Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  It was one of the paradoxes of Gladstone’s life at this time that, as his denunciations of the ‘upper ten thousand’ and ‘the West End of London’ became more shrill, so his own social life became if anything more elevated. In the autumn of 1878, despite his habit of not giving grand house parties, he had two dukes (Bedford97 and Argyll), as well as another duchess (Westminster) and the marquisal Baths, to stay at Hawarden. His own excursions that autumn included an early October semi-walking, semi-speechmaking tour of the Isle of Man (eight speeches in six days, which was prodigal particularly as the Manxmen had no United Kingdom votes) with his son Stephen. Then, after two weeks at home, he progressed via Bedfordshire to Cambridge. He stayed with the Bedfords at Woburn and with the Cowpers (he became Gladstone’s Irish Viceroy in 1880) at Wrest Park. In Cambridge, he stayed with the Sidgwicks, she Balfour’s sister and founder of Newnham, he the foremost exponent of Millite philosophy in the University and a vigorous educational reformer. Gladstone’s Sunday there comprised Trinity chapel at 10.30, a sermon from the Bishop of Ely in the University church at 2.00, King’s College Chapel at 3.30, and dinner in Trinity for the first time since he had stayed in that Master’s Lodge in 1831.

  In 1879 he was more adventurous than in the previous year. Not only did he go in the spring to two great south Midland houses for the first time, but he spent five early-autumn weeks on what was half a return pilgrimage to Dr Döllinger and the Bavarian Alps and half a descent into Venice for the penultimate (the last was in 1889) of his nine Italian visits. The country-house visits of the spring were both significant harbingers of his remaining fifteen years in politics. The first was to Althorp, where his host was the fifth Earl Spencer, the ‘red earl’, as he was known on account of his beard rather than his politics. When the Home Rule split came in 1886, Spencer, perhaps because of his experience as Irish Viceroy in 1882–5, was to be the most faithful to Liberalism of the grand old Whigs, although also, as First Lord of the Admiralty in 1894, the most jagged of the rocks on which Gladstone impaled himself during the last sad months of his fourth premiership.

  The second was to Mentmore (built 1852–4), one of the great Rothschild piles of the Vale of Aylesbury which had come to the fifth Earl of Rosebery through his marriage to Hannah de Rothschild, the only child of Baron Meyer and thus the principal Rothschild heiress of her generation. The marriage brought more wealth than happiness to Rosebery. But nothing, not even winning the two Derbys which were run during his sixteen months of undeserved and unrewarding premiership, brought him contentment. Rosebery’s interest for Gladstone in 1879, apart from the shafts of charm and wit which shone through his spoilt and misanthropic character, exemplifying themselves in his qualities as a writer and powerful if florid orator, sprang from the other Rosebery territorial base at Dalmeny, which looked north across the then bridgeless Firth of Forth and south over the city of Edinburgh.

  From the first mention of Midlothian in his diaries, which was in the entry for 16 May 1878, Gladstone had been increasingly attracted by the prospect of standing at the next election in that Scottish county, for which Edinburghshire was the alternative name. The constituency was geographically centred on the capital city, although extending beyond it and including on its electoral register only those inhabitants, whether of the city or of the hinterland, who qualified for the very restricted pre-1886 Scottish county franchise. Rosebery was regarded by Gladstone as the key to the seat, and indeed he acted as Gladstone’s host and sponsor during the two phases of the immortal Midlothian campaign, as during two of the three less dramatic subsequent general elections which Gladstone fought in the constituency.

