Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Three hundred and seventy-four days later Gordon was killed at Khartoum, where he had been under siege for 320 of them. A relief expedition under Wolseley reached the city two days later. The field for recrimination could hardly have been more wide open. Gordon ought not to have been in Khartoum at all. He was sent to advise on the evacuation of the Sudan, not to occupy it. Furthermore, his communications from there were of a highly erratic nature. Dilke, who was one of those responsible for his employment and on Gordon’s side to the extent of believing that an early expedition ought to be sent for his rescue, wrote in March: ‘Twelve telegrams from Gordon of the most extraordinary nature. . . . We [are] obviously dealing with a wild man under the influence of that climate of Central Africa which acts even upon the sanest men like strong drink.’14 And he added in September: ‘A telegram from Gordon which shows he’s quite mad.’15 The ludicrousness of the whole enterprise was well illustrated by the fact that within eight weeks of the despatch of a specially chosen agent of evacuation the Cabinet was racked by whether or not to send a major force to extricate him and then to perform the role which he had wilfully failed to do.

  Over this decision ministers hesitated long enough to ensure the worst of both worlds. Gladstone, supported by Granville and about half the Cabinet, thought that once Gordon had broken his orders he should be left to his fate. Hartington was strong, or at least stubborn, the other way. Dilke and Chamberlain had a position of their own, which was in favour of a small, quick expedition which would get Gordon out and the whole British presence with him. Hartington by contrast wanted a major offensive leading to a prolonged occupation, and Dilke took the view that had Hartington (and Northbrook) not held out for this Gordon might well have been saved.

  The issue consumed much of the government’s time and energies throughout that franchise bill summer of 1884. In July it provoked yet another of Hartington’s threatened resignations and on 2 August Gladstone wrote: ‘This day for the first time in my recollection there were three crises for us all running high tide at once: Egypt [debt problems], Gordon & franchise.’16

  The position was complicated in two other ways. First, Gordon would not accept that he needed a rescue expedition. He regarded it as a derogation from his role as a Christian imperialist who could subdue primitive races by a mixture of bravery and empathy. When, on 9 September, Wolseley arrived in Cairo to lead the so-called Gordon Relief Expedition, Gordon was furious at its title. ‘I altogether decline the imputation that the projected expedition has come to relieve me. It has come to save our national honour in extricating the garrisons. As for myself I could make good my retreat at any moment. . . . I am not the rescued lamb, and I will not be.’17 Second, one of Gladstone’s most dangerous blind spots was that he could not comprehend the force of Gordon’s appeal to the British public and hence his capacity to damage the government. Gladstone was the least pedestrian of Prime Ministers. He could ignite an audience and could endow a cause with an enthusiasm which passed well beyond rationalism. But he did not have the imagination to see how others might do this too, and for ends of which he disapproved. Gordon quickly became for him an ill-disciplined and rather junior general, whose showy and unsubtle Christianity did not compensate for his insubordination.

  The news of Gordon’s death reached England early on 5 February 1885. Edward Hamilton, awakened at 2.30 in the morning by Brett, Hartington’s secretary, who later as Lord Esher was the quintessential Edwardian courtier with a finger in many pies, reacted starkly by saying that it was ‘the blackest day since the horrible Phoenix Park murders’.18 Gladstone was staying with the Duke of Devonshire at Holker in North Lancashire, one of the Duke’s subsidiary residences, which looked in one direction to the fells of the Lake District and in the other across the sands of Morecambe Bay. Whether a mainline Cavendish possession or diverted to a cadet branch as it has been for the past 100 years, Holker has long been said to exercise a peculiar charm of view and ambience. It is doubtful, however, if the charm was strong enough to keep high the spirits of either Gladstone or Hartington, who was also there and whose responsibility (but not his exposure) was at least as great as that of Gladstone, when they received the news eight hours after Hamilton.

