Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  JUST AS IT WAS the budget of 1853 which made Gladstone’s first chancellorship, so it was that of 1860, and the negotiations for a commercial treaty with France which led up to and determined much of the shape of it, which made his second one. For his first two or three months, as we have seen, he treated Exchequer matters with a curious casualness. His July 1859 budget, which he presented four weeks after taking office, was ostensibly a holding operation, but in reality it was even more an almost insolent reassertion of financial discipline.

  Cornewall Lewis, like almost every previous Whig Chancellor of the century, had left the public finances in a fair state of laxity. Expenditure, mainly military, was 25 per cent up on the pre-Crimean War level, but was not covered by a corresponding increase in revenue. Gladstone took over a £5 million deficit. He also inherited an excited military climate. There was a colonial war with China. There was also war in the heart of Europe for the first time since 1815. That latter conflict on the plains of Lombardy was a war which, particularly as Britain was not involved, Gladstone might have had his heart much more than in the Crimea. The battle of Magenta took place on 4 June and the battle of Solférino on the 24th. They were both victories for the French (and the Italians) over the Austrians, as is demonstrated by the presence of these names on the street-maps of Paris and not of Vienna. What was more relevant to Gladstone, however, was that these events provided a smokescreen of excitement behind which his budget passed with surprising ease and scant attention. It invites comparison with Neville Chamberlain’s ‘hidden’ 20 per cent devaluation of sterling in September 1939. There was so much else happening that it was neither widely noticed at the time nor much subsequently remembered.

  Equally Gladstone’s 1859 budget contained a swingeing rise in taxation by the standards of those days. He put income tax up from fivepence to ninepence in the pound, the highest peacetime rate that had then been experienced. And to compound the impact he stipulated that all the increase should be collected in the first half of the financial year. He did it while protesting that he disliked the tax, which should in general be reserved as an instrument of war. However, its greater use had been made necessary by the laxity with which expenditure had been allowed to grow since he was last at the Exchequer.

  This budget went through on what Asquith would have called ‘oiled castors’. For Saturday, 16 July, Gladstone recorded: ‘Cabinet 2–5½: two hours took my Budget through, pur et simple.’1 The only grumbling appears to have come from Lewis, but as he had as Chancellor in 1855–8 been largely responsible for the build-up of the deficit, and was also manifestly sour at not himself being again in that office, he did not cut much ice. Nor was the House of Commons difficult. There was no great clash with Disraeli, and not even a division.

  Whether this easy passage helped Gladstone to settle in to a Cabinet headed by two Whigs is not clear. On Saturday, 6 August, such was the contrast between bursts of strenuousness and long periods of leisure which then made up the pattern of the parliamentary time-table, after attending and speaking in the House of Commons from noon to 1.30 p.m., he spent the afternoon in a Cabinet and wrote, a little dismissively: ‘but the Cabinet is now . . . just a place for conversation’.2 52 Four days later, however, at the traditional ministerial Fish Dinner in the Trafalgar Tavern at Greenwich he much moved the audience and even Palmerston himself with the felicity of his sudden toast to the Prime Minister. But by 31 August he was writing a bitter letter of complaint to Argyll (who had missed the last two Cabinets) about the behaviour on the Italian question of Palmerston and even more so of Russell,53 ironically in view of his own future handling of this relationship, calling in aid the Foreign Secretary’s brusqueness to the Queen ‘as a sovereign and a woman’:

  When I look over what I have written [he concluded, to Argyll], it does not look very kind towards the two most eminent men in the Govt., one of them particularly. But I am sorry to say first that I believe I confess the general feeling of our Colleagues: secondly that, as I learned, the Queen has undergone very great pain in this matter: thirdly that the conduct pursued has been hasty, inconsiderate, and eminently juvenile: fourthly, one is led to fear that it may have left behind disagreeable recollections.3

  Nevertheless he had been much occupied before his departure from London on 18 August with moving into 11 Downing Street, and did not therefore seem afflicted with the uncomfortable restlessness which had led him after only a few weeks to resign (in 1855) from the previous Palmerston government. The removal was far from complete. He kept his other No. 11 in Carlton House Terrace, left his London books there, continued to use it as a base for his seven children, and quite often for himself and/or his wife as well. His letters over the next six years were just as likely to be addressed from one as from the other. This was hardly economical. Mid-Victorian prosperity, which as a leading member of the Peel and Aberdeen governments he had done as much as anyone to bring about, was obviously and justly benefiting him. This was in contrast with the years of Oak Farm worry and austerity on the one side and of old-age apprehensiveness and even a combination of stinginess and willingness to sponge which beset him in his years of greatest fame.

