Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Then, almost suddenly, at the end of the month the mood changed. Even the Queen (whether or not influenced by Gladstone’s memorandum) became eager for an accommodation, and somewhat critical of Salisbury’s intransigence. ‘The atmosphere is full of compromise,’ Edward Hamilton wrote on 30 October. Gladstone himself was determined to get his bill, but he became less and less attracted by an upending of the House of Lords. He recoiled from the threat (and still more the reality) of a mass creation of peers such as King William IV had been forced to agree to in the 183–2 struggle, and he disliked equally the idea of a root-and-branch reform to make a more rational second chamber. The Conservatives were also doubtful whether they could hold their forces for a second rejection. The result was some rather fumbling negotiations on the form of a redistribution scheme between Hicks Beach (soon to be leader of the House of Commons and Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Hartington. They were fumbling because it was never clear to what extent Hicks Beach spoke with Salisbury’s authority and because Hartington (and maybe Beach too) had a far from perfect understanding of the intricacies of redistribution.

  The relevant figure who did have such an understanding was the President of the Local Government Board, Charles Dilke. It was his finest hour. With ambitious forethought he had begun working on a scheme in early July. He brought its heads before the Cabinet on 9 August and got a general blessing subject to the recess supervision of a Cabinet committee of six, of which he was appointed chairman. With typical but not ill-founded Dilke arrogance he then commented: ‘I soon got rid of the committee and went on by myself with Lambert.’ (Sir John Lambert had been an authoritative permanent secretary of the Local Government Board until he retired in 1882; Dilke brought him back for this special service.) As a result he was able to send Gladstone a detailed plan on 20 September. This was less radical in several respects than Dilke would have liked. He felt he had to pay regard to Gladstone’s instinctive conservatism on the one hand and on the other to Hartington’s concern for Whig electoral interests (which broadly meant that Whigs should not be overwhelmed by Radicals in the choice of Liberal candidates).

  On the first ground he did not dare to touch university representation or other forms of plural voting. On the second ground two-member constituencies (a great Whig attachment) were to be maintained in the counties, except for Yorkshire and Lancashire which were curiously regarded as urban throughout. The other counties were to be divided for the first time. Fifty-six boroughs of under 10,000 were to lose their separate representation, and thirty of under 40,000 their second member. The seats made available by this culling of the remaining semi-rotten boroughs were to be distributed partly to London (which was advanced from twenty-two to fifty-five seats), partly to the under-represented industrial boroughs, and partly to the counties, which for the first time were to exceed the strength of the borough representation. Ireland, Scotland and Wales were to continue to be somewhat over-represented, but within that over-representation were to have a pattern of seats roughly the same as in England.

  With his scheme on the table and a mastery of the subject in his head, Dilke was dominant, both within the government and with the Tories in the negotiations of the autumn. ‘Chamberlain and I and Mr Gladstone were the only three who understood the subject, so that the others were unable to fight except in the form known as swearing at large,’12 he wrote in September. He was for once modest in listing Gladstone and Chamberlain, both of whose knowledge was sketchy, as equal experts with himself. And he had another fortuitous bonus which they did not at the time share, which was that he had established a good relationship with Salisbury, who was always a mixture of sour and sweet, through membership of the star-studded Royal Commission on the Housing of the Working Classes (it included the Prince of Wales and Cardinal Manning as well as Salisbury), over which Dilke as the departmental minister surprisingly presided.

  The three key meetings between government and opposition were in late November, by which time the House of Commons had re-passed the franchise bill and the House of Lords had acknowledged the new atmosphere by letting it through on second reading, although retaining the power to maul it at later stages if the talks went wrong. They did not. Although the negotiating cast changed somewhat from meeting to meeting, the main business was done by a quintet of Gladstone, Hartington and Dilke on the government side and Salisbury and Northcote from the opposition. There were a number of modifications to Dilke’s September scheme. Towns up to 15,000 (rather than 10,000) were merged into their counties; the Tories at one stage, with a Disraelian swoop, proposed going to 25,000.

