Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  It also led to a memorable, even if not notably vote-winning, oration from Gladstone. He had to make it in unfavourable circumstances, for his deal with Granville exposed him to a multitude of points of order and procedural wrangles, which occupied the House almost until dinner time. When he eventually came to his main speech the House was emptying and those who remained were an impatient audience. He addressed them for his habitual two and a half hours. ‘The House gradually came round . . .,’ he recorded. His performance escaped by an even wider margin than usual any danger of being woodenly text-bound for he forgot his ‘eyeglass’, and could not read such limited notes as he had prepared.95 It was in this speech that he launched his denunciation of the false values of the West End of London. Arthur Balfour, who as leader of the House at the time of Gladstone’s death, twenty-one years later, had to pronounce the first panegyric, reverted to this 1877 occasion: ‘I shall never forget the effect which this speech left on my mind. As a mere feat of physical endurance it was almost unsurpassed; as a feat of parliamentary courage, parliamentary skill, parliamentary endurance and parliamentary eloquence, I believe it will always be unequalled.’22

  After the disposal of Gladstone’s resolutions there was a lull in the British debate while the Russians moved into position and then successfully fought the Turks. The next act of the British political drama had to await the Russo-Turkish armistice, the Treaty of San Stefano and the height of London war fever, all in the early months of 1878. Then the music-halls (or at least one of them) rang to the chorus of:

  We don’t want to fight, but by Jingo if we do,

  We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too.

  This could be regarded as an anti-Gladstone hymn, for it neatly encapsulated everything he was most against, fighting an unjust war, ‘jingoism’, a term which it put into the language, maintaining an overlarge fleet of vulnerable ironclads, sending troops unnecessarily to die, and, perhaps even worse, wasting public money and upsetting the probity of the budget. He had become a keen, almost obsessive theatregoer, with the music-hall by no means excluded from his patronage. Stage histrionics and pulpit thunderings almost equally engaged his interest, and the former if anything had the edge at this stage in his life. Nevertheless these controversies marked a certain extrusion of his influence from the metropolis and its Home Counties. He chose to attack the West End. The West End of ‘stage-door johnnies’ and even of more modestly pleasure-seeking members of the middle class chose to mock him. Immediately his great clash with Beaconsfield was the prelude to the strong (but somewhat sterile) Liberal victory of 1880, but it also sowed the first seeds of the Liberal retreat to the bastions of the West Country, the Pennines and the Celtic fringes.

  The conurbation on which Gladstone advanced within three weeks of his ‘resolutions’ debate was, however, the least remote, mountainous or Celtic in the whole of Britain, that of Joseph Chamberlain’s Birmingham. On 31 May 1877 he went from Hawarden, where he had spent a Whitsun fortnight, to speak at the inaugural meeting of the National Liberal Federation. He stayed with Chamberlain, then an MP of not quite a year’s standing. Radical Joe was not then in the full splendour of his gabled Italian gothic Highbury mansion, which was built only in 1880, but in a more modest but still substantial villa on the fringe of Edgbaston. It was nonetheless an exuberant day. Gladstone was hauled in triumph the couple of miles from the station to Chamberlain’s house for an early dinner with many guests.

  The meeting, in Bingley Hall, was from 7.00 to 9.30. The venue was itself a challenge. Bingley Hall was a big hangar-like exhibition hall with no seats for the multitude but an elastic standing capacity. Gladstone, when told there were likely to be more than 10,000 present, was uncharacteristically doubtful about his ability to command the cavernous space, but was persuaded that if Bright could do it so could he. In fact the audience far exceeded the estimate. Gladstone put it at 25,000 and Chamberlain at 30,000. There was speculation about whether so many had ever before assembled under one roof. Gladstone’s one-and-a-quarter-hour speech contained no memorable passages, but did not disappoint. He always gave good value.