  They left at once for London, and at Carnforth Junction another and well-known scene in the drama was played out. Gladstone was there handed by the stationmaster a telegram which the Queen had sent without use of the habitual cipher. Its terms were more explosive than grammatical: ‘These news from Khartoum are frightful and to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too fearful.’19 Low though his royal expectations had become, Gladstone was not pleased by this signal and semi-public mark of disfavour. Dilke, cynical but well informed, said that the Prime Minister’s immediate reaction was to enquire what were the politics of the Carnforth stationmaster and what therefore was the probability of the contents of the telegram leaking. Whatever the answer, the question was irrelevant, for there were more than enough other hands through whom the telegram would necessarily have passed to make certain, as was no doubt the royal intention, its position in the public domain.

  Nevertheless Gladstone when he arrived in Downing Street at 8.15 was, according to Hamilton, ‘calm and collected. He always rises to great occasions; and the greater is the crisis, the more coolly does he keep his head.’20 That same evening – Gladstone’s lack of procrastination in replying to difficult communications was consistently remarkable – he wrote to the Queen with frigid dignity:

  Mr Gladstone has had the honour this day to receive Your Majesty’s Telegram en clair, relating to the deplorable intelligence received this day from Lord Wolseley, and stating that it is too fearful to consider that the fall of Khartoum might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action.

  Mr Gladstone does not presume to estimate the means of judgement possessed by Your Majesty, but so far as his information and recollection at the moment go, he is not altogether able to follow the conclusion which Your Majesty has been pleased thus to announce.

  Mr Gladstone is under the impression that Lord Wolseley’s force might have been sufficiently advanced to save Khartoum had not a large portion of it been delayed by a circuitous route along the river, upon the express application of General Gordon. . . .21

  That day was a Thursday. On the following Tuesday Gladstone dined with Lord and Lady Dalhousie, a respectable if Liberal couple, and then went with them to the Criterion Theatre to see a contemporary success called The Candidate. Gladstone, as was his way and his strength, recorded the event calmly, merely noting that the play was ‘capitally acted’. Hamilton reproved himself bitterly for having allowed Gladstone to go. The occasion was regarded by Tory opinion as the final brick in his reputation as the heartless murderer of Gordon. Unfortunately Gladstone stooped to giving a bad excuse. It was not certain, he said, that Gordon was dead; he might be a prisoner. This incident, in itself unimportant, although insensitive, did a lot of harm. It more than outweighed any benefit which the government derived from Rosebery’s quixotic decision, without for once making any difficulties, to become the First Commissioner of Works (in the Cabinet) on 8 February.

  After the Gordon debacle the second Gladstone government was always a holed hull. It was mainly a question of how long it could keep afloat, with a subsidiary one of how long its chief wanted it to do so. In the train from Carnforth he wrote with resignation and almost with relief: ‘The circumstances are sad and trying: it is one of the least points about them, that they may put an end to this Govt.’22 And two weeks later Hamilton recorded:

  Mr. G. retains his equanimity marvellously. It is due no doubt mainly to having a clear conscience; but in part to a faint hope that he may be released from the cares of office. A vote of censure is to be moved; and he evidently cannot help secretly cherishing a hope that it may be carried. He even admits that a change of government might be best for the country. . . .23

  Yet running counter
to this was Gladstone’s view that a government should not scuttle, particularly in response to unjust charges. When the vote of censure came on a few days later he at least made a far better case than Northcote. But the government’s majority fell to fourteen, compared with a margin of forty-four on a similar motion nine months before.

  Most of the Cabinet were in favour of resignation on this vote. But Gladstone decided to rally them. His hope of a favourable plateau for his own retirement following the deal with Salisbury on the seats bill had been destroyed. But he did not wish to go out in the depths of the grand canyon into which Gordon had plunged him. So he kept the government going for nearly another four months. But it no longer had either external strength or even such internal cohesion as it had hitherto possessed. Its only achievements during this period were to make progress with the seats bill and to divert the atavistic desire for avenging Gordon by obfuscating the Mahdi and his followers by the more important Pendjeh conflict with the Russians in Afghanistan, which was itself settled without war, so that two conflicts were effectively avoided.

