Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Gladstone put these incompatibilities through the mincing machine of his mind and came out at first with a rather bland pâté. In his first speech as Prime Minister, when he went to Greenwich (a very rare experience during the eleven years he was member for that borough) to secure his re-election after taking an office of profit under the Crown, he produced the somewhat delphic statement that ‘I have at all times given my vote in favour of open voting, but I have done so before, and I do so now, with an important reservation, namely, that whether by open voting or by whatsoever means, free voting must be secured.’ In the 1870 session Hartington, acting not very departmentally as Postmaster-General, brought forward an anti-corrupt-practices bill which would, inter alia, have introduced ballot voting. It was a government measure but a low-pressure one. It was not given much priority compared with Elementary Education and Irish Land, the favoured measures of the session. This bill foundered, but another, concentrating on the ballot, was introduced by a private member late in the session. This was a ‘gesture’ bill rather than a serious attempt at legislation, but it nonetheless marked a decisive stage in the argument. This was partly because the Prime Minister spoke, and for the first time committed himself favourably on the issue, and partly because it secured a favourable vote in a full House of Commons. Gladstone said that many whose occupations made them vulnerable to pressure now had the vote and that these new social circumstances made the protection of their freedom necessary. Necessary more than desirable was the implication, and this was confirmed by his diary entry for 29 June in the following year, when the Ballot Bill was having its third canter round the parliamentary course: ‘Spoke on ballot, and voted in 324–230 with mind satisfied & as to feeling a lingering reluctance.’1

  In this 1871 session broadly the same bill had progressed to being a major government measure. W. E. Forster, nominally only Vice-President of the Council but a seasoned ministerial performer in the House of Commons, who had piloted the Education Bill in the previous session, was in charge. He drove it through an obstructing chamber. Then, after the amazing amplitude for such an apparently simple measure of eighteen days of Commons Committee and forty years of public discussion the Lords threw it out (and did so by the insultingly small vote of 97 to 48) on the ground that it had not been adequately considered. Gladstone reacted with more passion against the Lords than he had hitherto mustered in favour of the ballot. This could be regarded as a typical sign of his imperiousness: once his own mind, however reluctantly, had embraced the need for a change, he was impatient of the obscurantism of those who had not moved with him. In his holiday-interrupting speech in his son’s Whitby constituency on 2 September, he denounced the Lords for frustrating the will of the people’s House, and said that the next time round the bill would be presented with ‘an authoritative knock’ on the door of their Lordship’s House. In 1872 he threatened first a special autumn session, a rare event, and then, if the Lords still did not give way, a dissolution. Disraeli was not at all keen to risk his future prospects on this issue, and so, as a result of one of those processes of osmosis between the Conservative leader in the Commons and allegedly independent-minded Tory peers, the Lords gave way in early July and the crisis was averted. The first secret-ballot by-election took place as early as 15 August 1872. The last major legislative reform of Gladstone’s first government was in place.

  To the second achievement of 1872, the resolution of the ten-year-old Alabama dispute with the United States, Gladstone’s commitment was total and his influence was crucial. Furthermore, the settlement not only was the greatest nineteenth-century triumph of rational internationalism over short-sighted jingoism, but also marked the break-point between the previous hundred years of Anglo-American strain and the subsequent century and more of two world wars fought in alliance, a Cold War conducted by the American-led but partly British-created NATO, and several decades in which at least some people in both Washington and London believed strongly in a special relationship between the two countries.

  It was nearly fifty years between the Alabama settlement and President Wilson’s philosopher-king descent on the Paris of the 1919 peace treaty and nearly seventy before the ‘westward, look, the land is bright’ British mood of 1940. There were some nasty disputes on the way, particularly in the trade field but also over Venezuela in 1895–6. It was nonetheless the case that, after 1872, war between Britain and the United States became almost inconceivable, whereas in the previous hundred years it had been twice a reality and several times a possibility. The acceptance of the Alabama award therefore left at least as great an imprint upon Britain’s future orientation as did Lansdowne’s forging of the entente with France in 1904 or Ernest Bevin’s determination to commit the United States in Europe in 1947–9. Morley’s judgement that Gladstone’s ‘association with this high act of national policy is one of the things that give its brightest lustre to his fame’ was not hyperbolic.

