Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  This was the situation which confronted Gladstone when the new Parliament met. On 19 May he attended a conclave in the Speaker’s library, with a panoply of advisers on both sides. By this time Bradlaugh had announced that if he could not affirm he was prepared to swear. The Speaker claimed that if Bradlaugh had said this in the first instance he would have allowed no interference. But Bradlaugh’s public declaration that the oath could mean nothing to him made the matter more difficult. The Speaker then urged that, when an attempt was made to prevent Bradlaugh swearing, Gladstone should move the previous question. The Liberal Whip then said there was no chance of this being carried. It was therefore decided that the least bad course was to go for another select committee, this time to consider not whether Bradlaugh was entitled to affirm, but whether he was entitled to swear. That was accepted by the House without hazard although not without a bitter debate.

  That second Select Committee advanced matters little. When the issue came back before the House at midsummer all the old battle lines were reoccupied. Henry Labouchère, Bradlaugh’s colleague in the representation of Northampton (or at least in their intention to be so represented) moved that he be allowed to affirm. Giffard, never one to hedge his intransigence, moved a counter-motion that he be permitted neither to affirm nor to swear. This raised in most brutal form the direct issue of whether the acceptability of a member lay with his constituents or with the House of Commons.

  Gladstone saw clearly that this was dangerous ground, and said so forthrightly in an hour’s speech on the second night. He was also beginning, typically, to develop a more theological, idiosyncratic and probably less persuasive line of argument which, in the various debates on the issue, he came with increasing passion to deploy. This was the rejection of the view that an indiscriminate theism rendered a man acceptable, while its absence put him outside the pale. This crudity he regarded as a negation of nearly 1900 years of Christian thought and doctrine. ‘You know, Mr Speaker,’ Charles Newdegate MP called out with what might now be regarded as a jaunty saloon-bar camaraderie, ‘we all of us believe in a God of some sort or another.’ This to Gladstone was the worst sort of apostasy. Better an honest if benighted atheist than a man who believed that he had answered the spiritual needs of mankind by such a threadbare doctrine.

  Gladstone’s speech was not persuasive. A House with a nominal Liberal majority of over a hundred voted by 275 to 230 against allowing Bradlaugh either to affirm or to attest, and thus forbade him to represent his constituents. Worse still, as Gladstone wrote to the Queen, who was a doubtfully sympathetic audience in view of Bradlaugh’s republicanism and advocacy of birth control, both of which she minded more than his atheism, that the House received the result in ‘an ecstatic transport, [which] exceeded anything which Mr Gladstone remembers to have witnessed’.15

  On the next day Bradlaugh presented himself at the bar of the House and claimed to take the oath. The Speaker read to him the resolution of the House which forbade this. Thereupon he asked to be heard and this was allowed. Gladstone described his performance from the bar – a nightmare position from which to address the House – as ‘that of a consummate speaker’. Bradlaugh was then requested to withdraw, and putting up some resistance to this got involved in a semi-scuffle with the deputy serjeant-at-arms. This was Gladstone’s moment of weakness. As leader of the House he failed to lead, one way or the other, and, sympathizing with Bradlaugh, left it to Northcote to move the two disciplinary motions, the second, after the scuffle, committing Bradlaugh to custody. But, believing also in upholding the collective authority of the House, Gladstone somewhat sheepishly voted for both the motions.

  However, Gladstone soon rallied and on 1 July proposed and carried (by 303 votes to 249) a resolution permitting Bradlaugh to affirm. But there was a catch in the tail. He was permitted to do so only on his own responsibility and ‘subject to any liability by statute’, which meant that he was at risk in the courts. The next day he affirmed, took his place on the Liberal benches and voted in a division. The legality of his action was immediately contested at law, with Hardinge Giffard purporting to represent the outraged conscience of England. Bradlaugh lost and was unseated. He was re-elected in April 1881, but was persuaded to stay away while the government tried to get an Affirmation Bill on the statute book. The session came to an end before they had succeeded. When the next session opened in February 1882, Bradlaugh decided that he had exercised enough patience. He reappeared, advanced up the floor to the table, pulling a piece of paper out of his pocket, and proceeded to administer the oath himself. The next day he was expelled. Ten days after that he was elected for the second time at Northampton.