  Within the government itself, however, conditions quickly became something between a farce and a shambles. By mid-May Hamilton calculated that at least ten of the sixteen ministers in the Cabinet had hinted at or threatened or in several cases actually proffered resignations. Dilke and Chamberlain, supported by Shaw-Lefevre and probably by Trevelyan too, were threatening to go as a result of the blocking by all the peers in the Cabinet, except for Granville, of a Chamberlain scheme for Irish local government reform embracing a central board, which was supported by all the commoners, including the Prime Minister, except for Hartington. Hartington himself as usual was ready with several reasons why he ought to leave the government, and Rosebery, even with only three months’ membership behind him, was never behindhand in finding reasons for escaping office.

  Childers, the Chancellor, had also threatened resignation by walking out of the room after he was blocked first on his proposal to increase the beer duty, and again when he proposed to use the wine duty as a half-alternative. Childers was persuaded to come back, but not for long. It was on the beer-duty issue that, early on the morning of 9 June, the government was defeated, unexpectedly, by 264 to 252. It was an early result of tentative moves towards an alliance between Parnell and the Conservatives. Thirty-nine members of the Irish party voted against the government. So did six Liberals, and another seventy of them, mostly Radicals, abstained. Thus did the great majority of 1880 run into the sand. Ten hours later there was no dispute in the Cabinet that this time resignation was both inevitable and desirable. Gladstone took it all calmly. ‘A quiet evening,’ he concluded that day’s diary entry. ‘Worked on books and papers.’24

  The Queen was at Balmoral and showed as little initial disposal to come south (she eventually arrived on 17 June) as Gladstone did to travel to Aberdeenshire. On the 13th, however, she wrote and offered him an earldom (as opposed to the unspecified peerage of 1874) and did so in markedly gracious terms. He declined at once, also in generous terms. Such future small services as he could render would be better done from the Commons. The Queen was disappointed. By accepting the earldom Gladstone would of course have done her much more of a favour than he would have done himself. But they had both behaved with high propriety, and his farewell visit to Windsor on the 24th also passed off well. ‘Audience of H. M.,’ he recorded, ‘& kissed hands in farewell after half an hour of kindly conversation. . . . Got to the 3pm service at St George’s. . . .’25

  Salisbury began the first and shortest of his three governments that same day, and Gladstone removed himself from 10 Downing Street but only a few yards across Whitehall to 1 Richmond Terrace, a house temporarily provided by Stuart Rendel, then MP for Montgomeryshire and for the next decade and in several locations a most generous host to Gladstone.114 At this stage, however, Gladstone did not for long trouble him. He was much away from London during the summer, he spent nearly the whole of the autumn at Hawarden, and he was back in office and 10 Downing Street within eight months.

  PART FIVE

  IRELAND DOMINATES AND AGE WITHERS

  1885–1898

  SLOW ROAD TO DAMASCUS

  THE MOOD IN WHICH Gladstone left office in 1885, at the age of 75, was paradoxically different from that in which he had done so in 1874, when he was more than eleven years younger. On the former occasion he had presided over a notably successful administration except for its declining final phase (but which government is free of such a dying fall?). Yet he was resentful, not so much of his loss of office as of his rejection by the electorate. He was then still short, even by Victorian standards, of being an old man. Yet his talk was of ‘winding out the coil’ of his life and of seeking ‘an interval between parliamentary and the grave’ in which to devote himself to theological studies, to which he was ill suited.

  By 1885 he had become a still more dominating national figure, and a still more famous international one, but his second government, staggering as has been seen from Bradlaugh to Gordon, was at best a series of improvisations against disaster. Yet at the end of it he was neither resentful nor determinedly seeking a nunc dimittis. He no longer believed that he might serve his God and his age better by being a second-rate theologian than a first-rate politician. In a sense he genuinely wanted retirement, but he wanted it with honour, and he had an almost infinite capacity to persuade himself that he was more likely to find this around the next corner than where he currently was. His post-resignation attitude was perhaps best summed up by a letter which he wrote to his only surviving brother, Sir Thomas Gladstone, on 19 June 1885 (an odd and Tory recipient of such a confidence after many decades of coolness): ‘My profound desire is retirement, and nothing has prevented or will prevent my giving effect to that desire, unless there should appear to be something in which there may be a prospect of my doing what could not be as well done without me.’1 The weight, of course, was contained in the second half of the sentence, expressing his willingness to be prised away from withdrawal by some high purpose.

