Gladstone: A Biography
Page 36
The two principal members of the Conservative government were therefore, for somewhat different reasons, persuaded by the autumn that they should introduce a Reform Bill of their own. But, partly because they faced some trouble within their own Cabinet, they did little about preparing for it until the session was on top of them. The original intention was to proceed by vague resolutions of the House paving the way for a Royal Commission which by a year’s deliberation would obviate the need for legislation before the session of 1868. For the government this course would have the advantage both of excusing their procrastination and of imposing it on the opposition. It would be difficult for the Liberals, having failed ignominiously in 1866, to bring in another bill of their own while the Royal Commission was sitting.
The Royal Commission needed some steer on the angle from which they were to consider the vast subject. On 22 December Derby wrote to Disraeli giving his suggestions, and the flippancy of his tone owed less to an early onset of the Christmas spirit than to his interest in delay over substance: ‘Of all possible hares to start I do not know a better than the extension of household suffrage, coupled with plurality of voting.’12 ‘Plurality of voting’ meant that where an elector had multiple qualifications under the again envisaged ‘fancy franchises’ and, for example, met the property test, was a university graduate as well as a clergyman, had more than £X in the ‘funds’ and paid more than £Y in direct taxation, he should have votes in the same constituency, on each of these grounds. There thus opened the prospect that, by a brilliant sleight of hand, the Liberal leadership could be outflanked by unfurling the banner of household suffrage (although in practice limiting it to those householders who paid rates directly, as opposed to ‘compounders’ who did it through their landlords), while neutralizing any dangerous political effect, by almost balancing 400,000–500,000 ‘dangerous’ new voters with 300,000–400,000 ‘safe’ additional votes through plurality.
‘Household suffrage’, however ‘cribbed, cabined and confined’ (in a subsequent Gladstone phrase), was a most powerful legend, and one which was launched into practical politics by Derby’s letter. Gladstone, looking back many years later, first admitted that it outflanked him (‘We did not wish to make at once so wide a change as that involved in a genuine household franchise’); and second that it threw him on to the defensive (‘But the government, it must be admitted, bowled us over by the force of the phrase’).13 It thus put the government, Disraeli in particular, well on the way to his primary objective of skewering Gladstone. There were also penalties for the government. Three of the Cabinet of fifteen, Cranborne (soon to be Salisbury), Carnarvon and General Peel, the younger brother of Sir Robert (what was he doing serving under Disraeli?), regarded the term household suffrage as anathema. Two of them might have weakened under Derby’s persuasion, but Cranborne, rather like Enoch Powell in the Thorneycroft–Birch–Powell resignations of 1958, implacably drove them on, and on 2 March 1867 they all resigned. The substance of their analysis was absolutely correct. Household suffrage, they said, will live, but the balancing safeguards, plural voting based on fancy franchises and admission to the vote for direct ratepayers only, will die.
They failed to allow, however, for the momentum of manoeuvre, as in a brilliant cavalry action, which had seized the Disraeli-directed if Derby-led government. The resigners were replaced by two fairly obscure dukes (Marlborough and Richmond) and one even more obscure commoner (Lowry Corry) and the charge swept on. On Friday 12 February, quite contrary to the earlier intention, Disraeli, without Cabinet consultation, had committed the government to bring in an immediate bill. On the 25th he introduced, with studied lack of enthusiasm, the so-called ‘Ten-Minutes Bill’, which provided only for a £6 franchise in the boroughs, a £20 one in the counties, fancy franchises but no plurality. It was so called not because the speeches were limited to ten minutes, as in a certain modern House of Commons procedure, but because it had been agreed upon only ten minutes before it had to be presented, first by Derby to a Conservative party meeting and then by Disraeli to the House. It was designed to show the resigning ministers how out of touch they were, to invite opposition at a Carlton Club meeting and to build up pressure for something stronger. Disraeli withdrew it on 4 March and announced that a fortnight later he would revert to the plan for household franchise for ratepayers plus plurality of voting which had been foreshadowed in Derby’s letter of 22 December.