  Furthermore the counties and the big towns were all divided into single-member districts. This was the real gain for the Tories. It laid the foundation of ‘villa Conservatism’ and the safe Tory seats of the Home Counties and the prosperous suburbs in and around the big provincial cities. On this basis, subject to a few loose ends which he and Dilke subsequently tied up, Salisbury was willing to settle and carried Northcote along with him. There were at least compensating benefits, taking the two bills together, for Gladstone and Dilke. Hartington’s position was less happy, for the effective end of the two-member constituency meant the end also of the habit of running a Whig and a Radical in double harness. The Whig interest, which was thought to be dependent upon this tradition (for if a choice had to be made the Radical was likely to be preferred by the selection committee) was only lightly compensated by a last-minute arrangement for about twenty boroughs outside London. If they had previously possessed and were to retain two members, they were allowed to remain as undivided constituencies. However, Hartington was in no position to stand out. Having urged the linkage of redistribution with franchise extension, and representing the forces of mild and aristocratic Liberalism, it would have been quite ridiculous for him to have opposed agreement and insisted on continuing the struggle against the peers. He may have been out-manoeuvred, and the perforation along which the 1886 tear was to occur may have been given a few more holes, but he had no option.

  Gladstone on the other hand was delighted by the outcome, which made up for some of the vicissitudes, deserved and undeserved, which constantly beset that government. Mary Gladstone recorded that after the final meeting of the quintet on 27 November he was ‘splitting and chuckling’. His pleasure was at the early and suddenly secure prospect of getting the franchise bill on to the statute book. He never took particular pride in the seats bill, regarding it as little more than a key to unlock the door to franchise enlargement. It was nonetheless itself a major measure and as near to a final settlement as is ever possible amid the impermanence of politics. It decisively redrew the electoral map of Britain. There was no further redistribution (or pressure for it) until 1918, and even with the changes of that year and the subsequent and more frequent ones which started in 1950, today’s constituency pattern is recognizably based on that of 1884–5, and on no earlier arrangement. The modern single-member county constituency and the modern divided borough are both creations of Dilke under Gladstone.

  The autumn session was wound up on 6 December, with the franchise bill on the statute book, although not to come into operation until redistribution was through, and the seats bill past its House of Commons second reading. ‘Mr G. went off to Hawarden with Herbert [Gladstone],’ Hamilton wrote. ‘He never quitted London in greater personal triumph. No one could have achieved what he has done, and at the same time kept his party completely in hand.’13

  MURDERER OF GORDON?

  THE IMPERIAL AND FOREIGN policy of the government of 1880, the latter being in those days almost a subsidiary of the former, never achieved any moment of substantial triumph remotely comparable with the home policy success described at the end of the last chapter. In a sense this was in accordance with deserts for that government never achieved an external policy based on any firm ground which brought together principle and practice. Gladstone had both the unconventional vision to see that the British Empire was already over-extended in relation to the metropol
itan country’s economic strength and the fastidiousness to dislike the tinsel of jingoistic adventures. But he also had a sense of British dignity, perhaps even a subconscious one of the superiority of white Anglo-Saxon men, although his vast writings and innumerable speeches are, for the period, remarkably free of any racist expressions. More oppressively he had the Queen, who believed that she had a special position in matters touching her generals and her proconsuls, as well as half of his own Cabinet and party, and the whole of the opposition in favour of a forward expansionist policy. The almost inevitable result was a mishmash of an imperial policy, withdrawing from the Transvaal, bombarding Alexandria, taking over Egypt, sending out Gordon, taking terrible flak for his insubordinate death and for the wise refusal to avenge it, getting very near to war over the Pendjeh affair in 1885, when the Russians defeated an Afghan force and appeared to threaten the North-west Frontier of India.

  Sometimes Gladstone would bring off a minor coup, as when in the first autumn of the government he got the Turks to cede without hostilities the barren little port of Dulcigno to the Montenegrins – always one of his favourite peoples. (Granville announced the news by dancing with joy around Gladstone’s room; the Prime Minister received it at once more portentously and more prosaically. ‘God Almighty be praised,’ he said. ‘I shall go to Hawarden by the 2.45 train.’1) Equally, at the very end of the government, the conclusion without war of the Pendjeh incident had the spin-off effect of diverting attention and troops from Egypt to Afghanistan and thus turned even the mind of the Queen away from a punitive expedition – in theory limited to avenging Gordon but in practice only too likely to end up with the annexation of the whole of Sudan.

