Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  I have made some progress since yesterday afternoon and I may add that there is a small addition to my liberty of choice beyond what I had expected. Accordingly, looking as I seek to do all along to the selection of the fittest, I have real pleasure in proposing to you that you should allow me to submit your name to Her Majesty as President of the Board of Trade.10

  Thus did a combination of Dilke’s loyalty, the Queen’s prejudices and Gladstone’s flexibility under duress make Chamberlain the junior and much the most Radical member of the largely Whig new Cabinet, and thus too was Gladstone’s second government somewhat laboriously assembled. He never referred to it by any phrase approximating to that which he applied to his first Cabinet: ‘one of the best instruments for government that ever was constructed’. Nor did it replicate its 1868 predecessor’s attribute of containing no one who pressingly wanted to be Prime Minister. With varying degrees of urgency, Chamberlain did (although he later became more interested in power than place); Dilke did; Harrington in a rather sleepy way did, and was understandably mildly resentful about having been passed over; Harcourt was boisterously ambitious; Granville and Spencer, both men who at various times had been or were to be mooted for the premiership, could not be depended upon to say no; and Rosebery (not in the Cabinet until later in the government but the only one who actually got to 10 Downing Street) was always both ambitious and discontented. Nor was that government internally cohesive, as events soon began to show. In the 1886 split no less than seven of the original fourteen of 1880 were to desert Gladstone, and most, but not all, of these defections cast a shadow before them.

  The Cabinet of 1880 compared with that of 1868 was therefore a poor vessel for the weathering of storms. The fault for this was almost entirely Gladstone’s own. Admittedly the Queen was tiresome in her reaction to his suggested appointments. She objected to Selborne as Lord Chancellor, Childers as Secretary of State for War, Northbrook as First Lord of the Admiralty (because she would have preferred him in the War Office), and Chamberlain in any senior position. All these objections related to Cabinet appointments. Beyond these she complained about Ripon being made Viceroy of India, about Lord Fife (who subsequently married the Prince of Wales’s daughter) becoming Lord Chamberlain (too young), about Dilke (too republican) becoming an under-secretary, about a viscountcy (as opposed to a barony) for Robert Lowe, the excluded former Chancellor, and about Lord Derby (who had deserted Disraeli) being offered a Garter. But these were time-consuming and temper-trying diversions rather than effective ukases. Of the ten points listed she got her way only on the peripheral ones of Fife and Derby. For the rest Gladstone prevailed.

  He may have designed the Whig bias partly to reassure the Queen. But it also fitted in well enough with Gladstone’s own instincts even if not with his interests. The Queen may as a result of knowing less about him have helped the promotion of Chamberlain over Dilke, but this did not affect the balance of the Cabinet, and where she expressed an individual judgement, even such a sensible one as that Gladstone should not burden himself with the Exchequer, it made no difference.

  The real distinction between the government of 1868 and that of 1880 went beyond the relative cohesion of the two Cabinets. The 1868 government, because it had a legislative programme relevant to the dominant issues, was able to make the political weather. The 1880 government not only lacked a structured programme but it also had little idea in advance of the main issues with which it would have to deal. As a result it was always the creature rather than the creator of the circumstances in which it operated. The Prime Minister who had grandly proclaimed in 1868 that ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’ had hardly mentioned that unhappy island during the Midlothian campaigns. Yet Irish issues were still more dominant in the Parliament elected in 1880 than they had been in that of 1868. The difference was that the first Gladstone government thrust them before Parliament, whereas the second had them thrust down its own throat by deteriorating circumstances on the ground.

  Gladstone’s lack of foresight in this respect stemmed largely from his indifference to economic trends beyond purely fiscal and budgetary matters. Governments should not be expected to do anything about fluctuations in the state of trade. Gladstone therefore closed his mind to such issues and set up a rigid ‘Chinese wall’ between politics and economics. In reality the defeat of the Disraeli government owed at least as much to the economic recession which had set in strongly in 1876–7 as to any political issue; but this could never have been guessed from Gladstone’s orations. Equally the swing to budgetary deficit under the Conservatives was due just as much to the consequences of this recession as to imperialist extravagance or a weak hand at the Exchequer; but Gladstone preferred a moralist to a materialist analysis.

