Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Despite the press of work on his Hawarden days it was a cool thing for Gladstone to remain so long away from London at such an early stage of his first premiership. His diary entry for 8 January 1869 illustrates the pattern. After church at 8.30, he:

  Wrote to the Lord Chancellor – Lord Granville – Mr H. A. Bruce [Home Secretary] – Mr Hamilton [Treasury permanent secretary] – Lord St. Germans – Bishop of Oxford – M. Bratiano – Dean of Westmr. – Dr Miller – Mr Fortescue – Gen. Grey – Lord Southesk – Mr Happs, Mr Gurden, Mr Reeve – Mr Hammond [Foreign Office permanent undersecretary] – Telegr. to Mr H[ammond], Sir C. Trevelyan – Mr G. O. Trevelyan minutes. Two evening messengers from London. Felling a tree in aftn. . . . Read Giffen on Finance.3

  The purpose of his operating from 200 miles away rather than in Downing Street or Carlton House Terrace was well captured in a half-sentence of a letter to Clarendon, whom he showered with very courteously expressed foreign policy advice: ‘in point of hours it is much the same here and there though [here] the free hours feel much more free which is a great thing’.4

  Gladstone came to London on 22 January and began a period of intensive ‘softening up’ on the Irish Church Bill (at Hawarden he had applied himself to its intellectual preparation). He went first, accompanied by his wife, on a two-day visit to the Queen at Osborne. He could not persuade his sovereign to attend the opening of Parliament, which was fixed for 16 February, even though it was a new Parliament, elected on a new franchise, with a new Prime Minister, and turned out to be the beginning of a new political epoch. But he may have succeeded in diminishing her opposition to the Irish Church changes.

  However, Gladstone at this stage in their relationship was often over-optimistic about the effect of his explanations and persuasions on the Queen. On the first evening he wrote: ‘Saw the Queen on the Irish Church especially and gave H.M. my papers with explanations which appeared to be well taken. She was altogether at ease.’5 On the second day he did not know what to make of her absolute silence on the subject. That evening at dinner she had Mrs Gladstone and not the Prime Minister to sit next to her. The truth was that she had not made head or tail of Gladstone’s ‘papers’ until Sir Theodore Martin, the Prince Consort’s biographer, had been summoned to write a summary. Then she did not much like what she saw, and ten days later Gladstone was recording: ‘A letter from H.M. today showed much disturbance: which I tried to soothe.’6 Nonetheless his talks with her, and perhaps even more with General Grey on the December journey from Chester to Slough, had prepared the ground for her acquiescence in the inevitable, and when there came a crunch with the House of Lords in July she was helpful to the government.

  Gladstone also guarded his flank against a predecessor’s possible sourness. Five days after his return from Osborne he went to Richmond and spent forty-eight hours at Pembroke Lodge with Russell. ‘Much conversation with Lord R. on the Irish Ch. and other matters,’ he recorded.7 During that first year of the government he took a lot of trouble with the old Whig, but gradually the rule that nearly all Prime Ministers are dissatisfied with their successors, perhaps even more so if they come from the same party, asserted itself, and Russell drifted into discontent. Gladstone, when he wished, could be both solicitous and flattering. He was persistently so with John Bright, who was more opinionated than effective as President of the Board of Trade, but whom Gladstone determinedly treated as a great man as well as a great orator. This was partly because of his natural sympathy with what Professor Matthew calls ‘the sentimental side of Victorian Radicalism’, and was in marked contrast with his total inability, a decade later, to massage the abler but notably unsentimental Joseph Chamberlain.

  With the Queen, in a different way, Gladstone was just as unskilled as he was to be with Chamberlain, but with most of the members of his Cabinet he was elaborately courteous and nearly as solicitous as with Bright, certainly so with Clarendon, with Granville, with Argyll (to whom he wrote frequent general political letters while never interfering in his departmental Indian affairs), with Earl de Grey, the Lord President, whom he made Marquess of Ripon. The one whom he handled least well was Hartington, treating him like his much more amenable brother Frederick Cavendish, who after he married Lucy Lyttelton in 1864 became almost a Gladstone family satellite. In 1868 he made Hartington Postmaster-General, which bored him, and in 1870 he forced him to go to Ireland as Chief Secretary. This was a bad preparation for patronizingly handing over the leadership to him in 1875 and then, inevitably but without delicacy, superseding him in 1880. It was not surprising that Gladstone lost Hartington in 1886.

