Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  This made his handling of the Ewelme issue bizarre to the point of inexplicability. First he offered the living to W. E. Jelf of Christ Church, a Tory and an Evangelical, which meant that it was doubly broad-minded on Gladstone’s part. Unfortunately Jelf declined and Gladstone then became fixed on W. W. Harvey, another Tory, a scholar of moderate note and a fellow of King’s College, Cambridge. The only thing that he and Gladstone had in common was that they had been Eton contemporaries in the 1820s. It was perverse, to say the least, to choose a Cambridge man for this not particularly rewarding but Oxford-restricted appointment. And it was at once provocative and disdainful to believe that, having done so, he could obviate the problem by the method which he chose. He prevailed upon Oriel College to accept Harvey as a member and, after the statutory forty-two days, to get him admitted to ‘M. A. status’ and hence to Convocation. It was a curiously similar device to that which he had used with Collier, and it produced a not dissimilar reaction. There was no vote on this occasion, but he had a very rough debate only two and a half weeks after the Collier one.

  Both these incidents were widely regarded as showing that exhaustion combined with an imperious nature were leading Gladstone away from judgement and proportion towards a petulant authoritarianism. They damaged him both inside and outside the government. The next incident was hardly Gladstone’s fault, except insofar as it conveyed an impression, half justified, of remoteness from those aspects of the business of his own government with which he was not obsessively absorbed. He was very much an ‘all or nothing’ man. In the instance of the ‘scandals’, as he came himself rather damningly to call them, he reacted with a determined heavy-handedness, but allowed an unforeseen consequence of his solution of the problem to lead him into what was almost a new version of Collier or Ewelme.

  The ‘scandals’ were the misallocation (but not misappropriation) of public money to the telegraph service82 which touched the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Lowe), two other ministers, the Postmaster-General and the First Commissioner of Works, who were not at the time in the Cabinet but whose predecessors and successors quite often were so included, and two others in the Treasury, one political and one official. The matter began to break in early July 1873. As the facts emerged, Gladstone took the view that all concerned must cease to hold their current posts. He did not, however, feel that they should incur the full penalty of exclusion from office. In the case of Lowe this was right, for his responsibility was remote and Gladstone admired him as a notable if difficult man, while having reservations about his performance as Chancellor.

  In the case of Monsell, the Postmaster-General, the fault was more direct, and he did leave the government, although compensated with a peerage in the following year’s honours. Ayrton, the First Commissioner of Works, appeared to be the most to blame and compounded his fault on 30 July by attempting such an exculpatory and limited definition of ministerial responsibility in the House of Commons that Gladstone felt it necessary to get up after him and disavow what he had said. It must have been one of the most devastating of public Prime Ministerial rebukes. Nonetheless Gladstone thought that Ayrton ought to be given a compensating office. It was another example of his addiction to some private scale which mingled hierarchy and justice and often caused him considerable inconvenience. This was certainly so here, for the post which Gladstone was determined to offer Ayrton was that of Judge Advocate-General, which normally involved presenting the result of courts martial personally to the Queen; and the Queen, while in general sympathetic to Gladstone over these troubles, was determined never to have to see Ayrton. After several letters and telegrams it was agreed that Ayrton should have the job with the humiliating condition that all his communications must be made in writing.

  There were wider ministerial repercussions. A new senior office had to be found for Lowe and a new Chancellor as his replacement. Furthermore Ripon was anxious to resign as Lord President, partly because he was on the brink of a sharp transition from being Grand Master of the Freemasons of England to admission into the Roman Catholic Church. This half eased and half complicated the position. Eventually Gladstone settled Lowe by ennobling Bruce as Lord Aberdare, transferring him to the Lord Presidency of the Council, and thus vacating the Home Office. For Chancellor there were several possible candidates, but Gladstone felt under heavy pressure to take the job himself, and the conventional wisdom is that he was forced into it by his Cabinet colleagues. But by which of them? There is a singular lack of documentary support and the impression persists that he was more tempted than coerced. In any event he received for the fifth time the Chancellor’s seals of office on 9 August, and within forty-eight hours descended on the probably disappointed Cardwell – for he was one of the candidates – at the War Office and disclosed to him a fiscal strategy which must have been germinating in the Prime Minister’s mind well before he was ‘drafted’ to the Exchequer: ‘I told [him] in deep secrecy my ideas on the possible finance of next year, based upon abolition of Income Tax & Sugar Duties with partial compensation from Spirits and Death duties. This only might give us a chance.’1