  Such a cause – in the shape of Irish Home Rule – was easily forthcoming in 1885, although Gladstone was for a few months hesitant about whether he wished to embrace it, or indeed whether his doing so was necessary by the strict criterion which he had laid down in his letter to his brother. Up to and over the general election of that November (the very satisfactory Midlothian poll was on the 28th, and the national result – 333 Liberals, 251 Conservatives and 86 Parnellites – was also clear by then), he gave priority to the holding together of his party, which he rightly saw as in direct conflict with providing an Irish solution, and also cherished the hope that the Conservatives might grasp the Home Rule nettle. As a result he gave little guidance to the Liberal party or the nation over that summer and autumn, and little encouragement to Parnell to prepare for a Liberal alliance. His mind was nonetheless deep into Ireland, or, it would perhaps be more accurate to say, into the acquiring of factual and academic knowledge about that country. But he spoke little. This was at least partly because his voice was giving him serious trouble. He was diagnosed as suffering from chronic laryngeal catarrh, ‘a condition common enough’, in Matthew’s words, ‘amongst elderly actors’,2 and had to undergo twenty-one daily and unpleasant treatments between 17 July and 8 August. How effective they were is not clear, although they at least staved off the real danger of his becoming a tone-deaf Mozart or a castrated Casanova. In the November Midlothian campaign he was able to make six major speeches to large audiences, although the faithful Hamilton found them rather hollow shells compared with the great performances to which he had been used, with Gladstone undergoing the almost unheard-of experience of being upstaged by Rosebery, to whom Hamilton referred as ‘being nearly as much the uncrowned King of Scotland as Parnell is the uncrowned King of Ireland’.3

  Despite this potentially crippling vicissitude Gladstone in 1885 showed little of his 1874 desire to have done with politics. He stayed in or about London for the whole of J
uly and early August and did not go to Hawarden until nearly three months after his resignation. Most of his ‘about London’ visits that summer were either to Dollis Hill, the Aberdeen villa in what is now NW2, or to Combe Wood, a Wolverton house in an almost equally suburban location on the Wimbledon Common side of Kingston. He also spent a weekend at Keble College, Oxford, with his Lyttelton niece and her Warden husband, the future Bishop of Rochester, next Southwark, and finally Winchester, and at Waddesdon, the then three-year-old Rothschild extravaganza beyond Aylesbury which inspired him to the lapidary comment: ‘a remarkable construction, no commonplace [a] host’.4

  On 8 August he left for a Norwegian cruise of no less than three and a half weeks as the guest of Sir Thomas Brassey, son of a major railway contractor and himself a junior minister in the 1880 government, who subsequently accumulated honours as a fly-paper accumulates flies. He was made a baron by Gladstone in 1886 and an earl by Asquith in 1911. Campbell-Bannerman, not to be left out, made him a GCB in 1906 and Oxford an honorary DCL in the year of his earldom. In 1885 he contributed the yacht, Sunbeam (in which, he eccentrically informed Who’s Who readers, he had travelled 400,000 knots before giving it to the government of India as a hospital ship in 1916), and Gladstone contributed the company. They included his wife, his daughter Mary, his doctor, the man he was soon to appoint his Chief Whip (Arnold Morley), George Leveson Gower, who had been one of his private secretaries from 1880 and who, amazingly, managed to live until 1951, and ‘Lulu’ Harcourt, the engaging twenty-three-year-old son of ‘the great [but sometimes curmudgeonly] gladiator’, who met a sticky end in 1922. Lady Brassey and the wife of an admiral were also allowed aboard.