This tergiversation sounds as though the government ought to have been gravely damaged. In fact it was the opposition that suffered. Did this stem from Gladstone’s clumsiness, or from the inherent difficulty of dealing with Disraeli at the peak of his opportunistic form, which was as difficult as gathering up a basketful of eels? Curiously, Gladstone apprehended the difficulty in advance, and then failed to profit from his prescience. He had written to Brand, the Liberal Whip, early in his Roman sojourn.
Now [Disraeli] has made in his lifetime three attempts at legislation – the budget of 1852, the India Bill of 1858, the Reform Bill of 1859. All have been thoroughly tortuous measures. And the Ethiopian will not change his skin. His Reform Bill of 1867 will be tortuous too. But if you have to drive a man out of a wood you must yourself go into the wood to drive him. That is what I am afraid of. . . .14
Gladstone may have been afraid of it, as he had every reason to be, for Disraeli was far better than he was at woodcraft, but he was inept at keeping away from the treacherous paths. In particular, he failed to realize that Disraeli’s governing tactic was to defeat any amendment from Gladstone, even if it meant accepting a more extreme one from another source. He had to show he was winning, and this meant showing that Gladstone was losing.
This task was made easier by Gladstone commanding at that stage no great resources of loyalty or affection in the ranks of a parliamentary Liberal party which had been elected to support Palmerston. He was respected as a Chancellor and feared as an orator, but not revered or loved as a leader. His strength in that capacity was coming to lie much more among the non-parliamentary masses, who admired but did not know him, than with the members of Parliament, most of whom in fact did not know him either, but thought that they ought to do so. He was beginning to suffer from what Bagehot, in general an admirer, described as not knowing the difference between leading and driving. This was well illustrated by the two meetings of the Liberal parliamentary party which he held during the run-up to his three House of Commons humiliations of the spring. Of the first, held in his own house on 21 March, he recorded: ‘Meeting of the party 2½–4. I spoke near an hour: the end as good as I could hope.’15 And of the second on 5 April: ‘Liberal Party’s meeting at 2. Spoke at length.’16
At both these meetings the alleged purpose was to consult the party. At both it seems more likely that he harangued its members, and considerably exaggerated the degree of acceptance that he achieved. On 25 March the second reading of the bill went through without a division, as had been agreed at the meeting on the 21st, but Gladstone’s two-hour speech, exposing in detail the inconsistencies of the bill, was reported as losing the attention of the House. This mild failure was nothing compared with an 11–12 April debate on Gladstone’s principal amendment. He both opened and wound up. The amendment provided that a qualified tenant could vote whether or not he paid his own rates. This lost the support of some Whigs. It was, however, predicated upon a £5 qualification and not full household suffrage, and that lost the support of some Radicals. The so-called ‘Tea Room Revolt’ led to a significant defection from Gladstone. Forty-three Liberals voted with the government and twenty were absent unpaired. Cranborne, Gladstone’s old Oxford colleague Heathcote and five other Tories voted for the amendments, but this hardly compensated. The result was that in a House with a nominal Liberal majority of seventy-seven, the principal amendment to the principal bill of the session, moved by the Liberal leader of the opposition, resulted in a majority of twenty-one for the Conservative government. Gladstone’s comment of ‘A smash perhaps without examp
le’17 was in the circumstances relatively restrained.