  There was a number of quirks surrounding the visit. In bringing together the National Liberal Federation, which was made up of a hundred or more lesser caucuses clustered around the Birmingham core, Chamberlain was seeking a broader-based successor to the National Education League. In the early 1870s he had tried to use this as a vehicle to rally provincial Nonconformists against Gladstone’s education policy and to launch himself into national politics, but had found it narrow for the latter purpose. It was thus odd that he should want Gladstone at the Federation’s inaugural meeting and perhaps even odder that Gladstone should have made it his major engagement of the spring. The explanation on Chamberlain’s side was that, although equivocal about Gladstone’s anti-Turkish crusade, he wished to draw him back, for a short time at least, into the Liberal leadership to counteract the baleful Whiggery of Hartington and Granville. The irony was that the sixty-seven-year-old former Premier, once drawn back, stayed more than long enough to drive Chamberlain not only out of Liberal communion but out of his own caucus as well.

  Gladstone for his part had an equally compelling reason for going to Birmingham. He wanted the support of the National Liberal Federation for his Eastern policy. And once in Birmingham he of course swept the faithful along with his eloquence. He also temporarily embraced his host in the compass of his enthusiasm. On the next day too he did Chamberlain proud. He performed at a breakfast party, visited a factory of the Birmingham Small Arms Company, lunched at a Birmingham board school, received a municipal address at the Town Hall and spoke at a final dinner before retreating to Hagley for the night. He also arranged one of the most maladroit visits of his sometimes maladroit life. In the late afternoon he took Chamberlain with him to see Newman at the Birmingham Oratory. A Gladstone–Newman rendezvous, particularly with Gladstone anxious to push Newman into supporting his Bulgarian agitation, would in itself have been an uneasy occasion. It was made positively absurd by adding to the mix Chamberlain, whose whole cast of mind and religion, such as the latter was, was as different as it is possible to imagine from that of Newman, and indeed of Gladstone. It is not surprising that the result was a tense twenty minutes of stilted conversation.

  There was indeed an undercurrent of tenseness to the whole Birmingham visit. Gladstone had been gracious but reserved. Chamberlain had been welcoming but undazzled. Perhaps the most spontaneous warmth was in Gladstone recording that he ‘saw Mr. Chamberlain’s very pleasing children’.23 As these would certainly have included Neville (then aged eight) and maybe Austen (then thirteen) this presence of two future leaders of the Conservative party introduced a final twist of irony to the proceedings. Although the visit served the different purposes of both Gladstone and Chamberlain, it left no residue of affection or mutual understanding.

  It was Gladstone’s only political excursion for some months except for some almost accidental July speeches. These were to spontaneous crowds in Plymouth and Exeter, where he went ashore from a four-day English Channel cruise in the yacht of Donald Currie, the founder of the Castle (later Union Castle) shipping line. Gladstone went infrequently to the House of Commons, and left London for Hawarden on 28 July, an early retreat by the standards of Victorian parliamentary sessions. He stayed at Hawarden almost uninterruptedly from then until the beginning of his only Irish tour in mid-October. During that long static period he developed, again almost by accident, a novel form of semi-passive political campaigning, one which has never since been repeated except perhaps by one or two American presidential candidates who fought from their ‘front porches’. On 4 August he wrote: ‘A party of 1400 came from Bolton! We were nearly killed with kindness. I began with W[illy] the cutting of a tree; and had to speak to them, but not on politics.’24 Two days later The Times reported that ‘the very splinters which flew from his axe were picked up and treasured as relics’.

  Two weeks after
that about 3000 came from Salford and Darwen, and Gladstone seemed to be warming to the attention. They were ‘very well managed’, he wrote. Two days after that there were 2000 from Bacup who were ‘very hearty and enjoyed themselves much’. It seems as though the momentum was growing and no self-respecting Lancashire industrial town would be allowed to escape sending a contingent. In fact, however, the end of the holiday season and peculiarly dismal weather brought the expeditions to an end. There were 600 from Leigh and Rossendale on 1 September, and that was that. These activities aroused some London cynicism, with other politicians, who would have been appalled but also amazed and flattered to have been pursued to their country estates by enthusiastic crowds, affecting to believe that there was more contrivance than spontaneity about the excursions and that Gladstone had arranged it all as a massage for his own demagogic ego. Whether the ‘invasions’ were planned or impulsive, welcome or burdensome, there could be no doubt that they showed how Gladstone’s denunciation of Disraeli’s pro-Turkish imperialist showmanship had reknit the alliance between himself and provincial democracy.

