Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Despite the confusion the collective mind of the defeated Cabinet moved steadily towards an early resignation rather than waiting to meet the new Parliament. Those, notably Rosebery, who were less dedicated to Home Rule were always predisposed towards resignation, almost as the Spanish Falangists of the 1930s made ‘Long live death’ into a perverse slogan. And those, like Gladstone, Morley and Spencer, who had become so dedicated, recoiled from the only basis on which they could possibly live with the Parliament, which was that of an Irish policy (or lack of policy) acceptable to Hartington. Gladstone at last came to London on Wednesday, 14 July, held a Cabinet dinner on Saturday the 17th and a final Cabinet on the Tuesday the 20th, when the decision was unanimous, and the resignation was sent to the Queen that afternoon. She was at Osborne, and as had become usual during changes of ministry showed not the slightest disposition to come to London or even to Windsor.

  Nor did she express a single word of regret (which might have been hypocritical) about Gladstone’s departure, or of thanks for his third period of service as her first minister. She accepted the resignation at once, only reflecting that it might incommode Lord Salisbury by bringing him back two or three days early from his cure.

  Even with his French sojourn so foreshortened it was 25 July before the new Prime Minister formally kissed hands. And it was another five days after that before Gladstone was summoned to the Isle of Wight for his farewell audience. The Queen found him ‘pale and nervous’ and complaining of his train being late. She had made no attempt to assuage the inconvenience of the day trip by offering him luncheon. He found her ‘in good spirits’ with ‘her manners altogether pleasant’. He also noticed that during what he thought (falsely) might be his last audience after fifty-five years in political life and ‘a good quarter of a century’s service to her in office’,24 she was unwilling to discuss with him any matter of public substance except for civil list allowances for her grandchildren. The next day, however, she wrote him a letter which can be not unfairly summarized as rubbing in the point that she had always thought that his Irish policy was bound to fail, that she had been proved right in this, and that a period of silence from him on the issue would now be most welcome, as well as his clear patriotic duty.25

  As Gladstone made his early-evening way back across the Solent after that ungrateful audience he was too absorbed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, which had just been published and which he read through complete in the day, to be obsessed with grievance. Nor was he really in a valedictory mood, however much, partly for the purposes of pointing up its barren thinness, he might suggest that the audience could be final. His seventy-seventh birthday was approaching but he did not regard himself as beaten on Ireland. One of the reasons that he gave (to Spencer on 4 July) for an early resignation was that ‘if there is to be an anti-Irish Government the sooner it begins the sooner it will end’.26 Even before the defeat was certain, his power of recovery was already enabling him to look to the next government but one. Nor was he any longer saying that the next battle must be fought by other and younger generals. The truth was that he trusted neither their judgement nor their martial determination. For himself, on the other hand, the twelve years which had gone by since his withdrawal of 1874 had increased rather than diminished his appetite for the fray. He set out his game plan for himself with great clarity in a letter to his Calcutta son on 16 July: ‘What I think possible is that . . . I should obtain a dispensation from ordinary and habitual attendance in Parliament but should not lay down the leadership so as to force them to chose another leader; and should take an active part when occasion seemed to require it, especially on the Irish question.’27

  To the implementation of this prescription he proceeded forthwith. He moved out of 10 Downing Street by the end of July. This was much easier for him than on the previous occasion when he had the accumulation of five years’ residence. This time he had merely to pack a few crates of books and despatch them to the ever hospitable Lucy Cavendish at 21 Carlton House Terrace (he found it very difficult to keep away from one house or another on that old stamping ground), which he made his not greatly used base until the following spring when he effectively retreated to the Aberdeen-owned villa at Dollis Hill. In early August, however, he was mostly in the near countryside, first with Wolverton outside Kingston, then near Guildford with Sir Algernon West, his private secretary of the prosperous early years of his first government, whom he had made chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue in 1881, and finally outside Chislehurst with Charles Morley, the determinedly Liberal younger son of the Nottingham textile magnate. Gladstone was becoming increasingly fond, more so than of broad-acred ducal palaces, of well-appointed Home Counties residences of more comfort than fame in which the life of the house and the services of the household revolved around himself.

  From these various bases he descended upon the House of Commons for three leader’s speeches. He seconded the re-election of Speaker Peel, he spoke on the first day of the debate on the Address, and five days later he made a further intervention, this time for fifty minutes, on Irish land, and involving some altercation with the Speaker, whom he had so recently supported. Then he disappeared to Bavaria and Austria for three and a half weeks, although the unusually timed session of Parliament continued throughout this period and up to the last week of September. Lord Acton, but not Catherine Gladstone, was with him. Theological conversations with the now aged Dr Döllinger (eighty-seven) were once again the principal object of the visit, although the scenery of the Traunsee and the Halstattersee attracted much admiration. Lehnbach, the portraitist of 1879, had also survived and on this visit did a double portrait of Döllinger and Gladstone which until recently hung in the German Embassy in London.

  Gladstone regained London on Sunday, 19 September, and on the following day gave qualified support to an Irish Tenants Relief Bill which Parnell had introduced. On the Tuesday, he voted for it in a division of 202 against 297, which figures neatly illustrated the balance of the Parliament, an unassailable but not overwhelming anti-Irish majority. On the Wednesday afternoon he went to Hawarden, and stayed there for 125 consecutive nights, the longest continuous period that he ever spent under the Hawarden roof, or for that matter any other roof, between his marriage in 1839 and his death in 1898. He was not giving up, but he was husbanding his energies, which he recognized to be in decline. The question was whether, in Aberdeen’s immortal phrase, he was once again capable of being ‘terrible in the rebound’.

  ‘THE UNION – AND DISUNION – OF HEARTS’

  GLADSTONE’S HOPE THAT if an ‘anti-Irish’ government were allowed quickly in it could be got quickly out proved ill founded. The second Salisbury administration, despite its unclear majority, lasted with authority for six years. This was principally due to the mounting implacability of the Liberal Unionists towards Home Rule and therefore towards the prospect of a fourth Gladstone government. At the beginning of 1887 Chamberlain flirted with the possibility of Liberal reunion, and there was a round-table conference at which Harcourt performed as an eager rather than a neat bridge-builder. Gladstone gave him some discretion, but not too much, for he did not really want Chamberlain back. As a result the enterprise achieved little except for the return of Trevelyan, which might have happened in any event.

  Chamberlain, who was a naturally implacable man, then moved hard in the other direction. Hartington stood back from these negotiations at least as much as did Gladstone, and gave the impression that he was glad to be free of the Liberal cage, although this was paradoxical given that he had fled from it in company with Chamberlain, the man principally responsible for making its confines intolerable to him. Hartington was, however, highly susceptible to that anti-Irish furia which infected many otherwise calm Englishmen of his and the next generation. When Parnell was ruined by the O’Shea divorce case he told the Queen with an uncharacteristic lack of generosity, particularly in view of his own domestic arrangements with the Duchess of Manchester (not regularized until two yea
rs later), that ‘I never thought anything in politics could give me as much pleasure as this does.’1

  The Conservative government also gained authority through a successful ministerial performance. Randolph Churchill as Chancellor blew himself up within five months and Hicks Beach retired hurt from the Irish Office three months later. But their replacements were successful ministers: first Goschen, that nominally cross-party figure of weight and talent, a forerunner of Milner and Waverley (John Anderson); and second Arthur Balfour, who so ruthlessly demonstrated his languid steel in Ireland that his sobriquet changed from ‘Pretty Fanny’ to ‘Bloody Balfour’. Also successful was W. H. Smith, who at the same time moved from the War Office to the leadership of the House of Commons with the grand title of First Lord of the Treasury, which Gladstone thought improper for Salisbury to separate from the premiership. Together they constituted a formidable House of Commons trio.

  Balfour was the key figure of the three. He was the agent of Salisbury’s perception, in contrast with Gladstone’s, that Ireland could be governed from London for another generation. Gladstone’s long-term view was both more clear-sighted and more imaginative than Salisbury’s. He saw that quick Home Rule offered the only prospect of keeping Ireland permanently within the British connection. But Salisbury’s short- to medium-term judgement was cooler. Gladstone convinced himself in 1885–6 that civic order was about to dissolve in Ireland. That conviction, together with his age, made him in a hurry.126 Salisbury thought that Gladstone’s imagination had become fevered, that the resources of coercion were not yet exhausted, and that it was mostly a question of nerve. And in Balfour, literally nepotistic though his appointment was, Salisbury found the ideal instrument of unsentimental repression, combined with the intelligence to mingle a little reform with the iron fist. Balfour’s determination both secured his own passport to the premiership and strengthened the evolving alliance with Hartington and Chamberlain, the key to the twenty years of Unionist hegemony which began in 1886.

