Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  The whole speech is a wonderful example of Gladstone’s expository style, compelling, daring (there are a lot of attacks on venerable institutions and practices), with the figures never boring because, if not exactly made up for the purpose, they are selectively presented so as at once to surprise the listener and to carry him along with the argument. They are manifestly all his own work. No official would ever have contrived to present them so tendentiously.81 Despite the sonorousness the pace is fast, and there is always a tension about what he is going to say next. The 20,000-word speech is easy and rewarding to read today, and goes far to explain how a full House of Commons, whether in agreement or disagreement, could listen to him over such broad acres of time.

  Unfortunately, however, while Gladstone’s scheme was an elegantly constructed castle in the air, and while his speech advocating it was magnificent, the bill suffered from one fatal flaw, which was that no one except himself really wanted it. This applied to his Cabinet, which was the reason that he had to have so many meetings to get it through, and it applied particularly to the most departmentally concerned member of it. Hartington, having gone reluctantly to Ireland at the end of 1870, became enough engaged with its problems that he was offended when Gladstone in the summer of 1873, with that maladroitness which frequently afflicted their relations, responded to a false rumour that Hartington wanted a change by offering him a return to his old position as Postmaster-General.

  Hartington was sceptical about the form of the University Bill, but even more did he believe that there were two other measures of Irish reform which should be given priority over it. The first was public ownership of the railways and the second was local government reorganization. The object of the latter was to get away from the haphazard rule, at once inefficient and undemocratic, of Dublin Castle. The Castle was not corrupt but it was remote and relied on favourites who were almost by definition unrepresentative ‘Castle Catholics’, the Irish equivalent of Uncle Toms. And beneath it there was only the archaic structure of grand juries. Hartington could not much interest Gladstone in either issue. The Prime Minister’s mind was all on raising the number of students of the humanities in Ireland from 784 to perhaps 1500, or at most 2000. It was, to say the least, a disproportionate concentration of attention.

  Furthermore, in order to give his higher education scheme even a chance of success he had to hobble the very meaning of the word ‘university’ and limit the studies of those arts undergraduates to an extent which meant that they might almost as well have been studying dentistry or one of the other vocational courses about which he was so disparaging. The saddest passage in his otherwise magnificent speech was that in which he described the restrictions which would have to be placed upon the university:

  It can have no chair in theology; and we have arrived at the conclusion that the most safe and prudent course we can adopt is to preclude the university from the establishment of chairs in two other subjects, which, however important in themselves in an educational point of view, would be likely to give rise to hopeless contention. . . . The two subjects to which I refer are philosophy and modern history. [Laughter.]10

  It was curious that he should have got himself impaled, from the other direction as it were, upon the same stakes which had speared Newman in his Dublin lectures twenty years before. In one of the uneasiest passages in The Idea of a University Newman endeavours to reconcile his view that ‘the very name of University is inconsistent with restrictions [on the range of its teachings] of any kind’ with his reluctant acceptance of the Pope’s view that the university he had been asked to set up in Dublin must be a purely Catholic one. Newman tied himself in knots to try to resolve this contradiction, yet Gladstone, who was always very well up in Newmaniana, seemed to have learnt little from it. He exposed himself to the derision contained in that bracketed ‘Laughter’, yet failed to win over the Irish hierarchy. Cardinal Cullen was a very hardline Archbishop of Dublin, whose mission was to impose the will of Rome upon the Irish Catholic Church, which on his appointment in 1852 he had found almost as Gallican as the French Church of those days. The Irish Church obviously did not have the prestige of being the ‘eldest daughter’, but it had the alternative advantage of remoteness coupled with devout adherents.

  Cullen and his bishops, contrary to the hopes and expectations of Manning, on whom, in spite of his ultramontane excesses at the Vatican Council, Gladstone still depended too much, killed the bill. They wanted no system of education which mingled the religious and the secular power. But Gladstone had already made too many concessions to them for the bill to arouse any advanced Liberal enthusiasm. And the vested interests, in the shape primarily of Trinity, which he proposed to federate with Maynooth, Magee (a Presbyterian) College and two of the three existing Queen’s Colleges, were obviously opposed. So was the third Queen’s College at Galway, which he proposed to wind up on the ground that its main product were lawyers trained at too high a public cost. The bill therefore had plenty of enemies and hardly more than one friend, although powerful and dedicated in his solitariness.

  The bill perished soon after 2.00 a.m. on the night of 11–12 March. Gladstone had moved the second reading in another long expository speech on the 3rd, and then, after four nights of debate, wound up immediately before the fatal division. As he described it to the Queen, ‘Mr Disraeli rose at half past ten, and spoke amidst wrapt attention until midnight [despite deep underlying disapproval Gladstone was nearly always much more gracious about Disraeli’s speeches than vice versa]. Mr Gladstone followed in a speech of two hours.’11 The bill was then defeated by 287 votes to 284. The margin was narrow, but as this was in a House with a normal Liberal majority (even after a few bye-election losses) of eighty-five, and as Gladstone had described the bill as ‘vital to the honour and existence of the government’, the effect was nonetheless shattering.

