Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  The next day Gladstone issued a limited and unconvincing denial of the validity of the leak: ‘The statement is not an accurate representation of my views, but is, I presume, a speculation upon them. It is not published with my knowledge or authority, nor is any other beyond my own public declarations.’15 The denial was of course unavailing. What had been published was near enough to the truth to make any disavowal highly conditional, and the damage had been done. Hartington, to whom Gladstone had written a defensive letter116 on the same day that he issued the denial, well summed up the new position when he wrote back on the 18th:

  When you say that you are determined to have no intentions at present I understand that you do not desire to take or prepare any action before the [Conservative] Government have had an opportunity of acting. But the fact that you have formed the opinion that an effort should be made by the Government to meet the Irish demand, and that this opinion has been allowed to be made known and cannot be contradicted amounts in my view to action of enormous importance.16

  The second sentence was tantamount to a polite indication from Hartington that he was about to prendre congé. Two days later, although Gladstone had written to him again on the 19th, and was to do so yet again on the 20th, and again on the 23rd, he wrote to his constituency chairman to tell him that he would not move from the position he had taken up in the November election, that is to say he would not sail again under a Gladstonian flag. The strong probability is that Hartington would have broken on Home Rule in any event. But the maladroitness of the kite gave him an excuse for cutting the knot more quickly and therefore more easily, because it meant that he could settle his position before he had to expose himself to the pressure of Gladstone’s presence, more formidable than his letters, in the new year.

  Could Herbert Gladstone possibly have supposed that he was aiding either his father or the cause of Home Rule by his actions? The first would be plausible only on the assumption that his father had tipped him the wink to go ahead, while no doubt warning him, with what Tories and some Whigs would regard as typical machiavellianism, that the kite would have to be disavowed. There is no evidence for this other than a hypothetical passage in Hamilton’s diaries. Hamilton, in spite of his personal loyalty to and friendship for the whole Gladstone family, was very sceptical about Home Rule and critical (to his diary at least) of Gladstone’s handling of the matter, which he regarded as precipitate in substance and dissimulating in form. He did however have the ‘horse’s mouth’ advantage of dining with Herbert Gladstone on the evening after his arrival from Hawarden (15 December). And on the 23rd he recorded the version of events at which he had arrived.

  The story of the leakage has now been made pretty clear to me. The Provincial Press . . . kept on bombarding Hawarden with application for a lead on the Irish question. Mr. G. declined to commit himself; but he winked at the dropping of hints. Thereupon Herbert G. puts himself into the train; and on arriving in London goes off to the National Press Agency, gives a filial version of paternal views and talks freely with whomever he meets.17

  Gladstone’s reactions on 16 and 17 December were relatively calm, because he was too experienced in political nonsenses and confusions to overreact to them and because, as Hamilton had written after the Gordon débâcle, ‘the greater is the crisis, the more coolly does he keep his head’. But there was no sense that he had lit the fuse and was waiting with a mixture of expectation and apprehension for the explosion. Nor was there any doubt that he was discommoded. Herbert Gladstone (rather a bold step in the circumstances) went back to Hawarden by the Irish mail train late on the evening of 16 December. So he would have been there on the morning of the 17th when Gladstone was writing defensively to Hartington and issuing his unconvincing denial.

  Herbert Gladstone wrote in his diary for that day the odd comment that ‘Father was quite compos.’ This fairly common abbreviation of compos mentis (literal translation: ‘sane, of sound mind’) appears from the context to have been used by him in the sense of ‘calm and composed’ as opposed to the more frequent modern meaning of ‘in full possession of his faculties, not senile’. Any of the three meanings might in the circumstances have been regarded as distinctly patronizing. It was Herbert Gladstone who needed his father’s forbearance at the time, rather than the GOM requiring the son’s assurance that he was balanced and of sound mind. And this forbearance was on the whole forthcoming. There is a slight impression that Gladstone might for the moment have preferred the company of his other sons. It was a vigorous tree-cutting season with some noble trunk falling almost every day between then and Christmas. But the woodcraft was recorded as being with Willy or Harry rather than with Herbert. By Christmas Eve, however, he was taking pleasure in the completeness of the family party ‘young and old’.

