Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  There were broadly only two subjects on which Gladstone agreed with Palmerston. The first was Italy, and the second was their shared coolness (although differently expressed) to an extension of the franchise. It was the prominence of these two issues, the first still more than the second, in the three months following Gladstone’s return from Corfu which made Palmerston temporarily less repugnant to him than was Disraeli and led him to make a choice of direction which had the most momentous permanent effects. But his movement, although decisive, was carried out in a peculiarly crabwise fashion.

  His first days in London were marked by a frenzy of mainly political activity. During the day (Tuesday, 8 March 1859) which began with his morning arrival from Paris he had separate meetings with four or five of his Peelite colleagues as well as with the Colonial Secretary and Lacaita, went to the House of Commons for three hours and took the oath (following his re-election for Oxford), read a new Bagehot pamphlet on parliamentary reform, and indulged in several rescue encounters with ladies who had been deprived of his ministrations for several months, although he had managed one or two redeeming attempts (in what language?) in the Corfu streets.

  On the next day he had a further range of interviews, signing off (with the Prime Minister among others) from the Ionian Isles and signing on with the British Museum. The great Round Reading Room was then under construction, and Panizzi became as frequent a visitor to Carlton House Terrace as Lacaita (they often came together). Gladstone made a brief parliamentary re-entry speech about the Museum on 18 March, but both his reading and his thoughts were concentrating on what he would say on Disraeli’s Representation of the People Bill, which came before the House on the 21st, and was debated in the course of that and six subsequent nights. After listening to Disraeli’s opening speech and the first night’s debate, Gladstone made a diary entry in a rare form: ‘sorely puzzled’, he wrote.

  This attempt at a second Reform Bill had emerged from the Conservative Cabinet at the end of February after considerable dissension and the resignations of the Home Secretary (Spencer Walpole) and the President of the Board of Trade (Henley). As with all nineteenth-century franchise measures the question of the distribution of constituencies was just as important, in some ways even more so from a party point of view, as was that of who should vote. Even after 1832 the boroughs, particularly the smaller ones, were grossly over-represented in relation to the counties. And the counties maintained their Conservative tradition despite Derby and Disraeli having abandoned protectionism at the beginning of the decade. The affiliations of the boroughs were more mixed, but there was no doubt that a transfer of seats from them to the counties would produce some tilt in the political balance towards the Tories, and might easily more than counteract the effect of a lowering of the property qualification for a vote, about the political effect of which there were in any event greatly varying views.

  The bill which eventually emerged from a reluctant Cabinet, and which Disraeli spiritedly commended to the House on 21 March, was a package composed of extending the £10 householder franchise from the boroughs to the counties (that is, widening the electorate there), introducing a new £20 lodger (non-householder) franchise in both, supplementing these provisions with a series of ‘fancy franchises’, as John Bright memorably christened them, and taking seventy seats away from the smaller boroughs to give eighteen to the larger boroughs and fifty-two to the counties.

  The fancy franchises, which were thought to be a direct product of Disraeli’s over-fertile imagination, included votes for those with an income of £10 a year from the funds, or £20 a year from a government pension, or £60 capital in a savings bank account, or (if not otherwise qualified) were doctors of medicine, lawyers, university graduates, ministers of religion or in some categories of schoolmasters. Disraeli’s pre-eminent modern biographer has written with brutal honesty about Disraeli’s motives on the issue: ‘It would be absurd to claim that Disraeli viewed the matter other than first and foremost in the light of party expediency.’2 But were his motives worse than anyone else’s? Apart from the Radicals, who believed straightforwardly in the democratization of the franchise, the general mood among politicians from 1852 to 1867 was that an extension of the electoral base was inevitable, even if not particularly welcome, and that it was legitimate to manoeuvre so that the maximum advantage was achieved both from their party’s being the agent of the change and from the form in which it was done. There was no great difference in this respect between Tories and Whigs (becoming Liberals) or indeed Peelites, except that the last did not have a clear enough constituency interest for it to be obvious how they could best benefit themselves.

