by Roy Jenkins
It was for Gladstone a year of ebbing suspicion towards Roman Catholics. His theoretical tolerance might have been thought established by his brave opposition to the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill ten years before. But tolerance in matters concerning the action of the state was different from tolerance in matters relating to family or friends. He saw himself as having a special responsibility, in the memorable phrase he had used to (and of) Hope-Scott in 1845, ‘as one of the sentinels of the Church of England on the side looking towards the Church of Rome’. Until the spring of 1861 he had interpreted this so rigidly that for ten years he had had no contact with Manning. Then there was a hesitant correspondence, the initiative coming from the future Cardinal, who wanted back the early letters which he had written to Gladstone, in exchange for those which Gladstone had written to him. Then there was a meeting. Manning called on Gladstone on 20 March: ‘Saw Manning: a great event: all was smooth: but quantum mutatus! Under external smoothness and conscientious kindness there lay a chill indescribable. I hope I on my side did not affect him so. He sat where Kossuth [the Hungarian nationalist leader] sat on Friday: how different!’24
It was hardly an emotional reunion but thereafter relations were normal, and in the late 1860s almost back to warmth, even though Gladstone believed (falsely) that Manning had wanted his letters returned in order to destroy them and thus help to obliterate traces of his Anglican past. The appearance of Purcell’s reckless and often misleading biography of Manning in 1895, as we have seen, recurdled Gladstone’s sour feelings towards Manning, but by then the latter was dead, and the attendant chaplain of Gladstone’s 1861 journey from Ryde to Waterloo was Cardinal Archbishop.
Gladstone’s third major excursion to the wilder shores of political rashness came in May 1864, a few weeks after he had presented a well-received, relatively brief and uncontroversial budget. Its main provisions were a further income tax reduction from sevenpence to sixpence (it was nearly back to the fivepence with which he had started in 1859, but with a surplus instead of a deficit and lower indirect taxes), and some remission also of the sugar and fire insurance duties. The Cabinet had accepted the budget in a single sitting of one and a quarter hours, which was in sharp contrast with the 1860 and 1861 experiences.
On 11 May, a Wednesday and therefore in the habit of the nineteenth century a minor day for parliamentary business (the equivalent of a modern Friday, when the House both sat and adjourned early), Gladstone was dealing for the government with a ‘gesture’ bill, moved by a Yorkshire Liberal (Baines) and designed to reduce the property qualification for the borough franchise. The debate lasted only from noon until 2.45 p.m. and there was no question of a division.61 Gladstone nonetheless turned it into the major sensation of the month, if not of the session. Palmerston had written him a note that morning urging him not to commit himself and the government to any particular sum for the borough franchise. (As this pointed to a degree of apprehension, it is difficult to understand why the Prime Minister did not solve the whole problem by getting the compliant Home Secretary, George Grey, to deal with the matter; it was not an occasion which called for a ‘great Gun’ as Palmerston flatteringly referred to Gladstone when he wanted him to demolish Disraeli six weeks later.)
Gladstone, it could be said, obeyed the instruction to the letter. He did not concern himself with the minutiae of £6 (or £8 or £10) franchises. He simply took the whole argument up by the roots and set it down upon a new basis. He looked back over the various attempts at franchise reform of the past fifteen years and found it a scandal that there had been no advance from a position in which only one-tenth of those with a vote were ‘working men’, for the very good reason that only one ‘working man’ in fifty possessed a vote. His argument was tightly sociological, which is of considerable interest when the question of his motive is looked at. It was not desirable that the upper stratum of the working class was shut out while the lower stratum of the middle class was let in. Then came the sentence which was erected into a sensation: ‘I call upon the adversary to show cause, and I venture to say that every man who is not presumably incapacitated by some consideration of personal unfitness or of political danger, is morally entitled to come within the pale of constitution.’ Then, in a very Gladstonian way, he immediately qualified his declaration: ‘Of course, in giving utterance to such a proposition I do not recede from the protest I have previously made against sudden, or violent, or excessive or intoxicating change.’25
‘Some sensation’, Gladstone laconically commented, adding that it was due less to what he had said than to defensive complacency on the part of his hearers. There was a lot of scurrying round the House. Two whips ran off to tell Phillimore of the enormity of what his chief had just said. There was a contrived scene in the chamber when it was suggested that the Prime Minister (who had gout) should be sent for and asked if he agreed with the Chancellor. Palmerston did not agree, and on the next day he wrote the first of a nine-letter correspondence (five from Palmerston, four from Gladstone) which extended over the next week and a half. The Prime Minister’s tone was obviously one of determined remonstrance, but it was also remarkably good-humoured, as had been the case in previous exchanges. Gladstone in turn was unrepentant but never sullen.
Palmerston began, ‘I have read your speech, and I must frankly say with much regret [that] there is little in it that I can agree with, and much from which I differ.’ He added, ‘Your speech may win Lancashire for you, though that is doubtful, but I fear will tend to lose England for you.’ The use of ‘you’ rather than the more obvious ‘us’ as the last word may be taken as an interesting indication that, even in exasperation, Palmerston was assuming that the future lay with a Gladstone leadership.