  The more plausible explanation of the kite is that Herbert Gladstone brashly believed that his father needed a little push and Liberal opinion a considerable steer in order to bring the two into constructive harmony with each other, and that he himself was a necessary catalyst. This at any rate was the explanation on which he had settled by 31 December when he wrote a long letter (no doubt also intended as a record for himself and others) to his cousin Lucy Cavendish, in which he set out, defensively, defiantly and sometimes a little contradictorily, his version of all the events surrounding the flight of the kite. He defended his own right to speak ‘on his own responsibility’ as he had done for the previous five years. He specifically denied any collusion with his father: ‘With all these matters [that is, his own decision to go to London and the briefings there] my Father had no more connection than the man in the moon, and until each event occurred he knew . . . no more of it than the man in the street.’

  He then delivered what may be thought the less than convincing core of his self-justification: ‘in regard to my general action I have nothing to conceal and no apology to make. If I had not acted we should have got into hopeless confusion. It may be true that influential men are now all at variance on the question. On the other hand the Liberal Press is for the most part working smoothly and well on certain given lines.’ He then concluded a little sententiously but no doubt his words were heartfelt: ‘May the end of this great question be good; I can only pray that your great loss may tend more and more to bring ultimate peace to Ireland.’18 Lucy Cavendish showed this letter to her brother-in-law Hartington, but it is unlikely that it was written for that purpose or had much effect with him. It should have convinced Hartington that the GOM had not contrived the revelation, but this did not affect his central point that, once it had been made, it could not be satisfactorily contradicted because it truly represented Gladstone’s state of mind.

  What was more to the point was whether Gladstone needed the filial push. This raises the anterior questions of when and how firmly he made up his mind on Home Rule. To dispose of the second of these questions first, the push, insofar as it had any effect on the firmness of Gladstone’s commitment, was counter-productive. In the first half of December he gave every impression of moving steadily through the quiet conversion of his colleagues, except that, as so frequently in the past, he saw Chamberlain and Hartington at the end and not at the beginning of the line as he ought to have done – in neither case until after he had returned to London on 11 January 1886.117 Insofar as he was thought to have a period of hesitation, such disparate sources as Hamilton, Chamberlain, Harcourt and Hartington thought (wrongly) that lack of support (partly caused by the kite) was giving him pause, and that his mind was swinging back towards retirement.

  If a date for the settling of Gladstone’s mind on Ireland is sought, the best answer is that it was probably when he committed himself to paper at Dalmeny on Saturday, 14 November 1885, a third of the way through his electioneering in Midlothian. It was an example of Gladstone’s still pulsating energy that at the age of nearly seventy-six in the midst of the preoccupations of a campaign and without breaking his normal letter-writing and reading pattern (on that day he read parts of Greville’
s Diaries, of Lotze’s Microcosmus and of the Annual Register for 1819), he should find time to outline a detailed Home Rule scheme, which was not merely unnecessary for the campaign but which it was essential should be kept secret for weeks to come. He did not disclose his draft scheme to Rosebery, in whose house he was staying, although he did outline its main points in a letter which he wrote on the same day to his son Herbert, who was campaigning in Leeds.

  Among the circumstances in which he wrote this outline a salient one was that he had two weeks before received from Parnell via Mrs O’Shea an at least equally detailed – and conservative – ‘Proposed Constitution for Ireland’. The two papers were different in style and intellectual premiss (as was not surprising) but they rarely contradicted each other, although the one was sometimes precise where the other was vague, and vice versa. Gladstone, for instance, was at this stage firm that ‘Irish representation in Imperial Houses [should] remain, for Imperial purposes only,’19 118 whereas Parnell said that it ‘might be retained or might be given up’.20 Conversely Parnell was precise on the size and duration between elections of the Irish Chamber, whereas Gladstone was vague. But there was no question at this stage of Gladstone deliberately cleaving close to Parnell. He was still in the phase of being anxious that the latter should make a deal with the Conservative government. He had consequently returned a fairly chilly answer to Mrs O’Shea, even though it had been ironically somewhat warmed up on the advice of Lord Richard Grosvenor, who, despite his incipient Unionism, was too much of a whip to like the idea of losing even Irish votes.

