Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  These various tensions were poured into the cauldron of the unparalleled, sometimes bitter, immensely long-drawn-out Committee Room 15 debates of 1–6 December. From a Monday to a Saturday in gothic gloom at the end of the upstairs corridor of the House of Commons, the Irish parliamentary party thrashed out the issue. There were mostly about seventy members present. One session lasted eleven hours. Parnell presided throughout and added a farcical touch by some procedural rulings straight out of Alice in Wonderland. But there was always more drama than boredom in the proceedings. Timothy Healy’s Saturday taunt – ‘and who is to be mistress of the party?’ – in reply to John Redmond’s complaint that Gladstone was ‘the master of the party’ was as unforgettable as it was unforgivable, but it was no more than the culmination of a series of memorable and increasingly vicious exchanges.

  The only other party since the building of the present Palace of Westminster which it is possible to contemplate indulging in such a feat of self-absorbed yet semi-inspired navel-gazing is the 1950s Labour party, and even those stalwarts of brotherly distrust would not have had this degree of stamina. The immediate result was that the Irish split nearly two to one against Parnell and henceforward sat in the chamber as two parties, their relations characterized by a bewildering mixture of intense hostility and occasional rather dream-like acts of mutual courtesy and friendliness.

  Parnell set off to put to the proof his thesis that Ireland was with him even if its craven representatives were not. Dublin remained enthusiastic for its ‘uncrowned king’. Cork, his own constituency, was more equivocal. By the stringent test of by-elections, however, he met defeat after defeat. Kilkenny North before Christmas, North Sligo in April 1891 (his best result) and Carlow in the early summer.130 He consumed his small remaining reserves of strength in these and other campaigns. He married Mrs O’Shea in June. He was dead aged forty-six in October.

  Gladstone retained the leadership of the Liberal party, for the majority of the Irish parliamentary party had acted as he had asked them to do. But his leadership had nonetheless become ‘almost a nullity’. The golden prospect of a large Home Rule majority depended upon the fervent atmosphere of the ‘union of hearts’ holding Irish Catholicism and British Nonconformity in improbable alliance. And the ‘union of hearts’ depended upon two commanding if utterly different leaders, Gladstone and Parnell, working together in amity. Could more have been saved from the wreck if Gladstone had preserved the goodwill of Parnell by taking the risk of extending the hand of tolerance towards him and genuinely leaving it to the Irish to decide untrammelled? Gladstone would no doubt have had to face a barrage of protest, but his authority was great and he was too old to be frightened.

  Nor was he without supporters who thought that, in a fraught situation, this might be a wiser course. Morley might cluck and Harcourt might glower, but Spencer who after nearly nine years as Viceroy knew more about Ireland than either of them, and Asquith, who was to be the most effective member of the weak 1892 government and the first (and last) major Prime Minister of a Liberal government after Gladstone, both thought that this would have been the wiser course. It would not necessarily have saved Parnell. The influence of the hierarchy might have disposed of him in any event. But it might have avoided the death throes (politically as well as almost literally) of Parnell being turned against the English connection, and his consequently leaving a legacy which over thirty years proved fatal to the solution of the Irish problem within a British context.

  THE LEADEN VICTORY

  AFTER THE PARNELL débâcle and the smash-up of the Irish party Gladstone became a half-broken man. His optimism before these events had perhaps been excessive. On the basis of twelve by-election victories he regarded a massive Liberal majority at an 1891 or 1892 general election as a virtual certainty. This majority allied to a solid and moderate Nationalist phalanx under Parnell’s firm command would intimidate the House of Lords so that a Home Rule Bill could be quickly enacted. With this crowning pediment placed upon his life’s work Gladstone could then hand over the premiership (to whom, had he been allowed to exercise his preference, was never consistently clear) and devote such years as remained for him to a quiet communing with his God. He no longer saw himself as writing great works of theology, but he did see the need to settle his soul after the secular buffetings of sixty years in politics. This prospect led him into a series of remarkably benign end-year musings. The self-flagellation (metaphorical as well as literal) of circa 1850 was far behind him. On his eightieth birthday at the end of 1889 he wrote: ‘Excellent sermons. All things smile.’ And two days later: ‘And so the year has rolled into the great bosom of the Past. We had a grand dinner of 12 at the Rectory. S[tephen] & I played backgammon. The Castle topsy turvy as usual at Xmas: but many are made innocently happy. Benedictus benedicat.’1

