by Roy Jenkins
From this and other evidence Matthew has created an interesting and plausible theory: ‘It is more likely that it was not old age in the sense of senility but a calculated attempt to keep old age at bay which in the case of the Knowsley visit was taken too far. . . . Much is made of Gladstone’s lack of self-consciousness. . . . It may well be that, by the 1880s, Gladstone’s lack of self-consciousness was being consciously cultivated.’10
Whether his moods were contrived or spontaneous Gladstone needed reserves of optimism to bounce through the trials of the 1880 government. The steady run of luck against the administration embraced Parliament, Ireland, South Africa, Egypt and then the Sudan. In addition there were the Prime Minister’s troubles with his health, with his colleagues and with the Queen, all accompanied by a mood of almost unparalleled bitterness between parties. Following his severe 1880 summer illness and his four-day relapse in October, he had another three days in bed, this time with tonsillitis, in mid-January 1881. Then on 23 February, ill chance combining with a period of severe weather, when he was returning late to Downing Street from dining with the Waleses at Marlborough House, he:
slipt off my heels in the powdered snow by the garden door, fell backwards, & struck my head most violently (I was hatless) against the edge of the stone step. A wound of 1¾ inch was cut open, which bled profusely. [It was also deep, according to Hamilton.] All the household were soon most kindly busy: a neighbouring doctor came and bound it up perfectly well. C[atherine] G. arrived and soon Dr. Clarke. I got to bed with very uncomfortable feelings inside the skull, as it appeared to me, and some difficulty in placing the head: but thank God had an excellent night.11
His recovery was fairly quick, achieved by sleeping for half the time over the first few days and nights, but it was a singularly disagreeable accident for a man of seventy-one who often worried about the physical exhaustion of his brain. It was six days before he could leave his room and nine before he could return to the House of Commons. His recovery was not assisted by the arrival from South Africa of the news of the defeat by the Boers at Majuba Hill and the death of General Colley and of ninety-five other officers and men.
For the next couple of years Gladstone’s ailments were mostly confined to his normal short bouts of lumbago, diarrhoea or tonsillitis, but requiring a day or two or three at least half time in bed, to which he always took so easily. Then, after he got to Hawarden on 16 December for his 1882–3 Christmas and New Year holiday, insomnia struck. Paradoxically it was just after he had at last relieved himself of the burden of the Exchequer and when he ought to have been less oppressed than for some years past. But the transition to relaxation was often a dangerous moment for him. Thus in July 1881, as he moved into sight of the completion of the Irish Land Bill, which he had carried almost single-handed and which had involved thirty-two nights of committee stage, the longest since the great Reform Bill, he wrote with more apprehension than triumph of: ‘A sharp and long continued labour . . . the heaviest I have ever had: it will I think be followed by a severe fit of lassitude.’12
Over Christmas 1882 the semi-sleeplessness began to lower his morale but did not become an obsession until the first week of January. By the standards of some he did not do badly. His best night in that week was six hours, his worst two hours. But by his own high standards of long and undisturbed nights it was devastating. Dr Clark was summoned from London on the 7th and Gladstone agreed both to postpone the visit to Midlothian (his first in the nearly three years since the general election) which he had promised for later in the month, and to accept the need for six weeks of rest cure in the South of France. Lord Wolverton’s villa at Cannes was made available as were Wolverton himself and Lord Acton for company, as well as the family party of Mrs Gladstone, daughter Mary, son Stephen and nephew Spencer Lyttelton, who was one of his private secretaries. Apart from Lyttelton, they all set off from Charing Cross on the morning of 17 January. The frequently curmudgeonly Home Secretary (Harcourt) earned good marks by coming unexpectedly to see them off. They crossed to Calais and Paris during the day and then proceeded overnight in a fauteuil coupée (a sort of separated Pullman armchair), ‘for which the fine [fare?] was I think £11’.13 If so, and for Gladstone alone, it must have been one of the most expensive railway supplements ever exacted, the equivalent of over £500 today.
The Cannes visit was a success. Gladstone was delighted with the half-developed Riviera in winter, quickly recovered his sleep (although his wife did not), and fretted little at being away from Cabinets, his colleagues and his Sovereign over the start of the new session. Gladstone’s colleagues tried him more by resignation than by dissent. He never doubted their right to disagree, and it would not have occurred to him to sack a minister for his views. He regarded a Secretary of State (or the equivalent), once appointed, as inviolate, as much so as a member of the college of cardinals. Such a minister was a servant of the Queen, as he was himself, and as entitled to his own opinion. Gladstone was also good at treating disagreement with courtesy, always trying to pare it down, and not to denounce it. The limpet-like quality of modern ministers had not then developed. Gladstone’s problem (as had been Disraeli’s) was preventing unwelcome resignations rather than getting rid of colleagues he would rather be without.105
At the end of 1882 when Gladstone was engaged in a delicate Cabinet reconstruction his troubles – and particularly his royal ones – were added to by there being a simultaneous vacancy in the see of Canterbury. Archbishop Tait had died on 3 December. Gladstone, who had needless to say given a lot of thought to the matter, had come to the conclusion that the choice lay between Bishop Browne of Winchester and Bishop Benson of Truro. (Benson had been the founding headmaster of Wellington before becoming the first bishop of the new diocese of Truro.) Gladstone thought that the edge was with Benson, who, although perhaps a little too young at fifty-three, was better in respect of age than Browne who was too old at seventy-one. The Queen, however, thought there should at least be an offer to Winchester and, worse, confused matters by frivolously throwing in the name of the Bishop of Durham at a late stage. Gladstone, who had allowed her to do what she liked about a new Dean of Windsor (Dean Wellesley, almost their only mutual friend since the death of the Duchess of Sutherland, had also died that autumn), was determined to exercise his full constitutional rights in relation to the appointment of a new Primate. He regarded it as one of the most important decisions of his second premiership. It was not that he wished to make a partisan nomination. Benson and Browne were both Conservative rather than Liberal and Broad rather than High Church. But Benson, in Gladstone’s view, more than outweighed these disadvantages by being a great pastoral bishop. Fortunately the Queen gave way before the Prime Minister could mount too high a constitutional horse and utter the threats of resignation which the issue was raising in his mind.106
It was by no means only on appointments that the Queen added to Gladstone’s burdens. The fact that their relationship recommenced in 1880 on a much more arm’s-length basis than in 1868 did not bring all the compensations which might have been expected. It largely freed him from Balmoral, which he visited only once during the five years of his second premiership; and that 1884 visit was only a matter of two days. In addition there were occasional nights at Windsor and three visits to Osborne.
It was optimistically believed by Ponsonby and Hamilton that the Sovereign and the Prime Minister got on better in conversation than in correspondence, but Gladstone’s diary entry for 30 November 1881, a day when he was summoned to Windsor, did not suggest that there was anything extravagant about the greater ease when they were in the same room: ‘Received with much civility, had a long audience, but I am always outside an iron ring: and without any desire, had I the power, to break it through.’14
It was, however, in the correspondence that the wearisomeness of her constant nagging advice and complaint found its full expression. Her declared 1880 intention to have as little as possible to do with Gladstone and use the (to her) inoffensive
even if unadmired Granville as her main channel of relations with the government might at least have avoided this sterile exercise in mutual irritation. In contrast with the first years of the 1868 government the monarch and her first minister expected little of each other. The Queen had long since given up believing that there was anything to look forward to from Gladstone except for his surrender of office, an event which he always kept on the horizon, but which was never reached. Gladstone had receded from his hope of a decade before that the Queen might come to appreciate his loyalty and worth, and was perfectly realistic about this. ‘. . . I am convinced, from a hundred tokens,’ he wrote to Dilke as the latter took up his new office, ‘that she looks forward to the day of my retirement as a day if not of jubilee yet of relief.’15 And he expressed his own accumulated exasperation by telling Rosebery that ‘the Queen alone is enough to kill any man’.16
Yet the Sovereign and the Prime Minister could not leave each other alone. If their relationship was without affection or hope, at least it might have been coolly detached. But the Queen could not resist pouring out her advice and complaints. And Gladstone could not resist replying with a mixture of elaborate courtesy and pedagogic determination to put her right. Frequently, despite the speed of late-Victorian mails, a second issue of complaint would have arisen before the first could be replied to, so that the correspondence was interleaved in such a way that, particularly when she was at Balmoral or Osborne, he was never free of at least one pending censorious letter. And the tone and assumption nearly always was that if Gladstone had only behaved with patriotic firmness, abandoned his Liberal prejudices and pursued good sound Tory policies, the troubles of the country would have been miraculously cured. If he had given more thought to coercion and less to Irish land reform, atrocities would have been avoided. If he had let the military have their head and pursued a more forward imperial policy defeats would not have occurred. If he had locked up more Irish MPs for longer intervals there would have been less obstruction in the House of Commons. If he had either silenced or dismissed Chamberlain (and maybe Dilke as well) the Lords would have been more amenable, or at any rate they would have had less to be intransigent about.
The Queen also sent him messages of warning, as though he was the most inexperienced of ministers, before his projected forays to public meetings. Thus in October 1881: ‘I see you are to attend a great banquet at Leeds. Let me express a hope that you will be very cautious not to say anything which could bind you to any particular measures.’17 And in January 1883, when he was proposing the not very extreme step of addressing his Midlothian constituents for the first time in three years:
The Queen is sure that Mr Gladstone will not misunderstand her when she expresses her earnest hope that he will be very guarded in his language when he goes to Scodand shortly. . . . Mr Gladstone will remember that when she first saw him in 80 – when she asked him to form a Govt – she expressed her regret at some of his speeches in Midlothian, & he replied that he did not then think himself a responsible person.18
And so it went on. Hamilton calculated that, during the five years of this government, the Prime Minister had to write to her over a thousand times, and his letters were frequently in reply to hers.107 But she, of course, had much less to do, while to him the correspondence was a heavy supplementary burden. The compensation was that he minded her disapproval, because it was so predictable, much less than he had done in 1868–74. Indeed, slightly led by Hamilton, Gladstone came to the view that the Queen’s hostility was partly due to jealousy, which was not the most respectful explanation. Hamilton wrote on 27 September 1883:
She feels, as he [Gladstone] puts it, aggrieved at the undue reverence shown to an old man of whom the public are being constantly reminded, and who goes on working for them beyond the allotted time, while H. M. is, owing to the life she leads, withdrawn from view. . . . What he wraps up in guarded and considerate language is (to put it bluntly) jealousy. She can’t bear to see the large type which heads the columns of newspapers by ‘Mr Gladstone’s movements’, while down below is in small type the Court Circular. . . . Due allowance ought certainly to be made for this feeling, especially as it is only in the later days of her reign that She finds Herself with a Prime Minister whose position in this country is unique and unlike that of anyone else of whom She has had experience, or of whom indeed any of Her predecessors had experience.19
The reverence which Gladstone excited was real and widespread, but it was far from being universal. The exceptions were particularly and obviously to be found among the Tory political classes. The wildest rumours about him were there likely to spread fast. When his insomnia drove him to the South of France it was widely believed that he had gone mad and was being kept away to conceal this embarrassing fact. While such fantasies were no doubt rejected by those of cooler temperament and more sophisticated information, there was plenty of venom forthcoming from such sources, even when they had in the not too distant past been in close and friendly relationship with Gladstone. Salisbury in 1882 attributed every step in his opponent’s Irish policy since 1869 to a greed for votes and office, which as a personal and not merely a political attack was much resented by Gladstone who had several times been Salisbury’s house guest and on whose kindness as a host he had commented extravagantly. What he found still more wounding, however, was the virulence of Salisbury’s nephew, Arthur Balfour, in whom he had so ‘delighted’ and with whom he had enjoyed the closest relations barely half a decade earlier.