Gladstone began his first reply: ‘It is not easy to take ill anything that proceeds from you,’ and continued with some fairly convoluted explanation of the real meaning of his words. Palmerston then moved increasingly on to the point that Gladstone’s further and major sin was that, in receiving a delegation of working men, he had urged them to agitate for an extension of the franchise. ‘The function of a Government is to calm rather than to excite Agitation,’ he comprehensively concluded. Gladstone then gave a superb display of both the irrepressible and the naive sides of his character. The solution, he wrote, obviously was to publish his speech as a pamphlet. Once it was available in full the balance and sense of his words would surely set all doubts at rest. Palmerston wanted no such thing, but he failed to budge Gladstone. ‘You are of course the best judge as to your own line,’ he concluded with more tolerance than triumph.26
This exchange led to no quarrel between Gladstone and Palmerston, but it did lead to a new wave of argumentativeness in their relationship. Gladstone used his long days at Balmoral in October 1864 to fire off two provocative letters to Palmerston. In the first he suddenly reverted to the question of railway nationalization – not of the operations but of the track – an issue which had lain quiescent since his 1844 legislation as President of the Board of Trade, but which had come back into discussion as a result of uncontrolled and unco-ordinated building, quite often undertaken merely to force a bigger adjacent company to buy up the unwanted but possibly competitive track. Palmerston reacted, as might have been expected, with some dismay. ‘It is impossible to form a Judgement of your Plan till the Details are made out, but I own it appears on the first Blush a wild and more than doubtful project.’27 He did, however, eventually concede that there should be a Royal Commission on the subject, which deliberated under the chairmanship of the seventh Duke of Devonshire, and resulted in a negative report.
The second letter was of more serious immediate import and was, it might be thought, a most tendentious piece of aggression against an old Prime Minister, on what turned out, to no one’s surprise, to be the threshold of the last year of his life. Gladstone produced a convoluted mixture of prose and figures, running to well over a thousand words, which complained that, over the lifetime of the government, naval and military expenditu
re had only come down from £30 million to £26 million, whereas, given various special factors such as the ending of the China War, it ought to have done so by more. It was hardly a very obvious abuse, and it got back an even longer but much more enjoyable reply from Palmerston. First he said that he had delayed replying until Gladstone had finished his ‘severe but successful Labour in Lancashire’ (which was a euphemism for ‘another of your demagogic tours’). Then he produced his own piece of counter-aggression: ‘I think that any Body who looks carefully at the Signs of the Times Must see that there are at present two strong Feelings in the National Mind, the one a Disinclination to organic Changes in our representative System; the other a steady Determination that the Country shall be placed and kept in an efficient Condition of Defence.’28
So much for Gladstone’s two pet nostrums of the decade. Having nailed his colours to these hardline masts, Palmerston proceeded to adopt a more modern approach to national budgeting than anything Gladstone was likely to encompass. It all came back to what the Prime Minister called:
the Fallacy of Joseph Hume who always maintained that the Financial Concerns of a Nation were similar to the Nature of those of a private Individual, whose Income being a fixed and definite Sum, his Expenditure ought to be regulated by it: whereas in Fact the Cases are just opposite to each other, and with Regard to a Nation the proper and necessary yearly Expenditure is the fixed Sum, and the Income ought to be adjusted to meet that Expenditure’.29
Gladstone complained in his diary that the arrival of this ‘pamphlet letter from Lord P. about Defence Estimates holds out a dark prospect’. While it may be thought that Gladstone had somewhat deliberately walked into the dark prospect, there can be no doubt that the exchange marked the beginning of a new phase of greater tension between Prime Minister and Chancellor which persisted, although correspondence continued to flow freely from both sides, until Palmerston’s death almost exactly a year later. It also made membership of the Cabinet and of the government much less of a pleasure for Gladstone. On 19 January 1865 he wrote: ‘Cabinet 3¾–6½ very stiff indeed, on Estimates. Sky dark.’ And on 28 January: ‘Last night I could have done almost anything to shut out the thought of the coming battle. This is very weak: but it is the result of the constant recurrence of such things: estimates always settled at dagger’s point.’ Yet again, on 7 February, the day Parliament reassembled: ‘I flinch from the Session.’30
The inherent trouble was that he was the aggressor without possessing sufficient forces to sustain the assault. Palmerston was sitting comfortably on interior lines of communication. The national finances were healthy (thanks largely to Gladstone), the Prime Minister and the service ministers were no longer asking for any great new expenditure on armaments, merely for a maintenance of the existing, hardly monstrous level (about £1.6 billion at present-day prices), there was no question of additional taxation, only a moderation of the rate at which reductions could take place, and the Cabinet was perfectly content to sustain this balance. On 19 January Gladstone had been forced to admit: ‘In regard to the Navy Estimates I have had no effective or broad support: platoon firing more or less in my sense from Argyll and Gibson.’ Such haphazard small-arms fire from only two members was clearly insufficient, and the stark and obvious fact was that Gladstone had only the unappealing choice of defeat or resignation. As he did not want to resign he would have done better to have called off the battles before he had lost them. But that was not his nature, and as a result he inflicted unnecessary humiliations upon himself and pointless strife upon the Cabinet.