  Despite the complaints of his whips and of Phillimore and Acland, however, Gladstone could mostly cajole when he wanted to. He was psychologically incapable of flattery with some people, most notably the Queen, with Chamberlain as a runner-up, although in the latter case it was simple consideration, well short of flattery, which was lacking. Sometimes, with others, his courtesy failed because it was too elaborate and heavy-footed, but mostly his failures in human management were because he had not tried, hardly knew or noticed the person concerned, or just failed to understand that a word from him might make all the difference. But, in general, particularly away from politics, his manners were very good, and his charm, especially when he was not trying to achieve a result, formidable.

  In 1869 he was solicitous to keep both his Cabinet and his majority together. Although by the time he left Hawarden he had got his own mind almost completely clear on what he wanted in the Irish Church Bill, he nonetheless allowed time for five Cabinets before the opening of the session, and a long sixth (mostly on the bill) between the Queen’s Speech on 16 February and his exposition of the details to the House of Commons on 1 March. All the January and February 1869 Cabinets were early-afternoon occasions, starting at 2.00 or 2.30. As soon as the session began, while he kept to the same time of day, he reverted to Palmerston’s Saturday habit.

  Given that there was no formal agenda and no secretariat to record the results, Gladstone seems to have handled the meetings in a taut and orderly way. While it is difficult to believe that he emulated Attlee’s laconicism there was no suggestion of Churchillian orotundity either. Before each meeting he made out a neat little agenda card for his own use, and ticked each numbered item as he disposed of it. He was indeed in most ways instinctively neat. After he reached middle age this did not apply to his clothes, despite a ludicrous 1870 attempt by the Tailor and Cutter to portray him (in a joint representation with his son Willy) as being almost glossy. Photographs show him as carelessly and semishabbily dressed in his habitual formal London clothes, worn even for striding over the hills of Wales from Penmaenmawr. Sometimes he allowed the variant of lighter-coloured trousers with an 1840s-style brown stripe down the side.

  He had a passion for sorting papers and arranging books. It was one reason why he liked departures and arrivals. On the day before he returned from Hawarden to London for his first testing parliamentary session as Prime Minister he wrote: ‘Attempted to re-establish order with a view to departure’. On his second, third and fourth days back in Carlton House Terrace, he wrote variants of ‘Arranged books & papers a little.’8 Still more revealingly, when he arrived back at Hawarden for an autumn three weeks in the following November he recorded: ‘Worked 6 hours on my books arranging and re-arranging: the best brain rest I have had (I think) since Decr last.’9

  As well as giving his Cabinet full rein, if not to disagree on the major thrust, at least to feel that they had been fully consulted on the details, Gladstone in the run-up to the bill also kept in touch with others whom he thought might be useful. He could not expect much help from the bishops, although he maintained an open line to Tait of Canterbury which led to the Primate not voting against the second reading in the Lords (although certainly not voting for it) and reluctantly seeking a settlement rather than preparing for an impasse. Thirlwall of St Davids was the only prelate who went into the lobby for the bill, but Magee of Peterborough, later Archbishop of Y
ork, and the perennial Wilberforce of Oxford (who might have been expected to do better in view both of old friendship and of his impending promotion to Winchester) were scouts scurrying between the lines and incurring both the limited gratitude and the dangers of such a role.

