Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Gladstone himself who, among several other of the necessary requisites of a great orator, had the ability to rate with a deadly accuracy the varying quality of his performances, wrote with some satisfaction of the day:

  Finally settled my figures with Welby & Hamilton122 – on other points with Spencer and Morley. Reflected much. Took a short drive.

  H of C . Extraordinary scenes outside the House & in. My speech, which I sometimes have thought could never end, lasted nearly 3½ hours. Voice & strength & freedom were granted to me in a degree beyond what I could have hoped. But many a prayer had gone up for me & not I believe in vain. Came home, & went early to bed: of course much tired. My legs felt as after a great amount of muscular motion, not with the weariness of standing.13

  Gladstone’s vast speech was never again to be equalled in length or in expository quality by any of his subsequent efforts. In terms of Hansard columns it had, however, often been exceeded in his elastic middle age. By this criterion it ranked only twelfth of his Commons orations. It was only a little longer than his Don Pacifico debate speech delivered thirty-six years earlier. There has been no one else with the possible exception of Churchill (and one may doubt if he exactly commanded before 1914, in spite of his high offices) who has commanded the House of Commons over such a span.

  In content as opposed to length the speech was remarkable for its expository detail and for its peroration. The latter extended over perhaps ten minutes, yet never gave the impression that, like Mahler’s sixth symphony or Ramsay MacDonald in his last phase, it could not stop because a conclusion proved elusive. Gladstone recalled Grattan’s aphorism in his speech of opposition to Pitt’s Act: ‘The channel forbids union; the ocean forbids separation.’123 Then he dealt in high terms with two separate but related issues. First, were the Irish capable of civic virtue? This question, the posing of which may sound insulting, was more than justified within a few weeks by a rasping speech of Salisbury. On 15 May, in the St James’s Hall, Piccadilly, he pronounced with a typically Cecilian mixture of originality and arrogance that democracy was suited only to those of Teutonic race (this would have appeared an even odder choice of nomenclature fifty years later), which category he certainly did not see as embracing the Irish, who he thought were in this respect more akin to Hottentots or Hindus. He added that the best use for public money in Ireland was in promoting emigration. These gracious comments added a good deal of fuel to the flames of the controversy.

  Gladstone on the other hand totally rejected the widespread English view that the Irish had no taste for justice, common sense, moderation or national prosperity and looked only to perpetual strife and dissension. If an Irishman’s loyalty had been checked in its development it was because ‘the laws by which he is governed do not present themselves to him, as they do to us in England and Scotland, with a native and congenial aspect’. Where the Irish voluntarily took on an obligation, as when they joined the British army or the Irish constabulary, their loyalty and bravery fully matched that of their ‘Scotch and English comrades’. The related question to which Gladstone also applied himself was that of the reconciliation of local patriotism, ‘which, in itself, is not bad, but good’, with a wider commitment to the cause of the Empire and indeed of mankind. The two he brought together with a fervour and a conviction which would in the late twentieth century be of inestimable service in presenting the full compatibility of the high European case with a strong attachment to national cultures and to regional roots. In Ireland ‘misfortune and calamity have wedded her sons to the soil’, but this need not close their minds to wider concepts. His final words were:

  I ask that we should apply to Ireland that happy experience which we have gained in England and Scotland, where the course of generations has now taught us, not as a dream or a theory, but as practice and as life, that the best and surest foundation we can find to build upon is the foundation afforded by the affections, the convictions and the will of the nation; and it is there, by the decree of the Almighty, that we may be enabled to secure at once the social peace, the fame, the power and the permanence of the Empire.14

