Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Gladstone always liked the look (even if not the motion) of a rugged Atlantic-influenced sea, whether it was at Penmaenmawr or Brighton or Biarritz; the Mediterranean by contrast, in spite of his enthusiasm for the lands of Italy and of Greece, made little appeal to him until his ninth decade. That August he was prostrate during the two passages across the North Sea, but highly content during the long sojourn in Norwegian coastal waters. Despite frequent treatments by Sir Andrew Clark, he was doubtful whether the ‘soft air’ was doing his throat much good but he pronounced that his general health was excellent. One day he walked eighteen miles on very rough ground. On another he started to learn Norwegian, which at the age of nearly seventy-six perhaps pointed more to surplus energy than to a careful husbanding of time. He was delighted with his high recognition factor around the fjords and the warmth of the reception.

  On 1 September he disembarked at Fort George at the mouth of Inverness Firth and went to Fasque, where he had not been for more than ten years, for a week’s visit and the celebration of his brother’s golden wedding. Once back at Hawarden, he stayed there, apart from a twenty-four-hour medical visit to London, until he went to Edinburgh (Dalmeny) on 9 November for nearly three weeks of electioneering. Most there thought (wrongly) that it was to be his last campaign, but he did not skimp it. Then he had another uninterrupted six weeks at Hawarden, going to London only on the day the new Parliament met (11 January 1886) for the re-election of the Speaker.

  During this six weeks, which was the key period for the resolution of his mind on Ireland, he had half a dozen political visitors to Hawarden. Lord Richard Grosvenor, still his Chief Whip, came on 30 November and stayed a couple of nights. On one of the two Gladstone spoke for him in his Flintshire election, where polling day was a week later than in Midlothian. On the other he had a long conversation with him ‘on men and things’. Gladstone at this stage could not be faulted on the trouble he took with his Whip. He had written to him frequently during his Norwegian cruise and throughout the autumn. And Grosvenor again came to Hawarden for the inside of a day on 21 December. But it was unavailing. The Whig and family pressure on Grosvenor was too strong. After this second visit Gladstone wrote: ‘Three hours conversation friendly but with differences.’5 Grosvenor became what J. L. Hammond described as ‘a bitter Liberal Unionist’ in 1886.

  The other political visitors were more loyal or the exchanges with them more fruitful. Granville was there on 5–6 December and Gladstone noted with satisfaction that ‘we are already in promising harmony’. Granville then went as an envoy to Chatsworth, where he found Spencer as well as Hartington, but decided not to report back in person to Hawarden as this ‘would give rise to some foolish talk’.6 Granville remained wholly loyal to Gladstone until his death six years later, but his powers, always supple rather than rugged, were visibly weakening by this time.

  Spencer was more of an independent force and one with a deep knowledge of Ireland. He arrived at Hawarden on 8 December and lived up to Granville’s encouraging anticipatory report from Chatsworth: ‘You will find Spencer as usual very pleasant to discuss with.’7 Rosebery was there for the first night of Spencer’s visit, and might easily have imported a more querulous note into the discussions. Unlike Spencer, who was to be a dedicated and vital ally for Gladstone on this subject, he was never a steady enthusiast for Home Rule. Nor was he a man to miss many opportunities to make difficulty. But on this occasion he was amenable. Gladstone wrote back to Granville on 9 December: ‘I think my conversations with Rosebery and Spencer have also been satisfactory. What I expect is a healthful slow fermentation of many minds, working towards the final product.’8

  The final two political visitors were less mainstream. They were Lord Wolverton, Gladstone’s former Chief Whip and ever amenable host and companion from Cannes to Kingston-upon-Thames, and Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, his Christ Church contemporary (and the only one of his early friends who lasted the distance with him, being born in the year of Gladstone’s birth and dying in the year of his death). Acland in 1885 was a Privy Councillor and still a West Country MP, although he had never been a seeker after office. He was more independent than Wolverton, but in the last resort neither of them was likely to gainsay Gladstone.

