Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  The bungling of these intermediaries may have led to the missing of one of the great opportunities in Anglo-Irish history. J. L. Hammond thought that a major settlement between Parnell and the British government might have been achieved if O’Shea had not been so officiously self-promoting and Chamberlain less brash. Whether or not such a utopian outcome was a real possibility, it did not happen. But the Cabinet, on 2 May, did decide that Parnell (and two other prisoners) should be released. He was out of Kilmainham that afternoon and on the following day Forster, who had been the sole opponent of release in the Cabinet, was out of the government. The former Irish Secretary was making his damaging resignation statement in the House of Commons on the Thursday afternoon (4 May) when Parnell arrived, penetrated a small crowd of members at the bar of the House and strode impassively to his seat.

  From Forster’s resignation there followed the tragedy of Lord Frederick Cavendish. Gladstone caused surprise by appointing his amiable nephew by marriage to the vacant place. Cavendish made his first journey as Chief Secretary to Dublin overnight on Friday, 5 May and was assassinated in Phoenix Park on the evening of Saturday, 6 May, only three days after Parnell’s release. Parnell denounced the outrage with conviction, dismay and, according to Chamberlain and Dilke, vivid fear for his own life – as a result of the unleashing of a general bloodbath. Despite these protestations the juxtaposition was clearly fatal for any early development of a ‘union of hearts’ atmosphere.

  Gladstone–Parnell relations then entered a three-year period in which they were better than at the time of the Leeds–Wexford exchange of imprecations while remaining well short of the warmth which came in the late 1880s and 1890. What did Gladstone think of Parnell during this relatively calm midstream interlude? In June 1883, Hamilton (always a very good source) reported him as saying that he found the Irish leader ‘still a sphinx who probably works for and with the law as far as he dare, and who possibly does not in his heart of hearts hate the Government’. By February of the next year he had retrogressed to the extent of stating that ‘he felt towards Sir S. Northcote much the same as he did towards Parnell. Neither of them were really big men or pleasant antagonists; but their places might be taken by worse men, and therefore he preferred keeping them.’ In October 1884 he was back to expressing a ‘sneaking likeness [sic]’ for Parnell, to which Hamilton added ‘as frequently happens with him when he had an opportunity’.3

  All this was well short of Gladstone’s 1897 remark: ‘I cannot tell you how much I think of him, and what an interest I take in everything concerning him. A marvellous man, a terrible fall.’4 This was of course well after Gladstone in what he saw as the best interests of Home Rule had ensured that the fall was indeed terrible and had himself suffered heavily from it. Nonetheless it is easier to write with dramatic appreciation of those on whom the gates of history have slammed shut than of those with whom one has day-to-day dealings. However, Gladstone’s panegyric has to be considered in relation to another statement of his that ‘Parnell was the most remarkable man he had ever met’;5 to a judgement of the notably cool Asquith that he was ‘one of the three or four men of the nineteenth century’;6 and to R. B. Haldane’s opinion that he was the strongest man the House of Commons had seen in 150 years.7

  What was Parnell’s special quality which evoked such extravagant (although admittedly posthumous) tributes from a variety of discriminating judges? A large part of his power of leadership stemmed from his disdainful imperiousness. He added a special ingredient of authority to the natural arrogance of the Anglo-Irish landowners. In his youth he had been something of an upper-class lout, rusticated from Magdalene College, Cambridge, after a drunken fracas in the Station Road with a manure merchant, and brought to court in his local market town of Rathdrum after another disturbance in the hotel at Glendalough. At this stage in his life he was equally indifferent to his Co. Wicklow squirearchical responsibilities and to the holiness of the Glendalough early Christian site.

