Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  It would however be ludicrous to put the whole blame upon Disraeli. He was unrestrained in exploiting an opportunity, but the opportunity had first to be there. How and why did Gladstone, possessing as he did a great, even excessive, respect for the institution of the monarchy, and starting from his very strong Court position in the 1850s and his perfectly adequate one in the 1860s, allow it to arise? He undoubtedly changed more during the course of his long career than do most public figures. It is difficult to reconcile the neat and primly good-looking young Church and state High Tory of the 1830s with the somewhat wild eyes and flying locks of the People’s William of the 1870s, 1880s and 1890s. The Queen could have claimed that the sober and earnest young statesman whom she and her husband had found so much in tune with what they saw as the needs of mid-century Britain was very different from the towering leader (as his supporters saw him) or the destructive demagogue (as she and most members of the South of England prosperous classes saw him) of the last twenty-five years of his life. His first premiership caught him almost at the end of the transition and on the threshold of this last phase.

  But, if Gladstone changed to a bewildering extent, so too did Queen Victoria, perhaps even more so, and mostly in a diametrically opposite direction to that in which Gladstone was proceeding. Philip Guedalla, a largely forgotten non-academic historian of the inter-war years, and, insofar as he is remembered, underestimated – because of his straining after epigram and over-dramatic imagery – produced a penetrating jeu d’esprit in his introduction to the correspondence of the The Queen and Mr Gladstone. He amused himself and some others by claiming that the long reign of Victoria was a myth. There were really three Victorias:

  The youngest of the three was Queen Victoria I, who succeeded to King William IV. Her reign, by far the shortest of the three, was distinguished by a romping sort of innocence. It was a girlish Regency, appropriately housed at Brighton, where she rode out with aged beaux, her ministers, and listened with admiring eyes to Lord Melbourne’s explanations of everything. . . . She was succeeded shortly after marriage by Victoria II, a widely different type. This queen, no less impressionable than her cheerful predecessor, bore the unmistakable impress of her married life. A gifted husband . . . transformed her views; there was a change of manners, since the royal nurseries transformed her way of life; and it is interesting to observe the shock sustained by former intimates of Victoria I, when they found themselves in the more austere presence of Victoria II. Lord Palmerston, a lively feature of the former Court, who . . . had been ‘the one with whom I communicate oftenest after Lord Melbourne’, was quite unnerved by his experience.1

  Just as Melbourne and Palmerston were the political favourites of the reign of Victoria I, so Peel and Aberdeen and Gladstone were those of that of Victoria II, when material progress, earnest endeavour and liberal thoughts mingled together to produce a Court atmosphere from which Melbourne was lucky to be spared by death, which would have oppressed Palmerston had he not had the brazen assurance to be indifferent to it, and in which Disraeli was regarded as a flamboyant parvenu. But the reign of Victoria III was still to come. It was essentially a Disraeli creation and therefore began only in 1874. But it was casting its shadow before it in the early 1870s, when the guiding presence of Albert was becoming less immanent and Gladstone’s moral imperatives were coming to grate.

  After the long, dreary years of her retirement [to quote Guedalla again], it was a new sensation. For a touch of novelty was needed, if the melancholy charm of her eternal mourning was ever to be broken; and a skilful minister applied the magic touch. He even found her a new title. Monarchs have often raised their ministers a step in the peerage; but what minister before Disraeli bestowed a step in the monarchy upon his sovereign. The Queen became Queen-Empress; and a deeper change came with the change of style. For now she learned to recognise herself in a fresh character; and the modest outlines of V. R. soon vanished in the new magnificence of V. R. I.

  The change was more than titular, since it marked the Queen’s transition to her third and final manner. . . . Disraeli’s Queen reigned on, ageing a little with the years, until the roaring streets acclaimed her jubilee and, in a few years more, a silent gun carriage passed by under the grey light of 1901. But almost to the end her loyalties remained the loyalties of 1878 – her throne, her empire, the fighting services, a spirited foreign policy, and a strong distaste for Radicals.2

  If this thesis is even half accepted, Gladstone around 1870 had to deal with a Queen who had run her race as Victoria II, and was at least becoming ready for the Prince Charming who, somewhat arthritic and asthmatic although Disraeli had become, was to transform her into Victoria III. And at the same time Gladstone himself was in firm transit in the other direction, increasingly finding crowds more attractive than Courts, and with a growing conviction of his own righteousness. The contrary movement of two such formidable objects was a guarantee of the turbulence of the water around them.

