Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Of the fateful day itself Gladstone wrote: ‘Secs. and Dr Fergusson as usual. Had to make changes in figures & finished all up. H of C at 4¼. Spoke 5–9 without great exhaustion: aided by a great stock of egg and wine. Thank God. Home at 11. . . . This was themost arduous operation I had ever had in Parliament.’13

  The speech filled sixty-one columns of Hansard, as against seventy-two for his 1853 triumph. But the impact was at least as strong, although the speech, in cold print and after nearly a century and a half, is much less impressive. In 1853 he took fiscal themes and beat them into a batter of high oratory, historical continuity and quasi-philosophical coherence. In 1860 he took fiscal themes and, over four hours, presented them, persuasively but often pedestrianly, as fiscal themes. His argument was not bureaucratic. It is difficult to believe that any significant part of the vast speech could have been written by anyone but himself. It was too idiosyncratic and also too ingenuous for any hand but his own to have been seriously at work.

  His long panegyric in favour of French wine (in support of his reduction in the duty from five shillings and tenpence to three shillings a gallon), for instance, is a strong example of this. What Treasury official would have written thus for Gladstone?

  There is a notion gone abroad that there is something fixed and unchanging in an Englishman’s taste in respect to wine. You find a great number of people in this country who believe, like an article of Christian faith, that an Englishman is not born to drink French wines. Do what you will, they say; argue with him as you will; reduce your duties as you will, endeavour even to pour the French wine down his throat, but still he will reject it. Well, these are most worthy members of the community; but they form their judgement from the narrow circle of their own experience, and will not condescend for any consideration to look beyond this narrow circle. What they maintain is absolutely the reverse of the truth, for nothing is more certain than the taste of English people at one time for French wines.

  There came a most affecting passage in which he seemed to be arguing for fine growths as an aid to medicine:

  We hear of the rich man’s luxuries; and of contemplated reductions in duty upon articles which the poor man does not consume. Now, I make an appeal to the friends of the poor man. There is a time which comes to all of us – the time, I mean, of sickness – when wine becomes a common necessity. What kind of wine is administered to the poor man in this country? We have got a law which makes it impossible for the poor man when he is sick to obtain the comfort and support derived from good wine, unless he is fortunate enough to live in the immediate neighbourhood of some rich and charitable friend. Consult the medical profession: ask what sort of wine is supplied to boards of guardians in this country; go on board the Queen’s ships and see the wine supplied there. . . .

  When on some naval visit he had been pressed to sample the wine supplied to a sailor after surgery, ‘it was with great difficulty I succeeded in accomplishing the operation’.14

  In spite of this vinous excursion, and of many other obiter dicta (‘All those of the labouring classes who are in good circumstances are large consumers of currants,’ he suddenly announced), the speech, compared with its famous predecessor, remained lacking in high flights of Gladstonian oratory. Over a third of its mammoth length was devoted to a detailed justification of the commercial treaty with France, and although the general concept of the treaty, ‘a great European operation’, as he wrote of it to his wife, was noble enough, its individual provisions were not conducive to rhetoric. Nonetheless every point was argued with a mixture of force and simplicity. He loved to prove a point to his own satisfaction with arguments which were sometimes as naive as they were original. He certainly revealed an extraordinary state of strangulated trade between Britain and its nearest and most populous neighbour. In 1858 total British exports of manufactured goods were £130 million, of which no more than £688,000, barely a half of 1 per cent, went to France. And of that £688,000 nearly a third was accounted for by Cashmere shawls – that is, was merely an entrepôt trade from India.