  Gladstone’s winding-up speech won more praise than votes. Speaker Brand described it as ‘a magnificent speech, generous, high-minded, and without a taint of bitterness, although he was sorely tried, especially by false friends’.12 But its effect was less than that of the sullenly hostile pastoral letter which Cardinal Cullen caused to be read in all the Catholic churches of Ireland two days before the vote. It was the defection of Irish members which provided the seismic shift against the bill, and it was the prospect of this opened up by Cullen’s broadside which encouraged Disraeli to alert his whips, sharpen his words and thus provide a solid Conservative vote. Only this could make the shift decisive. Morley was both neat and justified in writing that ‘the measure that had been much reviled as a dark concordat between Mr. Gladstone and the pope, was now rejected by a concordat between the pope’s men and Mr. Disraeli’.13

  Forty-three Liberals voted against the bill, but only eight of them were English or Scottish members. The other thirty-five were from Ireland, twenty-five of them Catholics. On an alternative basis of classification, the unsuccessful ‘aye’ lobby was made up of 222 English members, 47 Scottish and only 15 Irish. The ‘no’ lobby contained 209 English, 10 Scottish and no less than 68 Irish members. This was the reverse of the pattern which was subsequently to become a feature of all measures of Irish reform over the thirty years when Gladstone and then Asquith tried to carry Home Rule in time to prevent the rise of Sinn Fein republicanism and the move to complete separation. In 1886, 1893 and 1912 (as in the subsequent re-runs of 1913 and 1914 made necessary by the Parliament Act) there was never an English majority for a Home Rule Bill. The majority, when it existed, was provided by an overwhelming preponderance of Irish members and strong support from the Scots, this last feature being the only one which was present in 1873.

  Despite more widespread unease on his own benches, Gladstone would have got his second reading, and maybe sustained the whole bill more or less intact, had it not been for Cullen and his supporting bishops. He was probably justified when he wrote bitterly to Manning on 13 March: ‘Your Irish Brethren have received in the late vote of Parliament the most extr
avagant compliment ever paid them. They have destroyed the measure; which otherwise was safe enough.’14

  Until a late stage Gladstone was unaware of the danger. ‘No apprehension is at present entertained,’ he wrote to the Queen on 5 March. Four days later he had changed his mind and when the defeat occurred he recorded that it ‘was believed to cause more surprise to the opposite side than it did to me’. He then acted with all deliberate speed. He adjourned the House of Commons for thirty-six hours and promised them a statement of the government’s intentions at the end of that interval. He caused the Queen to be immediately informed, despite it then being 2.45 a.m. And he summoned the Cabinet for 1.00 p.m. on what had become the same day. There was a complication because, although contrary to his frequent practice he does not record himself as being ill, he was engaged in intensive medical consultation. He wrote to his doctor – Andrew Clark – on the day which concluded with his winding-up speech and the great defeat; he went to see him at 11.30 on the following morning immediately before visiting the Queen, and did so again on the morning after that, which was the day when he formally tendered his resignation. For the last occasion he recorded that Clark ‘completed his examination and gave me his careful judgement’.15Twenty-one years later he reminiscently but obscurely wrote that ‘Clark . . . would give me on medical grounds no encouragement whatsoever.’16

  Gladstone’s complaint appears to have been general exhaustion, from which he suffered during the remainder of the session of 1873 and indeed through to the end of the government, rather than anything more specific and immediately menacing. He nonetheless obviously gave a high priority to his visits to Clark, which added to the commitments of a peculiarly burdensome week. It may also have turned his mind towards resignation rather than dissolution. These were the alternatives (as opposed to ignoring the defeat, revising the bill or going for a vote of confidence) to which the Cabinet quickly narrowed their options. Resignation would give him the ‘temporary rest’, about the need for which he recorded himself as ‘strongly advised’. Dissolution would do the reverse. It also offered little prospect of a Liberal victory.

  The Cabinet being satisfactorily amenable – Gladstone had written a few days before of it as being ‘most harmonious, at this critical time’ – resignation was the course determined upon, and he formally presented it to the Queen thirty-six hours after the defeat. An hour and a half later he announced it to the House of Commons. Disraeli then proceeded to throw his spanner into the works. The deadlock was complete, and Gladstone was furious, as he often was, with Disraeli’s manoeuvres. The latter’s motive was of course tactical. Although the Conservatives had gained thirteen by-election seats from the Liberals in the previous two years, Disraeli did not believe that the prospect for a decisive Conservative victory was yet secure. And the Parliament, under the Septennial Act, still had a possible two years and ten months of life. Gladstone insisted that when the opposition deliberately set out to inflict a major defeat on a government, as it had done with its heavy whipping for 11 March, there was a special obligation on it to provide an alternative.