  Why was Gladstone attracted to Midlothian rather than to Leeds? The answer is far from obvious. It cannot have been a simple Scottish pietistic loyalty, for from Newark through the most Anglican of university seats to Lancashire to metropolitan Greenwich he could hardly have been less affected by this sentiment over the previous forty-seven years of his parliamentary life. Nor was it the desire for democratic validity. Leeds, as has been stated, had nearly 50,000 electors. Midlothian had 3620. Nor was Midlothian a risky contest and therefore a greater challenge, with victory in consequence a greater prize. Leeds had a stronger Liberal preponderance, but, with a mass electorate uncontrolled by as efficient a caucus as that which Chamberlain had manufactured in Birmingham, it was not as accurately predictable. The smallness of the Midlothian electorate made those who were voters subject to reliable individual analysis. Such an analysis was carried out in advance by two Edinburgh lawyers who looked after the nuts and bolts of the campaign under Rosebery’s command and with his money. In January, 1879, just before Gladstone committed himself to the seat, they reported, through the Liberal Chief Whip, that he could count on a majority of about 200, ‘after giving all the doubtfuls (251) to the Conservatives’.9 (It was a remarkably accurate forecast; the actual 1880 majority was 211.)

  The Midlothian campaign, while it was magnificent, was not therefore electorally bold. Gladstone indeed explicitly recognized this in his letter of acceptance: ‘You have also been kind enough to supply me with evidence which entirely satisfies my mind that the invitation expresses the desire of the majority of the constituency.’10 Nor was the campaign necessary to win Midlothian. The purposes for which it was necessary were the reimposition of Gladstone’s authority on the national political scene, and the sending out of beams of Liberal enthusiasm. Edinburgh from this point of view was as well placed a lighthouse as it is possible to imagine. It was a subsidiary metropolis without being much seduced by either the fashionable jingoism of Mayfair, Belgravia and Kensington or the popular jingoism of the music-halls which made ‘Beaconsfieldism’ attractive to London and the Home Counties. It was a story which was to repeat itself in minor key just over a hundred years later when Scotland was noticeably cool on the Falklands War.

  There was one complication about Midlothian, which was that the sitting Conservative member was Lord Dalkeith, the son of Gladstone’s old friend, Cabinet colleague in the Peel government and occasional host at Drumlanrig, the fifth Duke of Buccleuch. This juxtaposition appears to have had no effect, one way or the other, upon Gladstone. He had no desire to do the Buccleuchs down, and indeed opened his campaign in the elegant Edinburgh Assemby Rooms (sometimes called the Music Hall) in George Street with a tribute to their qualities as noblemen and to Buccleuch’s (and Dalkeith’s) setting ‘us all an example in the active and conscientious discharge of his duty, such as he believes it to be’.11 Equally, however, there is no evidence that he was remotely embarrassed by the virulence of the conflict or by inflicting the territorial defeat. He was on particularly challenging form in the Corn Exchange of the town of Dalkeith, where he set out a programme of all-round devolution for the different parts of the United Kingdom.

  The truth was that Gladstone, both because this was made necessary by his having moved so far across the spectrum of politics and because he believed he was serving God’s purposes, was ruthless in the subordination of personal to political considerations. He did not quarrel with those with whom he disagreed, but nor did he hesitate when new needs sundered old friendships. Thus in the early 1880s he accepted almost with equanimity the ruptures with Argyll and John Bright, the two members of his first two governments for whom he consistently expressed the highest esteem. The politically much more important 1886 defections of Hartington and Chamberlain were in a different category, for in separate ways he underestimated them both almost as much as he had certainly overesteemed Bright and probably Argyll too. Compared with any of these his personal relations with Buccleuch, largely quiescent for a decade and a half, were barely a molehill in his path.

  Although Gladstone committed himself to Midlothian fifteen months before what turned out to be the date of the general election – the Parliament could have run another year after that – he did not say a definite ‘no’ to Leeds, and he did not visit Edinburgh until ten of those fifteen months had passed. He thus moved into a position curiously
comparable with that which he had occupied in 1868, and when the election came was nominated for both constituencies, just as he had previously been with South-west Lancashire and Greenwich. The difference was that in 1868 Gladstone lost the seat in which he campaigned, and had to sit for the one which he had never wanted or sought. The result was the wholly loveless marriage of his eleven years in Greenwich. In 1880, by contrast, he secured the seat which he wanted, and Leeds, which elected him by 24,622 against 13,331 for the leading Conservative, was left waiting at the altar. He passed on the disappointed bride to the youngest and most politically committed of his sons, who had just unsuccessfully fought Middlesex. Herbert Gladstone was returned unopposed for Leeds when his father renounced the seat, and sat there with mutual satisfaction until 1910.