  Gladstone also kept in close touch with Delane, the editor of The Times, and with Manning, already archbishop but not yet cardinal. Hitherto the Daily Telegraph, then firmly Liberal, had been Gladstone’s principal ally in the press, while Delane had been a little too Palmerstonian for his taste. But Palmerston was dead and Delane was very much a man of the moment. The Prime Minister saw him several times during the spring and summer of 1869, sometimes writing him notes of conspiratorial invitation: ‘If you can again find yourself in my little room at the H. of Commons this afternoon at 5, I shall be glad again to exchange a few words with you on the present aspect of the situation.’10

  Manning was an obvious ally of Gladstone’s on the issue, almost too much so to be an interesting one. However, he did have the advantage of fully agreeing with Gladstone, not only on the need for Anglican disestablishment but also on the unacceptability of ‘concurrent endowment’. Gladstone was against it for reasons of cost to the British Exchequer, Manning for reasons of threat to Roman authority if Irish prelates and priests became pensioners of the London government. The confluence of these views was powerful and satisfactory. Gladstone also found Manning a useful channel for dealing with Archbishop Cullen of Dublin and the Irish hierarchy, perhaps too convenient if he wished to avoid a colonial approach to Ireland.

  This led to a temporary renewal of warmth between Roman Catholic Archbishop and Anglican Prime Minister which would have seemed unimaginable at the time of their chilly 1861 resumption of contact after a ten-year gap. Manning wrote to Gladstone on 24 July 1869: ‘But at this time I will only add that I may wish you joy on personal reasons. I could hardly have hoped that you would have so framed, mastered, and carried through the bill from first to last so complete, so unchanged in identity of principle and detail, and let me add with such unwearying and sustained self-control and forbearance.’11 The momentum of Manning–Gladstone reunion was, however, heavily circumscribed by Manning being about to become the animator and agent of Vatican ultramontanism, which sent Gladstone into his greatest bout of anti-Romanism since Wiseman had ensnared (as he thought) his sister Helen in 1842.

  The conduct of the Irish Church Bill through the House of Commons and the command of tactics in the dispute with the Lords which developed in late June and July was almost exclusively handled by the Prime Minister himself. Chichester Fortescue, Lady Waldegrave’s fourth husband and cavaliere servente at her Strawberry Hill festivities, for whom she did not bother to change her name on marriage, was not a strong Chief Secretary for Ireland. He was allowed more of a role in the following session’s Land Bill, although even then provoking more exasperation than admiration from Gladstone. But in 1869 he was kept firmly on the sidelines. It was only in the very last stages of the summer dispute with the Lords that Gladstone, struck down by a severe gastric attack, the intermittent effects of which lasted for four or five weeks, was forced to delegate, and then he did so to Granville and not to Fortescue.

  For the main engagements Gladstone was in full and direct command, and discharged his commission with a combination of authority, persuasiveness and sustained energy which produced admiration from the most disparate sources. Of his three-and-a-quarter-hour speech introducing the bill, Disraeli, frequently so scornful of Gladstone’s verbosity, said: ‘There was not a word wasted.’ The future Archbishop (Frederick) Temple (admittedly just about to be given his first bishopric by Gladstone but not normally of his ecclesiastical tendency) wrote that ‘The Irish Church bill is the greatest monument of genius that I have yet known from Gladstone; even his marvellous budgets are not so marvellous.’12 Morley, who was a partisan but not a blind one, and who had a fine eye for discriminating between the relative quality of Gladstone’s different performances, wrote that, ‘since Pitt, the author of the Act of Union, the author of the Church Act was the only statesman in the roll of the century capable at once of framing such a statute and expounding it with the same lofty and commanding power’.13

  This power enabled him to carry the second reading after four nights of debate by the striking majority of 118. It was the first time since the beginning of the Peel government, twenty-eight years before, that a major party clash had been resolved so decisively. In the 1850s and most of the 1860s governments had fallen or survived and controversial bills had been carried or defeated by majorities of between five and nineteen. Few things could have more symbolized the change from mid-century political confusion to the relatively clear late-century alternatives of Gladstone and Disraeli or Salisbury than that 118. And Gladstone himself treated it as having an almost mystical significance. ‘A notable and historic Division,’ he described it in his diary.14 In a letter to Manning on 3 June, when the bill had gone through its committee stage like a tank brushing aside bushes which stood in its path and when the third reading had been secured by an almost equally impressive majority of 114, he commented with a mixture of pride and ambiguity that ‘The House has moved like an army, an army where every private is his own general.’15 was right in attaching importance to the earlier steadiness of the majority which had acted (to continue and maybe to confuse the military simile) like an artillery barrage upon Queen, peers and bishops. If it had not made them surrender it had made them see the advantage of a negotiated peace.