  The industrial downswing was accompanied by the onset of an agricultural depression which lasted much longer and had more profound causes and consequences. The combination of post-Civil War rebound in America, the completion of the transcontinental railways and the beginning of refrigerated ships gave a great fillip to New World food supplies. In England this produced falling rent-rolls and the first touches of austerity for those rural magnates who were not able to make up by the importation of rich American wives for the adverse effects of wheat and beef from the same source. In Ireland, with its much greater agrarian vulnerability, it meant near catastrophe. Particularly in the congested districts of the western provinces of Connaught and Munster, conditions became worse than at any time since the famine. The majority of Irish landlords made their normal unconstructive contribution, and evictions increased fivefold between 1877 and 1880. In parts of Ireland the degradation of peasant life became unparalleled in Europe west of the Balkans, and the disintegration of civil society a present danger.

  Yet such was Gladstone’s capacity for concentrating on one train of thought at the expense of all others that he did not particularly notice this. The statesman who in 1868 had given priority to Ireland and who in 1885–94 was to cause the Irish issue to pre-empt his old age, to split the Liberal party and to distort the pattern of British politics for a generation, was in 1879–80 so diverted on to other issues that he even accused Disraeli of raising the side issue of Ireland in order to cloak his iniquities in other parts of the world. Ireland was not the only issue to catch the second Gladstone government unawares. The affair of the oath or affirmation of Bradlaugh, the militantly atheistic new member for Northampton, drained away much of the momentum of the first year. This could not however reasonably have been foreseen.

  Again in contrast with 1868, this government had no planned legislative programme to put before Parliament, and it was only after four years that its major non-Irish measure of reform, the extension of household franchise to the counties and hence to the agricultural labourer, got to the statute book. Improvisation was the keynote of the government’s performance. Gladstone was fortunately a great improviser as well as a great performer, and many brilliant displays of the qualities which made him both and of his extraordinary parliamentary patience and stamina were needed to keep the government upright in the House of Commons. All of this, particularly during the first two and a half years, when he ludicrously held the Exchequer as well, took a heavy toll of his energies. These, as he himself recognized, were showing some signs of flagging. He wrote to Spencer, whom he had recently made Irish Viceroy, in October 1882, referring to his ‘increase of disinclination to work, and disposition (in homely phrase) to scamp it, which I think and know to be a sign of diminished powers. . . . It would be no good to anyone’, he continued, ‘that I should remain on the stage like a half-exhausted singer, whose notes are flat and everyone perceives it except himself.’11 He had over eleven years on the stage after that and his notes were rarely flat, except perhaps during the last six months of his fourth premiership. His health was if anything better in his short third and fourth governments than in this long and testing second one. During this 1880 government it was probably worse than that of any subsequent Prime Minister in offi
ce, except for Campbell-Bannerman and Bonar Law during their relatively rapid declines to death, until Churchill’s second Downing Street spell in 1951–5.

  Yet, illness intermissions apart, Gladstone retained his ability to dominate the House of Commons. With Disraeli declining in the House of Lords, Stafford Northcote the Tory leader in the Commons a sheep in sheep’s clothing, and Salisbury segregated in the Lords and in any event not a thundering orator, although with a caustic tongue, there was no one in Gladstone’s league. Bright was fading. Chamberlain, whose mixture of courage and rancour was to turn him into a master of the whiplash school of oratory, was still a parliamentary tyro, and at this stage never appeared in juxtaposition to Gladstone. Randolph Churchill, in this Parliament at the height of his short-lived powers, deliberately set himself up as an irreverent and irritating mocker of Gladstone. But this role made him more of a mosquito than a fellow eagle able to confront Gladstone beak to beak. Parnell, whose cold, sometimes forceful oratory, with words viscously struggling to get through, diverted the course of this Parliament even more than did Bradlaugh, but he had too small a following before the trebling of the Irish franchise in 1886 and too narrow a beam to be comparable with Gladstone on the floor of the House of Commons.

