to make Palmerston Prime Minister, an outcome for which public opinion appeared to be clamouring. Palmerston received the commission on 4 February and came to see Gladstone that afternoon, once again offering the Exchequer. Once again Gladstone declined, but not perhaps as definitely as he had done with Russell. The following day was spent in a scurry of consultation among the Peelites, the process made more comp
licated by Graham being ill in bed. But they were in a greater difficulty than that. They tried to hold the line that they would not serve in a Cabinet which did not include Aberdeen, preferably as Prime Minister, but if not at least as a member and as a guarantor of a sensible attitude (that is, not too bellicose) to ‘war and peace’.

  Aberdeen himself did not agree with them. He knew that his return to the premiership was out of the question, and he had no intention of serving in a subordinate capacity under Palmerston. But he believed that the others ought to accept office. The matter then came to turn on the extent to which Aberdeen would endorse the government, although not a member of it, in the House of Lords. On the Monday (5 February) he would commit himself only to expressing the hope that ‘it might do right’. Gladstone gasped with relief. He had a new excuse for standing out, and that day closed with the Peelites still refusing. On the Tuesday, however, Aberdeen said that he would endorse, and the little band publicly changed their mind and agreed to join. Gladstone wrote of their submission in almost biblical terms: ‘I had a message from P[almerston] that he would answer me but at night I went up to him.’10He spoke in equally emotional terms to Aberdeen – ‘. . . I hoped our conduct and reliance on him would tend to his eminence and honour’ – and said, ‘you are not to be of the Cabinet, but you are to be its tutelary deity’.11 Gladstone remained as Chancellor, Graham as First Lord, and Herbert as Colonial Secretary.

  The public shilly-shallying of 5–6 February was bad enough, but what followed was worse. These Peelite ministers were sworn in at Windsor on the 8th. On the 21st they all three resigned. Two other Peelites, Argyll and Canning, remained in the Cabinet. The ostensible and at least half the real reason for going was the decision of Palmerston and of the majority of the Cabinet to accept the committee of enquiry arising out of the Roebuck motion. Gladstone felt passionately that this was an unacceptable dilution of the power of the executive as well as a slur upon the Aberdeen government. He also felt that Palmerston’s believing this was inevitable showed that the new government did not effectively command the confidence of the House of Commons. But nearly all resignations have an underlying as well as a triggering cause, and Gladstone’s was that he had been unhappy at each of the three meetings of the Palmerston Cabinet which he had attended, and that his discontent was not made less by the knowledge, which cannot have been absent from his mind, that it had been his own conduct, as much as anything else, which had created the premiership of which he so disapproved.

  So ended Gladstone’s second substantial experience of office. He claimed that his resignation speech (of one and a half hours) on 23 February had led to his being ‘much satisfied with the feeling of this House’. On this occasion even Gladstone must have been overshadowed by John Bright’s unforgettable if somewhat florid eloquence on the same day when he had called up an image of ‘the angel of death [who] has been abroad throughout the land’ so that ‘you may almost hear the beating of his wings’. But more important than oratorical upstaging was that Gladstone’s departure and his behaviour over the previous month had left an impression of self-regard, bad judgement and wavering mind. Only his extraordinary force and talent enabled him to recover so spectacularly from such a setback.

  HEALTH AND WEALTH

  AFTER THE 1853 BUDGET Gladstone, while psychologically in much better shape than during his mid-century crisis, became exhausted and fell into indifferent physical health. The reaction from his budget strain and triumph followed a familiar time pattern. At first he was buoyed up. Then after about ten days he began to sleep badly and felt washed out. On 29 April he recorded in characteristically opaque terms: ‘I felt at length a good deal overset: and had recourse to blue pill at night.’ The next day he wrote: ‘I only had 6 or 6½ hours of business but was all the worse for it and repeated the Blue Pill [presumably a sedative; it had moved to the upper case over the preceding twenty-four hours] – absenting myself from the H. of Commons.’1

  Two days after that there occurred the unfortunate Wilson affair. A pathetic young Scot of that name, an unemployed commercial traveller, having seen Gladstone talking to two prostitutes near the Haymarket, tried to blackmail him with the threat of exposure unless he procured him a public service post, preferably in the Inland Revenue department. Gladstone was both too innocent and too wise to fall for that, and handed Wilson over to the police. As a result he had to visit Vine Street police station that night, make depositions at Marlborough Street magistrates’ court three days later, and attend (silently) the trial at the Old Bailey five weeks after that. Wilson was sentenced to twelve months’ hard labour, but was released after two of them as a result of Gladstone’s pleas to Palmerston as Home Secretary.