  The unsavoury farce then moved for a year from the Commons to the law courts. At one stage there were four legal actions pending. Bradlaugh’s opponents were endeavouring to impose bankrupting penalties upon him for his allegedly illegal vote; he was suing the deputy serjeant-at-arms for assault; his supporters were challenging (at law) the right of the House to exclude him; and he was being prosecuted for blasphemy. In April 1883 the government made a second and more determined attempt to carry an Affirmation Bill and cut through this legal jungle.

  This produced another memorable Gladstone speech in which he developed his subtle 1880 thought that there were worse things than atheism into an argument at once sublime and remote. The House, he said with more hope than truth, would be familiar with ‘the majestic and noble lines of Lucretius’. There then followed a six-line quotation (in Latin of course) in which pagan gods were described as ‘far withdrawn from all concerns of ours: free from our pains, free from our perils, strong in resources of their own, needing nought from us, no favour wins them, no anger moves them’. This, he said, was the real evil of the age, far worse than blank atheism, the proclamation of the total detachment of man from God, of God from man.

  Morley, then in his very first days as an MP and sharing Gladstone’s classicism although not his faith, was twenty years later to write of the House sitting:

  as I well remember, with reverential stillness, hearkening from this born master of moving cadence and high sustained modulation to the rise and long roll of the hexameter, – to the plangent lines that have come down across the night of time to us from great Rome. But all these impressions of sublime feeling and strong reasoning were soon effaced by honest bigotry, by narrow and selfish calculation, by flat cowardice.16

  In other words, Gladstone lost his bill, although by a majority of only three.

  Yet again Bradlaugh presented himself at the bar and yet again he was excluded, although apparently without on this occasion the seat being declared vacant. That, however, occurred once more in the following February (1884), and in what had become an equally routine way he was once more returned for Northampton. Perhaps out of boredom, he did not again trouble the House until July 1885, when in the dying days of that Parliament and with a new Conservative government on the Treasury bench he put the matter to a somewhat pro forma further test and was again excluded.

  At the general election of November 1885 he was re-elected for the fourth time and at the meeting of the new Parliament in January 1886, the whole charade of the previous Parliament was simply cut into shreds by the firmness of the new (1884) Speaker, Arthur Wellesley Peel, the youngest son of Gladstone’s old mentor, who in spite of his names was a Liberal MP. Peel absolutely refused to hear any objections to the taking of the oath by Bradlaugh (who wisely avoided any affirmation complications at that stage). Without debate he was swept in with the others.

  The House of Commons then proceeded to coat its previous prejudice and hysteria with a sentimental surface which made its overall performance no more attractive. Bradlaugh became, in the words of his Dictionary of National Biography chronicler (who, intriguingly, was Ramsay MacDonald), ‘very popular with the House of Commons’. He got a Tory Parliament to pass an Affirmation Bill in 1888, and in 1891, when he lay dying, it unanimously expunged from its records the motion of 22 June 1880, which had
been carried in an ‘ecstatic transport’.

  Whether or not this consoled Bradlaugh, it could not possibly undo the damage which the twists and turns of the affair inflicted upon the authority and momentum of Gladstone in his second government. The Prime Minister could not command the House of Commons on the issue, and his embarrassments were brilliantly and shamelessly exploited by Lord Randolph Churchill with his little group of francs-tireurs, commonly called the Fourth Party, who sat below the gangway on the opposition side. Churchill behaved as though Gladstone’s support for Bradlaugh’s rights meant that he had suddenly become converted to atheism, republicanism and contraception, but did so with such wit and impudence that this preposterous claim both amused and inflicted damage. Churchill’s object was to humiliate Northcote, the leader of his own party, as well as to bait Gladstone, and it was an important factor in the equation that Northcote never had the authority to stand up to his own party and lance the Bradlaugh boil, which he would probably have liked to do. Apart from its weakening of the Prime Minister’s prestige, the Bradlaugh issue, particularly in the summer of 1880, was a heavy drain on Gladstone’s energy and patience, and a contributory factor to his severe pneumonia (as it turned out to be) at the end of July.

  On 19 July he wrote: ‘H of C 4¼–8¼ & 8¾–3am: much exhausted.’17 On the 23rd: ‘A severe week & rather overdone.’ On the 24th: ‘Abandoned through fatigue the Trinity House Dinner: and went off at 6 to Littleburys.’18 103 Then, on the 30th, he was struck down, less violently at first than in the second wave of the attack. ‘Seized with chill & nausea’ was his initial comment. ‘Better when warmer.’ He then slept for ten hours ‘and got up at 11 seemingly well’.

  He saw three ministers and ‘got all ready for the Cabinet at 2. Meantime I had been for ¾ of an hour not shivering but shaking as a house is shaking in an earthquake. I had a fire lighted, & put on a thick coat & proceeded with my work.’19 By 2.00 p.m., however, the Cabinet was forbidden and he was ordered to bed. His amalgamated diary entries for the next four days (31 July–3 August) read:

  Close confinement to bed, strong and prolonged perspirations, poulticing, hot drinks & medicines. Temperature fell from 103 to 101 at night, to 100 Sunday morning but rose again to 103 by the evening. No reading, writing or business; only thoughts. I did not suffer. On Sunday I thought of the end – in case the movement had continued – coming nearer to it by a little than I had done before: but not as in expectation of it. C[atherine] read me the service. Monday the temperature had fallen I think to 101–2 but it was thought well to call in Sir W. Jenner [Dr Andrew Clark was already treating him on an almost hourly basis] whom I greatly liked in his clinical character. He was very strict about the economies, e.g. of speech and effort. On Tues. however I saw Godley [his principal secretary, later Lord Kilbracken] & dictated a letter respecting tomorrow’s Cabinet. In the evg. the temperature had gone down & Dr C. was delighted: thought the battle won.20

  The optimistic thought was justified. Thereafter he progressed steadily, getting up on the Saturday a week after he had been stricken, although it required a full month’s convalescence, including a ten-day round-Britain cruise on one of Donald Currie’s ships, before he was fully recovered. He had been seriously ill. His congestion of the lungs had been severe, his temperature had been high, and bulletins had been issued every few hours to an apprehensive public. During a miserable summer for himself and his government he had strained himself to and beyond the limit of his capacity. Yet that government had nearly another five years of sometimes productive life ahead, and its seventy-year-old head nearly another fourteen in active politics.

  GLADSTONE BECOMES THE GRAND OLD MAN

  GLADSTONE’S FUNDAMENTAL WEAKNESS in the 1880 government was that he was trying to hold together too wide a coalition. His social conservatism had become in uncomfortable conflict with his political radicalism. Although his taste for rhetoric and large audiences led him to an abstract respect for the masses against the classes, when it came to the choice of colleagues for a government, or to the organization of the Hawarden estate, or to the houses in which he stayed, he liked the style and values of the old landed ruling class, perhaps indeed attaching more importance to them than did some who had been more completely brought up therein.

  He was willing to make a great effort to keep the traditional Whig families within the Liberal tabernacle. He believed that their departure would be bad for the tone and balance of politics. The trouble was that, as the issues of the 1880s evolved, even before Home Rule appeared like a dividing spear, there had ceased to be any significant disputes on which men like Hartington and Argyll were instinctively on the progressive side of the watershed. Trying to keep the old mould was a constant trial for them and an incubus for a Liberal government.