  The votes were however to some substantial extent already lost, particularly in the Lancashire boroughs where the Irish were strong, and still more damagingly for the future a gulf of bitterness was opened between many Liberal candidates and Parnell and his party. The Nationalists had issued a manifesto calling upon Irishmen in England to vote against Liberals as ‘the men who coerced Ireland, deluged Egypt in blood, menace religious liberty in the school, the freedom of speech in Parliament, and promise to the country generally a repetition of the crimes and follies of the last [1880–5] Liberal Administration’. Sir Henry James, for example, former Attorney-General and a ball-bearing of influence whom Gladstone tried hard to persuade to be Lord Chancellor in his 1886 government, was probably pushed into Liberal Unionism by the virulence with which the Irish attacked him in Bury. It is dangerous to allow parties which may be destined to work together after a campaign to abuse each other too vehemently during its course.

  Nevertheless Gladstone’s action, somewhat instigated by Parnell’s similar exercise, in setting down his own views on the shape of a possible Home Rule measure may well have been decisive in the evolution of his own commitment. No doubt he did not intend this Dalmeny outline to be committing. He merely thought it would be useful to clarify his thoughts and to have a scheme by him if he came to think it right to implement one. But by so doing he immediately moved his mind forward. The act of tentative drafting was a catalyst even more than it was a fall-back. It is a well-known syndrome. The man who has a draft to hand has a powerful weapon with which to overcome those with whom he is arguing. But a draft is a prison as well as a weapon. Having invested intellectual capital he becomes most anxious to use it. Gladstone’s Saturday-morning work at Dalmeny, half by accident and half because it captured, as a flash of lightning illuminates a landscape, the way in which his mind was moving, may well have been the few hours in which the last major orientation of his life was fixed. The proposition has the advantages and the disadvantages of being as irrefutable as it is unprovable.

  At whatever precise moment it occurred, Gladstone’s shift of position to Home Rule,119 although it convulsed British politics in a way that in the past 200 years only Peel’s conversion to free trade and Lloyd George’s adaptation to a Tory coalition have done, was by no means an astonishing volte face. He had given remarkably few hostages to fortune in the shape of pledges to maintain the Union in all circumstances. Deep though was the aversion which Gladstone’s political genius evoked among his opponents, and profound though was their conviction that he boxed every compass for reasons of most blatant self-interest, it was impossible for them to produce clear examples of his pledging himself against Dublin autonomy. When, seventeen years before, he had launched his first government on the keynote of ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland’ he had hoped to do it within the framework of Pitt’s Union. But he did not exclude an alternative framework, and by the end of that government, in the already cited letter to Lord Fermoy,120 he declined to comment one way or the other on Home Rule because of the imprecision with which the phrase was used and the many different meanings which it could bear.

  However, Gladstone’s freedom from having to eat many of his own words was far from decisive. On the one hand he was widely regarded as the greatest master of explaining away his own statements who had ever bestridden the political stage. And on the other no absence of embarrassing pledges could soften the violence of the shock to which he subjected his party. Throughout the election campaign he had reserved his counsel and said nothing in public which made untenable the position of Hartington, Grosvenor and the other Unionist Whigs. His main speech on the subject had been delivered in the Edinburgh Albert Hall (‘to an audience of very manageable size and excellent temper’)21 on the evening of his arrival in the city. The maintenance of the unity of the Empire accompanied by more local self-government for Ireland (it had practically none) had been the twin desiderata, and the route to them which he asked the electorate to open was through a Liberal majority large enough to give a future government independence of both Tories and Nationalists.

