Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  The key visitor was his former Whip, George Glyn, now Lord Wolverton, who could not resist continuing to perform the more interesting half of his old functions. He came for two nights. On the first ‘he [threatened] a request from Granville and Hartington’ and left Gladstone ‘stunned’. On the second night he so persuasively argued ‘on the great matter of all’ (that is, another Gladstone premiership) that on the third (after his departure) Gladstone wrote out his Cabinet list. On the day after that Gladstone pursued Wolverton to London with a letter of spectacular obscurity of form, even though its substance was almost brutally clear. Everything should be decided ‘on the ground of public policy’.38 That apart, Granville or Hartington should head the government. That apart, Gladstone should seek repose. There was no question of honour or delicacy demanding that the established leaders should give way to him. There was no question of his seeking office for his own sake. It was all a matter of what ‘public policy’ demanded. Armed with this deadly if (or because) unprecise weapon, buoyed up by his post-Midlothian euphoria, and at seventy, ‘not consent[ing] to be old’, he set out for London on the afternoon of Monday, 19 April 1880.

  VICTORY, WHERE ARE THY FRUITS?

  DISRAELI RECEIVED THE NEWS of his final defeat – for at seventy-five and in his state of health there was no possibility of revenge – brooding in solitary state at Hatfield, where he was surprisingly installed in Salisbury’s absence abroad. From John Morley to Robert Blake there is agreement that he took the crushing result well. ‘Dignified imperturbability’ was Blake’s felicitous phrase for his demeanour. The results were more or less a reverse image of those of 1874, just as those of that year had been of those of 1868. There were party majorities of about a hundred in each of the three cases. This left Gladstone a clear two-to-one victor in the series, and, even though his campaign may not have shifted many votes in Midlothian, it had a considerable ‘lighthouse’ effect. Conservative representation in Scotland fell from nineteen to seven, a position as weak as that in the late twentieth century. In Wales there were only two surviving Conservatives, and even England produced a non-Conservative majority, which has been a rare phenomenon since the death of Palmerston. Only in Ireland were there more Tories than Liberals (twenty-five against thirteen) but that was balanced by there being sixty-five ‘Home Rulers’, of whom thirty-five were firmly affiliated to Charles Stewart Parnell, who replaced Isaac Butt as Nationalist leader immediately after the 1880 elections, and thirty wore the label more loosely.

  Disraeli, despite his stoicism, did not hasten to resign, or to hurry the Queen back from her Easter holiday in Baden-Baden. Nor did he use his decisive influence to reconcile her to the prospect of a Gladstone government. There was much need for someone, and most of all him, to perform this last role. On 4 April she had written of Gladstone to her private secretary (Ponsonby): ‘She will sooner abdicate than send for or have any communication with that half mad firebrand who wd soon ruin everything & be a Dictator. Others but herself may submit to his democratic rule but not the Queen.’1 On the 7th Disraeli told her that she need not leave Baden for another week. On the 21st he resigned, having advised her to send for Hartington, which may have been constitutionally correct, for the latter was still nominally the leader of the victorious party in the Commons, although it was gratuitous to add the recommendation that he was ‘a Conservative at heart [and] a gentleman’.

  Hartington’s gentlemanliness (for which he may not have felt the need for Disraeli’s imprimatur) is widely thought to have embraced an indifference to being Prime Minister. That is modified by a letter which he wrote to his father on 13 April. In this, after saying that he thought Gladstone would need to be pressed to be Prime Minister and that he did not think such pressure likely, he added that in consequence ‘it does look a very hopeful prospect for me’.2 This was already quite unrealistic. Wolverton, after his two-day visit to Hawarden, had reported the central truth to both Hartington and Granville on the 12th: Gladstone was available to be Prime Minister, but would not contemplate serving in any subordinate capacity. Once that was starkly clear neither the Queen’s semi-hysterical repugnance nor Hartington’s mild ambitions had more hope of survival than small sailing boats in the path of a hurricane.