  A curious clerical go-between, Malcolm MacColl, whom Gladstone had made a canon of Ripon in 1884, was also at Hawarden for the night of 13 December, and with Lord Salisbury by the evening of the next day. For communication with his successor as Prime Minister Gladstone also used a more eminent emissary. On the 15th he went to Eaton Hall, the Westminster house eight or ten miles from Hawarden, for a ‘beautiful morning service’ and a luncheon. Arthur Balfour, who had so delighted him in the early 1870s and so offended him in 1882, currently President of the Local Government Board (outside the Cabinet but with the special access which came from being Salisbury’s nephew), was staying there, and Gladstone took the opportunity to pour out to him a political message with the expectation that ‘he will probably repeat it in London’.9 To make sure that he did so, Gladstone followed up his words with a letter, but after a five-day interval, curiously long in view both of the importance of the issue and of Gladstone’s normal promptness in correspondence. Although it was encased in a typical Gladstonian penumbra of opaqueness its meaning was nonetheless clear enough:

  On reflection I think that what I said to you in our conversation at Eaton may have amounted to the conveyance of a hope that the Government would take a strong and early decision on the Irish question. For I spoke of the stir in men’s minds, & of the urgency of the matter, to both of which every day’s post brings me new testimony.

  This being so, I wish, under the very peculiar circumstances of the case, to go a step further and say that I think it will be a public calamity if this great subject should fall into the lines of party conflict.

  I feel sure the question can only be dealt with by a Government, & I desire specially on grounds of public policy that it should be dealt with by the present Government. If therefore they bring in a proposal for settling the whole question of the future Government of Ireland my desire will be, reserving of course necessary freedom, to treat it in the same spirit in which I have endeavoured to proceed with respect to Afghanistan & with respect to the Balkan peninsula. You are at liberty if you think it desirable to mention this to Lord Salisbury. . . . I am writing however for myself and without consultation.10

  To some extent the verbal overture, and still more the letter, were counter-productive. Gladstone’s message was received with almost complete cynicism by the Tory leaders. The virulence of party hatreds at the time was such that they were incapable of believing him to be activated by any motive other than that of greed for office. To this they saw him as now adding the sin of a nauseating hypocrisy. They were wrong, and the narrowness of their spirit gave them a heavy responsibility for throwing away an unusual opportunity for constructive statesmanship.

  A tentative Irish flirtation with the Conservatives had begun in the late spring of 1885, and its first fruits had been seen in the Nationalist votes against Childers’s budget, which had played a significant part in the defeat and consequent resignation of the government. Then a few weeks into the life of the Salisbury government Parnell had a secret and melodramatic meeting in a dust-sheeted Mayfair house with Carnarvon, the new Irish Viceroy. For the four or five months after that meeting, which period spanned the November general election, Parnell thought that he had at least as good a chance of getting Home Rule from the Tories as from the Liberal party. And Gladstone assisted him in this belief, even accepting the consequence of the diversion to the Conservatives of the Irish vote in the English towns. There was no period at which Gladstone held Parnell more rigidly at arm’s length. When the Irish leader applied to Gladstone in October for guidance on the development of his thought he got a distinct brush-off, delivered through Mrs O’Shea, who in this interchange had replaced her husband as go-between. Gladstone resolutely refused to enter into any competition with the Conservativ
es on the question of how far he would go in the direction of self-rule. His advice to Parnell was to seek a settlement with the party actually in office, that is the Conservatives.

  This sounded disdainful, but in fact it was high-minded on Gladstone’s part and in total contradiction of the view, so sedulously held in Conservative circles, that his Irish policy was nothing but a self-seeking search for votes and office by a power-drunk old man. Gladstone was already well down the road to his conviction that nothing short of a separate parliament (although one subordinate to the imperial connection) would settle Ireland. He was prepared, as was proved by future events, to devote another eight years of his ebbing life to trying to achieve Home Rule. But in 1885 he thought that it would be better done by a Conservative government.