  He also laid down a governing principle for his finance which had the advantage that it freed him from a simple ‘tea and sugar’ approach to fairness towards the poor and which he stated straightforwardly as follows:

  It is a mistake to suppose that the best mode of giving benefit to the labouring classes is simply to operate on the articles consumed by them. If you want to do them the maximum of good, you should rather operate on the articles which give them the maximum of employment. What is it that has brought about the great bettering in their position of late years? Not the mere fact that you have legislated here and there for the purpose of taking off 1d. or 2d. in the pound from some article consumed by the labouring classes. This is good as far as it goes; but it is not this which has been mainly operative in bettering their condition as it has been bettered during the past ten or fifteen years. It is that you have set more free the general course of trade; it is that you have put in action the emancipating process that gives them the widest field and the highest rate of remuneration for their labour.15

  The reductions in duty arising from the French treaty amounted to about £1.4 million. On top of these Gladstone proposed a further series of reductions, most of which, apart from timber, were fairly minor, but which had the combined effect of reducing the number of items on which duty was levied from the thousand or so which prevailed at the beginning of the main Peel government and the 419 which were still there in early 1859 to 48, of which only 15 produced significant amounts of revenue. These changes cost nearly another £1 million. All this might, give or take a small amount, have been financed out of a currently occurring fortuitous reduction of debt interest charges, known as the cessation of the long annuities.

  Gladstone, however, decided to make two further changes, one in one direction and one in the other. He raised the rate of income tax by another penny, which brought in about £½ million. And he again did it in an admonitory way. Public expenditure at the time of his 1853 budget was approximately £52 million. In the seven years between this and his second budget it had risen to around £70 million, a rate of increase totally disproportionate to the growth in national wealth, rapid although that had been. If this disproportionate growth had been avoided it would have been possible to have dispensed entirely with the income tax, the hope of which Gladstone had indeed held out in 1853. The fact that this had not happened he regarded as in some sense the collective responsibility of the prosperous classes, and he was right to the extent that they enjoyed the still relatively rare privilege of the vote and were the main formulators of a climate of opinion which had permitted the increase. It was therefore just, even desirable, that they should pay for the laxity which they had encouraged. Income tax went up from ninepence to tenpence in the pound.

  The second change, although it was a remission and not an increased imposition, proved much more controversial. This was the repeal of the paper duties, at a cost of about £1 million. Gladstone produced a list of sixty-nine trades, from the manufacture of artificial limbs to shipbuilding, which he claimed would benefit marginally from the change. It would also help rural life, for ‘where there are streams, where there are villages, where there is pure and good air and tolerable access, there are the places in which paper manufacture tends to establish itself’. But overwhelmingly the impact of the change would be on the ability to produce cheap newspapers and cheap books. It would amount to the removal of a tax on popular knowledge. And events were unmistakably to show that the change (which was not in fact implemented for another year) had a most powerful effect on the shape of the newspaper market. The Times never again held the position of the largest-selling English newspaper. Furthermore there was a substantial (although not permanent) shift from London to the provincial cities as centres of newspaper production. Hitherto there had been little of substance published in England (Scotland had an indigenous press) outside the capital. By 1864 the circulation of the provincials was nearly twice t
hat of the London dailies.

  Neither the force of Gladstone’s arguments nor the attraction of these likely developments was sufficient to generate anything approaching unanimous Cabinet enthusiasm for the repeal of the paper duties. Gladstone thought that he had with him Russell, Argyll, Milner Gibson (with whom more than anyone else he agreed at this time, although – or because – Gibson was commonly considered the most Radical member), Newcastle, Granville and, maybe, the Lord Chancellor (Campbell). Of a Cabinet total of fifteen, that was hardly a commanding majority. And among the others were not only Gladstone’s closest friend Herbert and his other Peelite ‘ally’ Cardwell, but the Prime Minister as well. Palmerston was a strong minister on his own subjects and a strong personality, but he was not exactly a strong Prime Minister. He went his own way, and allowed others, notably Russell and Gladstone, to go theirs, rather than attempting to co-ordinate the whole work of the government. Gladstone contrasted him with Peel in this respect. In Peel’s government a minister always opened an issue with the Prime Minister before he took it to Cabinet. In Palmerston’s this was not the habit. Ministers went straight to Cabinet, and, if the Prime Minister did not agree with them, hoped to outflank him there. Nevertheless, not to have the Prime Minister on his side was for a Chancellor making an important and controversial taxation change a grave source of weakness. And, although it was a matter of remission and not of imposition, the change was controversial both because the encouragement of a popular press was regarded by many as dangerously subversive and because many of his colleagues would much rather have spent the £1 million on fortifications and ironclads.