  More so than in 1868, the 1880 Liberal majority appeared to the nation and the world as being a Gladstone-created one. He was summoned, as Morley put it, ‘by more direct and personal acclaim’ than any predecessor. The Queen had no choice. And by fulminating she struck a blow, not at Gladstone’s premiership, but at the Sovereign’s role in the choice of chief minister, at least in post-election circumstances. Disraeli, had he been a wiser and less sycophantic friend, would have seen this and advised her accordingly during the several days after his resignation when he remained her crucial confidant.

  Instead there occurred the following sequence of events. Hartington was summoned to Windsor on 22 April and asked to form a government. He said that a government could not be formed without Gladstone and that he understood that Gladstone would not take a subordinate position. The Queen, according to her own account, said that ‘there was one great difficulty, which was that I could not give Mr Gladstone my confidence’.3 She then adduced some reasons for this sweeping statement, against which Hartington attempted a qualified defence of Gladstone. The upshot was that he was charged to convey the Queen’s views to Gladstone, and to ascertain whether he was adamant that he would not serve under Hartington. Hartington saw Gladstone four hours later in Wolverton’s house. Wisely, having consulted Granville, Hartington ignored his instructions and did not repeat the Queen’s expression of her inability to give Gladstone her confidence. But he did pose the direct question whether Gladstone would serve under him or anyone else. ‘This’, he said, according to Gladstone’s account, ‘is a question which I should not have put to you, except when desired by the Queen.’ Gladstone’s reply sounds fairly chilling. He affected to approve of the Queen, and therefore of Hartington as for the moment her agent, requiring ‘positive information’, he noted that he was not asked to give reasons but only to say yes or no, and accordingly reiterated his negative: ‘I have only to say I adhere to my reply as you have already conveyed it to the Queen.’

  He then added one of the most conditional offers of support ever made. And to add insult to injury he prefaced it by saying that he could not understand why it was to Hartington rather than to Granville that the Queen had applied, since it was to Granville that he had ‘resigned his trust’ in 1875. Nevertheless, if a government were formed by either, his duty would be to give them all the support in his power. But, alas: ‘Promises of this kind . . . stood on slippery ground, and must always be understood with the limits which might be prescribed by conviction.’4 If Hartington needed any further convincing that Gladstone was inevitable, that sentence alone must have been sufficient to do it. At the end of the following morning he again went to Windsor, this time accompanied by Granville, who, as the Queen herself rather oddly put it, ‘came down on the chance of seeing the Queen’. The chance worked, but she saw them separately, and reluctantly accepted from Hartington his refusal of the commission. He admitted that he had not been generously used, but loyally stressed Gladstone’s ‘great amount of popularity at the present moment amongst the people’ (the Queen’s words) and also urged her strongly not to begin by saying she had no confidence in him.

  She next saw Granville, by whom she was clearly unimpressed on this as on some other occasions. He ‘seemed very nervous’ and ‘much distressed at the painful position I was in’. He ‘kissed my hand twice and said he feared he had lost some of my confidence, but hoped to be able to regain it’. The Queen in response was about as unaccommodating as Gladstone had been when he told Hartington that if any other Prime Minister was to be tried it ought to have been Granville and not him. The Queen replied to Granville that ‘he certainly had done so [probably by opposing the bill creating her Empress of India], but that I should be very glad if he could regain it’.5 The gruffne
ss was not wise on her part (no more had it been on Gladstone’s) for she was soon endeavouring to deal with the new government as much as possible through Granville because Gladstone was ‘not a man of the world’, an unattractive catchphrase which she had picked up from Disraeli. Hartington and Granville both endeavoured to console the Queen (and perhaps themselves) with the thought that at his age Gladstone was unlikely to stay long in office. (This was Gladstone’s own view at the time; he saw himself as giving the country a quick purge of the evils of ‘Beaconsfieldism’ and retiring by the end of 1881.) All four – the Queen, Gladstone himself, Hartington and Granville would, in varying degrees and for various reasons, have been horrified to know that there were another fourteen years to go.