  So Gladstone was unique. He could dominate the House of Commons, not merely on a few setpiece grand occasions, but through night after night of the committee stages of the Irish Land Bill of 1881, the Coercion and Arrears Bill of 1882 and the Franchise Bill of 1884. He did so with a combination of sweep, patience and attention to detail which it is impossible to imagine a Prime Minister exercising today. He could also defend the government against the disasters which befell it with almost too great a power and facility.

  From one point of view Gladstone was an ailing Prime Minister presiding over a ramshackle government, within which relations between Whigs and Radicals became increasingly hostile, and staggering reactively from one crisis and one improvisation to another. At the same time he became the only person who could possibly hold the government and the Liberal party together. In the spring of 1880, within the inner circle, his premiership was regarded as more inevitable than welcome. Hartington, as we have seen, was a little miffed. Granville was more loyal than enthusiastic. Chamberlain and Dilke thought they might have done better under a Whig Prime Minister who needed to elevate them to compensate for his own right-of-centre position. Harcourt, always willing to lambast his colleagues in private, would have preferred Hartington, and a lot of the old Whig aristocracy – Bedford and Lansdowne for example – were becoming increasingly unhappy with the social and economic direction of the Liberal party well before Home Rule seriously reared its head.

  Yet, as that unproductive and often scourging Parliament ground on, so the desire for Gladstone’s early retirement paradoxically evaporated. There was still a general expectation that Hartington would some day come into his political as well as his ducal inheritance, but his own mind was becoming increasingly sceptical about the possibility of his leading a party containing Dilke and Chamberlain, with whom he disagreed on almost every issue which came before the Cabinet. Equally the two Radicals looked forward to a day when they would not need Gladstone, but they did not think they were yet strong enough to confront the Whigs without him. For both wings, therefore, in 1880 to 1885, the alternatives appeared to be Gladstone or split. The prospect of a split grew in the minds of both sides, but the idea that when it came, in 1886, it would be because of rather than in spite of Gladstone, and that it would find Hartington and Chamberlain uniting with each other against him, would have seemed preposterous at any stage in the life of the 1880 government.

  Gladstone’s position was thus doubly paradoxical. He was oratorically towering in Parliament, yet for a Prime Minister with a majority of a hundred his frequent weakness in the division lobbies was surprising. His Cabinet was increasingly anxious for his continuance in office, yet unwilling to pay the price of submission to his judgement. Not only on a host of minor matters but on several crucial issues, on Ireland, on Egypt, he allowed himself to be overruled. The Queen’s picture of him as ‘a Dictator’, whether or not ‘half-mad’, was far wide of the mark, and sadly so, for subsequent developments, particularly in Ireland, suggested that he had wiser judgement than his colleagues. Granville’s typically jaunty 1886 comment was more to the point. ‘I think you too often counted noses in your last Cabinet,’ he told Gladstone.12 The result was a disappointing government, and one which brought more frustration than satisfaction for its ageing but still often high-spirited Prime Minister.

