Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  On the other hand he wrote to Glyn, his Chief Whip, on the Sunday: ‘I go from here Wednesday morning, unless invited to stay on a little.’ He left on the Wednesday. More significant was a passage in a 1 October letter to Granville, to whom he found it easier to expose a bruise than to either his Whip or his wife: ‘Her repellent power which she so well knows how to use has been put in action towards me on this occasion for the first time since the formation of the Government. I have felt myself on a new and different footing with her.’23 On balance the petty issue of the date of the Queen’s 1871 departure for Balmoral probably did mark a significant point in the decline of their relationship. It need not have been an irrevocable decline had the Queen in particular had the will to reverse it, but she did not; and Gladstone was passing into a mood in which he accumulated grievances with a certain grim satisfaction.

  This deterioration was underpinned by their next serious argument, which was on a matter of more substance than the Balmoral departure nonsense. At the beginning of November 1871 the Prince of Wales caught typhoid staying at a country house near Scarborough. Lord Chesterfield, a fellow guest, and the Prince’s groom, who were also infected, both died. So nearly did the Prince. He was desperately ill at Sandringham for the first two weeks of December, but miraculously rallied on the 14th, the tenth anniversary of his father’s death in somewhat similar circumstances. It was very bad luck for Sir Charles Dilke, who was launched on an autumn campaign of republican meetings and found that his movement around the provincial centres, from Newcastle to Bristol to Leeds to Bolton to Birmingham, was punctuated by increasingly alarmist bulletins about the Prince which produced increasingly hostile audiences. The developments might have been regarded as even worse luck for the Prince, although when his fever eventually receded it became apparent that the momentum of the English republican movement had gone with it. His six weeks of illness had done more for the stability of the Throne than had his previous thirty years of life.

  The first and lesser impact of the Prince’s illness and recovery upon Sovereign–Prime Minister relations was concerned with the place, date and form of the national service of thanksgiving which was generally agreed to be called for. This was not allowed to be easy. St Paul’s and 27 February 1872 were settled on without too much difficulty, but there were a lot of other problems to worry about. The service must be short and simple; the Queen could not absolutely commit the Prince or even herself to attend, and if they did should she and the Prince and Princess ride in one carriage as she wanted or in two as they appeared to want? Eventually all was sorted out and the public enthusiasm gave her much gratification. It was Blackfriars Bridge writ large.

  She was also in an unusual supplicatory position towards the Prime Minister that winter because she had conceived a great desire to go to Baden-Baden at Easter to see Princess Feodore of Hohenlohe-Leinigen, her twelve-year-senior half-sister, who she rightly thought might be nearing the end of her life. She appeared to accept that she needed the permission of the government for this expedition, and approached securing it in a very submissive tone, rather like a young officer trying to get a week’s special leave from his colonel. She first raised it in a letter of 10 January, and after making a very strong case for a last visit to ‘her dear Sister’ (who did in fact die eight months later) whom she had not seen for six years, she continued:

  What the Queen wld therefore propose to do – wld be to run over to Baden! where her sister lives – at Easter when that Bathing place is quite deserted & where she cld get a private house, outside the Town she hears, – taking advantage of the Easter recess to do this. . . . the Queen wld not propose being away longer (including the journey there and back) than under 3 weeks. . . . The Queen has not menti

  oned this to a soul beyond her own Courier Kanne, till she has mentioned it to Mr Gladstone.24

  Gladstone replied a little sternly, recognizing the case for the visit but suggesting several reasons, including the need to make dispositions about the future of the Prince of Wales, against the Easter timing. The Queen was determined but not peremptory. She sent him a letter she had just received from Princess Hohenlohe in the hope that the tale of suffering it contained would melt his heart. It did, to the extent of his tacitly withdrawing his opposition provided the plans were kept secret for as long as possible. On 19 February, however, still five weeks before departure, she wrote to say that more or less public plans would now have to be made, and in doing so illustrated a startling contrast between her eager ingenuity when she wanted to do something and her magnification of obstacles when she did not. A three-country journey of 600 miles became much less of a burden than a drive along the Embankment to the City of London.