  The changes, although announced in a single unified budget, still had to be implemented in separate individual bills. Therefore, despite Gladstone riding temporarily high immediately after the budget, and securing its approval on 24 February after a successful winding-up speech and with a majority of 116, far bigger than the government’s normal strength, that was far from being the end of the matter. Palmerston had plenty of opportunities for reopening. At the end of March he began an epistolary bombardment which continued intermittently for several months, and on 5 May Gladstone recorded: ‘Cabinet 1¼–4¼. Lord P spoke ¾ hour agt. Paper Duties Bill! I had to reply: Cabinet agt. him except a few.’16 This last comment of Gladstone’s was probably over-sanguine, and the opposition in the Cabinet communicated itself to Parliament. When this bill was taken in the Commons three days later he found himself speaking ‘to a very adverse House’, and even worse he found that his great majority of 116 had shrunk to one of 9.

  This obviously left him and the bill very exposed before the Lords, who were far from enthusiastic about cheap newspapers. The position was made worse by Palmerston writing to the Queen one of the most disloyal letters which can ever have been sent to the Sovereign by a Prime Minister about a proposal of his Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Lords, he informed her, ‘would perform a good public service’ if they threw out the bill. She, in turn, described such an event to her uncle Leopold of the Belgians as ‘as a very good thing’. These letters were not made public at the time, but the feeling which led to their being written of course communicated itself to the political classes, helped to embolden the Lords to a rejection by 193 to 104, and was confirmed by the unconcealed public joy with which Lady Palmerston, witnessing the Lords’ debate, received the news of a defeat for her husband’s government. Gladstone then tried ineffectively to secure some strong government reaction to what he described as this coup d’état by the Lords. The strength of the phrase stemmed from his belief that the Lords by throwing out a financial measure on second reading had upset a constitutional understanding that had prevailed since the seventeenth century. But the strength of his phrase was not matched by any general strength of Cabinet reaction. Only Russell and Gibson backed him at all fully. Eventually, in early July, some mild resolutions of protest were introduced and carried. Palmerston introduced them and Gladstone spoke later in the debate. As they spoke in almost directly opposite senses this added a considerable element of farce to the proceedings.

  Gladstone, however, was not in a mood to enjoy the farce, although his tastes in humour often inclined in that direction. It was altogether a miserable summer for him. His immediate post-budget prestige collapsed much more quickly than it had done in 1853, and he came to be widely regarded in both Cabinet and Parliament as hectoring and rather wild. He was often unwell: at the end of April he was intermittently in bed for five days (‘Nipped again by the East Wind on my chest’); in mid-July he had another two days of incapacity with a stomach bug; and at the end of that month he was once again in bed for a day with an unspecified complaint. He was several times on the brink of resignation, against military expenditures, or in favour of paper-duties repeal, or against inactivity in response to the House of Lords. Although on Saturday, 2 June (at Cliveden, where, with the Sutherlands he spent five weekends that summer) he wrote; ‘My resignation all but settled,’ there is an underlying feeling that he had no steady wish to go. His state of mind was perhaps best summed up in a letter which he wrote to Argyll on 6 June, describing to the Duke a meeting which he had just had with Palmerston, during which Palmerston, ‘kind and frank’ in manner, had stressed his own determination to press ahead with a full programme of fortifications55 and warned Gladstone of the ‘evils and hazards’ which would attend him if he did resign. Gladstone appeared not to resent this warning but concluded:

  I am now sure that Lord P. entertained this purpose [of a major increase in defence expenditure] when he formed the Government; but had I been in the slightest degree aware of it I should certainly but very reluctantly have abstained from joining [the government] and helped as well as I could from another bench its Italian purposes. Still I am far indeed from regretting to have joined it, which is quite another matter.17