  Eighteen-seventy-nine, at least until Gladstone’s first Midlothian excursion, which lasted from 24 November to 8 December, was a year of waiting. The two imperial wars against the Zulus and the Afghans, which in Gladstone’s view piled Pelion on the Ossa of the vainglories of ‘Beaconsfieldism’, disfigured the year, but for the rest the weather provoked the most comment. It was a spectacularly cold Christmas and New Year over the turn of 1878–9. Gladstone left London for Hawarden in a thick fog on 20 December, arrived after midnight and worked until nearly 3.00 a.m. on his accumulated mail. Next morning he ‘Rose at nine: and saw the sun! Such a treat for a cockney at this season!’12 Late-Advent high pressure produced intense cold, even in North Wales. By Christmas Eve it was such that he could not chop wood. On Christmas Day ‘we worked on clearing the pond for skaters’. On the day after, Granville came for a night, and Gladstone found that his guest’s water-drinking (no doubt for his gout) ‘has [not] been favourable to his general mental force and especially his initiative’.13

  By contrast Gladstone, on his sixty-ninth birthday two days after Granville’s departure, was exultant about his own vigour. ‘And why has my health, my strength, been so peculiarly sustained? All this year and more – I think – I have not been confined to bed for a single day.’ This was not remotely true; according to his diary he had spent in bed at least part of fourteen days, scattered over the months of January, February, July and November, as a result of specific if minor ailments. But perhaps the interesting thing was that, stimulated by the continuing good hard weather, he believed it to be so. ‘In the great physical and mental effort of speaking to large auditories, I have been as it were upheld in an unusual manner. . . .’ He continued: ‘Was not all this for a purpose? . . . If I am spared for another birthday God grant that by that time there may have been a great shifting of events and parts & that I may have entered into that period of recollection and penitence which my life much needs before its close.’14

  The last sentence was bewilderingly contradictory. If there was to be ‘a great shifting of events and parts’, which could mean nothing but the defeat of the government, this was totally incompatible, given the hand that he was playing, with his retreat into a ‘period of recollection and penitence’. It is better perhaps to return to the weather, which was more susceptible to objective verification than were Gladstone’s yearnings or musings about his own future. The massive frosts continued until 18 January 1879, and then disappeared abruptly.

  They were not balanced by a warm and serene summer. Gladstone, who in general was not greatly interested in or affected by weather, gradually became obsessed by its awfulness. For 12 August he wrote with emphasis, ‘Our first pure summer’s day for the year,’ and the evening before on a drive to and from Chester he had noted that ‘The very faintest tinge of yellowing is just beginning to appear on some of the crops’.15 On 5 September he attended what he described as a ‘service of humiliation for the weather’ in Hawarden church. By then most of the faintly yellowing corn had been destroyed; six inches of rain fell on North Wales in two late-August days. It was only after this that he decided that ‘all things considered it seem[ed] right to undertake the journey’16 (to Venice). There fortunately ‘the moon [was] full, the weather delightful. . . . Band played in the Piazza at night: we all sat & iced before Florians.’17 He never saw Venice after that visit.