  Disraeli’s 1859 bill suffered from over-complication and from failing to satisfy any non-Conservative interest. Russell and Palmerston managed to come together in an amendment against giving a second reading to a bill which failed to make a larger extension of the franchise in the cities and boroughs. The contradiction was that one (Russell) of Queen Victoria’s ‘two terrible old men’ wanted more reform and that the other was glad of an excuse to avoid it altogether, a position which Palmerston brilliantly maintained for the remaining six years of his life. This did not prevent their alliance, supported by the Radicals, resulting in a government defeat by the surprisingly large margin of thirty-nine.

  Gladstone’s contribution was characteristic of his ambiguities in that spring of rebound. He spoke for an hour and twenty minutes on the penultimate night, his first major intervention for nearly a year. There were two memorable aspects to his speech. The first was an almost lyrical defence of the virtues of small (that is, semi-rotten) boroughs. They had been the nurseries of statesmen, of Pelham, both Pitts, Fox, Canning, Peel and, he might have added, of himself. It was not an obvious way in which either to mark his transition to Liberalism or to support a measure which disfranchised seventy of them. The second was a sustained piece of raillery of Palmerston, whose attitude to the issue was in fact very close to his own and whose long-term Chancellor of the Exchequer he was about to become. He mocked him for having needed war in 1855, peace in 1856, the dissolution of Parliament in 1857 and the dissolution of his government in 1858 to save him from reform. Having thus boxed several compasses, Gladstone proceeded to vote for the bill, with the government, and in a minority. Later, on a separate motion, he voted in a large majority against the introduction of the ballot, thereby conspicuously not paving the way to one of the principal reforms of his own first administration.

  Derby decided to dissolve on the defeat, and was justified to the extent that he improved Conservative numbers in the House of Commons by about thirty, their greatest strength since Disraeli’s destruction of the Peel government thirteen years before. On the other hand the new figure was still short of a majority and the opposing forces had become more inclined to come together. So the election gains, far from providing the Conservatives with a secure foundation for government, put them out for another seven years and left Derby without office (not that he ever greatly cared about that) for most of the last decade of his life.

  Gladstone was crucial to this new anti-Conservative stability, but he did not show this by his behaviour during the election, any more than he had by his vote in the division which had led to the dissolution. He was unopposed at Oxford, for the last time as it turned out, and therefore needed to do nothing on his own behalf. But nor did he campaign for anyone else, not even in Flintshire. Parliament was dissolved between 19 April and 31 May. He made no speech during this period. He visited Oxford from 6 to 13 May, but this was first for the purpose of having his son Stephen confirmed by Bishop Wilberforce at Cuddesdon, second to be installed as one of the first honorary fellows of All Souls following an 1857 change in the statutes (he stayed four nights in the college), and only third to pay the customary round of visits to Heads of Houses to mark his re-election.

  For the rest his time was taken up with reading George Eliot’s just published Adam Bede, entertaining the Duc d’Aumale (Louis-Philippe’s fo
urth and most interesting son), twice visiting the Carlton Club, from which he was on the brink of resignation, and writing a hurried but substantial article for the Quarterly Review on the Franco-Piedmontese war against Austria in Italy (which had started at the end of April). He never went outside the Home Counties during this period, and indeed five months passed after his return from Corfu before he visited Hawarden, thus imposing upon himself a total absence of ten months. In London he did a good deal of rescue work, although he did not appear to be obsessively concentrated on any individuals. On 25 May, however, he thought he had transgressed sufficiently, with a lady named Trelawney, to resort to the use of the scourge for the first time for two years, and the last time ever according to his diary records.