  When Gladstone became Prime Minister Queen Victoria was forty-nine and a half years old (a little under ten years his junior), with nine children of her own, the oldest twenty-eight and the youngest eleven, was already eight times a grandmother, and was just completing her seventh year of widowhood. During these seven years she had hardly been seen in public, although she had once opened Parliament, at the beginning of the session of 1866, but had done so with waxen visage, responding to neither the populace outside nor the peers inside. London and Windsor had become almost equally distasteful to her. Only Osborne on the Isle of Wight and Balmoral in Aberdeenshire, neither convenient for the transaction of official business, were congenial or, she insisted, good for her delicate health. Nevertheless she worked quite hard at papers and correspondence, although complaining to far busier ministers that her burdens were unique. She had in General Grey an unobsequious private secretary with a Whig background who firmly believed that she ought to pull herself together and undertake more public engagements, and a doctor in William Jenner (not to be confused with his more eminent but unrelated namesake who had invented vaccination) who was professionally reputable but who encouraged her valetudinarianism. When Grey died in 1870 he was succeeded by Henry Ponsonby, who was at first referred to as Colonel Ponsonby, but when he settled into the job became General Ponsonby, rather like a housekeeper receiving the honorary title of ‘Mrs’.78 Ponsonby, whatever his rank, was a man of firm Liberal views (indeed his son became a Labour MP and his grandson Labour Whip in the House of Lords, although that of course was not necessarily proof of his own radicalism).

  The Queen was not therefore surrounded by reactionary influences, although Jenner encouraged her resistance to greater visibility, which would also in a sense have made her more democratic. There was in addition John Brown, ‘the Queen’s highland servant’ as he had become officially designated in 1865, although ceasing at the same time to be confined to Balmoral and allowed to operate at Osborne as well. His political views are not known. He came from a Liberal part of the country, but was probably not naturally of a reforming turn of mind. Then there was Disraeli, who had had a nine-month run with the Queen for most of 1868. He had made the most of it, referring to ‘we authors, Ma’am’ when her Highland Journal was published, and had received his first offering of royal primroses. But he had not captivated or prejudiced her mind in the way that he was so effectively to do during his second and long government.

  At the November 1868 general election she would almost certainly, had she possessed a vote, have used it for the Conservatives rather than for the Liberals. But it is also true to say that in all the previous six general elections of her reign she would have voted for the incumbent government, whether it was Tory or Whig. She had hitherto been loyal rather than partisan. Eighteen sixty-eight was the break-point. At all the subsequent six she would undoubtedly have voted Conservative. In 1868, however, her preference was clear (although she had just had a strong argument with Disraeli about whether Bishop Tait of London should become the new Ar
chbishop of Canterbury; at the end of it, however, Disraeli deferred to her, which on a matter he would have regarded as of such importance Gladstone would not have done), but her preference was not obsessive. She was disappointed but not dismayed by the election result.

  It never occurred to her for instance that she might have played with trying to get a Whig peer to accept the premiership and have confined Gladstone to his old stamping ground of the Exchequer combined with the leadership of the House of Commons. She despatched General Grey to Hawarden with perfect propriety, and the initial attitude of both Queen to new Prime Minister and of Prime Minister to Queen was probably well expressed, allowing a little for the natural flattery of persuasive correspondence, in an exchange of letters between Gladstone and his old Eton and Christ Church contemporary Dean Wellesley of Windsor. Wellesley was as close to the Queen as any Anglican dignitary ever was (she preferred Scots Presbyterians, without ever being overkeen on ‘men of God’, north or south of the border). He wrote to Gladstone on 27 November 1868:

  1st. I know that the Queen has a great regard for you, and believes you to be attached to her & anxious to consult her wishes & comfort, as far as is possible, so that you need have no fear but that you will be received at the outset [my italics] with the greatest cordiality personally. . . .