  Bright though the lustre and high the act, however, the circumstances out of which it arose were of byzantine complication and a classic example of an oak growing out of an acorn. In July 1862 when pro-Southern feeling was at its height in Britain (Gladstone made his Newcastle speech ten weeks later), a thousand-ton sloop, steam-powered but wooden hulled, set off from the Mersey, where she had been built, on a trial cruise of jollification. She anchored in an Anglesey bay. The celebrants were quickly taken off by tender and replaced by a more determined crew. The sloop then sailed to the Azores where she was equipped by supply ships from London and Liverpool with officers, armaments and coal which turned her into a ready-for-action Confederate man-of-war. Thus accoutred, the Alabama, as she had also become, proceeded to terrorize Union shipping in the North Atlantic to an extent which would surely have aroused both the admiration and the amazement of German U-boat commanders in the First and Second World Wars. Single-handedly, it was alleged, she had almost cleared the ocean of the Union marine.

  That there was some dereliction of Britain’s proper discharge of her neutral duty was difficult to deny. Customs officials in Liverpool were dilatory in sending in reports and the Foreign Office, then presided over by Russell, was dilatory in acting upon them when they were received. On the day on which the Alabama sailed, Russell, having waited for the opinion of the Law Officers, decided, ineffectively, to detain the ship. Gladstone, as Chancellor at the time, was responsible for the customs agents.

  The United States government bore heavy resentment over the activities of the Alabama (and of one or two other less devastating marauders originating in British waters, one from Australia) and wanted compensation. Towards the end of the 1860s, with the war won, there were two new factors compared with 1862. First, British opinion had swung away from the South and towards the victorious North. Second, it was obvious that the unsundered United States was on the road to becoming a major commercial force, and maybe a world power as well. These considerations, fortified by some appropriate guilt on the part of Palmerston’s surviving colleagues, predisposed the 1868 Gladstone government towards a settlement. By good fortune its short-lived Disraeli predecessor had also committed itself in the same direction. That government had agreed to a convention by which a mixed Anglo-American commission should decide upon the settlement of all outstanding claims between the two countries, and had further agreed that, in the event of failure to agree, the Alabama claims in particular should be referred for arbitration to the head of a friendly state. (In 1871 the King of Prussia, newly elevated to be German Emperor, performed the role in relation to a minor related dispute.)

  As a result the Alabama settlement, which could so easily have been demagogically opposed, never became a matter of bitter inter-party dispute. At one stage, indeed, the far from blameless Russell threatened to cause more trouble in the Lords than Disraeli ever did in the Commons. The 1868 convention foundered because the US Senate, mainly for internal political reasons, failed to ratify it. But when a new and similar plan was launched in early 1871 Disraeli agreed that Stafford North
cote should be one of the five British commissioners who under the presidency of Lord de Grey (soon to be Ripon) went to Washington to try to negotiate a framework treaty under which an arbitration could take place. Northcote’s presence and his good relations with de Grey effectively hobbled the opposition in the House of Commons. And in June of the following year Gladstone, writing to the Queen, referred to ‘the signal prudence of Mr Disraeli during the anxious period of the Controversy with the United States and the value of the example he had set . . .’.2

  Such restraint was very desirable, for the Americans, while apparently wanting a settlement, advanced, or at least talked about, the most fantastical claims. The nigger in the woodpile, if this phrase may be used about such a vehement and distinguished opponent of slavery, was Gladstone’s old friend Charles Sumner, Senator from Massachusetts and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee from 1861 to 1871. His 1857 visit to Hawarden seemed to have done peculiarly little good in improving his disposition towards Britain or Gladstone. He was the leading advocate of the so-called ‘indirect claims’, which could be crudely defined as blaming the Alabama for the North taking longer to win the Civil War and charging Britain accordingly. In one speech in the Senate he suggested a figure of £400 million, which was approximately six times the size of total British annual public expenditure at the time. On another occasion he proposed that a cession of Canada to the United States might act as an assuagement. These could have been dismissed as ‘noises off’ had not Hamilton Fish, the founder of a famous Hudson Valley foreign policy dynasty and President Grant’s Secretary of State, been very apprehensive of Sumner; he was frightened to negotiate far away from Sumner’s extravagant imperatives.