  She wld wish to go straight through France stopping nowhere – & thus avoiding the fatigue of any visitors on the road – wh wld be difficult in going the other way [presumably through Belgium and Germany]. Besides that the quiet embarkation at Portsmouth & quiet disembarkation in the Dockyard at Cherbourg wld save gt fatigue to herself & prevent all delay from fogs in the rivers – Thames & Scheldt. She went that way in ’68 to Lucerne.

  The Queen concludes that there cld be no political objection or personal risk in going thro’ France?25

  In spite of the sadness of her mission there is a touch of throwback to the spontaneous enthusiasm of Guedalla’s Victoria I about her approach to the journey, and she may be thought to come more attractively out of this correspondence than did Gladstone. As he hinted in his first letter, he was limbering up, somewhat laboriously, to use the aftermath of the illness of the Prince of Wales to push through a scheme which had been for some time maturing in his mind. This was intended to fulfil the double objective of providing a pediment for the three columns (the first the Church Bill, the second the Land Bill and the third the University Bill of 1873) of his policy of pacifying Ireland and at the same time providing employment for the Prince.

  There was general agreement, embracing certainly the Queen, and up to a point the Prince himself, that such employment was desirable. At the time of his typhoid he was thirty years of age, had been married for eight and a half years, had five children, was a leader of fashion, which he tempered with a mild easy-going liberalism, or at least reaction against his mother’s rigidities, but was best known for idleness, self-indulgence and dissipation. However, there was a hope that his long fever and narrow escape had washed away his sins as well as his vitality and that with the rebirth of his innocence there was an opportunity for a new beginning on a life of greater public service. The Queen gave to his elder sister, the Crown Princess of Prussia, an affecting picture of him at Osborne in mid-February: ‘It is like a new life – all the trees and flowers give him pleasure, as they never used to do, and he was quite pathetic over his small wheelbarrow and little tools at the Swiss cottage. He is constantly with Alix [the Princess of Wales], and they seem hardly ever apart!!!’26

  It was a narrow window of opportunity for by May she was back to complaining that he was gadding about too much, and Gladstone may have missed the window by a few weeks, for he submitted his memorandum of serious proposals only on 5 July. But the timing seems unlikely to have been crucial. The proposals united in opposition the Queen and the Prince, which was a deadly although by no means an inevitable alliance. In a long (3000 words) and lucidly argued letter Gladstone first reviewed several canvassed proposals for the special association of the Prince with one or other of several departments of state, the Foreign Office, the India Office or the War Office, and found them unsatisfactory, as he did that for a special fostering role in relation to art, science and philanthropy. He then came to his recommended solution, which was that for the winter season the Prince should reside for several months in Dublin and take over the role of Viceroy, which office would be abolished, thereby releasing to him the salary and other considerable emoluments of that office. (This was a clever bait, for the Prince was finding it difficult to live on his income.) The Chief Secretary would, however, continue in being wit
h responsibility for Irish administration, although the Prince by working closely with him would gain experience in executive government.

  For the rest the Prince (and the Princess) should for the London summer season take over from the Queen the (undischarged) responsibility for providing from Buckingham Palace an active Court and the leadership of society. Somewhat curiously he had supported this in a previous letter to Ponsonby by saying: ‘I am convinced that society has suffered fearfully in moral tone from the absence of a pure Court.’27 It was curiously and somewhat tactlessly put because from the Queen it had not had an impure Court (although she could have interpreted his words otherwise) but no Court at all, and from the Prince it was quite likely to get the reverse.

  Gladstone summed up his proposals in a way that made them sound a little like a regime of long runs and cold baths prescribed by a mens sana in corpore sano schoolmaster: ‘Four to five months in Ireland, two or three in London, the Autumn manoeuvres, Norfolk and Scotland, with occasional fractions of time for other purposes, would sufficiently account for the twelve months.’28 There was no chance of the proposals being accepted. The Prince was filled with no nostalgia for his 1861 escapade at the Curragh (when a young actress had been smuggled into his quarters) and hated the idea of nearly half a year of exile. The Queen (with some justification) thought that there could be constitutional complications about the Prince’s position in Ireland, and half tried to sugar the pill for Gladstone by saying that there, ‘placed at the head of a smaller and inferior society to that of London . . . he will be surrounded by Gentlemen of the Irish conservative party who will endeavour to attract him to their views’.29 Her rejection of the Buckingham Palace Court suggestion on the other hand contained no sugar and a smart snub: ‘The Queen considers [this] to be a question which more properly concerns herself to settle with the members of her family as occasion may arise.’30

  Gladstone might have done well to recognize defeat, but this was not his way. Five days after her reply she got another 2000 words. She discouragingly acknowledged ‘Mr Gladstone’s long letter’, again doubted the feasibility but promised to consult the Prince of Wales when he came to Osborne in a few days’ time. Two weeks later she reported that his reaction was as adverse as her own and added: ‘The Queen therefore trusts that this plan may now be considered as definitely abandoned.’31 Three weeks later Gladstone redeployed the argument in another 2000 words. The Queen replied that she ‘thinks it useless to prolong the discussion on this proposal’. Gladstone, in return, ‘need hardly say with how much grief he finds his views to be so unequivocally disapproved by Your Majesty on a matter of so much importance, either way, to the interests of the Monarchy. But, having been permitted to explain himself at so much length, and with such freedom, he refrains from further trespass on Your Majesty’s patience.’32

  He ended, a little huffily, by saying that ‘as matters now stand’ he would assume that he need not that year go to Balmoral (although he had been invited). A week later she renewed her invitation for him to go ‘for 2 days . . . but if there is nothing very special to communicate the Queen hardly likes to urge Mr Gladstone to put himself to the inconvenience & fatigue of coming over’. Gladstone did not go, although he circled Balmoral, at three houses and an inn, for three weeks.

  In November there was an anti-climactic little exchange in which the Queen may have had her tongue more firmly in her cheek than did Gladstone. Clinging to a very puny raft in place of the proud ship which he had endeavoured to launch, Gladstone wrote from Hawarden: ‘It would without doubt be a great object gained if, without reference to any other means, the Prince of Wales could, through your Majesty’s influence or otherwise be induced to adopt the habit of reading. The regular application of but a small portion of time would enable him to master many of the able and valuable works which bear upon Royal and Public duty.’33 The Queen replied after two weeks: ‘With respect to an observation in one of Mr Gladstone’s letters respecting the Prince of Wales – she has only to say that the P. of Wales has never been fond of reading & that from his earliest years it was impossible to get him to do so. Newspapers & very rarely, a novel, are all that he ever reads. . . .’34

  The government lasted just over a year after this depressing ending to an enterprise which Gladstone undoubtedly thought he had started in order to underpin the monarchy, while the Queen and some of her Court no doubt thought it was in order to underpin his Irish policy. The enterprise had by any standards been conducted with determination, powerful arguments and a marked lack of persuasive tact. It was a significant notch in the downward progress of their relations. Gladstone’s first and strongest government, while it produced no open rupture, ended with their relations substantially worse than they had been at its beginning.

  ‘EVER AND ANON THE DARK RUMBLING OF THE SEA’

  IN APRIL 1872, DISRAELI went to Manchester and delivered one of the most memorable polemics of the nineteenth century. The Free Trade Hall ought to have been Gladstone territory just as a great provincial meeting was almost a Gladstone patent. But Disraeli was capable of emulating as well as mocking his vis-à-vis, although he did it in a very different style, sardonic rather than uplifting, but at least equally generous in amplitude. Disraeli’s Manchester speech, almost unbelievably, lasted three and a quarter hours, throughout which he sustained himself with two bottles of very weak brandy and water. Its claim to near immortality, however, was all concentrated in barely two minutes of brilliant imagery. The government, he said, was losing its destructive energy:

  Their paroxysms ended in prostration. Some took refuge in melancholy, and their eminent chief alternated between a menace and a sigh. As I sat opposite the Treasury bench the ministers reminded me of one of those marine landscapes not very uncommon on the coasts of South America. You behold a row of exhausted volcanoes. Not a flame flickers from a single pallid crest. But the situation is still dangerous. There are occasional earthquakes, and ever and anon the dark rumbling of the sea.