  4. Everything depends upon your manner of approaching the Queen. Her nervous susceptibility has much increased since you had to do with her before & you cannot show too much regard, gentleness, I might even say tenderness, towards Her – Where you differ it might be best not at first to try and reason her over to your side but to pass the matter lightly over with expression of respectful regret, & reserve it – for there is no one with whom more is gained by getting her into the habit of intercourse with you. Put off, till she has become accustomed to see you, all discussions which are not absolutely necessary for the day. . . .

  The advice was precise and perceptive, and the opening encouragement was the more convincing for being realistically qualified by assuring Gladstone only that the Queen would not be initially hostile to him. After that it was up to him. He took Wellesley’s letter well and replied on 29 November:

  Every motive of duty, feeling and interest that can touch a man should bid me to study to the best of my small power the manner of my relations with H. M. She is a woman, a widow, a lover of truth, a Sovereign, a benefactress to her country. What titles! I should be ashamed even to add to them the recollection of much kindness received.

  On the other hand I have plenty of besetting infirmities. Among others I am a man so eager upon things as not enough to remember always what is due to persons – and I have another great fault in the unrestrained or too little restrained manifestation of first impressions, which I well know is quite a different thing from the virtue of mental transparency. The height is among friends to find those who will frankly warn me against those and other errors. . . . But indeed few things would be more painful to me than the thought in retrospect that I could at any time cause H. M. one moment of gratuitous pain or trouble.

  In other words Gladstone saw and was grateful for the force of Wellesley’s advice but, much though he desired to serve and be appreciated by his Sovereign, was very doubtful whether his temperament would enable him to live up to it. The recipes which Wellesley laid down were those which Gladstone was quite incapable of following. He had an immense respect for the Queen, both as an institution and as an individual – probably more than Disraeli did – but the chances of his being able to turn this into gentleness, tenderness and restraint in pursuing his point when he was convinced that he was right, and that his views were in accordance with the best interests of the monarchy and the country, were quite negligible. Thus, even before he kissed hands as Prime Minister, this exchange of letters illuminated with a harsh clarity (insofar as that word could ever be applied to Gladstone’s opaque phrases) the bleakness of the future landscape.

  Such full bleakness took some time to be attained, and for the earlier half of the life of his first government relations were, in diplomatic terms, ‘normal’ or even a little warmer. It was in 1871–2 that the real freeze-up began, although even after that there could be intervals of hesitant thaw. What was, however, always the case, in the bad periods and the better ones alike, was the huge amount of Prime Ministerial time that was devoted to relations with the Sovereign. It was qualitatively different from any recent practice. Not only were there the frequent extended autumn visits to Balmoral (two weeks in 1869, good-tempered release in 1870, a week in 1871, rather huffy release in 1872, and ten days in 1873), the often inconvenient journeys to Osborne, the full letter after each meeting of the Cabinet, and the daily letter of description of proceedings in Parliament (a task now long since delegated to a whip). All this was in a sense routine, and was to be matched by at least an equal effort (although more skilfully conducted and more copiously rewarded) by Disraeli in 1874–80. What were special to Gladstone were the long and often argumentative audiences (conducted standing, for it was only in the subsequent government that she accorded Disraeli the surreptitious privilege of sitting – surreptitious because he removed the chair before leaving in order that no Court servant should be aware of how familiar he had been) and the long and equally argumentative letters which Gladstone chose to address to her on specific matters of policy or appointments. These exchanges, both oral and written, were of doubtful utility. Neither fitted in with Wellesley’s advice. The former led to her complaining that Gladstone addressed her like a public meeting (she might have done better to get him, too, to sit down), and the latter, encouraged it must be said by almost equally long royal replies, led more often to an impasse rather than to a resolution. She could not effectively answer Gladstone’s over-meticulous arguments, which made her irritable, and she found it easier to say no on paper than face to face.