  The only person who might have resolved the impasse in the way Gladstone wanted was the Queen. But she chose not to do so. This was perhaps her first act of gross favouritism towards Disraeli. Undoubtedly by that stage she would have welcomed a change of government, and she might have been right from a national point of view. The Liberal administration was running down, as all its principal members had the sense and the public spirit to see. March 1873 would have been the right time for a change. But if Disraeli counselled otherwise she accepted his judgement, in a way that she would not have done without protest with Gladstone. And she accepted the price, which was that she had to soldier on for another eleven months (it could have been longer) with an unloved Prime Minister.

  Late on the Sunday evening, 16 March, she requested Gladstone to resume his office. He was staying with a large party at Cliveden, where he had not been since the death of his old friend the Duchess of Sutherland in 1868 and the consequent change of generation in the house. It was another remarkable example of his reluctance ever to put off a visit and his liking for country-house gatherings, the pleasures of which, however, hardly diminished the flow of his writing and reading. Already during that day he had compiled a memorandum on the whole course of the crisis before sitting down at 10.45 p.m. to write a substantial response to the Queen’s request. The note was one of resigned acquiescence. He would ‘repair to London’ the following morning, would see ‘some of the most experienced members of the late Government’, and would endeavour to prevail upon them to join with him in picking up the unwanted burden. But the position had been sufficiently ‘unhinged’ that he doubted whether the government or the Parliament ‘can again be what they were’.17

  These commitments he faithfully discharged, but with no great sense of urgency and still less of zest. It was 10.15 the next morning before his ‘adieu to our most kind hosts’ (Gladstone’s hosts were almost invariably given a high accolade) and it must therefore have been nearly noon before he started on his consultations, beginning with Granville. The reluctance to do any effective business in the morning was a persistent feature of mid-Victorian political life. However, the results of the consultations were unenthusiastically positive and at a Cabinet on the following day the formal decision to resume office and to try to keep the Parliament going into 1874 was taken. Gladstone did not get the rest which he and Dr Clark thought he needed, and while the new and unexhilarating goal of keeping the Parliament alive into the next year was narrowly achieved, these ten months in which borrowed time was thrust upon the government brought little advantage to the Liberal party or the country. Gladstone, his judgement maybe impaired by exhaustion, made a whole series of mistakes, most in themselves small but leading to a cumulative impression of a government in decay. And one of those mistakes, which was himself to take over the Exchequer in August 1873, was both crassly foolish for a Prime Minister at the limit of his reserves and singularly unfortunate for the direction in which it set the government’s programme for the 1874 general election.

  DEFEAT AND RETIREMENT

  GLADSTONE’S SMALL BUT DAMAGING MISTAKES began in the year before the defeat of March 1873. In the late winter of 1872 he had been arraigned before the House of Commons for two displays of arrogant corner-cutting. In the first case he wished to appoint Sir Robert Collier to a vacancy on the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. Collier, who later became Lord Monkswell and founded an interesting dynasty, was a fine lawyer, whose personal qualifications were never challenged. Nor was there anything unusual about propelling the Law Officers into high judicial office. Indeed, when a few years later the Chief Justice of the Common Pleas was transformed into the Lord Chief Justice of England the office became known as the ‘Attorney-General’s pillow’, so frequently did political Law Officers go direct to that position. But there was a specific provision that a judicial appointment to the Privy Council had to have served as a High Court judge in either England or India. Scotland or Ireland would not do.

  Gladstone solved the problem by appointing Collier to the puisne bench for a two-day spell. It was efficacious but arrogant, and was resented by the judicial bench, whose members protested strongly through Chief Justice Cockburn. Motions of criticism were pressed in both Houses. In the Commons Gladstone had a majority of twenty-seven, not glorious for a government with a nominal majority of nearly a hundred, and in the Lords, which mattered less, one of two. Collier was embarrassed and Gladstone had used up credit. It was a maladroit affair.

  The second imbroglio was even less necessary. The village of Ewelme, near Wallingford, had and has a peculiar connection with the University of Oxford. Today it provides a grace-and-favour residence for the Regius Professor of Medicine. Until 1871 the rectorship of the parish had been a subsidiary benefice for one of the University’s professors of divinity. As a compensation for the severance of that link, which followed from the semi-secularization of the Unive
rsity, it was provided that the rector of Ewelme, while no longer a professor of divinity, must continue to be an Oxford MA. This could hardly be regarded as an onerous restriction upon Gladstone. In general he was loath to accept the appropriateness of anyone who was not a graduate of one of the two old universities as suitable for Anglican orders, and within this category he often had difficulty in keeping to the unwritten rule that an Oxonian bishop should next time be balanced by a Cantabrigian one.