Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Fowler, the solicitor from Wolverhampton, and twenty-two years’ Asquith’s senior, could not compete in these fashionable stakes. In 1892, however, he was also a successful minister and effective debater, who carried the Parish Councils Bill, the major legislative achievement of that government. For the rest the ministry was a familiar Gladstonian one, with Herschell again Lord Chancellor, the secretaryships of state apart from the already mentioned Home and Foreign ones filled by Kimberley, Ripon and Campbell-Bannerman, with Spencer at the Admiralty, Mundella at the Board of Trade, and G. O. Trevelyan at the Scottish Office. A. H. D. Acland, the son of Gladstone’s Christ Church contemporary, Shaw-Lefevre and Arnold Morley brought up the rear of the Cabinet. There was also James Bryce, in ministerial office for the first time as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster with that office’s scarcity of administrative duties enabling him to act as a general constitutional adviser.

  Although Gladstone could still gear himself up for formidable feats of endurance, particularly if they involved declaiming on his legs before an audience, the normal conduct of a Prime Minister’s business had become just beyond his capacity. Rightly if he was to retain adequate authority, he had cursorily dismissed a scheme canvassed by Hamilton and others that he might ask someone else (perhaps Spencer) to become Prime Minister while himself accepting one of the grand honorific offices with the specific role of drawing up and conducting the Irish Bill. (The only vestige of this which survived was the perverse one that he took the office of Lord Privy Seal as well as that of First Lord of the Treasury, which he had done in his 1886 administration but not in his two previous and major ones.) Nor did he act upon an alternative Hamilton suggestion that at ‘conclaves’, the informal precursors of modern Cabinet committees, he should nominate on an ad hoc basis a presiding colleague who could actually hear what was being said.

  What he did do as a recognition of his deafness was to take the more iconoclastic step of changing the locale and physical shape of Cabinet meetings. He rationalized this by pretending that the new arrangement was inherently better. Hamilton wrote on 19 August:

  Mr G. has just discovered, after many years of Cabinet holding, that it is not right for Ministers to sit round a large table with blotting books and paper before them and with the consequent temptation to write things down unnecessarily and to draw pictures of nothing and nobody. He proposes now that he alone should sit at a writing table (with Rosebery on his right hand) and that the others should sit round as closely as they can. This arrangement will partly get over the difficulties of his deafness: and the discovery is opportune.28

  Then, on 27 October, he continued: ‘Mr. G. held his first autumnal Cabinet today. They met in his own room – the corner room on first floor (over the old Cabinet room) – in No. 10 Downing Street.’29

  Amazingly, however, and once again illustrating Gladstone’s unique capacity to be larger than life, but not wholly rationally so, he responded to the challenge of taking on for the fourth time a burden which was just beyond the perimeter of his capacity by an absolute refusal to concentrate all his energies upon it. He continued with four other tasks, all of which any normal man would have abandoned, postponed or at least neglected when struggling on the frontiers of his strength to be Prime Minister at an older age than any other man before or since. The first was to complete a long article for the North American Review designed to refute an attack in the same periodical by his old but separated friend the Duke of Argyll on the principle of Home Rule. On his first three days in London after the election he worked hard on this abstract argument for a recondite journal.

  Second, he was intent on doing a new translation of the Odes of Horace. He conceived the idea in the Fife Arms Hotel at Braemar in the immediate aftermath of the election and made a start within a week. On his journey to London from Hawarden on 27 July for his immediately pending ‘formidable’ interview with Harcourt he worked the whole way on the Odes. No doubt the searching for appropriate English renderings was easier on his eyes than continuous reading. He was at them again as soon as he had sent off his anti-Argyll article to the North American Review, and then, a good deal more intermittently, during the autumn. He returned to more serious Horatian work during his Biarritz Christmas holiday. The translations were eventually published by John Murray in 1894.