  More frequently, however, Gladstone was ducking and weaving to try to preserve the standards of mid-Victorian restraint in the much more imperialist climate of the 1880s. No one became more extreme a jingo than the Queen herself, so that the Prime Minister’s view of April 1885 that her judgement had become ‘quite worthless’ would not have been seriously dissented from by her Foreign Secretary Granville, or her Colonial Secretary Derby (who admittedly was a pretty useless minister himself), or her War Secretary Hartington, or even her own private secretary Ponsonby. Nevertheless Gladstone was constantly compromising between imperialist pressures and his own instincts, which were a mixture of Little Englander caution and Concert of Europe idealism. Neither pointed to the expansion of territory or colonial wars, which were nonetheless a frequent feature of the life of that government. They were mostly backed into without enthusiasm. This reluctance was a good recipe for getting the worst of both worlds, and by no stretch of the imagination could foreign and colonial policy in 1880–5 be called a resounding success. It consumed a lot of the Prime Minister’s time, but the highest claim that could be made for it was that, in a somewhat hand-to-mouth way, worse excesses were avoided.

  From the beginning a government elected on a largely anti-imperialist platform found itself uncomfortably squelching in too many imperial quagmires. Within the first two years British forces were engaged in battle at either end of Africa and in central Asia. In 1880 there was renewed Afghan trouble, with the defeat of General Burrows at Maiwand followed by the victory of General Roberts after a brilliant 300-mile march to Kandahar. In 1881, General Colley was defeated and killed by the Boers at Majuba Hill. Neither of these campaigns struck at the heart of British power. But they were equally far from being recreational shooting parties. Burrows, for instance, lost nearly a thousand men killed at Maiwand, a casualty rate which, a century later, would have been regarded as unacceptable in either the Falklands or the Gulf wars. And the proportion of defeats made it more difficult to disengage without humiliation, although this was eventually achieved in the Transvaal (for a decade) and Afghanistan.

  In 1882 there was the more serious affair of the bombardment of Alexandria, followed by the victory of Wolseley at Tel-el-Kebir and the occupation of Egypt. This embroilment led on through a chapter of mistakes and accidents to the despatch and death in Khartoum of General Gordon, which dégringolade overshadowed the last year of the government and gravely weakened Gladstone. Egypt at the beginning of the 1880s was still nominally a Turkish province of which the strategic importance had been much increased by the completion of the French-inspired and French-financed Suez Canal in 1869. This enterprise, on top of the role which France had played through the early campaigns of Napoleon and the cryptology of Champollion in opening Egypt to the modern world, made French influence powerful in Cairo. Their predominance was somewhat redressed by Disraeli’s 1875 raid on the shares of the Suez Canal Company. This coup had, however, been strongly opposed by Gladstone, who regarded it as a showy and dangerous example of forward diplomacy, carrying in its train over-extended future entanglement. Such fears proved abundantly true, with the main burden of the over-extension falling upon Gladstone himself, who accepted it with a curious mixture of reluctance and bravado.

  Egypt’s impact on Europe stemmed not only from its permanent position as the hinge of Africa and Asia fortified by its new function as the conduit to India and beyond. Nor even was the drawing power of an ancient civilization with unique surviving artefacts under a benign winter climate the only or even the main supporting factor. There was a more material one, which was the enormous size of the Egyptian national debt and the wide distribution of its bonds, partly through an indirect formula, among the propertied classes of Vienna, Paris and London and a habit of active trading in the bonds on the bourses of Europe. The size of the debt is indicated by interest upon it consuming two-thirds of the total revenues of Egypt in 1880. Its indirectness arose from much of it being Turkish government stock, issued on behalf of Egypt and underpinned by a so-called annual Egyptian Tribute to Constantinople designed to cover the servicing. Throughout Europe many prosperous investors kept moderate holdings in their portfolios. Gladstone, however, allowed his investment policy to be quite remarkably concentrated upon them. The details of his holdings, together with an attempt at an appraisal of their significance, will be given later.