  That speech, if it did not cause, at least coincided with a political turning-point. Hitherto Disraeli had been a hesitant leader of the opposition, with only nine months of interim premiership behind him. From 1868 it had been very much Gladstone’s Parliament, and there had been strong Conservative party murmurings that they might do better under a different leader. Suddenly the situation appeared transformed. Disraeli came to look a future as well as a past Prime Minister, and even ministers began to feel that they should prepare for a nunc dimittis. In sharp contrast with the careerist political culture of today when Prime Ministers find it difficult to get rid of their colleagues, nineteenth-century Prime Ministers often had a problem keeping men in their governments. And no one was riveted to the results of the next general election, regarding it as much nearer to an unpredictable act of God than a subject for obsessive political manipulation.

  This was as true of Gladstone himself as it was of his subordinates. He was by no means above political manoeuvring, but his eye was also always half-fixed on that desirable interval ‘between parliament and the grave’, and his morbidity made him doubtful in his sixty-third year of his actuarial chances. Of his fourteen Cabinet colleagues of 1868, Clarendon had died, Bright and Childers had retired because of ill health, and Hatherley was about to do so for the same reason. The survivors and the four (Halifax, W. E. Forster, Stansfield and Selborne) who had joined or were about to join them were beginning to feel the imminence for the government of ‘twilight and evening bell’. There remained two of the most notable achievements of the government – the Ballot Bill and the conclusion of the Alabama arbitration and settlement with the United States – to be brought to a safe lodging (which was accomplished in July 1872 in the former case and two months later in the latter), and one great failure – the Irish University Bill – to be endured before the government in March 1873 made its first attempt at escape from office. After defeat on the Irish Bill the Cabinet decided on resignation, which Gladstone accordingly tendered to the Qu
een on 13 March. Disraeli coolly and ruthlessly refused to take office. He would have been in a minority in the House of Commons, but a dissolution would have been open to him as it had been in roughly similar circumstances to Russell in 1846 or to Derby and himself in 1852, and was to be to Campbell-Bannerman in 1905. But he had had enough of minority office and decided that he wanted to see the government get still deeper into the mire. After a week’s interregnum he forced them back into office.

  The Ballot Bill was not much more welcome to Gladstone than had been the Elementary Education and the University Tests Bills. It was nearly forty years since he had informed the readers of the Liverpool Standard that the fall of the Roman Republic was to be attributed to the corruptions of secret voting, and while there were few subjects, except perhaps for the importance of religion in politics and the quality of Dante’s poetry, on which his views of the 1830s were within hailing distance of those of the 1870s, he had retained a certain resistance towards the idea that those who deserved the vote also needed the protection of being able to exercise it secretly. His ideal polity was a mass of contradictions. He liked small boroughs with restricted electorates which could nurture statesmen without distracting them from higher things with the squalor of local log-rolling. He also liked the idea of voters as independent gentlemen who strode to the poll with their heads high and the courage to declare their choice without fear or favour. (It must be said that this caricature of Athenian democracy did not bear much relation to his own early experience of Newark.) Yet he had also come to believe in the good moral sense of the masses against the classes. The great democracy of Northern England and Scotland, acting like a vast jury, was the best hope of saving Britain from the brittle values of the metropolitan ‘upper ten thousand’ and their Home Counties hangers-on, of whom Disraeli had made himself the unesteemed mouthpiece.