  Although he himself took no part in the campaign there was one campaigning speech which made a great impact upon him. That was by Palmerston in his Tiverton constituency on 29 April. Palmerston was also unopposed, but in order to achieve this result he made an appearance at a hustings in his Devon borough and there delivered himself of some impromptu remarks which struck a strong chord of response in Gladstone’s italophil heart. Palmerston in a half-modern fashion had prepared a hand-out from his speech, although in a way that was far from modern he had himself written it out in his own beautiful hand, and the reporters, also eschewing modern practice, had not taken this hand-out on trust or deserted their posts in Tiverton market-place. The written text merely said that any Conservative attempts to drag Britain into the Italian war on the Austrian side must be resisted. The ‘spontaneous’ additions included the statement that ‘if the consequences of Austrian aggression should be that she should be compelled to withdraw to the north of the Alps and leave Italy free to the Italians . . . every generous mind will feel that sometimes out of evil good may flow and we shall rejoice at the issue . . .’3

  These words excited Gladstone. Aberdeen, even in the last year of his life, penetratingly understood him and immediately perceived this. He told Graham that Palmerston’s ‘brilliant stroke’ at Tiverton would have ‘secured Gladstone’ and made him ready ‘to act with him, or under him’.4 Palmerston’s words were no doubt the more effective in this respect because, although unscripted, they were not at variance with his premeditated thought. He had written to Granville several months before:

  I am very Austrian north of the Alps but very anti-Austrian south of the Alps. The Austrians have no business in Italy, and they are a public nuisance there. They govern their own provinces ill, and are the props and encouragers of bad government in all the other states of the Peninsula, except in Piedmont, where fortunately they have no influence.5

  Gladstone, possibly smarting both from Schwarzenberg’s contemptuous dismissal of his Neapolitan pamphlet eight years before and from his more recent experience of having to run around Vienna explaining the leak of Sir John Young’s despatch, might not have endorsed Palmerston’s enthusiasm for Habsburg power even north of the Alps. Nevertheless he regarded Palmerston’s forthrightness towards getting the Austrian white coats out of the Po valley as an immense improvement on Derby–Disraeli respect for the simulacrum of power of the Hofburg and the supine attitude towards it of their weak Foreign Secretary, Lord Malmesbury. When, eight months later, Gladstone had to explain the step of joining Palmerston, he did so with the one word ‘Italy’. But he made no reference to the Tiverton speech in his diary, and in the six weeks between it and the formation of the second Palmerston government his method of transition became even more crab-like than hitherto.

  On the afternoon of 6 June a meeting took place in Willis’s Rooms (formally Almack’s and a fine haunt of early nineteenth-century dissipation). Why it was there is a mild mystery. Two hundred and seventy-four MPs were recorded as being present, and they included several Whig magnates who could have accommodated that number in their own London houses, and, in default of that, the Reform Club, palatial, then both sectarian and only sixteen years old, would have been more than adequately welcoming. But it was nonetheless in the faintly rakish surroundings of Willis’s that the accouchement of the Liberal party is commonly regarded as having taken place. And the equivalent of the first cry of the newly emerged infant was when Palmerston (then aged seventy-five), having mounted the platform first, gave an assisting arm to little but no longer very agile Johnnie Russell (then aged sixty-seven). This gesture of common courtesy was elevated by resounding cheers into the approximate nineteenth-century equivalent of Martin Luther nailing his notice to the church door in Wittenberg or of the embattled farmers by the rood bridge at Lexington firing ‘the shot heard round the world’. Both Russell and Palmerston said they would serve under the other. John Bright also spoke and said that he would support such a government, although he had excluded himself from membership of it by the vehemence of his recent speeches against the peers and the upper classes. Nonetheless Manchester rallied to Whiggery, and, flavoured by the Peelite presence of Sidney Herbert and James Graham, produced a new cocktail in the shape of a party of government which was to last for fifty-six years.50

  There were to be six Liberal Prime Ministers during this period. The first two, Palmerston and Russell, were the stars of the Willis’s meeting. The last three, Rosebery, Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith, were not present for the good reason that they were respectively aged twelve, twenty-three and six at the time. The third in chronology, who was to be incomparably the most dominant of the fifty-six years, was also not present, and for the less good reason that he did not choose to go. This was despite the presence of Herbert and Graham. Gladstone made no excuse. He just stayed away. And he compounded this by voting for the (Conservative) government in the 11 June division on the Whig–Liberal amendment to the Address.

  That division, which took place after three nights of debate on a Liberal amendment moved by the then almost juvenile Marquess of Hartington, put the Conservatives out for another seven years. It resulted in the defeat of the government by thirteen and immediate resignation. That result was achieved against the vote of the man who was to be both the greatest beneficiary and the greatest ornament of the new political pattern thus created.