  Hartington and Granville then returned to London, went immediately to call on Gladstone in Harley Street, and gave him the message that he was summoned to Windsor for 6.30. (There was a lot of shuttling up and down the Great Western line, for it does not seem to have occurred to the Queen that she might save the time of others by going to Buckingham Palace; no doubt they were lucky that she was not at Osborne, or even Balmoral.) Gladstone first sought the assurance of Hartington and Granville that they had unitedly advised the Sovereign that he should be sent for and, having received that assurance, made a half-apology for putting them to the inconvenience of first withdrawing in 1875 and then re-emerging. He had genuinely but mistakenly believed that ‘quiet times’ lay ahead. He then asked them whether they would both serve under him, and, when they assented, settled immediately that Granville (‘but modestly and not as of right’) would take the Foreign Office. For Hartington he suggested the India Office, which he claimed, without much convincing reason, was likely to be at that stage the next most important department in the government. Hartington asked for time to consider.

  That evening at Windsor Gladstone recorded the Queen as receiving him ‘with [the] perfect courtesy from which she never deviates’.6 That was a familiar Gladstone euphemism, trying to intermingle his strong loyalty to the monarchy with some respect for the truth, for saying that she was fairly chilly. An alternative phrase of his to convey the same meaning was to pay tribute to her ‘great frankness’. On this occasion this latter quality showed itself in her desire to know whether he could undertake to form a government or merely endeavour to form one. She presumably and justifiably thought that the interregnum had gone on long enough, although she put the question in the odd form of saying that she wished to know in order to inform Lord Beaconsfield. Could she still have been playing with the idea of keeping Beaconsfield as Prime Minister if the Liberals became locked in a Hartington–Gladstone impasse?

  Gladstone swept aside any such uncertainty. He would form a government. He already had Granville and Hartington on board (the latter was reflecting only on his office, not on his participation), and he told her of some other projected Cabinet dispositions before disclosing that he intended to be his own Chancellor of the Exchequer. The Queen, who informed Disraeli that evening that Gladstone had looked ‘very ill and haggard, and his voice feeble’, sensibly said that she was amazed by this decision to combine the premiership with the heaviest departmental office. She did not however attempt to resist him. Monarchs have never been much interested in the Treasury. She was much more concerned with who was to be Secretary of State for War, wanting Hartington, but having to be fobbed off with Childers.

  She then further illustrated her gift for frankness by telling him that she did not like many of the things he had said during his campaigns. It was the sort of issue with which Gladstone’s sophistical convolution made him good at dealing. He said that he had ‘used a mode of speech and language different in some degree from what I should have employed had I been the leader of a party or a candidate for office’.7 She also recorded him as saying that ‘he considered all violence and bitterness to belong to the past’.8 What is remarkable is the coincidence of their two accounts, both sharing the advantage of having been written within hours of the interchange, Gladstone’s on Windsor paper, implying that it was done either while waiting in the castle for the train or with prudently collected supplies during the journey. This Windsor audience might have been a propitious start in the adverse circumstances had not Disraeli been so immanently there, resigned but always available to poison the mind of ‘Madam and Most Beloved Sovereign’, as he was writing to her that summer.

  That day was a Friday, and between then and the following Wednesday, although not without difficulty, Gladstone assembled a complete Cabinet list. The result struck the Queen as being ‘very radical’. It struck almost everybody else as being very Whig. Gladstone took the view that, having got him as Prime Minister, the Radicals ought to be more than satisfied, and be quite happy to see the top half of the Cabinet filled up with the old Whig cousinage. Quite why he expected to be accepted as a paid-up member of the Radical faction is not clear. He was never a Whig, and he had long ceased to be a Conservative, at any rate in the party-label sense of the word. But he was at least equally far from being a Radical in the collectivist, semi-socialist sense which Chamberlain and Dilke had given to the word in the 1870s.