  His mood a year later was transformed, and very much for the worse. The new sombreness, however, took a little time to settle. It required evidence both from Ireland of Parnell’s destructive fighting strength on the ground and from England of a decisive change in the electoral trend. The latter turned on the Bassetlaw by-election, in which polling took place in mid-December. Gladstone if anything invested it with too much importance, as he had perhaps done with the favourable results of the previous two years. On 11 December he went there himself and addressed meetings in Retford and Worksop, the two principal towns of the somewhat amorphous and uninformatively named Nottinghamshire constituency. It was familiar ground for him with Clumber Park, where he had begun his political career by waiting on the Duke of Newcastle fifty-six years before, almost in the suburbs of Worksop. But it was far from a familiar gesture from a party leader, particularly one who had been three times Prime Minister. Even in the third quarter of the twentieth century party leaders stood back from bye-elections, and in the last quarter of the nineteenth century such an intervention was wholly unprecedented. Nor did it work. Bassetlaw, which in 1885 had produced a narrow Tory majority of 295 (in 1886 the seat was uncontested), dramatically broke the previous trend and put the Tory majority up to 725.

  Gladstone, who was at Hawarden,131 at first received the news, even in the privacy of his diary, with a superficial ‘looking on the bright side’ worthy of a modern party spokesman: ‘Bassetlaw defeat. A lesson: but the reading of it not yet clear.’2 On the next day, however, Morley, calling for a morning and luncheon visit on his way from Dublin to London, found him looking like ‘some strange Ancient of Days: so different from the man I had seen off at King’s Cross [for Retford] less than a week before’. Morley then recorded Gladstone as saying: ‘Bassetlaw looks as if we were going back to 1886. For me that is notice to quit. Another five years’ agitation at my age would be impossible – ludicrous (with much emphasis).’3

  This was not exactly the way in which he saw the prospect in his year-end summing up of 1890. The horizon had certainly darkened, and most oppressively so: ‘We may if things do not go decisively well in Ireland lose hold of that margin which in the constituencies spans the space between victory and defeat. Home Rule may be postponed for another period of five or six years. The struggle in that case must survive me, cannot be survived by me.’ But he still saw himself as a conscript – even if the commander-in-chief – in the army of justice for Ireland. It was his hopes for a furlough before the end which was the certain casualty, not necessarily the Irish goal or even his own part in securing it:

  O! ’tis a burden, Cromwell, ’tis a burden

  Too heavy for a man that hopes for heaven.4

  ‘Undoubtedly it is a new and aggravated condition of my life’, he continued, ‘if I am finally to resign all hope of anything resembling a brief rest on this side the grave.’5 Gladstone did not succumb. By this stage he was almost constitutionally incapable of giving up. But the new and gloomier prospect lowered his spirits and took some of the zest out of even his sanguine temperament.

  Between December 1890 and the date which Salisbury chose for the 1892 election (about a year before t
he statutory limit on the life of the Parliament) there was an interval of eighteen months. During this period Gladstone continued to hope for but hardly to expect an adequate victory, and there is a feeling that his life was on a lower key than had ever previously been the case. It would, for instance, have been difficult to imagine his repeating in February 1891 or 1892 the visit, lasting no less than eight days, which he paid to All Souls College, Oxford, in that month of 1890. There he charmed everybody, and particularly the most die-hard Tories, of which All Souls had a fair quota, by his courtesy, his innocence and the range of his reminiscent conversations. The pleasure was mutual and he wrote to his wife: ‘I am reading the Lessons and all sorts of things – such pranks!’,6 while to his diary he gave an impression of unrelenting entertainment and enjoyment: ‘9–11¾. Breakfast at Magdalen: a gigantic dissipation. Luncheon at Exeter (Prof. Pelham). Dinner at the Vice Chancellor’s (St. John’s) with the Club [a still extant Oxford institution, not to be confused with Dr Johnson’s foundation, The Club, in London]. Read Shakespeare – Tracts on Oxford. Residue of time filled with conversations.’7