  The idea that the Conservatives might perform this role was optimistic, but not ludicrous. Carnarvon was in favour. Randolph Churchill was a loose cannon which might go off in any direction. Hicks Beach and W. H. Smith did not seem totally opposed. And the rationale for wishing the Conservatives to do the job was clear. The implementation of Home Rule would manifestly be difficult and divisive, even if there were few of its supporters who would have expected a delay of thirty-seven years, during which the hope of doing it within a continuing British entity would be destroyed.

  Even without knowledge of this dismal perspective the attractions of being able to do it on the run were great. There is a well-known political rule that difficult and necessary measures are best accepted from the party or the leader least expected to do them. This was General de Gaulle’s strength in relation to withdrawal from Algeria. It was nearly that of the 1964–70 Labour government in relation to trades union reform. Furthermore the Conservative party in late-nineteenth- (and indeed most of twentieth-) century Britain carried the additional advantage that what was proposed by its leaders was almost invariably accepted by the House of Lords. A solution could have been achieved so much more quickly and smoothly without the sterile struggles with the second chamber of 1893 and 1912–14.

  It was therefore a clear shaft of perception which made Gladstone see the national benefit of a Conservative-proposed (and Gladstone-supported) Home Rule commitment in the autumn of 1885, and an act of statesmanship which made him tolerant of the pursuit of such an alliance by Parnell. As is always the case a more cynical explanation was possible. Home Rule was one of the most powerfully fissiparous issues of the politics of the past two centuries. It was liable to split any party which touched it. There were obvious attractions to a Liberal in the Conservative party taking the first brunt of the nuclear explosion. Yet as Gladstone’s primary motive this is unsustainable. Whatever else characterized his handling of the Home Rule issue it was not the tactics of party manoeuvre.

  Conservative incomprehension of Gladstone’s high-mindedness was fortified by two accidents of timing, the second a deeply unfortunate one. In the first place Gladstone intervened too late. On the day before he spoke to Balfour the Conservative Cabinet had met and had decided, in the words of Salisbury’s letter to the Queen, ‘that it was not possible for the Conservative Party to tamper with Home Rule’.11 In other words the Carnarvon initiative was dead. (Balfour would not necessarily have known of this before the Eaton Hall conversation.) By the time that Gladstone’s dilatory letter arrived and was passed around, the circumstances which had given it relevance were more than a week downwind. This heightened the artificiality with which ministers wished to endow it.

  It had also been superseded by an apparently contradictory initiative known as the ‘Hawarden kite’. Herbert Gladstone, still not quite thirty-two, unmarried and often acting as a private secretary to his father, but an MP of five years’ standing, had spent most of the first half of December at Hawarden. He was close to his father, but did not always merely echo his views. He had for instance been known as a declared Home Ruler at least since the previous July. During the autumn he had wished his father would take a more forward line, not keep Parnell so much at arm’s length, and look to an early return to Liberal government and not to a Conservative conversion to deal with the Irish problem. On top of this, Herbert Gladstone received a disturbing appeal from a disturbing source (particularly for him, as a member for Leeds) at the beginning of this same over-animated week when the Conservative Cabinet was meeting and Gladstone was talking to Balfour. The source was Wemyss Reid, the editor of the Leeds Mercury and in general an important as well as a moderate Liberal who might equally easily follow Hartington as Gladstone. He complained that the Gladstonian case was being allowed to go by default, and that, unless the serious Liberal press were given some guidance, all the running was left to be made by Chamberlain, who, it was thought, had his own reasons for being against an early Liberal return to office.

  Herbert Gladstone decided to respond by going to London and seeing Reid on 15 December. The next day he also gave an interview to the editor of the National Press Agency, which supplied material to about 170 local newspapers. He saw his father before he went, but there is no evidence that they substantially discussed Reid’s letter or Herbert’s mission. Nonetheless the son was of course privy to his father’s developing thought and the general drift of his conversations with Granville, Rosebery and others. This knowledge formed the basis of the very hard briefing which he gave to Reid and to the representatives of the National Press Agency. It was the latter which caused the main trouble when its result started to appear in the evening papers of 17 December. The Pall Mall Gazette began its long, politically sensational and personally tendentious story on a note of authority.