On 16 May of that same year, only ten days after Gladstone had received the crushing blow of Cavendish’s death, Balfour denounced the so-called ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ for the release of Parnell from gaol and Gladstone’s part in it in terms which were in both intent and effect as offensive as it is possible to imagine. ‘I do not think’, Balfour said, ‘any such transaction can be quoted from the annals of our political history. It stands alone in its infamy. . . . They have negotiated in secret with treason. . . .’20 Balfour never apologized, although he said privately that he regretted that in the heat of the moment he had used such an emotive word as ‘infamy’, which although objectively justified was better avoided in debate. In fact it was less a matter of heat than an early example of the ‘cool ruthlessness’, as Churchill described it in Great Contemporaries, which enabled Balfour to cross a muddy street ‘like a powerful graceful cat walking delicately and unsoiled’.
The depth of Gladstone’s feeling was expressed in a letter which he wrote to his daughter Helen in Cambridge: ‘I cannot refrain from writing to tell you how vexed, I might also say cut to the heart, I am about Mr Balfour’s exhibition yesterday. . . .’ There was then a routine and unconvincing denial that he was ‘personally wounded’ or ‘sorry for the Government’.
But I am concerned, and also perplexed, for him – are his notions of conduct & social laws turned inside out [sic] since the days when I knew him, enjoyed his hospitality, viewed him with esteem and regard, nay was wont to mate him with the incomparable F. Cavendish, now lost to our eyes but not to our hearts, as the flower of rising manhood in the land? To see a man like this given over to the almost raving licence of an unbridled tongue does grieve me, and I cannot make light of it & do not wish I could, any more than I should if I saw someone rend the Madonna di San Sisto from top to bottom.
You may ask me what is the use of this. It is simply that I would ask you to say as much (or as little) of this as you can, or think proper, either to his sister [Eleanor Sidgwick, the principal of Newnham], or to Mr Sidgwick – they will at least know that it cannot possibly be sincere.21
It was not perhaps a wise or wholly dignified letter for Gladstone to write, but it gave startling evidence that the wound was at least as deep as that in his head fifteen months before and also of his epistolatory energy. Many might have half composed such a letter in their heads during a night when grievance predominated over sleep, but few, even if they were not carrying a Prime Minister’s burdens, would have put it on paper the next mo
rning. Sloth can have its advantages.
Those hostile to Gladstone were not confined to his professional parliamentary opponents. Hamilton recorded an experience two months later, on 20 July:
Dined last night with the Cavendish Bentincks. We were 28, and I think . . . I was the solitary Liberal. I am sure that if I had been a Tory all my life the bitterness and narrow-mindedness of my friends would have converted me to Radicalism. It is all indiscriminate abuse. Everything that Mr. G. does must be wrong and wicked, and everything wrong and wicked that happens must be attributable to Mr. G. He has created all the difficulties in Egypt and Ireland. His one object is to ruin landlords, plunder bondholders, and to destroy, in short, the country.22
The Queen’s antipathy no doubt somewhat encouraged this hostility in the fashionable world, but it could not be regarded as a decisive cause of it. In the first place the Queen was not fashionable, and her pattern of life remained sufficiently withdrawn, even if not quite so obsessively so as in the 1860s and early 1870s, that few except for former Conservative ministers, whom she entertained with unusual frequency, were in contact with her views. And both her private secretary, Ponsonby, and her heir (who was a leader of fashion) maintained a much more friendly attitude towards Gladstone, the secretary because of a general Liberal disposition and because he knew better than anyone else with how much Gladstone had to put up, and the future King Edward VII because of an inherent tendency on the part of crown princes to provide a counterbalance to their parents and sovereigns, tinged in his case with a certain natural benevolence provided there was no conflict with his own pleasures and indulgences.