  Gladstone had one other bias which rivalled what Dilke once called ‘his Scotch toadyism to the aristocracy’,1 and that was the importance which shared classical knowledge played in his personal relations. As a link, although he would have been horrified to admit it, it was really more important than shared religious belief. Thus all the men to whom he was close, from his school and Oxford friends, through Hope-Scott and Manning, Peel and Aberdeen in his middle life, to John Morley and Rosebery in his old age, could confidently and happily exchange Latin and Greek quotations with him. In Morley’s case this ability outweighed his agnosticism. Unfortunately, however, neither of the two Liberal politicians whose support on Ireland was vital to Gladstone were classicists. Chamberlain, although surprisingly cultivated for a screw manufacturer who had left school at sixteen – he spoke French adequately and was quite widely read – did not include the dead languages in his intellectual armoury. And Hartington preferred quadrupeds to hexameters.

  Gladstone could do without one man but not without both. He would probably have done better to have cultivated Chamberlain and, if necessary, to have let Hartington go before 1886. But he could not bring himself to appreciate Chamberlain. Hartington at least had the advantage of being indisputably patrician, even if he did not know his Virgil. But there was no instinctive rapport between Gladstone and either of these crucial figures. Nonetheless, given the sulphurous state of their mutual relations throughout the 1880–5 government, it was a remarkable feat of man-mismanagement to drive them into each other’s arms by 1886–7.

  This reversal of alliances was however still well in the future in the early days of Gladstone’s second government. Once he had recovered from his pneumonia, he had a relatively tranquil 1880 autumn, although he knew that the shadow of Ireland lay heavily over the prospects for the 1881 session. In his seventy-first birthday thoughts on 29 December 1880, he referred to a ‘disturbed’ anniversary after which he ‘must wait for a calmer session before I trust myself to say what a year it has been, and why’.2

  On the third day of the new year of 1881 a figure from the remote past re-entered Gladstone’s life. Lady Lincoln (restyled Lady Susan Opdebeck by virtue of her Scottish ducal parentage and her terminated Belgian second marriage) called on him in Downing Street. He had not seen her since his ludicrous Italian pursuit of her in 1849. His diary entry read: ‘after some 32 or 33 years I felt something & could say much.’ Could he easily relate her to that figure whom he had first described as ‘once the dream of dreams’, and whose escapade had later so excited his prurience as well as engaging him in twenty-seven days of expensive wild-goose chase? His immediate reaction to the visit was to go to the Lyceum Theatre in order ‘to unbend after the strain’.3 More constructively and with typical concern, he then wrote to her no less than four times in the next fortnight and made continuing strenuous efforts to get the Newcastle estate, itself hardly affluent, to provide some money to relieve her poverty. To this end he stayed on for another year as a Newcastle trustee, an obligation from which after decades of devoted service he had not unnaturally become eager to retire, and also enlisted, somewhat mysteriously, the services of Mrs Thistlethwayte, herself by this time in financial difficulty, as an advocate o
f Lady Susan’s claim on the Newcastle estate. The rationale of this appeared to be that it was through the late Duke (formerly Lincoln and Lady Susan’s husband) that Gladstone had first met Laura Thistlethwayte in 1864.

  Gladstone’s reaction to this twitch upon the thread was symptomatic: already by this second government an important part of his life had come to be lived in the past. As his seventies wore on he became isolated, in the sense that most of his contemporaries had died, much more than, in the same decade of his life, he would be today. And, while in some ways he was young for his age, in at least as many others he was old. In spite of his frequent retreats to a sickbed, he remained physically hard, sparse and energetic. Staying two days at Balmoral (for the first time for thirteen years) in the autumn of 1884, he climbed Ben Macdui, at 4300 feet the highest point in the Cairngorms, taking seven hours forty minutes to do the twenty-mile round trip. He confessed to ‘some effort’ but it may also have been thought some achievement at the age of nearly seventy-five.