  In 1891 there were no comparable nostalgic excitements, although he spent a short weekend at Eton in March and gave a lecture on the Greek goddess Artemis. Most of that winter he alternated between London, where he stayed mostly at 1 Carlton Gardens in the house of Stuart Rendel, MP for Montgomeryshire until he became a peer in Gladstone’s 1894 resignation honours list, and Dollis Hill, the Aberdeen villa. So his housing needs were well and economically looked after. Rendel was an Etonian engineer, who had been a partner of Sir William Armstrong, from 1887 Lord Armstrong of Cragside, the Newcastle shipbuilder and armaments manufacturer, from which association Rendel had clearly made a lot of money. But by the age of little over fifty his chief pleasure and even purpose in life seemed to have become that of entertaining Gladstone, which he did not only in Carlton Gardens but also at Hatchlands, his Surrey mansion, and the Château Thorenc at Cannes.

  As a purveyor of hospitality he was closely rivalled by George Armitstead, ten years his senior and intermittently Liberal MP for Dundee until 1885. He came of a more exotic background. He gave his education as ‘Wiesbaden, Heidelberg, etc’ and his occupation as ‘Russia merchant’. This activity must have been as remunerative as Rendel’s engineering for in cash terms Armitstead was an even more generous host to the Gladstones. Although he had fine houses in London and Perthshire, he mostly entertained them in hotels. At Easter 1891, they were his guests first at the Victoria Hotel at St Leonards and then at the newly opened Metropole Hotel (‘what an abode of luxurious comfort,’ Gladstone wrote) in Brighton. Then in September 1891, when Armitstead was staying at Hawarden (so the entertaining was not entirely one way) and when the Gladstones were unusually low in the aftermath of Willy’s death, he suddenly performed a major feat of spirit-lifting. ‘Mr Armitstead in the morning opened the subject of his giant treat to us,’ Gladstone wrote.8

  And so indeed it was. He proposed to take three Gladstones (Helen as well as Catherine) for a ten-week Christmas and New Year holiday in Biarritz and back via Pau, Toulouse, St Raphaël, Nice and Paris. John Morley and Sir Algernon West were also of the party for some of the time, although whether they were encompassed in Armitstead’s generosity was not clear. The Biarritz visit was a clear success. Gladstone loved the turbulent but mild Atlantic weather. ‘The sea continued grand and terrible,’ he wrote on 30 December. Biarritz with its Basque coast and hinterland was henceforward a favourite destination of Gladstone’s. He went back for two subsequent long visits, Armitstead acting as a combination of courier, conversation–backgammon partner and bill-payer on all three occasions. Like Rendel he did eventually get a peerage but it did not come from Gladstone; he had to wait until his eighty-second year, 1906, and the new Campbell-Bannerman government.

  For the rest 1891 had few uplifts. It was either flat or worse. In May Gladstone had had a severe attack of influenza with nine days of fever which even involved a break in his diary-writing, the first since his 1880 pneumonia, and kept him away from his regular early church for three weeks. At the beginning of July his eldest son Willy had died after desperate surgery. Gladstone, still convalescent after his ’flu, had been staying near Lowestoft accompanied by his wife until she went to London for the attempt at salvation by operation, and by his daughter Mary, complemented by a three-night visit from John Morley. His host at the house which he had never previously visited was J. J. Colman, the Norwich mustard manufacturer, who welcomed him and his party, without much obtruding. When the dread news came it was at first kept from Gladstone. The penultimate day he wrote of as ‘a day of illusion’. Then on the final day Mary Gladstone wrote: ‘At 6 [in the morning] I went in to Papa and told him gradually of the alarming news, tho’ keeping the worst from him till we were within half an hour of London. He was terribly shocked and broken down, and at Liverpool Street the little note from Helen reached us telling us of the end at 5.30.’9