  That Gladstone did not achieve, although the Liberals did remarkably well for the end of five years of bumpy Liberal government. There was no revulsion as in 1874. In Great Britain the Liberals had a hundred more seats than the Conservatives. Had Ireland already gone, it would have been one of the only six great anti-Tory majorities of the past 130 years. But Ireland had not gone, did not do so for another thirty-seven years, and under Gladstone’s scheme would in any event have continued to affect the strategic shape of the House of Commons. What had gone was the Liberal vote in Ireland. Whereas in 1880 Ireland had returned thirteen Liberal MPs, the 1885 result allowed them not a single representative. The Conservatives on the other hand retained (mostly in Ulster) nineteen of the twenty-six seats which they had held under the much more restricted franchise of that previous election. This differential rate of retreat robbed the Liberals of their overall majority, which would in any case have been more nominal than real, for it was difficult to think of any issue (and certainly not the dominant one of Ireland itself) on which all 333 Liberals could have been got into the same division lobby.

  Far more significant than this squabbling over the remnants of Tory or Liberal representation in Ireland, however, was the extent of the Parnellite victory. This was qualitative as well as quantitative. They won 85 seats out of 103 in Ireland (and one in Liverpool), and they won them by overwhelming majorities. In the two divisions of Kilkenny, for instance, a relatively prosperous and urbane Irish county, the Nationalist candidates each polled over 4000 votes, with their Tory opponents getting only 170 for one seat and 220 for the other. In the few Ulster seats which the Nationalists contested, on the other hand, even in ultra-Protestant Antrim, they ran the Tory very close.

  This overwhelming expression of Irish opinion made a profound impression upon Gladstone. It did not strike him like a thunderclap when the results came out because the anticipation of such a development had affected his thinking at least since the early autumn. But expectation was one thing and the reality of counted votes another, and the clarity with which the Irish constituencies had spoken was unmistakable. The solidity was such as to create a fear that virtually all the Irish MPs from the three southern and western provinces together with a sizeable minority from Ulster might withdraw from Westminster and set up their own assembly in Dublin. Home Rule might be achieved by secessi
on without the constitutional covering of an imperial Act of Parliament which preserved the theory of Westminster sovereignty. The choice, devastating for the fundamental tenets of Gladstonian Liberalism, would then have lain between military reconquest or the acceptance of an illegal and revolutionary break-up of the United Kingdom.

  That Gladstone’s thoughts had been much on the delicate hinge between law and popular demand is shown by the pattern of his reading that autumn. In October he read a lot of Irish eighteenth- and nineteenth-century history, contrasting the situation before and after what he had come to see as the ‘gigantic though excusable mistake’ of Pitt’s Act of Union. In November and early December he was into Burke’s thoughts on the treatment of the American colonies and A. V. Dicey’s just published Law of the Constitution. Dicey was to be an unyielding opponent of Home Rule, but his interest for Gladstone lay in his theory of the unfettered supremacy of Parliament and its right both to delegate to and to override subordinate institutions.

  Less theoretically Gladstone also studied the two Acts (of the Imperial Parliament) by which Canada led the way to what came to be called Dominion status. Here, however, part of the interest lay in his method of procuring copies of the two Acts. On 9 October he wrote from Hawarden to ask Lord Richard Grosvenor if he would obtain for him the Canada Acts of 1840 and of 1867. Grosvenor complied, although it was hardly a normal part of his Chief Whiply functions. Nor was Gladstone habitually without self-reliance in obtaining his vast intake of books and papers, parliamentary and other. It is difficult to believe that this was not a coded message, effectively informing Grosvenor, to whom he was very attentive at the time, as not only his Whip but also the ambassador of the Whigs to his court, that he was prepared to let Ireland follow where Canada had led. He ended this letter by saying: ‘I have been working on Ireland: & have got a speech in me, if I dare speak it.’22