It might also have left him freer to make his own taxation dispositions. As it was, Palmerston was courteously teasing him only a day or so before his ninth budget on 27 April 1865. ‘If you will allow me to say so,’ he wrote, ‘some of your best financial arrangements lost much of their deserved popularity by the ingenious Complications with which they were accompanied. It will be as well on this occasion not to fall into the similar mistake. . . .’31 had wanted to levy a tax of fourpence in the pound upon all rateable buildings, and it was this which Palmerston was determined to get him off. Gladstone was nonetheless able to bring income tax down from sixpence to fourpence, tea duty from one shilling to sixpence and further to diminish the fire insurance duty (a curiously pervasive issue of the time).
In June Palmerston graciously tossed an episcopal nomination to Gladstone, and the Regius Professor of Divinity went from Christ Church to Chester. The Prime Minister hoped the choice might help Gladstone with his ‘oncoming election’. It did not, or not sufficiently so at any rate. The government gained twenty-six seats throughout the country, but on 17 July 1865 Gladstone was out at Oxford. The size of the University poll was considerably increased by the introduction for the first time of postal voting (thereby improving the relative influence of country clergy as against resident dons). Gladstone’s sitting colleague Heathcote polled 3236, the new challenger Gathorne Hardy 1904, and Gladstone himself 1724. ‘A dear dream is dispelled,’ he wrote. ‘God’s will be done.’32
The quietism lay more in words than in deeds. He had already been nominated for South Lancashire (in those days multiple nomination was common practice), and the next morning he was off to the north, and in the afternoon addressed 6000 people in Manchester and in the evening 5000 in Liverpool. He was indeed ‘unmuzzled’ by Oxford, as Palmerston had feared that he would be, and by 20 July had succeeded in being elected for South Lancashire. The meetings were, however, more of a triumph than the result. In a three-member constituency he ran only third to two Tories, although a good thousand ahead of the other two Liberals.
The election made little difference to the balance or direction of the government. Lord Westbury had been forced out by nepotistic scandal at the beginning of July and was replaced by the seventy-five-year-old Cranworth as Lord Chancellor. Otherwise there was no change of personnel. Palmerston’s main desire had become that of preventing changes. The Cabinet met once on 24 July. (‘All in good humour,’ Gladstone recorded, although others reported him as being in a subdued mood), and then shuffled off on holiday. The new Parliament did not meet, even to choose a Speaker, until nearly seven months after its election, which must surely be a record for dilatoriness. Gladstone went to Hawarden on 27 July and did not return to London until 20 October. For the first time for six years he did not go to Penmaenmawr and applied himself heavily to family and estate affairs. In late September he made a ten-day Scottish ducal excursion (Buccleuch and Argyll), but was recalled to Liverpool on account of the death of Robertson Gladstone’s wife, the lady against whom he had become so excited in 1839. Over the intervening twenty-six years he had come to value her more, and in middle life he had moved closer to Robertson than to either of his other brothers, and indeed depended substantially on his sponsorship and support for the South Lancashire seat. Once again, as with John Neilson Gladstone’s death less than two years before, he devoted more than a week to a Liverpool visit of mourning, support and comfort. From there he went to Clumber, where he had first waited on the old fourth Duke of Newcastle thirty-three years before and where he was currently engaged in the vast and unrewarding task of clearing up as an executor the chaotic family and financial legacy of the fifth Duke.
It was against this sombre and wearing background that Gladstone, on the evening of 18 October, received news of the sudden death of Palmerston. His last letter to Gladstone, courteous in intent and jaunty in tone, had contained no hint of an impending end. ‘I do not foresee any reason for calling the Cabinet together till the 10th of November,’ he had written on 7 October.33 Alas, this easeful prospect could not be maintained. The Cabinet next met on 28 October, but under a different Prime Minister. There was no trouble about Russell’s succession. There were only two people who could have put in doubt the return of the old Whig to 10 Downing Street – after thirteen years away, the second longest interval ever between two premierships of the same man. The first was the Queen, and she, perhaps because of the looming shadow of Gl
adstone appeared to have learnt her lesson from her Granville experience in 1859, and made no difficulty. The second was of course Gladstone himself, who had been urged by some, including notably that worldly prelate Wilberforce, to make a pre-emptive strike for the top place. He showed no desire to do so. The flame of ambition was burning relatively low in him at the time. He even betrayed some signs of dismay at the general election victory of the previous July, feeling after more than six years in office that there were attractions in the freedom of opposition. He accepted with at least a show of reluctance the leadership of the Commons which a change from a Lower House to an Upper House Prime Minister made vacant (‘The charge of leading fastened on me’). Also, he positively believed that Russell was entitled to another term and wrote to tell him so within a few hours of getting the Palmerston news. Russell received the commission on the following day.