  Of Gladstone’s near contemporaries as Prime Minister, Disraeli as we have seen was equally Queen-obsessed, although in a totally different and much more productive way. Palmerston, Russell and later Salisbury remained more detached. Even they necessarily had more Court duties than is the almost minimal practice today, but they did not get emotionally involved. Palmerston sailed jauntily through all disagreements. Russell had the true Whig’s approach to the monarchy as a convenience rather than an institution for reverence. And Salisbury, while in the Golden and Diamond Jubilees of 1887 and 1897 he built on the Disraeli practice of exalting and even exploiting the Queen–Emperor as a symbol of Empire, patriotism and unionism, wisely got on with his own business and left the Queen to get on with hers.

  Examples of Gladstone’s less relaxed and more interventionist style abounded from the beginning of the government. On a day in his first week of office on which he wrote a total of thirty letters, five of them were to the Queen and two to her private secretary. The first small storm blew up before he had even begun to hold regular Cabinets and concerned an election indiscretion of G. O. Trevelyan, the father of both the historian G. M Trevelyan and the Labour Minister of Education Sir Charles Trevelyan. G. O. Trevelyan was then a young junior minister at the Admiralty and had been rash enough to say that the Court and the Duke of Cambridge (the Queen’s first cousin) as Commander-in-Chief were obstacles to army reform. Gladstone responded with horror and with two letters, each of which must have taken him half an hour to write, in hand of course. The indiscretions were ‘extraordinary and unaccountable’. ‘Mr Gladstone cannot but humbly subscribe to Your Majesty’s judgement that an error of this nature even raises the question whether, if it was in Mr Trevelyan’s mind to point to Your Majesty in the expressions he used, he can be allowed to continue in the office which he holds.’3 Then, three days later, after a thunderbolt to Trevelyan and a propitiatory reply, Gladstone wrote again with continued contrition but also a glint of optimism: ‘Mr Gladstone has a very strong sense of the offence committed, but it appears to him that the confession is frank and manly, and he feels confident that the gentleman, who is really a gentleman
of high character, ability, and promise, has received a lesson for life. With this preface, Mr Gladstone desires to take Your Majesty’s pleasure.’4

  The Queen’s pleasure was that the apology should be accepted, although with an additional one to the Duke of Cambridge, and Trevelyan remained a member of successive Gladstone administrations until in 1886 he temporarily broke with his chief on Home Rule, thereby incurring the Queen’s equally temporary approval, for he changed his mind on the issue in 1887. The main impression left by the incident and the correspondence is that Gladstone took it a great deal too portentously. The wise equivalent of Disraeli’s ‘We authors, Ma’am’ would have been to say ‘These inexperienced junior ministers, Ma’am. . . . I’ll see he doesn’t do it again,’ and leave it there. But that was not his way.

  The next issue which gave rise to reams of correspondence was the Queen’s recoiling from a public suggestion that she might open the parliamentary session on 16 February. She did so on the just acceptable grounds of health and the unacceptable and unconstitutional one of her dislike of the Irish Church Bill. She had come to treat a state opening of Parliament as a health hazard comparable with a visit to a fever camp. It was too cold outside and too hot inside. Moreover riding backwards in a carriage upset her. Gladstone accepted the decision with obsequious resignation:

  Mr Gladstone prays to be allowed to assure Your Majesty that he is deeply and habitually sensible how great are the burdens entailed by Your Majesty’s exalted station, and by her manifold, weighty and incessant obligatons. . . . In the present instance he will not only obey Your Majesty’s desire but will do so in the spirit of humble and earnest co-operation and concurrence.5

  Then in May 1869 there was a most laborious but amicable exchange on the question what should be done about an uninvited visit from the Viceroy of Egypt, and in June another on the question whether the Queen should open the new Blackfriars Bridge and also take in an inspection of the equally new (Victoria) Embankment, the Farringdon Viaduct and the Metropolitan Railway (‘of which the construction is most curious’, Gladstone wrote, presumably intending to be enticing). This produced an outburst of horror from the Queen: ‘The fatigue and the excitement would be far too great,’ quite apart from the well-known intolerable heat of London in June. Eventually, after heavy pressure from Gladstone and the City of London authorities and with General Grey, as always, in favour of less neurasthenia and more activity, she did it in November, and was delighted with the occasion: ‘Nothing cld go better or more satisfactorily in every possible way than the ceremony and long progress thro’, the Queen must think – nearly a million of people today.’6