  The last sentence presumably referred to electoral prospects, although the dominating impression conveyed is not that of political opportunism but of eagerness to put his hands back upon the fiscal levers. The state of overstrain in which he approached the end of the session (prorogation took place on 5 August) should have made him more cautious. On 23, 26 and 27 July he was in bed for most of the time. On 6 August he wrote to the Queen: ‘The labours of the last few days have been incessant and the peculiarly invidious character of those labours has not unnaturally increased the strain; but Mr Gladstone has been well-tended, and hopes to come through without breaking down. . . .’2 It was not exactly the best foundation on which to add the heaviest department to a Prime Minister’s normal burdens of co-ordination and leadership.

  Gladstone’s metabolism enabled him to move with bewildering rapidity from disturbingly frequent bouts of prostration to displays of almost manic energy. Within five days of his apprehensive letter to the Queen he was outlining his fiscal programme to Cardwell before leaving in the late evening for a 3.30 a.m. arrival at Hawarden. ‘Off at 8.50,’ he wrote, ‘with a more buoyant spirit and greater sense of relief than I have experienced for many years on this which is the only pleasant act of moving to me in the circuit of the year. This gush is in proportion to the measure of the late troubles and anxieties.’3 83 A still more extreme example of his alternations was provided a couple of weeks later. As soon as he arrived at Balmoral he excused himself from dining with the Queen and took to his bed with a gastric attack. Within a week he did a day’s walk of thirty-three miles over very rough Highland ground, which took him to what he kindly described as ‘a good hotel at Kingussie’, where, however, he was ‘sorely disturbed with rats’.

  There was a hidden hazard in Gladstone’s taking over the Treasury which, had he apprehended it, might have made him hesitate more than did his mercurial attitude to his own health. This was the clear rule that MPs accepting ministerial office were held to have vacated their seats and had to seek re-election by their constituencies. The position about those adding one office to another was more complicated, although there were precedents associated with Lord North, Spencer Perceval and Canning which suggested that in these circumstances no re-election was necessary. But these were not strictly relevant, for the 1867 Representation of the People Act had redefined the rules. The intention was to make them less strict. But the outcome was an unsatisfactory ambiguity of language which had not since been tested, and which left plenty of room for argument about whether Gladstone, once he had taken the seals of the Exchequer, was entitled to sit as member for Greenwich. The point was not academic, for in the event of the seat being vacated the Conservatives would contest it, and the expectation was that Gladstone would lose.

  Gladstone became aware of the problem on the day he took office, and a week later wrote to his old Whip Brand, who had succeeded as Speaker and
in whose hands the matter would ultimately lie, saying that he was taking no resignation initiative but was seeking the best legal advice. Speaker Brand wrote back reserving his judgement but saying that he was sure Gladstone was right to take such advice. This might have been helpful had the best legal advice not been hopelessly divided. Coleridge and Jessel, two of the most eminent lawyers ever to hold the posts, were respectively Attorney and Solicitor, and took the view that Gladstone was safe. But within a month Jessel became Master of the Rolls and two months after that Coleridge became Chief Justice (Gladstone not being in the least put off his preferment by the Collier case). In the meantime there had been an unhelpful intervention from Selborne, the Lord Chancellor, who took a contrary view and was supported in it by the Lord Advocate (whose locus in the matter was far from clear).