  He would also have been right, had he taken satisfaction in his own contribution to that result, which he did not do, for self-congratulation as opposed to a conviction of the rightness of his own case was never part of his conceit. His introductory speech may have been a masterly example of lucid exposition, but it was his one-and-a-quarter-hour winding-up speech on 23 March, a nutshell of succinctness by his standards, which was the debating triumph and was rightly chosen for inclusion in the treasury of Gladstone’s orations. This speech had an easy confidence which made comprehensible his otherwise paradoxical (late-life) remark that he was only nervous when opening a debate (presumably with a prepared text) and never when replying and therefore depending upon the inspiration of the moment to turn a pudding into a soufflé. This concluding speech, largely unprepared, is a brilliant example of his best flowing debating style, and is a standing contradiction to any view that he was a pompous, humourless and viscous speaker. His sentences in this speech were, as always, long and elaborate, but perfectly constructed and easy to read. He had some good jokes. He engaged with Gathorne Hardy, who had spoken immediately before him; with Disraeli, who had opened the debate for the opposition; with Lord George Hamilton, who had made a successful maiden speech which presaged a parliamentary career lasting into the Balfour–Asquith epoch; and with Spencer Walpole, the tearful Home Secretary of 1867; and he annihilated Stafford Northcote, his former private secretary who had become Conservative MP for North Devon. The whole speech conveys an exceptional force and mastery over both subject and audience.

  It was not only in the setpiece debate that Gladstone demonstrated by his stamina and unflagging patience a Prime Minister’s strategic command combined with a detailed knowledge of the intricacies of a bill which few departmental ministers would have been able to rival with a measure of their own. There were thirteen committee days, all concentrated within three weeks, and then, after a short interval, a couple more days for report and third reading. For around seven or eight hours on all of these days Gladstone was continuously on the government bench, always listening, always in charge, intervening on all the most difficult points, invariably with knowledge and conviction, mostly with judgement. The fact that the bill got through the Commons so compactly, the majorities always above a hundred, the debates intensive but never running out of control, the government never having to seek a pause because of some new point which it could not answer or some setback from which it needed a few days to recover, owed much to th
e Prime Minister’s hands-on generalship.

  Over the Lords he could obviously exercise no such control, both because of the absence of a Liberal majority and because he could not there participate, even though he sat listening upon the steps of the throne for some significant part of the proceedings. Second reading was carried by 179 to 146, a very large vote in the then under 500-strong House. Canterbury and York (as well as the already mentioned Winchester and Peterborough and most other bishops) abstained, and thirty-six Conservative peers headed by the Marquess of Salisbury (the Hatfield visit perhaps justifying itself) voted for the bill. It was only the second time in a generation that the Conservative leadership in the Lords had been defeated in a division.

  This promising start did not prevent the Lords mauling the bill at committee stage. They concerned themselves very much with the temporalities rather than the spiritualities. As Morley succinctly put it: ‘The general result of the operations of the Lords was to leave disestablishment complete, and the legal framework of the bill undisturbed. Disendowment on the other hand was reduced to a shadow.’16 This at least had the advantage of reducing the dispute between the two Houses to a haggle about money, which was perhaps more manageable, even if less elevating, than a clash of religious principles. However, Church money, and in particular Church stipends, were more than capable of raising passions. The controversy was further fuelled by the Lords twice insisting on an alteration to the preamble of the bill. This alteration, while it did not have direct practical effect, predicated the whole exercise on a ‘concurrent endowment’ approach which was as repugnant to Gladstone as he believed (probably rightly) it was to almost all Irish opinion.