  Twelve days later after the funeral at Hawarden he went back to Lowestoft for the second half of July. The Clyffe there was the epitome of a semi-anonymous reposeful house of comfort. Such houses, rather than those of historic note, even when accompanied by the ‘overflowing kindness’ of the hosts, were what he now liked. He did however occasionally venture on to ground which, while mostly loyal and always friendly, was less tailored for his own needs. In February he went to Lord Rothschild’s Tring Park for a Saturday to Monday, and commented on the ‘extreme kindness’ but (not surprisingly) found the Sunday ‘very unsabbatical’;10 in September he spent a week at Fasque, his first visit under the reign of the new baronet his nephew, and his last visit ever to that family house in which he had spent long autumns during his periods of greatest emotional turbulence between thirty-nine and fifty-seven years before. And in December he divided four days between visits to Spencer at Althorp and Rosebery at Mentmore. Both of these visits were, however, essentially political, Spencer’s party being almost a shadow Cabinet in the country.

  His main speech-making excursion of 1891 was to Newcastle for the October annual meeting of the National Liberal Federation. It was his first overnight visit to the Tyne since his unfortunate praise there of Jefferson Davis in 1862. This second visit, for quite different reasons, was not much happier. While his only real interest now lay in Ireland he realized that there had to be some sort of general Liberal platform. So he allowed Harcourt, Morley and others to cobble together the so-called ‘Newcastle Programme’, which was a capacious ragbag but weak on theme. Home Rule was of course at the head, but it was buttressed by proposals for Church disestablishment in Scotland as well as Wales, for triennial parliaments, for a further measure of franchise reform simply embracing ‘one man (but not one woman), one vote’, for local vetoes on drink sales, for the establishing of parish and district councils, for employers’ liability in industrial accidents and, a little more tentatively, the payment of MPs and restrictions on the hours of work (not of them but of the manual labour force, or at least some parts of it). And brooding over the whole manifesto were heavy warnings to the House of Lords about the consequence for their shape and powers if they resisted the items in this catalogue.

  A number of these items were positively distasteful to Gladstone. Most of the others failed to excite his appetite. But he did not have the time or the energy to argue about them in detail. So he decided that the only way to get enough of them down was to abandon his well-known habit of over-mastication and swallow them whole. It was a necessary price for keeping the Liberal faithful enthusiastic for Home Rule. The result was a flailing speech delivered with more vehemence than conviction. It lasted an hour and twenty minutes in the rococo and many-tiered Theatre Royal and was best remembered for the extravagance of his oratorical movements. Sometimes his arms rose high above his head in indignation, sometimes his knees sagged almost to the ground in supplication. When taken in conjunction with the recordings of Gladstone’s voice which were made in 1890 and are still exta
nt, with their undulating cadences, slight northern accent and hint of retribution, it is difficult not to recall the opening words of the old American ‘Wobbly’ song: ‘Long haired preachers come out every night / Try to tell you what’s wrong and what’s right.’ But Newcastle was an off day, with Gladstone in his own memorable phrase of thirteen years earlier, ‘putting on the steam perforce’ in an unusually mechanical way. On more favourable occasions his voice could still have a wonderful vibrancy and his arguments a massive momentum.

  The morning after the Theatre Royal speech he received the freedom of Newcastle in the City Hall with a speech of twenty-five minutes and an audience of 2500. Then he retired quickly to Hawarden and wrote: ‘Deo gratias for having finished a work heavy at near 82.’11 With that he endeavoured to put Newcastle out of his mind. He was still a very good judge of the quality of his own performances.

  For two months after his return from Newcastle Gladstone slept every night at Hawarden. He made no speech other than on a one-day swoop to Port Sunlight at the end of November when he addressed the Wirral Liberals, and he had no specifically political visitors except for Rosebery, who was typically playing hard to get as a member of a future Liberal government, Arnold Morley, his current Chief Whip, and Edward Marjoribanks, who was to succeed to that office in 1892. He cut down a few of his last trees (it was he who was becoming exhausted, not the arboreal resources of Hawarden), he worked on the text and then the proofs of two long articles on Olympian religion which he wrote for the New York publication North American Review. But above all he worked on sorting books in the Temple of Peace, then transporting and installing them in his new memorial library. ‘Worked on books here and at St. Deiniols’ became a constant daily refrain. In mid-December he left for his ‘great treat’ at Biarritz and in Provence.