  In these circumstances it required nerve, first on the part of the British Commissioners to get the Washington treaty signed and then on the part of the British Cabinet, in view of the continued American muttering about the indirect claims, to let the matter go to the five specified arbitrators – nominees of Great Britain, the United States, Italy, Switzerland and Brazil – who met in Geneva. There the day was saved by a combination of Charles Adams, the American nominee, and Chief Justice Cockburn, the British nominee.

  Adams had been minister in London at the time of the escape of the wretched ship, but far from being full of personal resentment was the only man on the American side who had the cool statesmanship to jettison the wilder claims. Cockburn’s behaviour was even more of an unexpected bonus, for he was a natural illiberal British chauvinist. Great though was the trouble caused by his famous and long-lasting definition of obscenity, he seemed to have been sufficiently relaxed by ‘abroad’ to make unanimous the decision that Britain was responsible for the acts of the Alabama. The other arbitrators fluctuated between these two poles on the different counts, and ended up by deciding on a total British liability of £3¼ million. This was at once a vast sum by Victorian standards, directly equivalent only to about £160 million today, but in relation to national income more like £4 billion, and in relation to the size of the budget (to which it added approximately 5 per cent) the equivalent of a modern £15 billion. Yet it was barely a third of what the Americans had demanded, even when the indirect claims were set aside. It was also the equivalent, in 1870s terms, of fivepence on the income tax, although the government, quite rightly, treated it as a once-for-all item rather than a normal revenue outgoing, and made no attempt to cover it by taxation in a single year. Far transcending the importance of the sum, however, was the fact that the government, in the plenitude of Britain’s power, accepted the principle of the liability.

  The autumn of 1872, once the Alabama affair had been settled, was one of relative calm for Gladstone, indeed of almost unbelievable calm, so far at least as external circumstances were concerned, by modern Prime Ministerial standards. There was no parliament from 9 August until 6 February 1873. There was no party conference. It never occurred to him to visit his constituency. In October 1871 he had addressed a large open-air meeting on Blackheath, and that he judged was enough until the general election of 1874. He never went there in the interval. The Queen in the spring of 1872, maybe as a thanks-offering for being allowed to go to Baden-Baden, or maybe as a rather good royal tease (although it does not sound exactly her style), had offered him a grace-and-favour house in Greenwich in order to ease the discharge of his constituency duties. He firmly and courteously refused ‘for reasons purely domestic and personal to himself, with which it is quite unnecessary to trouble Your Majesty’.3

  He was continuously at Hawarden from 10 August to 18 September, the late-summer sea-bathing urge seeming for once to have deserted him. Then he went on a three-week Scottish tour, which with neither Balmoral nor speeches was singularly free of political duty. His last Highland port of call, after six days with the Liberal Marjoribanks (later Tweedmouth) at Guisachan, was at Strathcarron, an Easter Ross property of the then only twenty-four-year-old Arthur Balfour, by whom Gladstone was temporarily enchanted. ‘I really delight in him, no more and no less,’ he informed his wife. After six days he reluctantly returned to London for a Cabinet requested by Granville on commercial relations with the French Republican government which had somewhat tentatively followed the fall of Napoleon III. A constant feature of Gladstone’s country-house visits was that he never suffered from travel fever and prolonged his recreation well into the day of departure and indeed up to the moment of the train leaving. Long and often roundabout walks to the stations were his habit. On this occasion he rather overdid it. He had gone on an expedition with his host which involved crossing a little loch to get to the station of Achanalt. Balfour recorded fifty-eight years later that the wind was so strong and the boatman so old that as they approached the bank ‘I saw our train approaching with ill-timed punctuality.’ A combination of wading ashore and waving to the engine-driver enabled the train to be caught. ‘As the train ran slowly out of the station,’ he continued, ‘I saw with intense thankfulness a pair of wet socks hanging out of the window to dry.’4 Gladstone’s account is remarkably compatible. His diary entry was a shade stately: ‘The lake nearly caused my missing the train but by effort we gained it.’5 To his wife he was more detailed and confirmatory of Balfour: ‘I took off my feet (the Scotch say change your feet) when I got into the train and effected a partial and considerable drying by dancing my socks in the air and putting my shoes in the sun.’6