  Gladstone’s was a controversial but a quiet vote. Almost all the other big parliamentary guns – Palmerston, Disraeli, Russell, Bright, Sidney Herbert, Graham, Roebuck, Cornewall Lewis – fired off during the three nights. Gladstone did not, although abstinence from a major debate was unusual on his part. He merely slipped unobtrusively into the lobby and cast his vote for the Conservative government. The remaining prominent Peelites in the House of Commons, Herbert, Graham, Cardwell, all voted the other way. Gladstone no doubt felt the separation keenly, particularly from Herbert. It was less than sixteen months since they had jointly expressed ‘the fervent wish that in public life we might never part’. Gladstone was also subject to some metaphorical jostling. Two days before the vote he recorded that he had seen Mrs Herbert, ‘who threatened me’.6

  In the case of anyone but Gladstone such behaviour would have seemed an almost certain indication that he was preparing rather shamefacedly to slip his old moorings, go back into full communion with the Conservatives, and thereby hope to solve the problem of his need for office. In his case, however, such an interpretation bore no relation at all to either his motivation or the way in which events turned out. He had rejected all the Derby–Disraeli overtures of 1858, and although he might in the meantime have become more aware of the futility of politics without office, he had also, in his perpetual struggle to find an equilibrium point which enabled him to be anti-Disraeli without being pro-Palmerston (and vice versa), been moved a few notches towards Palmerston. His preferred outcome after the election was a Derby–Palmerston coalition with Disraeli moved away from the leadership of the Commons without being given the Foreign Office as a consolation. But that possibility disappeared at Willis’s Rooms and by the time he voted it must have been obvious to him that his vote was unlikely to help the government to survive. So far from trimming for office he was indulging in another
bout of Maynooth-style perversity, voting against his interest, against his friends, against his evolving beliefs, all out of some sort of loyalty to the past.

  Counterbalancing this was the fortunate fact that Gladstone by this stage in his life did not need to look after his own interests. His force was such that anyone endeavouring to form a stable government wanted him in it. This was perfectly illustrated by the events of the few days after the Commons vote and by the sense of slightly resented inevitability about the way in which Gladstone emerged from them.

  When Derby resigned the Queen presaged her foolish attempt twenty-one years later to keep Gladstone out in favour of Hartington by trying to get Granville, then young (only forty-four) as well as benignly unabrasive, instead of either Palmerston or Russell. This attempt to consult her own preference rather than the political realities (it was surprising that the Prince Consort allowed her to do it) would probably have foundered in any event, but it was most firmly blocked, not so much by Palmerston’s unwillingness to be number two, as by Russell’s determination not to be number three. Up with the number-two position he was prepared to put, but not, as an ex-Prime Minister, with the number-three one. So, by Monday, 13 June, Palmerston was again Prime Minister, and by late that night Gladstone was Chancellor of the Exchequer. He would have accepted no other office.

  Russell became Foreign Secretary, Cornewall Lewis, who had hoped to be Chancellor, Home Secretary, and Granville, deprived of his undeserved premiership, Lord President. Among the Peelites, who always did well for office when they could be persuaded to take it, Gladstone was buttressed by Argyll as Lord Privy Seal, Herbert as Secretary of State for War, Newcastle as Secretary of State for the Colonies and Cardwell as Chief Secretary for Ireland. Clarendon, who had been Foreign Secretary in the previous Palmerston administration and was to be so again under Russell and then under Gladstone in the second half of the 1860s, was left out, which may have accounted for the bitterness of his wife’s comments on Gladstone’s return to the Exchequer. Lady Clarendon complained that Gladstone had forced himself into his old job, thereby producing the effect of a ripple demotion among the Whigs (Lewis slipped to the Home Office and her husband out altogether): ‘Why he who voted in the last division with the Derby ministry should not only be asked to join this one, but be allowed to choose his office, I cannot conceive or rather, I can conceive, for I know that it is his power of speaking. They want his tongue and they dread it in opposition.’7