  Despite these adverse underlying political currents Gladstone’s morale was on the whole high during the first four years of that Salisbury government. By the end of this period he was aged nearly eighty-one, and with this advance there undoubtedly went some failing of powers. Both his hearing and his eyesight deteriorated, the former to such an extent that he found theatre-going, which had played a great part in his life for the previous twenty years, had become pointless. This was after an intermediate phase when he tried by a special dispensation the device of sitting on a corner of the stage. In the same way poor vision caused him somewhat to restrict his reading (although not as much as in his fourth government), and was one of the reasons for his growing addiction to backgammon, which consumed after-dinner hours when in earlier years he might have read. His memory, particularly for names but also for recent events, although not for more distant ones, showed signs of fading. From the spring of 1887 there began to be occasional gaps in his diary entries because when he came to write them up in the evening he simply could not remember the names of some to whom he had written in the morning.

  On the other hand his physical stamina remained formidable. He felled his last tree a few weeks before his eighty-second birthday, but for a couple of years before that final event he had begun to substitute for arboreal activity the almost equally strenuous one of first sorting and then moving (mostly by wheelbarrow) large quantities of books to St Deiniol’s Library in Hawarden village. This institution for residential scholars he founded as a sort of advance memorial in 1889; unlike American presidential libraries however it was not a shell for Gladstone memorabilia but a serious theological and historical research library.

  He continued to walk well and to be physically agile. When earlier in that same year of 1889 he was knocked down in London by a passing cab, he got up, pursued the errant driver and held him until the police came. His stamina also showed in his ability to address large audiences for long periods, although this had become almost a reflex action on his part. In the autumn of 1888, on a return National Liberal Federation visit to Bingley Hall in Birmingham, although in contrast with 1877 without Chamberlain as master of ceremonies or even in the audience, he had addressed 20,000 for one and three-quarter hours.

  The essence of his good morale during these years was that he was of settled mind so far as his own political future was concerned. He would remain leader of the Liberal party so long as he could see the prospect of settling the Irish question. He had one more river to cross, and that, if not the river Jordan, was a mixture of the Liffey and the Thames, for it was not simply justice in isolation for Ireland, but the reconciliation of Ireland to Britain which inspired him. From his own point of view the advantage was that it gave a continuing but not time-fixed purpose to his life in his late seventies and early eighties. The frequent menace of old age is that it imprisons its victim in a departure lounge of life,127 awaiting with a mixture of apprehension and impatience the announcement that the aircraft is ready. Gladstone’s sense that he had ‘one fight more, the best and the last’ (in the words of Browning’s Prospice) was a tremendous prophylactic against senile futility. While he had a cause, the future lay before him, unbounded except by the prospect of a final success. His energies might be running out but his life was not running down. For the 1890 session he even rented a London house of his own, 10 St James’s Square, now the Royal Institute of International Affairs, which had been previously lived in by two other Prime Ministers, Chatham and Derby.

  On this basis of expectation he was content to spend long autumns at Hawarden, followed over the turn of the years 1887–8 and 1888–9 with six- to eight-week excursions to Florence on the first occasion and Naples on the second. Each trip was rounded off with a few days in Cannes, which under Rendel and Acton auspices was becoming a favourite resort. At home his country-house visiting, particularly to the very grand establishments, became less frequent. There were many fewer Whig magnates whom he wished to visit or who would have enjoyed entertaining him. He did, however, make a twelve-day West Country Whitsun tour in 1889, which included visits to four houses as well as five nights on the yacht of a Rothschild daughter and several speeches. He was ‘delighted’ with the still incomplete Truro Cathedral and regarded Sir William Harcourt’s equally new example of the style sometimes known as Parliamentary Tudor, appropriately set in the New Forest, as ‘a marvellous creation’.2 He paid only one constituency visit between the general elections of 1886 and 1892, but that was a substantial one, lasting a week in the autumn of 1890. Lady Rosebery, still a young woman, was dying at Dalmeny, so he stayed with the Dean of the Faculty of Advocates in the Edinburgh New Town. He made four major speeches, two minor ones and visited the newly opened Forth railway bridge.