  MIDLOTHIAN BECKONS

  IN THE EARLY STAGES of the Russo-Turkish War the campaign favoured the Russians, and Disraeli, egged on by the Queen, came very close in July 1877 to advocating British intervention on the Turkish side. Fortunately he had a reluctant Cabinet and a more than reluctant Foreign Secretary in the shape of Derby, who pointed out that Britain would have no allies. Disraeli replied that the British needed none other than the Turks who, soldier for soldier, were worth twenty Spaniards – he was drawing an analogy with Wellington’s Peninsular campaign. The Turks proceeded to give some force to his argument by their resolute defence of Plevna, which kept the Russians 250 miles or so from Constantinople for five months. As it was the fear of Tsarist troops on the Golden Horn and the Bosphorus which most excited English bellicosity, this produced an autumn lull. But when on 9 December Plevna at last fell, and the Russian armies advanced to spend their Christmas almost within sight of the minarets of Stamboul, the most virulent phase of the British political battle began.

  In January 1878 a British fleet was despatched to the Dardanelles. Lord Carnarvon, the Colonial Secretary, resigned from Disraeli’s Cabinet, and there was a Russo-Turkish armistice, which at least removed the imminent threat of the Tsar bestriding the Bosphorus. It also led on to the March Treaty of San Stefano, with the creation of a huge Bulgaria and the effective throwing out of the Turks from Europe except for a tiny Constantinople hinterland. At the end of January Gladstone used the improbable ambience of a six-hour dinner of the Palmerston Club at Oxford to deliver his strongest denunciation of ‘Beaconsfieldism’. On 24 February, and again two weeks later, there were London Sunday afternoon demonstrations against Gladstone. On the first Sunday his Harley Street windows were smashed. On the second he and his wife had to seek refuge in the Cavendish Square house of his doctor, and then escape in a cab escorted by four mounted constables. In most of the Northern or either of the great Scottish cities he would by contrast have been carried shoulder-high. In the previous November he had crushingly defeated Stafford Northcote for the rectorship of Glasgow University96 and in March he both announced publicly that he would not stand again for Greenwich and received a strong invitation to become a candidate for Leeds, as safe a Liberal seat as it was populous an electorate (49,000). Gladstone gave a stalling answer at that stage. Two months later the first flicker of a Midlothian possibility came over the horizon.

  In the meantime, the Treaty of San Stefano had been signed at the beginning of March and at the end of the month Derby had resigned (after hesitating too long to make his going effective) against the warlike steps of ordering Indian troops into the Mediterranean and calling up British reserves. On 9 April Gladstone voted in a small minority of sixty-four against the latter step, which well illustrated the limited parliamentary strength of hard-core anti-‘Beaconsfieldism’ as opposed to those, like Hartington, who thought it wise from time to time to assuage Gladstone rather than to expose themselves to the blast of his oratory. This combination of Liberal disunity and lukewarmness gave House of Commons protection even to a government front bench as weak as that which had been left by Disraeli’s departure to the Lords.

  The country was a different matter, particularly in the North and Scotland, and it was on this dimension that Gladstone’s attention became increasingly concentrated. In the summer of the Congress of Berlin he made only one major speech in Parliament, and that, on 30 July, was notable more for its length (his almost statutory two and a half hours for an important debate) than for its content. His own version of the occasion was realistic. He had been suffering over the weekend from the ‘depressing and sharp pain of a gumboil’.1 On the Monday of his speech his face was less distorted, although: ‘I was in body much below par but put on the steam perforce. It ought to have been far better.’2

  ‘Putting on the steam perforce’ was a vividly truthful rather than a flattering phrase for a great orator to write about himself after an indifferent day and fitted in with some other almost devastatingly self-critical remarks which he made around this time. When his letters to Samuel Wilberforce were sent to him in 1879 by the Bishop’s biographer with a request for their free use, Gladstone acceded but added the private comment: ‘They are curiously illustrative of a peculiar and second-rate nature.’3

  Such surprising shafts, accompanied by a certain inherently comic quality about his persona and his reaction to some events, made Gladstone a much more sympathetic character than his moralizing and didactic personality might at first sight lead one to suppose. Thus for 14 June 1879 he remarked: ‘6–11. Attended the dinner of the Savage Club. Too long and the clouds of tobacco were fearful. In other respects most interesting. It was impossible to speak ill of so quick and sympathetic an audience. I returned thanks for Literature & was (like the ensemble) too long; but nothing could exhaust their patience.’4 The audience would have been composed of ‘literary gents’ and some actors. Gladstone loved any audience with histrionic affiliations. This fitted in with his April 1878 reaction to an address of an hour which he gave to ‘a remarkable meeting’ of Nonconformist Ministers in the Farringdon Street Memorial Hall, where, twenty-two years later, the Labour party was to be founded. ‘Never did I address a better audience,’5 he wrote. They were, of course, themselves mostly performers and this gave them something of the same quality which, a decade and more later, he attributed to what he described as the best audience of his whole life – a congress of actors, because they were the ones who best understood what he was trying to do.