  By the time of the first phase of the Midlothian campaign in late autumn the British weather had been superseded in Gladstone’s mind by more exciting subjects for comment, although his two foremost biographers have done their best to make up for this by supplying conflicting colour. Morley wrote of 24 November, the day when Gladstone progressed by train from Liverpool to Edinburgh, with intermediate station speeches at Carlisle (an audience of 500), Hawick (4000) and Galashiels (8000), as ‘a bleak winter’s day’.18 Magnus described it as a ‘beautiful sunny day’.19 The Scotsman’s ‘Meteorological Register’ for that day leans towards Morley by recording Edinburgh weather as having been ‘overcast, showery, with a maximum temperature of 44°F’. What was certain was that it was a day of enthusiastic progress and of triumphant arrival in his new constituency. It was dark when he reached Edinburgh, but ‘the scene even to the West end of the City was extraordinary both from the numbers and the enthusiasm, here and there a solitary groan or howl. We drove off to Dalmeny with Ld Rosebery and were received with fireworks & torches. I have never gone through a more extraordinary day.’20

  The first week was devoted to strict Midlothian campaigning. He made another nine speeches, of which four, receiving addresses or replying to a toast, were short and to small audiences. The other five were major orations, whether judged by their content and length or by the number of people listening to and indeed held rapt by them. At the Edinburgh Assembly Rooms he addressed 2500, at the Dalkeith Corn Exchange 3500, the same number in the West Calder Assembly Rooms, 5000 in the Edinburgh Corn Exchange and then, on the same Saturday afternoon as the Corn Exchange meeting, 20,000 in the Waverley Market. The venues were local to the constituency, but even the physically present audiences were wider-based – enthusiasts came in from all over Scotland – and the reading audience was fully nationwide. Throughout the kingdom all serious newspapers (and most were so in those days) carried four- or five-column reports of the major speeches. This meant that, although unprepared in detail, each of the speeches had to be different from the others in theme, and sufficiently coherent, even fastidious, in language as not to repel Liberals of light and learning who absorbed the words not in the emotional atmosphere of a mass meeting but in the more critical calm of their breakfast rooms. Gladstone’s oratory here, as elsewhere and at other times, was a little turgid, but there could be no ranting.

  He did however indulge, to use Morley’s oxymoron, in ‘intellectual sentimentality’. In this category could be placed his references to the Zulus and to the Afghans, both of whom he saw as the pawns of Disraeli’s showy imperialism, which was as cruel to its overseas victims as it was corrupting to the appetites of its home supporters. Of the Zulus 10,000 had been slaughtered ‘for no other offence than their attempt to defend against your artillery with their naked bodies, their hearths and home, their wives and families . . .’. Of the Afghans, his audience was called to remember that ‘the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own’.21 To balance this there was the immense seriousness of the arguments which he put before his mass audiences. In the Edinburgh Corn Exchange, for instance, he spoke to 5000 for one and a quarter hours on the most intricate and statistical detail of Disraeli’s financial profligacy. At West Calder he spoke to almost as many on the details of foreign policy and on why quack remedies (that is, protection) were no answer to the current agricultural depression.

  He never pandered or talked down to his audiences. He treated them to the same full rigour of his elevated and erudite if somewhat tendentious style of argument as he deployed before the House of Commons. The flattery lay in assuming their seriousness and judgemental capacity. And given the reverence he excited this increased the self-respect of those who came to his meetings and thereby gave them a satisfying experienc
e. They felt that they had been raised to membership of some mystical tribunal of the nation. To his mass 20,000 standing audience in the Waverley Market (at which he noted that people who had fainted were ‘continually handed out over the heads . . . and were as if dead’),22 few of whom were within miles of the county franchise, he gave the same accolade of dignity. You ‘who do not fear to call yourselves the working men of Edinburgh, Leith and the district’ were nonetheless part of the great assize of Britain.

  In the second week of the campaign Gladstone gave overt expression of the truth that the object was much wider than winning Midlothian and deserted Edinburgh for other Scottish towns and cities. On Monday, 1 December, he made speeches at Inverkeithing, Dunfermline, Aberfeldy and Perth (two, one to a civic gathering of 1500 in the City Hall for the conferment of the Freedom and the other to an open-air meeting of 4000). The Friday was his Glasgow day, beginning with his rectorial address before an audience of 5000. He had devoted far more preparatory attention to this than to any other speech of his Scottish fortnight. It was essentially an attack on the plutocratic values which in the 1870s were widely perceived as having gained as much ground as they were again to do 110 years later in the 1980s.