  His 1859 autumn was marked by two non-Oxford academic honours. On All Saints Day, together with his Cabinet colleague Sir George Grey, his brother-in-law Lyttelton and the ubiquitous Bishop Wilberforce, he received a Cambridge honorary degree. In December he paid a five-day visit to Edinburgh which resulted in his being pre-elected as Rector by the University Court there, although he was not installed or called upon to deliver his rectorial address until the following April. He then spoke on ‘The Work of Universities’ and survived ‘a crowded and kind Assembly’ (in the Music Room in George Street) without riot or egg-pelting.

  By far his most pregnant encounter of that autumn, however, was Richard Cobden’s visit to Hawarden on 12–13 September. Cobden, then aged fifty-five, had been returned, unopposed and in his absence in America, for Rochdale at the spring general election, having been out of the House since he lost his West Riding of Yorkshire seat in the Palmerston triumph of 1857. He was still away for the Willis’s Rooms meeting, but he was greeted at Liverpool on 29 June by letters from both Palmerston and Lord John Russell (for whom he had a much higher regard) pressing him to join the new government as President of the Board of Trade. He declined, on the ground that his opposition to Palmerston’s policies had been so complete that suddenly to accept office under him would be ridiculous. But his long and good-humoured interview of refusal with Palmerston a day or two later left no bitterness and indeed substantially improved their relations. It also left Cobden with a slight sense of guilt towards the government and of futility about his future purpose in Parliament. Palmerston had shrewdly asked him how he expected to influence foreign policy in particular if he could never join a government.

  Cobden had decided to spend the winter of 1859–60 in Paris, partly for reasons of economy, a course few Englishmen would today contemplate for that reason. While there he sought to occupy himself by engaging in commercial discussions with the French. In this way he might assuage his own sense of frustration, give some help to the government from the outside, and promote not only free trade but the relaxation of military tension. To fulfil this role, however, he needed a strong patron within the British government, and Gladstone offered the best prospect. As Chancellor he obviously held a key office. He had a proven record on free trade. Already coming under pressure for heavy armament expenditure against the French, not only from the Prime Minister, but also from his old friend Herbert as Secretary of State for War and from the Duke of Somerset as First Lord of the Admiralty, he had a strong motive for wishing to improve London–Paris relations. And he was also developing an affinity with Radicals. Once he had made his Conservative break, Gladstone was in many ways more at home with the pacifism, the anti-protectionism and the moral-force politics of the left of the Liberal party than he was with the more casual and less ideological outlook of the Whigs. This paradox was of
much importance for British politics in the last forty years of the nineteenth century.

  Of more immediate impact, however, was the consequence that when Cobden wrote to Gladstone from Manchester on 5 September suggesting that he might ‘run over’ to Hawarden in the following week and have ‘a little talk’ about trade with France,4 Gladstone responded with alacrity. Although he was only four days into his Penmaenmawr holiday he arranged to return to Hawarden and receive Cobden on the following Monday and Tuesday. His diary entries expressed satisfaction with the expenditure of time and the sacrifice of holiday. For the Monday: ‘Mr Cobden arrived. Several hours walk and talk with him.’ Then later that evening: ‘Conv. . . . with Mr C. on Currency.’ And on the Tuesday morning, with more commitment: ‘Further conv. with Mr Cobden on Tariffs and relations with France. We are closely and warmly agreed.’5 Gladstone saw him off at 11.00 and returned that afternoon to Penmaenmawr and a new burst of sea-bathing and work on Tennyson.