  This speech was a considerable success, its reception leaving such an experienced observer as Hamilton with the impression that the bill would be carried on second reading, even though it would probably be ‘scotched and killed in Committee or undergo most radical amendment’.15 Gladstone was optimistic, hoping for a majority of well over twenty. He needed such buoyancy for the parliamentary pressures upon him were formidable. On the day after it he had an uncomfortable procedural entanglement with Chamberlain (over the latter’s desire to refer in his resignation speech to the details of the Irish Land Bill, discussed in Cabinet but not already presented to Parliament). In the following week he had on the Monday to listen to the opposition of Hartington expressed in what was generally thought to be the most cogent and powerful speech of his life. (Opposing Gladstone instead of living on the same side under his great shadow seems to have had a stimulating effect on oratorical prowess, as Chamberlain’s development also showed.) Then he wound up the first reading debate in a speech of one and a quarter hours after midnight at the end of the Tuesday sitting. On the Thursday he had to pay a tribute appropriate to the retirement of that legendary clerk Sir Erskine May as well as sustain Harcourt’s first budget. And on the Friday he moved the first reading of the Irish Land Bill in a speech of more than two hours. For the principal performers at least the idea of nineteenth-century parliamentary life as a leisurely pursuit is untenable.

  Moreover there was an uneasy feeling abroad that the movement of events was not favourable. This undercurrent surfaced disagreeably when Gladstone moved the second reading of the bill on 10 May. Like all great performers, Gladstone was never one to miss the reaction of the audience. ‘Spoke 1¾ hours,’ he wrote. ‘The reception decidedly inferior to that of the Introduction [that is, the speech of 9 April].’16 Hamilton was equally honest and more specific:

  It is clear that the speech will do little to improve the prospects of the measure. The concessions in the line of giving Ireland partial representation at Westminster will not satisfy Chamberlain & Co; and the concessions, such as they were, were not clearly explained. His voice was in bad order. At times he was nearly inaudible; though there were bursts of rhetoric occasionally when his animation and passion got the better of his huskiness I do not see now how defeat is to be avoided.17

  It was not. The second-reading debate was an extraordinarily strung-out affair, even by the standards of the time. Twelve parliamentary days were devoted to this stage, but even more remarkable was the fact that they were spread out over a full lunar month. The vote on the motion which Gladstone had proposed on the first Monday in May came only during the sitting on the first Monday in June, and as was then usual barely before the next day’s dawn. There had been a spiral of hope after 27 May when he had summoned and addressed for an hour in notably conciliatory terms a Liberal party meeting in the Foreign Office. If the bill were given a second reading, he almost pleaded, it would be withdrawn and reintroduced in the autumn with substantial concessions, particularly in relation to Irish representation at Westminster. Then, the next day in the House of Commons, Hicks Beach successfully provoked him into a hardening which confined the concessions to Clause 24 (Irish representation) points. He was also led into stressing (accurately but impolitically) that a vote for the bill was a vote for the bill and not just a vague aspiration towards a solution of the Irish problem. Probably this fencing did not matter. The die was already cast.

  Gladstone of course wound up on the last night. He never delegated the crucial occasions, whether they were pregnant with defeat or triumph. He spoke of Ireland standing ‘at your bar, expectant, hopeful, almost suppliant . . .’, and the words might have applied to himself, except that he was not by that stage hopeful. The result was clear-cut. The bill was rejected by 341 to 311. Of the losing 311, 84 were Irish Nationalists, so that of the 333 members who had been elected as Liberals six months
before only 229, including two tellers, went with Gladstone into the division lobby. Of the missing 103, a remarkably high proportion cast positive votes the other way. Only 10 were absent or abstained. All the notables, Chamberlain, Hartington, Trevelyan, Bright, Goschen, James, Collings, marched firmly into the Tory lobby.124 It was one of the biggest divisions, physically as well as symbolically, in the history of Parliament. Of a total membership of 670, only 18 failed to vote. A curiosity was that a significantly higher proportion of Scottish than of English Liberal members – 37 per cent as against 19 per cent – failed to support Gladstone.