  So Gladstone teetered on the brink. But crucially, from the point of view of his evolution into the heir of Palmerston and Russell, he did not go. He suffered, however, from being thought ‘anxious to wound but afraid to strike’. His reputation as a blowhard resigner whose threats need not be taken too seriously stemmed to a large extent from the events of that summer. He also suffered on 20 July from the further indignity of having a Savings Bank Monies Bill defeated in the House of Commons on a thin division by 116 to 78. Small though the figures were, the division entailed the loss of the bill and suggests lack of active support on the part of the government whips. He noted it as ‘my first defeat on a measure of finance in the H. of C.’, but endeavoured to take it in one his St Sebastian moods: ‘This ought to be very good for me, & I earnestly wish to make it so.’18

  The session also dragged on uncomfortably long, and he found himself attempting to deal with his Treasury correspondence (‘44 envelopes to open’) in the absence of his private secretary as late as 21 August and taking minor debates in the House as late as the 23rd. Eventually he got to Hawarden on the 27th, and then had the full month of September at Penmaenmawr, as well as most of October at Hawarden. He had no major holiday task on hand (although he made an abortive attempt at ‘a paraphrastic translation of [Aristotle’s] Politics’, which never saw the light of day. As a result he had rather too much time to spare, and devoted an excessive amount of it to agitating himself and others about the possible remarriage of his clergyman brother-in-law Henry Glynne to a Miss Rose, who had been governess to the Glynne girls. It would be easy for the uncharitable to think that Gladstone’s objection was to any marriage which might produce a Glynne male heir and so upset the Hawarden succession, but Miss Rose was also open to some ad feminam objections.56 It was, however, another example of Gladstone getting too excited about other people’s marriages when he might have been much wiser to let them make their own decisions without his influence.

  Altogether the year of 1860 was not an obviously good one for Gladstone. Nonetheless his usual birthday summing-up on 29 December was less breast-beating than had often been his custom. His main concern was the secular and no
t unusual one of growing older: ‘began my 52nd year. I cannot believe it. I feel within me the rebellious unspoken word, I will not be old.’ He concluded with an expression of ‘the unbounded goodness of God and of [my] own deep deep deep unworthiness’,19 but that for him was no more than par for the course.

  Less obviously, however, 1860 had been an important stage in his advance to pre-eminence. Despite the evaporation of his popularity during the summer, he had added another formidable budget to his record of achievement. And, perhaps even more important, he and Palmerston had begun to acquire the habit of living together if not in harmony at least without rupture. They had taken each other’s measure, and had survived in the same government. By the end of 1860, therefore, Gladstone was already well on the way to meeting the main provision for his succession to the Liberal leadership, which was that he should not resign.

  THE PEOPLE’S WILLIAM

  GLADSTONE’S EXPERIENCES in the summer of 1860, both with the Tory House of Lords and with his Whig Prime Minister, did much to drive him towards what became in some but not all respects an advanced Liberalism. This process was aided by two parallel developments. First death removed nearly all his close political associates. Aberdeen, the ‘tutelary deity’ of the Peelites as Gladstone had described him in 1855, subsided in December 1860 at the full age of seventy-six. Then in August 1861, Sidney Herbert, who had been forced by ill health to resign from the War Office in July, died at only fifty. Gladstone was desolated by this, the more so perhaps because of their recent disputes within the Cabinet.

  Thus the two politicians with whom he felt the closest emotional links, one of a previous and one of his own generation, had both gone within eight months, and the latter event in particular filled him not only with sadness but with morbidity. When Herbert had come back through London on 31 July, after an unavailing health journey abroad, Gladstone went to look from a window of a neighbouring house in order to watch him as he came and went from his house in Belgrave Square. ‘Alas it was a sore sight.’1 Two days later Herbert died at Wilton, where a week after that Gladstone attended the ‘alike sad and soothing’ funeral. There is a view that, had Herbert lived, he and not Gladstone would have succeeded to the Liberal leadership after Palmerston had died and Russell had withdrawn. This is hardly more plausible than the view that Oliver Stanley, a somewhat similar figure who died in somewhat similar circumstances in 1950, would have frustrated Harold Macmillan in 1957.