  Cobden’s skill lay in presenting the matter to Gladstone in terms which were by no means exclusively commercial. Obviously the freeing of trade with Britain’s most important neighbour was in itself a highly desirable objective. But Cobden also argued for it as a corrective to the mounting fear of war with France (soon to be fortified by Napoleon III’s annexation of Savoy and Nice) which was a feature of that autumn, and hence offered some protection for the Chancellor against the clamour from his colleagues for increased expenditure on armaments. The difficult point for both of them was that a bilateral commercial treaty was not wholly compatible with the strict doctrine of generalized free trade. Yet such bilateralism was the only hope of making progress with the étatiste French government, even more true to the spirit of Colbert in 1859 than it is today. Gladstone and Cobden agreed that this difficulty could be got round by allowing an asymmetry in the treaty. The British would make their concessions apply to other countries as well as to France, while the French could refrain from benefiting the Eskimos or even the Austrians in order to match a concession to the British. Thus was a British doctrine of non-discrimination maintained in theory, although in practice the concessions were directed towards French needs: it would have been difficult to argue that the heavy cut in wine duties was likely to be of much benefit to Swedes or Canadians, or that fine gloves, on which there was another important reduction, were at that time likely to flood in from Brazil. When the negotiations were complete Cobden felt it necessary to write defensively to Bright on this point: ‘I will undertake that there is not a syllable on our side of the treaty which is inconsistent with the soundest principles of free trade.’6

  In his anti-armament struggle Gladstone needed every help that he could get that autumn. Not only was there an expensive little war going on with China. His greatest friend in the government, Sidney Herbert, who however in the two years before his premature death in 1861 was too much of a victim of the widespread ministerial disease of departmentalitis to be much of a Cabinet ally, wanted to raise battalions of volunteers, fortify Portsmouth and Plymouth, and scatter Martello towers over much of the south of England. Somerset, as First Lord, wanted new ‘line of battle’ ships as well as the iron-plating of as many existing ones as possible.54 And they both of them had the enthusiastic and even hectoring support of the Prime Minister, while Gladstone before his 1860 budget did not have quite the prestige that he was to enjoy immediately after it.

  On 15 December Gladstone received a formidable letter from Palmerston. ‘Sidney Herbert has asked me to summon a Cabinet for tomorrow that we may come to a decision on the Fortification Question,’ it menacingly began, ‘and I am most anxious that the arrangements which he has proposed should be adopted.’ He then proceeded to paint a nightmare scenario.

  One night is enough for the Passage to our Coast, and Twenty Thousand men might be landed at any Point before our Fleet knew that the Enemy was out of Harbour. There could be no security against the simultaneous landing of 20,000 for Portsmouth, 20,000 for Plymouth and 20,000 for Ireland. Our troops would necessarily be scattered about the United Kingdom and with Portsmouth and Plymouth as they now are these two dock yards and all they contain would be entered and burned before Twenty Thousand men could be brought together to defend either of them.

  £10 or £11 million, he concluded, needed to be spent on fortifications, but there was no need for this to be a direct burden on the budget. It could be financed by a loan, payable over twenty or thirty years.

  ‘The objection to borrowing for Expenditure is Stronger for Individuals than for a Nation,’ he cheerfully continued. But his conclusion was less benign:

  If we do not ourselves propose such a Measure to Parliament it will infallibly be proposed by somebody else & will be carried; not indeed against us, because I for one should vote with the Proposer whoever he might be, but with great Discredit to the Government for allowing a Measure of this Kind involving one may say the Fate of the Empire to be taken out of their Hands.7

  Not only did this missive show Palmerston as addicted to the emotive use of capital letters as was his Sovereign; it also amounted to as great a mixture of siren song and intimidating barrage as has ever been deployed by a Prime Minister against his Chancellor of the Exchequer.