  In general his non-parliamentary speech-making was active during those years. He addressed the annual meetings of the National Liberal Federation not only on the already mentioned Birmingham occasion in 1888, but also at Nottingham in 1887, and Manchester in 1889. He had previously decided to miss the Sheffield gathering in 1890, which was lucky as it fell in the immediate shadow of the Parnell divorce case, to the considerable embarrassment of Harcourt and Morley, who had to perform in his absence. At Newcastle in 1891, to cast forward a little, he was again present and orating, but more mechanically, more floridly and less magisterially than usual. Despite his often imperious attitude to constituencies and followers, he was the first party leader to make a fixture of party conferences. He also addressed major provincial meetings at Swansea, Cardiff, Plymouth and Dundee.

  Neither his advancing years nor his concentration upon, almost his obsession with, a single political objective produced any marked diminution in his intellectual activity. Despite his increasing eyesight problem, he was still reading voraciously. His count of books and pamphlets read in 1890, his eighty-first year, for instance, gave the almost incredible figure of 419, supplemented by 39 periodical articles. And his writing also remained prolific. In that same turn-of-the-decade year he e
arned from articles and reviews a sum of just over £1915,3 the rough equivalent of £95,000 today.

  Gladstone’s contemporaries, and some who were younger, began to drop around him almost like flies. Phillimore, probably his oldest friend had gone in 1885; in 1889 Bright went in March, as did Gladstone’s sole surviving brother, Sir Thomas; in 1890 Döllinger and Newman died; in 1891 Granville, his oldest political collaborator; and in 1892 Manning and Tennyson. Gladstone took all these deaths with fortitude. This may have been partly because of the strength of his Christian faith. But it also owed much to his sense of his mission and responsibilities as a great commander who, when he heard painful news of illustrious casualties, whether on his own side or the other, could not be distracted from his duties and his strategy. He may indeed have been more affected by the deaths, a couple of years later, of his doctor, (Sir) Andrew Clark, and his valet, Zadok Outram, who after many years in Gladstone’s service became an alcoholic and then drowned himself in the Thames. They were operational staff, necessary for the conduct of the campaign.

  That strategy, which particularly in the two years from the second half of 1888 to late 1890 (when twelve seats changed from Conservative to Liberal at by-elections) showed strong signs of working well, depended crucially on the partnership with Parnell. This prospered and then festered with an heroic reversal of fortune more akin to the heights and depths of Greek tragedy than to the normally mild landscape of Victorian England. This final phase of Gladstone’s relations with Parnell revolved around two of the most famous lawsuits of the late nineteenth century, which was the classical age of not only parliamentary politics but also of great trials with gladiatorial advocates and dramatic denouements. The librettos of Sir W. S. Gilbert were the house ballads of both the Palace of Westminster and the Royal Courts of Justice. These two legal processes were separated from each other by little more than eighteen months, but produced violent fluctuations in Parnell’s reputation and hence, perhaps more inevitably than admirably, in Gladstone’s attitude to him. In April 1887 The Times produced a damaging and, as was demonstrated nearly two years later, entirely unfounded libel of Parnell. They published forged letters in which Parnell appeared to apologize to some of his nationalist supporters for his ‘tactical’ denunciation of the Phoenix Park atrocity. He hesitated to sue because of suspicion about the prejudices of a propertied London jury. Eventually, however, the government set up a most unfavourable form of enquiry, which was a Special Commission of one lord justice of appeal and two puisne judges, Unionists to a man, who, moreover, were set to investigate every alleged Fenian crime of the previous ten years or more. In spite of this penumbra of obfuscation the Special Commission could not avoid, on its fiftieth sitting day, 21 February 1889, getting to the gravamen. Pigott, the purveyor of the letters, was then so mauled by Parnell’s counsel, Sir Charles Russell, that he fled to Madrid rather than face another day’s cross-examination, and there committed suicide. Asquith, at the time only a junior barrister standing in for an exhausted Russell, completed the rout by exposing the prejudiced irresponsibility of Macdonald, the manager of The Times.