  This kept the issue open so that the incoming English Law Officers had to be asked to endorse or contradict the opinion of their predecessors. They were Henry James and William Harcourt, whose jurisprudential distinction did not match that of Coleridge and Jessel, but who were both (particularly Harcourt) to achieve high political importance. On this early test, however, they showed little of either political acumen or legal decisiveness. After consulting Charles Bowen, then Junior Counsel to the Treasury,84 and widely regarded as the most subtle and acute of nineteenth-century legal minds, they reported on 1 December that there were very strong arguments both for and against the view that the seat had been vacated. It might have been better had they had more of the spirit of Jessel, who is reputed to have said of himself: ‘I may be wrong, and sometimes I am; but I have never any doubts.’

  The issue hung over Gladstone throughout the autumn of 1873. It was not currently critical, for with Parliament in recess there was no question of his incurring penalties by sitting illegally. With the opening of the new session in February 1874 it would, however, become so. On 18 January Gladstone wrote: ‘On this day I thought of dissolution. Told Bright of it. In evening at dinner told Granville and Wolverton [formerly Chief Whip Glyn]. All seemed to approve. My first thought of it was as an escape from a difficulty. I soon saw on reflection that it was the best thing in itself.’4 Then, ironically, he received on the 20th, when he was once again bed-bound, a memorandum from Sir Erskine May, the most famous of all clerks of the House of Commons, which would no doubt have been decisive with the Speaker, opining firmly that the Greenwich seat was not vacant.

  The problem had been a running sore over the last five months of the Parliament’s life, increasing the sense of a government whose time was exhausted, and it was an important factor in determining the date of a disastrous general election. But there is no evidence that the Liberals would have done better at any other practicable date. A bigger influence on the shape and result of the campaign was the unfortunate budgetary strategy which Gladstone formulated.

  J. L. Hammond, as we have seen, was the foremost proponent of the view that the Treasury spirit was Gladstone’s poison. Set him free from it and he became an imaginative statesman, upholding the Concert of Europe and international arbitration, sensitive to the agrarian as well as to the political wrongs of Ireland, even capable of measures of constructive reform at home. Imprison him in its toils, and he became a penny-pinching miser, elevating the reduction or abolition of particular taxes to the status of an ultimate achievement, and willing to trample on all sorts of other desiderata on the way.

  Gladstone believed that the bold fiscal scheme which he had outlined to Cardwell, particularly as he had resolved to supplement it by a considerable remission of local property taxation, would have at least three advantages. First, as a dashing and outflanking manoeuvre, it would enable the government to seize the political initiative, which it had manifestly lost, at least since the defeat of the Irish University Bill, and dictate the agenda on which the general election, whether it came before or after the budget, would be fought. Here he ought to have remembered that such manoeuvres, as in 1867, were more in Disraeli’s style than in his own. Second, he hoped that it would reconcile to the government the non-political men of moderate property, the ordinary run of the middle classes who cared more about the solid comfort of their domestic lives than about political or social or even religious ideology. But this again was not Gladstonian. His natural appeal was moralizing rather than materialistic, and he had fulminated too often against the politics of the pork barrel for it to be sensible to rest on a short-term financial enticement to defeat a growing longer-term affinity of these groups with the suburban respectability flavoured by imperial excitement of the new Conservative party.

  Third, Gladstone believed that the reproclamation of fiscal austerity and the minimalist state, which the abolition of the income tax would symbolize, was the best available formula for uniting the Liberal party. While there is room for argument about his judgement on the first two propositions there can be no doubt that on this third one he was profoundly mistaken. Joseph Chamberlain, for example, then only the Mayor of Birmingham, but soon to be one of that city’s MPs and by the time of Gladstone’s next government the leader of the Radical wing of the party, described (admittedly after the election had been lost) the election address in which Gladstone presented his proposals as ‘the meanest public document that had ever, in like circumstances, proceeded from a statesman of the first rank. His manifesto was simply an appeal to the selfishness of the middle classes.’5 Chamberlain was by no means alone. The Economist under Bagehot, and the Bee Hive, an important Radical journal in spite of its teashop-like title, were both vehemently opposed. An article in the latter complained that ‘Mr Gladstone has sacrificed the lower classes, who worshipped him, to the richer classes, who disliked him.’6