  In whatever way it was made up the defection was horrifyingly large. It can, however, be argued that what was more surprising than the number of those who went the other way was that so many remained faithful, given the magnitude of the change and the abruptness with which the new policy was introduced, so soon after an election in which it had not figured either in the Liberal programme or in any of Gladstone’s own speeches. In whichever direction lay the reason for surprise there was no doubt that the vote had brought a phase of the government’s life to an end. The possibilities were only resignation or dissolution. Gladstone was firmly for the latter, and had no difficulty in carrying his Cabinet with him. ‘Dissolve nem. con.,’ he minuted the decision at a noon meeting on the day after the vote. How sanguine he was about the result of an election is another matter. He ended a twelve-clause memorandum which he had quickly drawn up for his own use with the words: ‘My conclusion is: a Dissolution is formidable but resignation would mean, for the present juncture, abandonment of the cause.’18

  He had no trouble with the Queen on his request for a dissolution, young though the Parliament was. There were at least two reasons which would have weighed with her against the possibility of refusing. The first was that the leader of the Conservative party had already made his attempt to live with the 1885 House of Commons and had failed. The second was that she probably had a shrewd instinct for what the outcome of an election would be. There was unlikely to be any need for her to strain constitutional propriety and play around with the possibility of a Hartington-led and Conservative-supported government in order to get rid of Gladstone. And the electorate did indeed perform its loyal duty, producing an anti-Home Rule majority still more decisive than the House of Commons had done. But, unlike the House of Commons, which registered an almost uniquely full participation, the electorate did it largely by abstention.

  On the surface at least the collapse of the vote between November–December 1885 and June–July 1886 was a psephological phenomenon without parallel. In the former general election nearly four million went to the polls. In the latter barely two and a half million did so. Boredom leading to abstention is always liable to be a factor when one general election quickly follows another. Between the two 1910 elections the turnout fell by about a sixth. But this was much less of a collapse than between 1885 and 1886, and between the two mass plebiscites of 1950 and 1951 there was hardly any decline. In 1886, however, there was a substantial countervailing factor, which was the exceptional number of unopposed returns. To some extent these could be regarded as a product of boredom. They were also influenced by the cleverly opportunistic Conservative willingness to withdraw candidates against Liberals, whether of the Hartington or Chamberlain persuasion, who voted against the bill. In Birmingham for instance, the five seats of Chamberlain’s fief were all without a contest. In total 152 seats, as opposed to 23 in 1885, were in this category. If in just over 500 seats two and a half million voted, it may be roughly assumed that in the 129 seats which were fought in 1885 but not in 1886 another 600,000 might have done so. Even so, the decline in the participation between the two elections was striking. And it was concentrated on the collapse in the Liberal vote in the counties. In the boroughs the Liberals more or less held their own; they polled a few thousand more than the combined Unionist forces. But in the counties their vote, almost unbelievably, fell from 1,113,693 to 534,508. Even adjusting for the uncontested seats, this was a devastating price which Gladstone paid for first picking up Collings’s amendment as a useful tactical instrument and then doing absolutely nothing about it, neither himself deflecting his eye from Ireland nor encouraging Chamberlain to pursue a parallel policy on behalf of the rural labourer. The casting of a Liberal vote in squirearchical villages, except on the great Whig estates, where the allegiance of the proprietor had in any event typically just changed, required some courage. Unfanned by attention, this mostly did not survive for a second go.

  The collapse of the Liberal agricultural vote was the central element in the massive Liberal defeat. The Gladstonians retained only 193 seats, a result comparable with the Conservative massacres of 1906 and 1945 and with little else except when Liberal and Labour or Labour and the Liberal–Social Democrat Alliance were struggling over which should be the official opposition in modern British politics. Gladstone himself was a beneficiary of the smaller but not negligible number of unopposed Home Rule returns (forty-two); on 2 July he was elected without a contest,125 but after a vigorous five-day visit to the constituency two weeks before. Exceptionally he stayed at the Royal Hotel in Princes Street and not at Dalmeny, but this appears to have been due to Rosebery’s absorption in the Foreign Office rather than to any estrangement. Gladstone addressed his usual round of meetings, including a speech of one and a half hours in the Music Hall. Edinburghshire apart, however, he spoke only in Glasgow, and in the following week in Manchester and Liverpool. Even these three occasions excited the Queen enough to cause her to remonstrate against the indignity of Prime Ministers taking part in elections.