  Gladstone, however, was proof against even such a bombardment. The French Emperor might or might not have been able to take Portsmouth or Plymouth but he would have found it much more difficult to overwhelm Gladstone. The Chancellor had the paradoxical advantage that, having been at Hawarden until specially summoned, he had read neither the Prime Minister’s letter nor Sidney Herbert’s paper on fortifications until he arrived at 10 Downing Street as the Cabinet began. He therefore had a good stalling position. His order of proceedings for the day was to travel up from Chester, to attend the Cabinet from 3.30 to 6.00 p.m., to seek sustenance of various sorts from Lord Aberdeen, the Duke of Newcastle and Marion Summerhayes, to dine with Sidney Herbert, whose paper together with the history of Pitt’s aborted plan of 1785–6 for fortifying the dockyards he had belatedly read, and then to go to bed complaining of being ‘much oppressed with cough and cold’. The next day he consequently rose late and wrote only fourteen letters, including ones to the Prime Minister, Herbert and Russell, as well as conducting three interviews before departing for Hawarden and arriving there late at night and ‘in bitter frost’ for two weeks of Christmas holiday.

  The delaying tactics were effective. Palmerston in January 1860 never managed again to bring matters to the boil, and on 7 February, three days before his great budget, Gladstone, choosing his time well, wrote a dismissal of Palmerston’s December proposal which was as intransigent as Palmerston had been thrusting, and, for once, a good deal more succinct. ‘My mind is made up and to propose any loan for Fortifications would be on my part, with the view I entertain, a betrayal of my public duty.’8 Palmerston was left to cleave for the shore: ‘I have received your letter of this Morning. We will let the Question about the Fortifications rest for the present as there will be Room left for them in your Budget.’9

  This budget had been due on 6 February, the date having been wisely chosen to get through the French treaty, which Cobden had succeeded in negotiating to the point of signature on 23 January, before the rats could get at it. A four-day postponement had, however, been made necessary by Gladstone’s ill health. He had been intermittently bronchial since his 16 December complaint of ‘cough and cold’, thereby once again disproving the view that vast energy (plus, as it turned out, exceptional longevity) is necessarily connected with robust health. He had spent most of New Year’s Day in bed, and although he functioned more or less normally during January he was severely stricken down on 3 February. That day was taken up with an almost endless series of special-interest deputations, which were in favour of the French treaty in general and cumulatively against it in almost every particular, and by the next morning (Saturday) he was worse and had to submit to strenuous remedies. ‘Sent for Dr Fergusson early who found the right lung somewhat congested: he g
ave me antimonial wine, James’s powder in pills, more mustard plasters, and at night a hot sponge coating round the chest wh proved very powerful.’10 Even so Gladstone accepted on the Sunday that the budget on the Monday was ‘physically impossible’.

  It was then arranged by Palmerston (as leader of the House of Commons) that the budget statement should be on the following Friday, and be preceded by a Cabinet on the Thursday, which with apparent consideration was to take place in Gladstone’s house. But Gladstone had had enough of pre-budget Cabinets. A week before he had recorded: ‘Cabinet 1–4¼: very stiff. I carried my remissions [of customs and excise duties] but the Depts. carried their great Estimates.’11 And Palmerston, behind his consideration, was clearly anxious for some reopening. ‘Some of our Colleagues’, he wrote, ‘wish to have more discussion and Explanation about the arrangements, and also to endeavour to come to an Understanding about the Fortification Question upon which, like me, they have a very strong Feeling.’12 Gladstone was not so easily caught. His reply, containing the passage rejecting a fortifications loan which has already been cited, made it clear that Friday was as much as he could manage (‘I shall have no strength either of heart or lungs to spare’), and simply allowed the Cabinet to take place in his house but also in his absence. He remained firmly upstairs, even though he had been out for a recuperative drive on the previous day.

  The ordeal to which he was about to subject himself was indeed a testing one. It was the third-longest speech that even he ever made in Parliament, and the postponement had inevitably (and perhaps even deliberately) increased the tension. The Times, a little mockingly, said that the question of the day had become ‘How is Mr Gladstone’s throat?’ and suggested it was ‘just a little ridiculous that all Europe should hold its breath because an English gentleman cannot make an oration in his best manner’. Ridiculous maybe, but also flattering to Gladstone, to the House of Commons and to Britain. It is some time since the chancelleries of Europe hung upon a British budget speech.