  Beyond the affront to the constructive Radicals, Gladstone’s budgetary plans were also potentially disruptive within the Cabinet. Whatever else he was, Gladstone was not an irresponsible financier. He would not sacrifice a balanced budget even to get rid of the income tax. This meant that despite the £5 million surplus with which he started the year and the £2 million of new revenue which he proposed to raise from spirits and death duties, he needed at least another £600,000 to cover the abolition of the income tax, the remission of the sugar duties and some relief of local taxation. This money he saw as coming from a reduction in the service estimates, with the emphasis on the naval ones. This was strongly resisted by Goschen, the First Lord of the Admiralty, and also by Cardwell, the War Secretary. Neither of them had been extravagant ministers and they had been steadily if marginally squeezed throughout the life of the government. They felt they could do no more and an unresolved Cabinet crisis was the background to Gladstone’s 18 January decision to dissolve. The dissolution was as much against the Admiralty and the War Office as it was against the Tories.

  The other objection to Gladstone’s 1874 fiscal programme was that it was manifestly against the tide of history. When eight years before he had concluded his electoral reform oration with the ringing message (at least to those who understood it) of: ‘Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor. You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side. The great social forces which move onwards in their might and majesty . . . are against you,’ there was not only force but validity in what he said. But in 1874 he was in the reverse position. His fiscal programme failed to deflect the Conservative tide at the election. It was also manifestly the last shot of an old war rather than a harbinger of the future. From its reintroduction in 1842 to 1874 the abolition of the income tax had been a flickering flame of hope, never achieved and mainly kept alive by Gladstone himself fanning it away from extinction. After 1874 it ceased either to flicker or to be even a contingent hope. At that election it was a desperate ploy by a beleaguered government, and did not work. At no subsequent general election could it even have been thrown into the arena by any serious party.

  Gladstone’s decision to play this card, and to do so in the cause of Liberal unity, points both to his very imperfect knowledge of the party of which he had become the lea
der after only eight years of adherence, and to the extent to which ‘the People’s William’ had gone into retreat during his first prime ministership. In contrast with his building up of his position against Palmerston by the force of his popular appearances and appeal, Gladstone effectively abandoned public meetings and speeches between 1868 and 1873. In a period of a little over five years he addressed only three popular audiences, and all these occasions were concentrated within eight weeks in the autumn of 1871. The first was in the small North Yorkshire fishing town of Whitby, where his eldest son was member. The second was at Aberdeen, when he received the freedom of the city on his way to Balmoral. And the third was to an enormous open-air assembly on Blackheath in his own constituency. It was effectively his only visit to Greenwich in the course of that Parliament. When the election came, however, he spoke there three times, once in Greenwich itself, once in Woolwich and once at New Cross. They were all open-air afternoon occasions, the Greenwich one in pouring rain, with audiences of between 5000 and 15,000. But he spoke nowhere else. There was no nationwide campaign, and the government went down to heavy defeat without deployment of its greatest battering-ram. That was in accordance with the habit of the time, and Disraeli spoke no more frequently or widely.

  Gladstone’s very different pattern in the run-up to 1880 was therefore to be the bigger shock. But it cast no shadow before it in 1874, and accompanied by his demagogic abstinence in 1868–73 meant that he had reverted to being a politician very much confined (as were most others) to Westminster, Whitehall, the Court and his favoured country houses. Greenwich was a thoroughly unfortunate constituency for him. It aroused neither his affection nor his interest. On the widely separated occasions when he went there it was only for an afternoon, and it gave him no additional angle of sight outside the metropolis. South Lancashire, even Oxford, which provided a special dimension to his life, had been better. Midlothian, when it came, was the best of the lot, although even there he was distinctly sparing in his visits.