  He then noted that he had ‘a journey of 650 miles without break. . . . the Highland line very fine from Aviemore to Dunkeld’. He added that ‘Bruce got in at Granton & we discussed various things.’7 This conveys a vivid picture of both the efficiency and the intimacy of Victorian railway travel. It was remarkable that, less than forty years after Peel took nearly a month to get from Rome to London, his political heir should be able to wade in a remote North of Scotland loch one morning and preside over a Cabinet at 2.00 the next afternoon. And it was in a different way equally remarkable that the Prime Minister, travelling alone, should not be particularly surprised when the Home Secretary casually joined him at another wayside station. Bruce wrote to his wife: ‘He [Gladstone] was very friendly and communicative, and I saw more of him than I ever did before.’8 It is curiously easy to imagine these two Victorian statesmen, soberly rather than glossily clad (although Gladstone had presumably regained his socks and shoes by then), sitting opposite each other in the buttoned upholstery of corner seats and engaged in earnest conversation as the train meandered through Scotland before gaining momentum in England. To avoid early-railway romanticism, however, it is necessary to note that Gladstone recorded it as being ‘1¼ h. late’ at Euston. Even more remarkable was the Highland cavorting of a sixty-three-year-old moralizing Liberal leader with a twenty-four-year-old future Conservative Prime Minister who came to be the epitome of elegant realism and deflating wit.

  Once in London Gladstone used the opportunity to hold not one but three long Cabinets (sitting in aggregate for fourteen hours), to dine with Mrs Thistlethwayte (‘stayed late X’) on
the first night, as well as on the third, and to see many other people before returning to Hawarden for another unbroken month on 18 October.

  Then in mid-November he paid his first visit to Oxford since his defeat as member for the University in 1865 and stayed a couple of nights with Warden Talbot and his Lyttelton wife in the newly erected multichrome splendour which Butterfield had just provided for Keble College. There followed a month in London, interspersed with two short weekends at Sandringham (the Prince of Wales) and Hatfield (Salisbury – ‘there are no kinder hosts than here’)9 and a ‘dine and sleep’ at Windsor, which he approached very much as a duty and not a pleasure. During the month he held no fewer than ten Cabinets, supplemented by another six early in the new year of 1873 between 22 January and the opening of the parliamentary session on 6 February. In the meantime there had been another six weeks of Hawarden calm, save only for a forty-eight-hour expedition to his brother Robertson, then alone and declining towards his 1875 death. William Gladstone combined this with a controversial philosophical-theological address to Liverpool College. He thus had over a hundred nights at Hawarden – more than in any year since his asylum from politics in 1857–8 – and another thirty-two at other destinations away from London during that long recess.

  Paradoxically, the number of recess Cabinets was also a record. They were mainly concerned with preparations for the new session, and as time went on they became increasingly concentrated on the Irish University Bill. The Prime Minister’s own mind was overwhelmingly so directed. He regarded the reform and expansion of university education in Ireland as an essential third leg to the programme of pacification to which he had already contributed Church disestablishment and the Land Bill. And the Queen’s destruction of his plan to overarch the three by employing the Prince of Wales to give Ireland a new status in relation to the Crown made him the more anxious to complete the tripod. Furthermore, his tastes, his interests and his experience made him only too anxious to engage obsessively with the issue, bristling with difficulties and with a history strewn with failure though it was. He made himself a great theoretical expert on the subject. He read voluminously around it, thus occupying many hours of his Hawarden autumn. The result was that his 13 February speech introducing the bill, for all that it lasted three hours, was the most fascinating and ingenious lecture, showing an amazing command over the facts of the history of higher education in Ireland and an equally impressive ability to construct his own theory out of them. He delivered a disquisition on the nominal suzerainty of the ancient but shadowy University of Dublin over its sole constituent college, Trinity, which he described as ‘perhaps the wealthiest college . . . in Christendom’, far superior in that respect to his own humble alma mater of Christ Church. He was equally compelling and original on the paucity of modern non-vocational university training in Ireland: a total of only 784 arts students, he managed to demonstrate, of whom no more than an eighth came from the Roman Catholic three-quarters of the population. This compared with a Scottish figure of 4000 arts students, in a country with barely a half of the Irish population.