  Mr Gladstone has definitely adopted the policy of Home Rule for Ireland and there are well-founded hopes that he will win over the chief representatives of the moderate section of the party to his views. Lord Spencer is practically convinced that no other policy is possible, and his authority as the Minister who has governed Ireland during a most troubled time is unimpeachable.

  The article then added authenticity by giving some detail about the scheme in Gladstone’s mind, in particular saying that Irish members would not be excluded from the House of Commons, but would continue to share in deliberations ‘in Imperial affairs’. Still more tendentiously the article concluded:

  Mr Gladstone is sanguine that the policy of settling the Irish question once for all will commend itself to the majority of his party and to the English people, when it is clearly understood that no other course can bring real peace. If he is enabled to eject the Government on this issue, he will have a large majority in the House of Commons for his Irish bill, and he believes that the House of Lords, weighing the gravity of the situation, will not reject it. Should there be a sufficient rejection by moderate Liberals to encourage the Lords to throw out the bill a dissolution would be inevitable, but except in the event of any serious explosion in Ireland that would have the effect of exasperating the popular feeling in England against the Irish the country would in all probability endorse Mr Gladstone’s policy and give him an unmistakable mandate to carry it into law. There is reasonable expectation that both Lord Hartington and Mr Goschen will come round to Mr Gladstone’s view, and Mr Chamberlain and Sir Charles Dilke, in spite of their present attitude, could not consistently oppose it.12

  The article was at once deadly accurate and designed to produce an adverse reaction on the part of every person or group of persons mentioned. Spencer was the first to be affronted. His support of the Gladstonian line was as described and he was not diverted from it, but he nonetheless abhorred the form of the disclosure. ‘I never was so disgusted in my life’, he wrote to Rosebery at the end of the month, ‘as I was by the Standard and the Pall Mall, not to say Leeds revelations.’13Then the views of the majority of Liberals as well as of ‘the English people’ were pre-empted, and any recalcitrant ‘moderate Liberals’ as well as the House of Lords were threatened with a punitive dissolution if they stood out against a Home Rule bill. Hartington and Goschen (the latter had hardly been in Liberal communion on any issue since 1874 and
was to be Chancellor of the Exchequer in a Conservative government within a year) were roughly informed of their expected duty – but counter-productively so, for they both voted against the 1886 bill. And finally Chamberlain and Dilke were sharply given their marching orders.

  What did Herbert Gladstone think he was up to? He was not a wholly foolish and in no way a malevolent young man. He claimed that he expected his briefing to be treated as background rather than as a verbatim expression of view, and also as though he were giving his own opinions rather than those of his father. The first hope was naive, the second silly. The idea that his own off-the-record opinions on what exact shape of the bill, or on what Hartington or the House of Lords would do to it, would themselves have commanded vast newspaper space was presumptuous and misplaced. And Herbert Gladstone, whatever else he was, which included being an innovative Home Secretary nearly a quarter of a century later, was not presumptuous. Perhaps for this reason the GOM took his intervention with exemplary parental calm. Herbert was his youngest son, the most politically committed and the most frequently at his father’s service of the four. These were all marks of credit or grounds for affection in Gladstone’s eyes.

  Nonetheless he must have been sorely tried. The ‘kite’, unfurled in a way that was at once crude and with a touch of subterfuge, not only upset his Liberal colleagues and negated the delicacy with which he had hitherto been endeavouring to bring them along, but also provided fuel for Tory leaders who wished to see his Balfour overture as typical hypocrisy. The first fluttering of the kite was indeed the reason why Gladstone delayed from 15 to 20 December sending the confirmatory letter to Balfour. He in fact wrote it on the 16th, but by that day the preliminary ripples from Herbert’s London visit began to reach Hawarden, and he delayed sending it. His relevant diary entries for the 16th read: ‘A day of anxious & very important correspondence [he lists, inter alia, letters to Mrs O’Shea, Hartington and Balfour]. . . . Matters of today required meditation. After dealing with the knottiest point, I resumed Huxley.115 We felled a good ash. Read Burke – Dicey. Suspended the Balfour letter.’14