  After these few excursions Gladstone retired to Hawarden and stayed there (at first semi-solitarily, for his wife was in London) for sixteen days while the increasingly bad electoral news came in. On 3 July he thought only that ‘the chances now are slightly against us’,19 but by the 8th he wrote starkly: ‘The defeat is a smash.’20 He read and wrote during the day, and then, evening after evening as the outlook became steadily worse, he walked across to the rectory to dine and play backgammon with his son Stephen. His outpouring of letters was even more voluminous than was his habit. He was still Prime Minister of course, although cut off from the machinery of government by 200 miles, except for the postal service supplemented by occasional telegrams. At one level he took his defeat with a resigned calm (‘The Elections perturb me somewhat; but One ever sitteth above’),21 reflecting that he would be as glad to end his painful relations with the Queen as she would to end hers with him. But at another level he became resentfully argumentative. He wrote two bitter letters of complaint to John Bright on 2 July. They were provoked by a speech of Bright’s which Gladstone thought attacked his honour and his conduct and not merely his policy, and were remarkable for containing none of the expressions of personal esteem with which Gladstone normally cloaked his political disagreements, and for referring to their past association with more reproach than nostalgia.22

  Then on 14 July he put on an imitation of the Queen and wrote to the Duke of Westminster,23 ticking him off for electioneering, on the Unionist side of course. There was then a loose convention that the corollary of peers having no vote was that they should not attempt directly to influence the votes of others, and Salisbury had indeed subscribed to it to the extent of spending most of the campaign in the French spa of Royat. Gladstone no doubt thought that he had a special position vis-à-vis Westminster, whom he accused of having struck ‘a fresh blow at the aristocracy’, by virtue of having made him a duke twelve years before. But his action pointed to tetchiness as well as bossiness. And then, after he had returned to London, he suddenly wrote to Hartington peremptorily demanding chapter and verse for some statements in a speech which the latter had delivered no less than seven weeks earlier.

  Gladstone’s reactions to losing, as he certainly claimed, were genuinely based on considerations of public policy (his conviction of the urgency of the Irish issue and of his own solution having become the only viable
one) rather than of personal convenience. He nonetheless reacted to it with some clear and engaging displays of human pique. What was less clear was how and when he ought to resign. Although he had indisputably lost, and lost heavily, the paradox was that Salisbury was not so indisputably the victor. He had 316 seats in a House of Commons with a membership of 670. Gladstonians and Irish Nationalists together constituted 278/280. (There were always one or two loose cards in any nineteenth-century party count, so that as often as lists were compiled so they produced very slightly varying totals.) Liberal Unionists (or ‘seceding Liberals’ as Gladstone preferred to call them) were mostly put at seventy-two or seventy-three, of whom around sixty were Hartington Whigs and around twelve Chamberlain Radicals. None of these wanted at this stage to enter a Conservative government, although Goschen (who was not, however, among the sixty Whigs, for he had been defeated in July) was to break ranks by becoming Chancellor of the Exchequer within a few months. No one indeed knew how far these Liberal Unionists would sustain Salisbury on anything other than Ireland. There was frequent talk of Liberal reunion over the next eighteen months, and the uncertainty was bizarrely illuminated by the fact that the essential component of the government’s majority sat for the next six years on the opposition side of the House, Hartington and Chamberlain cheek by jowl with Gladstone and Harcourt on the same front bench. They rose to excoriate each other, and the leaders of the smaller group to give crucial support to the party opposite, from the same despatch box.