  The first summer was particularly wearing, and ended with Gladstone more severely ill than at any time since his erysipelas in the north of Scotland twenty-seven years before. Gladstone first met the new Parliament on 20 May. He noticed ‘a great and fervent crowd in Palace Yard; and much feeling in the House’.13 It was his last exultant note of the summer. First there was a sense of let-down on the Liberal benches at the news that neither Bartle Frere in South Africa nor Henry Layard in Constantinople, both regarded as symbols of Disraeli’s imperialism (despite Layard having previously been a Liberal minister), was to be ostentatiously recalled. In fact Layard was quickly sent on a leave from which he never returned and was replaced by Goschen, while Frere was recalled within a few months. So it was only gesture politics which was lacking. But it was enough to create a bad atmosphere and to pave the way to a series of government defeats on peripheral issues. In June the House carried by 229 to 203 a motion from Sir Wilfred Lawson, the dedicated temperance reformer, in favour of local option, against which the Prime Minister had not only voted but had spoken as well. In mid-July there was an even more ignominious rejection of a government-supported proposal to install in Westminster Abbey a monument to the Prince Imperial, Napoleon III’s heir, who had been killed fighting with British troops in the Zulu War. The Cabinet had acquiesced out of deference to the Queen, but few of them carried their deference to the extent of attending and voting in the House of Commons. The Prime Minister (and Hartington) voted in a largely Tory lobby with only eight other Liberals. Gladstone not unnaturally described it as a ‘weary day’, but blithely added: ‘Our defeat however on the Monument was on the whole a public good.’14 And then at the end of that month there was even trouble on a Hares and Rabbits Bill.

  None of these issues was of inherent importance (the local-option motion was an expression of parliamentary opinion not an enactment), but they imprinted the image of a government whose authority did not match its majority. As tests of Gladstone’s patience, moreover, they did not begin to rival his other two trials of that summer, the Bradlaugh issue and the (Irish) Compensation for Disturbance Bill. They were interspersed around one highly successful event, which, however, was a further addition to the burdens of those few months. On 10 June Gladstone introduced what was at once his twelfth budget and also his first for fourteen years. He did it very much like a veteran stylist coming back to give an apparently effortless performance at the crease or on the tennis court. He did it in two hours, which was a miracle of compression by his standards. It was a largely alcoholic budget. He replaced the malt tax by an agriculturally much more acceptable beer duty, reduced the excise on table wines, tidied up the duties on alcoholic sales, and balanced off the picture by putting a penny on income tax, a tax towards which Gladstone was highly flexible, frequently denouncing it but no less frequently raising it when he wanted to combine sound finance with other fiscal remissions.

  The easy demise of the malt tax, over which Stafford Northcote had stumbled throughout the whole of the 1874 government, aroused feelings of envy, irritation and admiration in about equal proportions among Conservatives. Why could Gladstone achieve in two months the great benefit for their rural supporters which had eluded Northcote for six years? There could be no question of their opposing the change, and indeed the whole budget went easily through and considerably raised the spirits of the ministerial party. Nevertheless the plain fact was that Gladstone ought
not to have been performing such a departmental task at all, but ought to have been concentrating on the overall direction of the government and endeavouring to anticipate events, particularly in Ireland, rather than merely reacting to them.

  The discreditable Bradlaugh saga blew up even before the beginning of the session. Bradlaugh had written to the Speaker in advance of the meeting of Parliament, claiming the right to affirm rather than take the oath of allegiance on the ground that the latter would have no meaning for him. Speaker Brand’s legal advisers were against allowing such a claim, and he accepted their view, suggesting to Gladstone (and to Northcote) that a select committee should be appointed to deliberate quickly upon the matter. A strong committee resulted. From the government side there were Henry James and Farrer Herschell, the former a most urbane politician, the latter to be twice Lord Chancellor, as well as John Bright. They all supported Bradlaugh’s claim to affirm, as from outside the Committee did Selborne, the current Lord Chancellor and a churchman who was as devout as Gladstone himself, although a good deal more conservative. The forces of intolerance on the Committee had a most formidable champion in Hardinge Giffard, Disraeli’s Solicitor-General, who went on to become the first Earl of Halsbury, to be Salisbury’s (and Balfour’s) Lord Chancellor for fourteen years, to lead the ‘diehards’ against the 1911 Parliament Bill at the age of eighty-eight, and to survive for another ten years after that. The chairman was Spencer Walpole, the lachrymose Home Secretary of the 1866 Hyde Park riot, and Giffard, aided by one or two Liberal defections, gave him both the opportunity and the nerve to exercise his casting vote against Bradlaugh.