  On the Sunday morning following the four hours of tobacco-clouded (and no doubt liberally wine-supplied) Savage Club jollification, Gladstone recorded himself as being ‘laid up with deranged liver & bowels’. Dr Clark came, prescribed castor oil and tactfully laid ‘the blame on eight hours of heat [the length of the celebration seemed to have grown overnight] & on preserved peas’.6 An alternative if less tactful explanation would have been that Gladstone was suffering from a good old-fashioned hangover. There is some inconclusive evidence from the pattern of his quite frequent sick headaches, which kept him in bed for half a day or so, that he may have been subject to this form of retribution after occasional over-indulgence. On the one occasion (in 1885) when he dined alone at Grillion’s, for by accident no one else came, he entered himself in the club book as having consumed a single bottle of champagne, which was quite moderate, particularly as he might not have finished it. While there is no evidence that his consumption, unlike that of Asquith, ever rendered him unsteady, he liked wine throughout his life, and, as with most people, probably drank more under stimulus of animated conversation than in solitary state.

  Over the summer and then the recess of 1878 Gladstone was politically quiet. Private obligations filled some of the slack. In May at a dinner party of the Frederick Cavendishes he sat down next to the Duchess of Argyll, who immediately had a stroke and died within a few hours. Whether because of the
proximity or for more general reasons of respect for the Duke and his family, Gladstone went to the funeral near Helensburgh, travelling all night from St Pancras ‘in a Pullman bed with rest but no (continuous) sleep’.7 After the interment he went to Glasgow, and looked at a ‘highly interesting’ exhibition of pictures. Glasgow, with no Kelvingrove Gallery for another twenty years, let alone a Burrell Collection, was nevertheless foreshadowing its twentieth-century reputation as a centre of both indigenous and imported art.

  Then he took an evening train to Sheffield, on his way to Clumber, the Newcastle house where he had first waited on the fourth Duke in 1832, and where he was still laboriously trying, fourteen years after the death of his friend the fifth Duke, to discharge his thankless duties as a trustee of the embarrassed estate with its degenerate heirs. (A year later the task was made even more onerous by the house being badly burnt.) On this visit he devoted two and a half days mainly to trying to sort the letters of the fifth Duke, an obligation which it might be thought a once and future Prime Minister could have delegated.

  This Clumber visit, and Gladstone’s continuing efforts to make some sense out of the financial chaos of the Newcastle affairs, prompts a comparison between the way in which he and Disraeli discharged their earlier-incurred ducal obligations. They both liked a duke, but had different ways of showing it. Disraeli had benefited greatly from his 1840s association with Lord George Bentinck and had also been assisted by Bentinck family money in the purchase of Hughenden. In 1880, in the last year of his life, Disraeli summoned the head of the Bentinck family, a twenty-two-year-old Coldstream Guards subaltern who had recently succeeded as sixth Duke of Portland, to visit him there. No one else was present other than Montagu Corry. Nevertheless Disraeli came down to dinner in the blue riband of the Garter, but regarded this as a substitute for conversational effort. The meal passed in barely broken silence, but all too slowly for the mystified and uneasy young nobleman. Then Disraeli rose to his feet, said, ‘My Lord Duke, I come from a race which never forgives an injury, nor forgets a benefit,’ and bizarrely announced that he proposed to make the Duke’s stepmother (his closest relation, for both his parents were dead and he had made a cousinly succession) a peeress in her own right. (She became Lady Bolsover.) He then closed the evening, sweeping aside the Duke’s attempt to reply and retired to his red boxes.8 Disraeli paid his debts with theatre, mainly devised for his own amusement, Gladstone with a heavy-footed almost interfering devotion.