  The case did not do Gladstone much harm, although it occasioned a few raised eyebrows and no doubt further agitated him at a time of strain and pressure. ‘This day my work touched 17 hours very nearly,’ he recorded between the committal and the trial, and two days after that he developed erysipelas in his leg (a febrile disease which although local had killed his mother in 1835 and nearly killed his daughter Agnes in 1847). He was half confined to bed for three or four days. His immediate verdict (some time before that at the Old Bailey) on the Wilson incident was: ‘These talkings of mine are certainly not within the rules of worldly prudence: I am not sure that Christian prudence sanctions them for such a one as me, but my aim and intention did not warrant the charge which doubtless has been sent to teach me wisdom and which I therefore welcome.’2 It produced no increase in prudence, however. That summer his ‘rescue work’ was intense, seven such encounters being recorded in the last week of June. Yet there is a strong impression that the motivation was less frenzied than had been the case two or three years before.

  Mainly as a result of concern about his health, he began that summer a frequent and dutiful habit of riding in London. For 11 May he recorded: ‘Rode: an adventure, after so long a cessation.’ He kept up the habit for nearly two years, except during the periods when the aftereffects of his recurrent attacks of erysipelas precluded it, and often four or five times a week. Mostly it was a session of three-quarters of an hour in Hyde Park, but on one day in April 1854 he recorded himself as having ridden for an hour and twenty minutes ‘into the country’. (What did that mean at the time? Chiswick?) Early that year he rode regularly with Sidney Herbert, but for the most part it was a solitary and somewhat contrived pursuit. On 4 April 1855, as abruptly as he had taken to the saddle in May 1853, he decided that he had had enough and assumed a policy of complete renunciation. ‘Rode: my last; I am glad to get rid of a personal luxury and indulgence.’3 However, he continued over that and subsequent summers and autumns in the country occasionally to get on a horse with one or other of his older children, who were beginning to grow up. Willy was fifteen, Agnes thirteen and Stephen eleven that year. And then, from the following spring, he began to ride again in London, but always, in contrast with his habit before the renunciation, with a child. This, accompanied by his other habits of giving them regular Latin lessons and seeking religious conversations whenever possible, meant that they saw much more of him than was common in upper-class families of the time, even when the father was far less occupied than was Gladstone.

  Whether riding did his health any good, which was its ostensible purpose, seems more doubtful. He was in bed for most of two or three days (again with erysipelas in a leg) in early June 1853, he described himself as ‘pretty well knocked up’ at the end of the session in mid-August, and two weeks into his Scottish holiday trip he became severely ill. On 3 September he (and Catherine and Willy Gladstone) arrived at Dunrobin Castle on the Moray Firth to stay with the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland. On the 4th he took to his bed with his old friend ‘erysipelas inflammations’ (as he then put it) and remained there for eight days. Then he got gently better, but was unable to leave Dunrobin until his projected visit of a week or so had turned into a twenty-six-day one. Fortunately, as he recorded, ‘the welcome was the kindest possible’. Then th
e Gladstones proceeded on a westerly arc which took them via Oban and Greenock to Drumlanrig in Dumfriesshire, where they stayed with the Buccleuchs for two days only, and without mishap.

  They regained Hawarden on 1 October, but did not settle down there for an extended autumn, as had been Gladstone’s habit at Fasque in the 1840s and was to become so, although a little more intermittently, at Hawarden itself in the later 1850s and 1860s. This was not simply a function of his being in office. No habit of presence in London, let alone a regular attendance at the Treasury, was expected of a Chancellor, or forthcoming even from one as diligent as Gladstone, during the months when Parliament was not sitting. It was more a function of the main house at Hawarden, which the Gladstones shared with Stephen Glynne until his death in 1874, only gradually being got back into shape after its Oak Farm-induced closure from 1847 to 1852. There were also frequent commands, issued more on a personal than a political basis, to stay with the Queen and Prince Albert at Windsor, which led him to graft on to these Windsor excursions London visits, which he used for encounters with both his Cabinet colleagues and his ladies. Thus he was at Windsor for two nights on 25 and 26 October (followed by one in London) and for three nights (this time with Catherine) from 9 to 12 November (followed by twelve in London and a veritable flurry of nine late-night excursions), and then at Windsor yet again from 4 to 6 January 1854. It was a strong indication of how good were Gladstone’s relations with the royal couple during that noontide of their marriage. The relations of court and government were also generally closer than today.