  Later his arrogance took more dignified even if still ungracious forms. In 1883 his financial affairs had become sufficiently embarrassed that the sale of his house and estate at Avondale in Co. Wicklow seemed the only way out. This was avoided by the raising of a public subscription which by the end of that year had produced £37,000 (not much less than £2 million at today’s values). At Morrison’s Hotel (a locale which played a chequered part in Parnell’s life) the Lord Mayor of Dublin, in the presence of about twenty Nationalist MPs, conducted a small ceremony and handed over the cheque. According to most accounts Parnell cut short the Lord Mayor’s encomium, merely asked him whether the cheque was ‘made payable to order and crossed’, tucked it into his pocket and brought the ceremony to an end. At the banquet that evening Parnell spoke powerfully about the state of Ireland, but confined any reference to the munificent subvention to two cold sentences.

  Another example of Parnell’s capacity for detachment was later provided during sittings of the 1888–9 Special Commission of Enquiry (into Irish agrarian crime and the allegations of The Times about his own involvement), the deliberations of which were vital to Parnell’s repute and future. His star counsel, Sir Charles Russell (later Lord Chief Justice), was irritated by Parnell’s fitful attendance and threatened through Michael Davitt to throw up his brief if Parnell did not attend the next day’s hearing. Parnell dismissed this as a prima donna’s tantrum, but did attend at the Law Courts on the following morning. He brought with him a small brown-paper parcel, to the unwrapping of which, before a mystified Davitt, who was beside him, and an exasperated Russell, he completely devoted himself. It contained a tiny particle of gold, which he had assayed from a lump of stone, sent to him by his agent in Avondale. ‘After fourteen years’ search,’ he triumphantly told Davitt, whom he expected to be as excited as he was himself. The incident illustrated many aspects of Parnell’s unusual and contradictory character: his interest in rather simple scientific experiments, his proprietorial optimism accompanied by some financial naivety, his self-absorption, and his imperviousness to the reactions of others.

  After the Phoenix Park murders the Parnellites were too thrown back on their heels to muster their previous virulence against coercion, and at the same time any British optimism about an early solution was stilled. Government and Nationalists went into a relationship of standoff, the old parliamentary bitterness somewhat diminished but with no lively constructive hopes, which lasted for two to three years. The deadsea fruits of this flaccid period were memorably summed up by Dilke when he stayed in Viceregal Lodge, Dublin, at the very end of the government’s life:

  Early in the morning of Sunday, the 24th [May 1885] I attended church with Spencer, and in the afternoon took him for the only walk which he had enjoyed for a long time. We passed the spot where Lord Frederick Cavendish was killed, and accompanied by a single aide-de-camp, but watched at a distance by two policemen in plain clothes, and met at every street corner by two others, walked to the strawberry gardens, and on our return, it being a lovely Sunday when the Wicklow Mountains were at their best and the hawthorn in bloom, met thousands of Dublin people driving out to the strawberry gardens on cars. In the course of the whole long walk but one man lifted his hat to Spencer, who was universally recognised. At his dinner party on the Sunday evening Spencer told us that a Roman Catholic priest who was present . . . was the only priest in Ireland who would enter his walls, while the Castle was boycotted by every Archbishop and Bishop. On Monday morning . . . I paid a visit to the Mansion House at the request of the Lord Mayor of Dublin, taking by Spencer’s leave the Viceregal carriages there, where they had in his second Viceroyalty not been before. . . .

  In a separate letter Dilke added the comment, directed as much against the whole government’s policy as against the Viceroy: ‘What a life is Spencer’s – cut off from nearly the whole people – good and bad! What sense of duty, what high-mindedness, and what stupidity!’8

  Dilke’s devastating description of the position of the British Governor-Ge
neral in Ireland within a few weeks of the end of five years of Liberal power showed how far that government was from having settled the problem of Ireland, although on the land issue it had made one important step forward. Ireland was nearer to having settled the fate of the government. Of the ten out of sixteen Cabinet members who at that disintegrating time had submitted tentative resignations, over half of the threats were on the Irish issue. Any early successor administration, Conservative or Liberal, looked likely to be dominated by Irish policy. It was also already clear that the issue was a fissiparous one for the Liberal party, although the lines of potential division were confused, Chamberlain (and Dilke) then demanding a greater devolution of power than Gladstone, under Whig pressure, was prepared for the moment to push through.

  THE THIRD REFORM BILL

  DURING THE RUN-UP to the 1883 session when Gladstone was recovering from his insomnia at Cannes, his mind and those of the Radicals were turning towards franchise reform. It had always been part of his strategy that the extension of household suffrage from the towns to the countryside should be the major task for the government in the second half of its life. By 1883 his administration was already three years old, and despite the Septennial Act there was no example between 1832 and 1914 of a parliament lasting for more than six years. However, in Gladstone’s absence, the Cabinet preferred procrastination to the dangers of disruption with the Whigs which this extension of the franchise might involve. The Radicals were compensated with the inclusion of bills in the Queen’s Speech for the reform both of London government and of local government in England generally. The first foundered on the departmental intransigence of Harcourt, who half counted as a Radical, and the second got blocked in its wake.

  Harcourt, then aged fifty-five, was a brilliant academic lawyer and a fierce parliamentary controversialist whose party loyalties were more fixed than his views. His confidence was that of a Whig patrician, his style that of a partisan Liberal bruiser and his temper that of a mixture of the irascible, the boorish and the wittily charming. By the end of his life he had earned (among the Liberal faithful) the sobriquet of ‘the great gladiator’. There were strong elements of Hugh Dalton in him, as well as a touch of Willie Whitelaw’s ability to attract affectionate mockery. He would have been more disliked by his often injured opponents had he not been a natural figure of fun.

  However, in the following year it was his colleagues and not his opponents whom Harcourt succeeded in bruising. The proposed scheme for London local government was not markedly different in its destination from that which was enacted under Salisbury in 1888. It was to set up a unified (although two-tier) local government for that part of the capital which was already solidly urban, in other words the four-million core which, with its twenty-eight metropolitan boroughs, became for three-quarters of a century the area of the London County Council. But the routes were sharply different. The Liberals proposed to do it by extending (and democratizing) the City of London Corporation. The Conservatives eventually did it by leaving the City as a fine anomaly set in aspic and providing for the serious although not the ceremonial representation of London over its head and around its narrow boundaries.

  The key practical difference related to the control of the police. The City controlled its own force through a municipal committee, like any provincial borough. In the rest of the metropolis the constabulary, as remains so today, was directly responsible to the Home Secretary and under no local control. The majority of Gladstone’s colleagues, and particularly those who had interest in or knowledge of local government, regarded it as inconceivable that the contribution of a Liberal government to democracy in London should involve the removal from an expanded City Corporation of any power over its own police force. Harcourt, on the other hand, obsessed as he was with the Fenian threat and fancying himself as a Fouché, was equally resolute and a good deal more vehement against any surrender of Home Office prerogatives. Showing an imperfect grasp of the difference between operational and administrative control, he tried to frighten his colleagues with nightmare scenarios of committees and sub-committees having to be summoned before there could be any response to an explosives threat.

  The result was impasse. A strong even if sometimes risible Home Secretary is difficult to shift on his own ground, and the outcome was the foundering for that session and indeed for the lifetime of the government of the London bill. And the wider local government measure became rather like a train which is blocked, not because of its own failure, but because the one ahead of it on the line has lost its power. During the early stages of these disputes Gladstone was recovering at Cannes, but failed to resolve them on his return. To a large extent he allowed such issues to pass over his head. They were not for him the essence of politics. It was nevertheless a failure of generalship and produced the second unnecessarily barren session. Moveover it left the government well into the fourth year of its life with remarkably little domestic result to show for its efforts.

  This was belatedly but substantially corrected in 1884. Gladstone spent the two middle weeks of September 1883 on a northern-waters cruise in another of Donald Currie’s ships, this time the Pembroke Castle. Currie’s invitation had been for a week around the Hebrides. Once aboard, however, if youth was not exclusively on the prow, pleasure, aided by almost perfect weather, quickly took over at the helm. The party included Tennyson and Mrs Gladstone as well as the GOM, with a middle-aged leavening of Currie himself, Sir Arthur Gordon, who had progressed from ADC in the Ionian Isles to Governor of New Zealand, and Sir William Harcourt, who appropriately for the Home Secretary was present in British waters only, as well as a younger contingent of Mary Gladstone, Hallam Tennyson, Lewis (‘Lulu’) Harcourt and Laura Tennant, Margot Asquith’s short-lived elder sister. Gladstone’s uninhibited ability to enjoy such a jollification, and to infuse others into his own sense of enjoyment, was one of his striking and attractive qualities. As a result the cruise, with Currie’s happy concurrence, extended from the Hebrides to Orkney, Oslo (then Christiania) and Copenhagen. In the Danish capital there were great junketings with the Danish, Russian and Greek sovereigns, as well as the Princess of Wales, who were all assembled there. There was a Danish royal dinner at the palace of Fredensborg and a return luncheon on the ship, after which Tennyson read ‘The Bugle Song’ and ‘The Grandmother’, absent-mindedly beating out his rhythm on the thigh of the Tsarina, whom he mistook (shades of Palmerston?) for a maid of honour.1

  Queen Victoria was not at all pleased when she heard of these proceedings, ostensibly on the ground that Gladstone had omitted to give her prior notice of his stepping on to a foreign shore and meeting her fellow sovereigns, but possibly also on the ground of simple jealousy that they had made so much fuss of him. He brushed off her complaints with a mixture of equanimity and restrained irritation, and, fortified by Tennyson’s acceptance of a peerage, returned to London on 21 September in better spirits for an autumn of legislation preparation than in either of the two previous years.

  Between the end of September and Christmas Gladstone was in London almost as much as at Hawarden and held four or five Cabinets. Perhaps more important, however, was the fact that for once he applied himself with foresight and persuasive skill to the conciliation of Hartington, whose continued presence in the government had become essential to the enactment of a Franchise Bill. And such an enactment was in turn essential to determine whether the 1880 government would or would not stand as an administration with major reform to its credit. The 1884 Reform Bill, when eventually enacted, increased the size of the electorate from three to five million. Absolutely it produced the biggest increase in the numbers entitled to vote of the three nineteenth-century franchise measures, but it was not the biggest proportional increase. Ironically it was the ‘great Reform Bill’ of 1832 which did least from either point of view. In England and Wales that bill added 217,000 to an electorate of 435,000. The 1867 bill, after Disraeli’s committee-stage lurch to democracy, nearly doubled an electorate which had over th
e previous thirty-five years grown to a million. The 1884 bill, in comparison with these increases of just under 50 per cent and just under 90 per cent respectively, produced an overall growth of a little less than 60 per cent. Its effect, however, was qualitative as well as quantitative. It extended the limited town democracy of 1867 to the countryside, which was more of a shock to the remains of English feudalism than anything which had gone before, and the effect was magnified by the bill’s running-mate, a Redistribution of Seats Bill, giving the counties for the first time more seats than the boroughs. The coal miners, who mostly lived in industrially scarred countryside rather than in towns, were also brought within the franchise, thereby opening the way to much the largest group of working men representatives in Parliament.

  Furthermore the effect of the bill on Ireland was more dramatic than its effect on Great Britain. Since 1829 the impact of Catholic emancipation had been deliberately reduced by keeping Ireland on a more restricted franchise than England. When the 1884 reform ended this, it was therefore the redress of more than half a century of discrimination. As a result, like the release of a dam, it had a greater relative effect. As against the overall 60 per cent increase there was in Ireland an addition of 230 per cent to the electorate. Gladstone and his supporters did this with their eyes open and rather nobly. They apprehended that it would mean more than doubling the size of the Parnellite parliamentary party and also the virtual elimination of Liberal MPs (of whom there were thirty-five in 1880) from Ireland. Both of these apprehensions proved justified. The latter consideration was expected to be more than outweighed by Liberal gains in Great Britain (which supposition was never exactly put to the test in neutral circumstances, always an elusive electoral concept). The embracing of equality for Ireland was a good test of the traditional Whig hallmark of accepting the inevitable with generosity and even enthusiasm. It was a pity that the confidence of the Whig rump, as represented by Hartington, was in the 1880s so low that they did so only growlingly. Their predecessors, from Fox to Russell, had put up a better show.