  Inevitably the burden of this huge debt resulted in hesitations in Egyptian government payments and resentment in Egyptian popular opinion. Ismail Pasha, the effectively independent (of Constantinople) Khedive was extravagant and financially ill organized. In 1879 the Anglo-French (so called) Dual Control deposed him in favour of his son Tewfik Pasha, who was an appropriate precursor of King Farouk. And to balance him there arose in 1881 an equally appropriate precursor of Gamal Abdel Nasser. Arabi was a colonel and an indigenous Egyptian, not a Turk or a Circassian or an indeterminate Levantine like most of those who surrounded the Khedive. ‘Egypt for the Egyptians’ was the core of his message and the main vehicle for its achievement was to be a fourfold increase in the size of the Egyptian regular army, which was moreover to be paid on time, an experience which had hitherto eluded it – thus setting it at variance with the more promptly serviced bondholders. It was a classic colonels’ revolt, half nationalist, half anti-privilege, except for that of the army. Arabi carried out a sort of half-coup in the autumn of 1881, not deposing the Khedive, but forcing him to dismiss his ministers and rendering him semi-impotent.

  Gladstone, partly under the influence of the notable Arabist and great coureur Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, was at first well disposed towards Arabi, whom he was prepared to see as a latter-day Garibaldi. But in the winter and spring of 1882 he swung away from Blunt112 to the more conventional advice of the two British consuls on the spot, Malet and Colvin. (The quintessential proconsular figure, Evelyn Baring, later Cromer, was not in Egypt at the time; he had been there from 1877 to 1879 as debt controller, but was in Calcutta as Finance Minister of the Viceroy’s Council before returning to Cairo in 1883 and remaining there until 1907 as the effective ruler of the country.) Partly under their influence Gladstone delivered to the House of Commons in mid-June a most conservative statement of the aims of British policy: ‘they are well known to consist in the general maintenance of all established rig
hts in Egypt, whether they be those of the Sultan, those of the Khedive, those of the people of Egypt, or those of the foreign bondholders.’2 That was three days after Arabi-inspired anti-foreign riots had broken out in Alexandria and had led to the death of fifty and the injuring of another sixty, including the British consul. Arabi then began to fortify the harbour at Alexandria, which activity, it was a little implausibly claimed, threatened the safety of the British fleet which was lying offshore. What it more evidently threatened was the European view of Alexandria as a port open to all nations, a gateway which by its architecture and its ethnic mix proclaimed Egypt’s status as the eastern outpost of the West rather than as the leader of the Arab world.

  When Gladstone reluctantly became convinced that in the interests of ‘order’ some action against Arabi was necessary his natural preference was for a Concert of Europe intervention, and an ineffective conference was called at Constantinople to explore this possibility. It failed, mainly because Bismarck, who was the pivotal statesman, was indifferent. Let the British and the French do what they judged necessary was his shoulder-shrugging view, and, if they got into a weakening entanglement, so much the better. But the French, only twelve years after the defeats of Sedan and Metz and obsessed with Germany, were cautious, particularly as the more robust Gambetta government had fallen at the end of 1881. The French fleet, which had also been anchored off Alexandria, simply steamed away. So it was the British on their own or nothing. Gladstone was still reluctant to take military action – not surprisingly in view of his past attitude to Egypt and to Disraeli’s adventures in general. But he was at variance with the majority of his colleagues, was preoccupied with Ireland, and was additionally worn down by the burdens of the Exchequer. In the Cabinet he was isolated except for Bright and Harcourt. The line of Bright, who eventually resigned on the issue, was close to absolute pacifism, which was never Gladstone’s position. Harcourt was far too quarrelsome to be a pacifist, but worked off his aggressiveness by denouncing imperial illusions. Per contra all the ‘imperial’ ministers, the Secretaries of State for India, Colonies, War, Foreign Affairs, and the First Lord of the Admiralty, were firm for action. Chamberlain, much influenced by Dilke’s ‘Greater Britain’ realpolitik, was showing his first signs of jingoism. So the line-up was overwhelming, and Gladstone’s ability to resist was weakened by his tiredness. For 1 July, after a continuous sitting on the Irish Crimes Bill from the Friday afternoon to 8.00 on the Saturday evening, he wrote: ‘My share of the sitting I take at nineteen hours. Anxious Cabinet on Egypt behind the [Speaker’s] Chair 4–5.’3 And four days later: ‘My brain is very weary.’4