Gladstone went home in chagrin, contemplating retirement to the back benches, and Disraeli went home in triumph, calling in at the Carlton Club on the way and being toasted by Matthew Ridley as ‘the man who rode the race, who took the time, who kept the time, and who did the trick’. He was pressed to stay to supper (it was then nearly 3.00 a.m.) but disengaged himself with habitual reserve and went on to Grosvenor Gate, his wife, a Fortnum’s pie and a bottle of champagne.18 Even Bishop Wilberforce, Gladstone’s continuing friend, but a cleric who could take a political temperature, wrote a little later: ‘The most wonderful thing is the rise of Disraeli. It is not the mere assertion of talent. He has been able to teach the House of Commons almost to ignore Gladstone, and at present lords it over him, and, I am told, says that he will hold him down for twenty years.’19 68
Gladstone did not flounce out of the leadership (nor is there much indication that he was near to so doing), but he resolved to move no more amendments of his own and indeed became somewhat fitful, for a leader of the opposition, in his Commons attendance, except on the Reform Bill. But on that he had to endure at least two more humiliations and one unvalorous retreat. On 9 May he supported another attempt to deal with the problem of compounding (paying rates through the landlord) and ‘Spoke earnestly and long for Comp. Householders: in vain. Beaten by 322:256. Much fatigued by heat and work.’20 Then in the middle of May there was the most bewildering of all Disraeli’s shifts of position. Hodgkinson, whom Gladstone patronizingly described as ‘a local solicitor little known in the House’ (this form of words may have been occasioned by a stab of jealousy on account of his both being member for Newark and getting away with his amendment), had put down a form of words which simply abolished ‘compounding’ and therefore the problem of the compounder by providing that within boroughs no rate could be levied which was not individually paid. There was a competing and better-drafted amendment down from H. C. E. Childers, who was regarded as a mouthpiece of Gladstone, and that was sufficient to make the Hodgkinson amendment relatively attractive. So Disraeli, apparently without consultation with Derby or any other member of the Cabinet, simply accepted it. It added nearly half a million voters to the electoral rolls, in other words doubled the effect of the bill. ‘Never’, Gladstone wrote, ‘have I undergone a stronger emotion of surprise than when, as I was entering the House, our Whip met me and stated that Disraeli was about to support Hodgkinson’s motion.’21 The speed and irresponsibility with which Disraeli moved left Gladstone floundering.
Once Hodgkinson’s amendment had been accepted (even though its form proved impracticable and had to be replaced by a government redraft) most of the other previous subjects of argument fell away as irrelevant. The fancy franchises, plural voting and the £5 franchise were all transcended. The remaining controversial issues were female suffrage, on which John Stuart Mill’s amendment was comfortably defeated by 196 to 73, with Gladstone voting in the majority, and the enfranchisement of lodgers, who were regarded as a dangerous voting group. Eventually, provided they did not move often and occupied rooms of an unfurnished rateable value of £10 (which meant they were fairly lavish) they were allowed in. (By 1869 only 12,000 had met the qualifications, of whom two-thirds were in Westminster or Marylebone, only twentyeight in Manchester and one in Birmingham.)22
Third reading took place on 15 July and extracted from Gladstone an extraordinary confession of the weakness of his position on the bill: ‘A remarkable night. Determined at the last moment not to take part in the debate: for fear of doing mischief on our own side.’23 Without provocation from Gladstone this stage passed without a division (as he had wished). The Lords, under Derby’s control, were amenable, thereby showing that their partisanship was more a matter of party than of issues. They made no more than a handful of amendments, of which only one, designed to protect minorities in three-member boroughs (such as Birmingham) by giving each elector only two votes, survived the return to the Commons. The bewildering bill, which enfranchised approximately a million new voters, as opposed to the 400,000 which is all that the too radical Russell–Gladstone bill of the previous session would have done, was safely law by 15 August.
Gladstone had already departed for Penmaenmawr on 10 August. He could not look back on the session with much satisfaction. There was a wave of complaint that as party leader in the Commons he was remote and chilling and would not fraternize. His old friend Sir Thomas Acland wrote, taking as he said ‘a great liberty’, to tell him a few home truths.
Well, what is pressed on me is that . . . there is an impression that you are absorbed in questions about Homer and Greek words, about Ecce Homo, that you are not reading the newspapers or feeling the pulse of followers . . . and besides that there is so little easy contact with the small fry, as when Palmerston sat in the tea-room, and men were gratified by getting private speech with their leader.24
Morley wrote that Gladstone lacked the little civilities and hypocrisies of political society, and Phillimore on one occasion told him that if he would only say something to a particular member, even if it was to abuse his views or tell him that he smelt, instead of ignoring him completely and implying that he knew neither his face nor his name, that member would immediately become his most devoted follower (perhaps a little difficult to believe). What is striking about this catalogue of complaint is that it is so familiar. It has been heard about every political leader from Peel to Churchill, from Balfour to Heath. The only man of whom it was manifestly not true was Baldwin, and although his qualities were somewhat underestimated for half a century after his withdrawal from office, he does not provide the most outstanding example of dynamic leadership or bold statesmanship.