  In a Cabinet of only fourteen, Gladstone had six peers plus Hartington, whose membership of the House of Commons until his father died in 1891 hardly made him a commoner rather than a nobleman. Together with Granville and with Kimberley,102 who took the Colonial Office after refusing the Indian viceroyalty, Hartington as Secretary of State for India ensured that the three external departments were in the hands of two earls and a marquess. Selborne, soon to be an earl, was Lord Chancellor, Earl Spencer was Lord President, the Duke of Argyll was Lord Privy Seal; and yet another earl, Northbrook, was First Lord of the Admiralty. Of the commoners, Harcourt had Radical friends as well as high Whig connections, but, although a partisan parliamentary bruiser, he was more irascible than ideologically predictable as a Home Secretary. Childers, Secretary of State for War, had spent ten years as a young man in the untraditional atmosphere of Melbourne, Australia, but was said to have grown less radical since his second marriage to the daughter of the Bishop of Chichester. Dodson, of Gladstone’s own Eton and Christ Church provenance, was a not very exciting President of the Local Government Board who became a Liberal Unionist in 1886.

  John Bright was regarded by Gladstone as a great man as well as a great orator, and exactly what a Radical ought to be, cloudy and moralizing rather than demanding and practical. But precisely for these reasons he had by then come to be seen as a great windbag by his fellow member for Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain, and by those who thought like Chamberlain. As Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Bright was not however required to deal in actions as opposed to words. W. E. Forster, as Chief Secretary for Ireland, found himself, almost by accident, in charge for the two years before his resignation of the most exposed sector of the government’s responsibilities. Forster did not shrink from these for he was a man of force and stubbornness. He was of Radical rather than Whig origins. He was brought up as a Quaker, he had married a sister of Matthew Arnold, and sat for Bradford, which was a town of advanced politics. But both his habits and his views had moved to the right. His favourite pastime had become card-playing and his favourite companion in this pursuit the Duchess of Manchester, later (1892) Duchess of Devonshire. And his conduct of the Education Bill during the previous Gladstone government had brought him into sharp conflict (leaving continuing animosity) with Chamberlain.

  Chamberlain was the fourteenth member of the Cabinet and the only representative there of the new-wave Radicalism which had contributed almost as much to the Liberal victory as had Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign. Although, ironically, he himself had been elected for Birmingham only in the number-three place, after Bright and Muntz (which should have won him Gladstone’s sympathy after his own Lancashire and Greenwich experiences), it was nonetheless the case that the Chamberlain-created National Liberal Federation had been successful in sixty of the sixty-seven seats in which it had engaged. Chamberlain w
as described by The Times as ‘the Carnot of the moment’, the organizer of victory. Carnot or not, Gladstone thought an under-secretaryship was good enough for him. He attempted to fall back upon what he called ‘Peel’s rule’ of allowing no one into the Cabinet who had not previously served in subordinate office, although it was a rule which was breached by Peel himself in the case of Buccleuch and by Gladstone in his first government in that of Bright. The truth was that Gladstone, in spite of that 1877 night under his Birmingham roof, always wrinkled up his nose at the thought of Chamberlain.

  It was Dilke, at least equally well qualified for high office, who made him unwrinkle it. Chamberlain before the election had proposed to Dilke an offensive–defensive alliance by which they would refuse any office unless they were both in the Cabinet. Dilke thought this was over their market price and moderated the compact to demanding that provided one was in the Cabinet the other could accept junior office. Chamberlain accepted this reluctantly, no doubt thinking that it was not merely Dilke pouring water into his wine but also preparing for his own entry into the Cabinet, while leaving Chamberlain to accept lesser office. Exactly the reverse was the outcome. Dilke was sent for first and offered the under-secretaryship at the Foreign Office. He stuck absolutely to the limited compact and said that if this were the offer to him and Chamberlain was not to be in the Cabinet he would refuse. This produced a considerable reaction, both hostile and productive. Gladstone was amazed and affronted. The unctuous side of Granville, who was present as Dilke’s putative chief at the Foreign Office, was perfectly captured by Dilke when he later wrote: ‘Lord Granville made a disagreeable little speech in his most agreeable way. . . .’9 Gladstone, however, could not afford to do without both of the Radicals, and he judged that the Queen would probably accept Chamberlain for the Cabinet more easily than Dilke. He conseqently illustrated his remarkable capacity for cloaking in fluent orotundity his recognition of political reality and wrote to Chamberlain on the next morning in the following terms: