Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Although he was for the moment moving slowly and cautiously, Gladstone did not doubt that Ireland was in a potentially explosive state with a constitutional crisis overlaying yet another rent crisis. One of the attractions of both Parnell’s and Gladstone’s own Home Rule schemes was that they would leave the new indigenous government to deal with rent and collect the interest and repayments due on land purchase advances. Ethnic stresses would thus cease to compound agrarian ones. But all Gladstone’s private sources, from James Bryce, then Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, as well as Liberal MP for Aberdeen and a constitutional expert of world repute, to E. G. Jenkinson, who as head of the Special Branch in Dublin had a more worm’s-eye view, agreed upon the extreme fragility of the social and political fabric in Ireland. Gladstone knew that he was only in slack water so long as he was waiting to see if the Tories, with his encouragement and promise of support, were willing to grasp an Irish solution. As soon as it became clear that they would not do so, he did not doubt his own urgent responsibility.

  There was another major consideration which weighed with him. Just as in his approach to his first government he was influenced by the thought, unusual for a British politician of the period, that justice to Ireland was necessary for England’s European reputation, so after the experience of his second government and on the threshold of his third, he was powerfully influenced by an equally unusual and sophisticated consideration. He thought that Irish violence and English reaction to it was corrupting the whole polity. The most analogous recent situation was la sale guerre in Algeria of the late 1950s and its effect upon metropolitan France. Harcourt may have liked emulating Bonaparte’s Fouché, but Gladstone had hated being the first Prime Minister since the post-Napoleonic Wars unrest to have a police bodyguard forced upon him. On a broader point he disliked having to introduce the closure and the guillotine into the House of Commons in order to protect its proceedings from depredations of the disaffected Irish. He found he could not overcome Harcourt’s determination to use the Fenian threat to keep local democratic control away from the Metropolitan Police. And he had to sponsor coercion bill after coercion bill which between them piled arbitrary powers upon the Viceroy and, even with as reputable a figure as Spencer in charge, led to very messy cases like the Maamtrasna hangings.

  Gladstone saw that the maintenance of the liberal state was incompatible with holding within its centralized grip a large disaffected community of settled mind. The result of the 1885 election convinced him that the Irish mind was settled. The turn of the year convinced him that the Tories would do nothing. They preferred party unity to national interest. Up to this point at least Gladstone acted with a rare statesmanship. His overwhelming desire was a quick settlement of the Irish question, which he had come to see, perhaps belatedly but with a strategic instinct which far outweighed that of Salisbury or Chamberlain or Hartington, as an endemic poison to state and society. His only doubt was whether he had the continuing energy to carry through the new policy. Such thoughts could give him moments of discouragement. But essentially he preferred action – even with exhaustion – to repose, and he could always persuade himself that he should attempt one more stage of the perilous ascent which, as in Browning’s Grammarian’s Funeral, he saw as his life’s duty.

  Unfortunately, at least from the end of 1885 onwards, while his presence and his rhetoric remained magnificent, he was far from surefooted. Like Peel he broke his party for a cause which was greatly in the national interest. Unlike Peel, however, he failed to carry the cause. He paid the fee, but he missed the reward. What vast benefit for Britain would have followed from an Irish settlement in the 1880s, thirty years before the Easter Rising. And how right – and generous – Gladstone was to see that the best chance of achieving it quickly was from a Conservative government with his playing the not very exciting role of a Russell to Salisbury’s Peel. But Salisbury, who was a cynical pessimist as well as a skilled statesman, was not a Peel. The opportunity passed to Gladstone, who had not sought it, and who responded with courage and passion but without a tactical dexterity to match his strategic vision.

  SCHISM AND FAILURE

  GLADSTONE CAME TO LONDON from Hawarden on 11 January 1886, ten days before the opening of the new Parliament and the need for him to make a public pronouncement in response to the Queen’s Speech. The unusual amplitude of the cushion of time indicated his sense of both the difficulty and the importance of pending moves. His habit, to the dismay of his whips and loyal lieutenants, had long been to arrive only at the last moment.

  Even in that year of impending schism, however, he declined to summon an early meeting of the shadow Cabinet, or ‘conclave’ as he preferred to call it, and even more firmly dismissed Lord Richard Grosvenor’s suggestion of his giving an eve-of-session dinner. He had never given such a dinner in opposition (as he had hardly previously been leader of the opposition this was of doubtful relevance), and never, going back to the time of Peel, attended one, ‘except at Hartington’s’. Whenever, at this stage of his life, Gladstone’s memory went back to Peel it was a certain indication that he was pulling rank or at least age. What he wanted to do, of course, was to deal with his colleagues one by one, and thus exclude the real possibility, given how many of them were disposed to defect, that he might find himself corralled. Thus, on the evening of his arrival in London, he saw Dilke, Granville, Grosvenor and Harcourt – all separately – and on the following day he saw Spencer, Chamberlain, Bright and Mundella, and Granville, Harcourt and Grosvenor for the second time. And on the two subsequent days he introduced Kimberley, Derby, Ripon and Rosebery into the circle of consultation, as well as having a second go at Bright and Mundella, and both a second and a third go at Hartington.

  Although he was becoming exasperated with some of his former colleagues, notably Selborne, who on 28 December had written a ‘very able but I think deplorable paper’ slamming the door on his support for Home Rule, and Hartington, whom he accused to Granville of becoming an agent of chaos by making it impossible in differing ways for either of them (Gladstone or Hartington) to lead the Liberal party, his own public position remained tentative and conciliatory during the mid-January weeks. In reality of course his mind was made up, and therefore his apparent hesitation was no more than the gliding of an eagle waiting to swoop. But he had more than enough wing power to enable him to choose his time. And, while there was a good deal of churning within the Conservative government, he preferred to await the outcome. The agents of the rejected policy of Irish conciliation resigned, first Hart Dyke the Chief Secretary and then Carnarvon the Viceroy. Dyke was replaced by W. H. Smith, the great newsagent who, five and a half years later and ironically in view of his 1886 role, was to share a day of death with Parnell, and to find himself obituarily upstaged. Smith had the honest clarity to see that the only alternative to conciliation was more coercion, and during his brief inaugural visit to Dublin, from 24 to 26 January, successfully recommended a new bill to the Cabinet. They accepted his recommendation, which had the effect of turning his inaugural into a farewell. By the time that he stepped ashore at Holyhead on the 27th the first Salisbury government had been defeated.

  In the first days of the debate on the Queen’s Speech both sides held off from a direct engagement on Ireland, and Parnell, even though he had by then abandoned his hopes of Home Rule from Salisbury, was equally disinclined to force the issue by putting down and voting on his own amendment. Gladstone’s ‘waiting’ speech, delivered on 21 January, was the one in which he referred to himself as ‘an old parliamentary hand’, and on this basis advised his supporters to follow him in keeping their own counsel and to await for a little while the development of events. In the retrospective fragment which he wrote in the autumn of 1897, only six months before his death, Gladstone explained his hesitancy on the ground that to have provoked an early division on Home Rule in a House of many new Liberal members might well have resulted in it attracting the support of no more than 200 (as opposed to the 311 who eve
ntually voted for the bill) and killing the issue for the Parliament.

  He did not however allow the ‘little while’ to cover more than a few days, although still avoiding any vote which was nominally on Ireland. When, on the 28th, it became known that three days later the Irish Secretary would bring in a Coercion Bill, he decided to treat that as a casus belli and turn off the life machine which until then he had provided for the minority Conservative government. In one sense his indignation could be regarded as synthetic, for there was no member of the House who had been responsible for as many Irish coercion bills as Gladstone himself. But in another sense he was fully justified in seeing this as the final and public rejection of ‘Carnarvonism’ (Carnarvon’s own resignation, decided upon before Christmas, had been made public on 16 January) and thus destroying the basis for Gladstone’s tolerance of Salisbury’s retention of office. Gladstone’s own retrospective description of his reaction was as follows:

  Not perhaps in mere logic, but practicably it was now plain that Ireland had no hope from the Tories. This being so, my rule of action was changed at once: and I determined on taking any and every legitimate opportunity to remove the existing Government from office. . . . Immediately on making up my mind about the rejection of the government I went to call on Sir William Harcourt and informed him as to my intentions and the grounds of them. He said ‘What, are you prepared to go forward without either Hartington or Chamberlain?’ I answered, ‘Yes’. I believe it was in my mind to say, if I did not actually say it, that I was prepared to go forward without any body. That is to say without any known and positive assurance of support. This was one of the great imperial occasions which call for such resolutions.1

  The instrument which Gladstone found most conveniently to hand was hardly in the great imperial category. Jesse Collings, then member for the Bordesley division of Birmingham and as complete a Chamberlain henchman as it is possible to imagine, had on the order paper an amendment regretting the omission from the Queen’s Speech of any measures benefiting the rural labourer. It took up the smallholdings theme which had been part of Chamberlain’s ‘unauthorized programme’ of 1884, and is commonly referred to as the ‘three acres and a cow’ amendment. Without Gladstone’s swoop to attack, it would have been left to languish as a gesture amendment. Suddenly, however, it was underpinned by the whole weight of the official opposition, it was brought forward for a few hours of debate, Gladstone himself spoke, there was a vote soon after midnight, and the Conservatives were out. There is no more symbolic a test of whether or not a government commands the general confidence of the House of Commons than its ability to carry the Address unamended. The Salisbury government failed that test by a margin of seventy-nine.

  No one saw the issue as primarily bucolic. Collings had his few hours of glory, but the speeches were not confined to the cows and their three acres, nor were the votes so cast. Goschen voted with the Conservatives, but he had become used to doing that. What was more serious was that Hartington and Henry James did so too. And neither of them, not Hartington, the too-long-awaiting heir apparent, for whom like several in that position the cards had not fallen right, nor James, the putative Lord Chancellor and epitome of an amenable but respected lawyer politician, split from the party within which they had advanced so near to the differing summits of their ambition on any argument about whether cows should have two or three acres. They and most of the House of Commons realized that what they were voting about was whether Gladstone should form a Home Rule government. Two hundred and fifty-seven Liberals and seventy-four Irish Nationalists voted that he should. Two hundred and thirty-four Conservatives and eighteen Whigs, elected as Liberals, voted that he should not. And, more menacingly, seventy-six Liberals (including John Bright) were absent or present and abstaining.

  That division was the beginning of the volvulus which knotted British politics for the next thirty years. The Liberals, having embraced Home Rule, could command no clear majority without the Irish, save in the exceptional circumstances of 1906, for which election they had in any event placed Home Rule on the back burner. Yet their policy was dedicated to getting rid of this parliamentary segment which alone made them, again with the exception of 1906, an intermittent party of government. The Conservatives, on the other hand, who increasingly came to be called Unionists, and whose success largely depended upon the Liberals keeping prominent in their shop window the Home Rule cause, which was unpopular in England, were two or three times deprived of office (in 1886, in 1892–5 and arguably 1910–15) by the Irish, whom they were determined to keep within the British polity, yet whose influence there they deeply resented. It was a fine recipe for stasis in the government of an already challenged empire and led to the efforts of Lloyd George and a varying number of Conservatives to resolve it by coalition in 1910, 1916 and 1919–22.

  In January 1886, however, there were shorter-term and clearer-cut consequences. Late at night on Friday the 29th, three days after the vote, the Queen’s secretary, Ponsonby, called upon Gladstone at Lady Frederick Cavendish’s house, where (as often) he was temporarily installed, and gave him the Queen’s commission, ‘which I at once accepted’.2 On the Monday, 1 February, he kissed hands at Osborne, where the Queen, to the astonishment of, inter alia, the Prince of Wales, insisted on remaining through the change of government. This did not mean that she allowed the change to go through easily. If anything, she behaved worse than in 1880 because she then had some justifiable even if unrealistic basis for believing that she might turn the tables and get Hartington. In 1886 she was mildly and improperly obstructive without hope or purpose. Her ploy was to write most indiscreet letters to Goschen and to summon him to Osborne with hints that he might form a coalition government. Goschen, bereft of Liberal loyalty though he was by this time, nonetheless had a sense of constitutional propriety and declined to go, saying that his presence would cause public misunderstanding, and that she had better get on with it and send for Gladstone.

  Salisbury behaved somewhat but not much better than Disraeli in 1880. He refused with style the Queen’s offer of a dukedom (‘His fortune would not be equal to such a dignity. . . . The kind words in which your Majesty has expressed approval of his conduct are very far more precious to him than any sort of title.’),3 but he encouraged her foolish view that the main mistake of his government was to be dilatory in introducing Irish coercion, although that move became its death rattle. They clucked together over the weaknesses of Carnarvon (‘He never could be entrusted with any post of importance again.’)4 and of Hicks Beach (Randolph Churchill would be a much better Commons leader than the latter, Salisbury opined, a view which, within a year, he would violently have repudiated). But he never attempted to tell the Queen that her duty, and her interest, was to give Gladstone’s Irish policy a fair if sceptical trial.

  What was that policy as Gladstone announced it for the purpose of getting colleagues to join his new government? He sought to ease the process by putting a thin coating of tentativeness over his proposals, but his import was clear enough:

  I propose to examine whether it is or is not practicable to comply with the desire widely prevalent in Ireland, and testified by the return of 85 out of 103 representatives, for the establishment, by Statute, of a legislative body, to sit in Dublin, and to deal with Irish as distinguished from Imperial affairs; in such a manner, as would be just to each of the three Kingdoms, equitable with reference to every class of the people of Ireland, conducive to the social order and harmony of that country, and calculated to support and consolidate the unity of the Empire on the combined basis of Imperial authority and mutual attachment.5

  On this foundation there was put together a government which included nine – Spencer, Granville, Kimberley, Ripon, Rosebery, Harcourt, Childers, Chamberlain and Trevelyan – who had previously served in a Gladstone Cabinet. But Hartington, Derby, Northbrook, Selborne, Dodson and Carlingford were all part of the Whig withdrawal. Bright, from a different angle, refused to serve and Dilke was regarded as n
ot available (reluctantly by Gladstone, hysterically so by the Queen) because of his sensational divorce case, which first erupted in July 1885 and led to the effective end of his career. Furthermore two of the first nine, Chamberlain and Trevelyan, joined most hesitantly and lasted in the government for less than two months.121

  The Queen added her own quota of difficulties. She was determined neither to have Granville back at the Foreign Office, nor to have Kimberley as a replacement. She wanted either Rosebery (still under forty) or Spencer (although she was much shocked by his conversion to Home Rule), and she got Rosebery. This discrimination against Granville may not have been wholly at variance with Gladstone’s own feelings, for Granville was over the hill, although nonetheless an essential ambassador from Gladstone to such Whigs as remained open to persuasion. So it was awkward to move him, and he had to be accommodated with whatever other high-ranking post he found most acceptable. This was the Colonial Office, and from that there followed a notorious piece of maladroitness.

  Chamberlain was clearly the marginal adherent, and if he was to be put in the government at all (Gladstone told the Queen that he thought it ‘best to take in Mr Chamberlain’,6 a statement well short of enthusiasm) it must have made sense to give him an office from which he would be loath to resign. The bold step would have been to offer him the Exchequer, to which Harcourt, who went there, had at this stage no prescriptive right; he could have been contained at the Home Office for at least a further short Parliament. But Gladstone put Childers in that senior secretaryship of state. Gladstone’s attachment to Childers, never a figure of great popularity or charm, was curious. There was no intimacy between them; Childers was never, it seems, at Hawarden. Yet Gladstone allowed him to be several times in the way, with Hartington in 1882, and now (at one remove) with Chamberlain in 1886. Nonetheless these were the dispositions, adverse to Chamberlain’s desires, which Gladstone had in mind while he carried on the laborious negotiations for Chamberlain’s entry into the government. Distracting him throughout was the fact that he had not yet secured Granville’s acceptance of dislodgement from the Foreign Office. In reality Chamberlain’s adherence was more important to the success of a Home Rule government than was Granville’s, but that was not how Gladstone, who had served with the old Whig in six different Cabinets, saw him in relation to the screw manufacturer.