Gladstone therefore had no great need to worry about this shower of nervous, well-intentioned but tiresome advice. In fact, as is often the case, he was being asked to improve his leadership performance by changing the personality which had made him, and not twenty-five or thirty other equally available men, leader in the first place. There is no evidence that the issue worried him at Penmaenmawr, where he remained (with twenty-five sea-bathes that year) for almost a full month before retiring to Hawarden for ten weeks, interrupted only by one night in Liverpool with his brother Robertson and five at Holker (near Carnforth) with the Duke of Devonshire.
There was then a brief autumn session (the first since 1854). It had been called to provide credits for a punitive expedition against King Theodore of Abyssinia. As, however, that particular Lion of Judah was generally held to have behaved very badly by rounding up and holding in chains all available British subjects this did not cause much controversy or take long. The session was over inside two weeks, and by 3 December Gladstone was back at Hawarden for another hardly interrupted two and a half months.
He was again much preoccupied that autumn and winter with Homeric studies, but there is also a sense of detachment from the affairs of day-to-day politics, a gazing at the more distant future rather than a reaction to short-term shifts in the political weather. No doubt this was to some extent a reaction against recent parliamentary buffetings and humiliations. His fifty-eighth birthday, however, passed with only the most cursory of introspective reflection: ‘Another year of mercies unworthily received is added to the sum of my days: of wanderings and backslidings: of much varied experience in the world & in private life. I long for the day of rest.’25
Tree-felling, then in its tenth year, became a dominant and hazardous Hawarden activity. On 23 December: ‘Willy and I felled a good tree. . . . A splinter struck my eye, causing some inflammation: and in the evening Dr Moffatt came and sent me to bed’; and on the 24th: ‘In bed and in the dark all day. Much rumination: on imperial concerns – & on Homer – among other matters’; and on Christmas Day, ‘Kept to bed till 1am [sic]’. However, Gladstone was always a great man for the recuperative effects of bed, and by 27 December he was back at the slaughter in the park: ‘Today a tree we were cutting fell with Harry [his third
son, then aged fifteen] in it. He showed perfect courage and by God’s mercy was not hurt.’ A month later he was himself again the victim and had to ‘put off letters on account of a finger a little bruised in the chances of woodcutting in the afternoon.’26 There arises the thought that, in spite of his sparse frame and taut movements, he might have been a little clumsy. From the September day twenty-five years before when he had shot off the forefinger of his left hand (and subsequently always wore a black stall, or occasionally a glove) while reloading one barrel of a gun with the other fully cocked, he had shown some proneness to accidents.
At the end of February 1868 Disraeli became Prime Minister. Derby was sixty-eight, well younger than Palmerston or Russell, but a combination of his gout and his doctor made it impossible for him to carry on, and the last Prime Minister to be born in the eighteenth century disappeared from the scene and died a year later. Disraeli had a genuine affection for Derby, but was nonetheless delighted to have ‘climbed to the top of the greasy pole’. In March he gave a grand reception to celebrate the event, and borrowed the new Foreign Office from Derby’s son Stanley for the occasion: Mrs Disraeli thought 10 Downing Street ‘so dingy and decaying’. The party was a dazzling symbol of Disraeli’s rise (although he himself was reported as looking ‘impenetrable’ and ‘low’, while his wife looked ‘ill and haggard’). There were present princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, ambassadors and prelates – and the Gladstones. Gladstone did not exactly enthuse over the event: ‘Dined at Mr Cardwell’s. . . . Mr Disraeli’s party and Speaker’s Levée at night’27 was the only mention it got in his diary. But he went, and thereby kept up the convenances of mid-Victorian politics. The emphasis should be on mid, for it is much more doubtful whether, had a similar celebration taken place nine or ten years later, he would have done so, or would indeed have been welcome.