  One reason why his application to Horace became spasmodic during the early autumn was that he had agreed to deliver on 24 October the first Romanes lecture in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, and proceeded to devote the most disproportionate amount of time to its preparation. He started on 31 August, which was two days after the third and the most dangerous but also the most farcical of his three accidents of that summer. After an afternoon drive with his wife he ‘walked & came unawares in the quietest corner of the park on a dangerous cow which knocked me down and might have done serious damage’.30 There are slightly more dramatic versions, including Magnus’s statement that he had to lie down, feigning to be dead, until the cow’s attention was distracted and he could escape first behind a tree and then back to the Castle. The malfeasant beast was apparently not part of a dairy herd but a wild heifer which had intruded into the park and was subsequently shot. It was compensated by the tributes of having its head permanently displayed at the Glynne Arms in Hawarden village, and of evoking an elaborate wreath despatched with a card inscribed ‘to the memory of the patriotic cow which sacrificed its life in an attempt to save Ireland from Home Rule’.31 Gladstone, although he had walked home and sat down calmly at dinner, suffered a few weeks of mild ill effect, which was not surprising at nearly eighty-three.

  The incident did not much distract him from the preparation of his Oxford lecture. Between the end of August and mid-October he spent substantial portions of fifteen separate days working upon it. During this period he surprisingly pleaded this preoccupation in a letter to the poet’s son, as a reason for not agreeing to act as a pall-bearer at Tennyson’s Westminster Abbey funeral. Then he recorded on 17 October: ‘Finished at last writing my interminable lecture.’32 But he still devoted parts of another three days to touching it up, including an occasion when he assembled an audience of half a dozen or so at Hawarden (not all family, for one, James Stuart, MP for Hoxton, was a former fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge) and read it to them for an hour and twenty minutes. His approach to the actual performance was equally respectful. He engaged in correspondence with the eponymous Professor Romanes (not a venerable Oxford don but a forty-four-year-old Canadian-born, Cambridge-educated scientist, who had held a chair of physiology at the Royal Institution) on the question whether he should wear a red or a black gown, and he arrived in Oxford and was installed in the Christ Church Deanery two days in advance.

  Altogether it was a remarkably disproportionate elaboration, particularly from the man who with no indication of more than half a morning’s preparation had delivered some of the greatest (and longest) of nineteenth-century parliamentary orations. It can only be interpreted as an old man’s act of Oxford pietism, a gesture of thanksgiving for sixty-three years of connection with the University, which has at least had the lasting effect of giving the Romanes series a unique prestige among all Oxford lectures. Fortunately, in the circumstances, the occasion was a success. Gladstone pronounced the ‘audience excellent’. The Times, not then his most enthusiastic supporter, reported: ‘He was in excellent voice, and each word and intonation was fully appreciated by every person in the crowded theatre.’33 This was despite the fact that the lecture’s title, ‘An Academic Sketch’, hardly lived up to the preparations. It was in fact an erudite survey of the history and spirit of the University, with some sidelong glances at Cambridge which made him anxious to be assured by the former fellow of Trinity that these were fair. The crowning irony was that, having devoted all this attention to a private excursion to Oxford, he stubbornly declined to deliver the obligatory Prime Minister’s speech at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet which took place two weeks later. Andrew Clark was encouraged to provide a
medical prohibition. Two Cabinet meetings had to consider who should be the substitute, until it was devolved through Ripon to Kimberley.

  Gladstone’s fourth preoccupation was with the affairs of the Granville estate. Granville, as we have seen,135 had never been a broad-acred as opposed to a many-cousined earl, but it was not realized until after his death in April 1891 that he was effectively bankrupt. This may have been the principal reason why he had refused the marquessate which Gladstone offered him at the end of the 1886 government.136 When it became clear that there was a substantial deficit on the estate Gladstone occupied himself in the matter with all the relentless dedication which he had shown in dealing with the Oak Farm débâcle or the embarrassed affairs of the fifth Duke of Newcastle. Following a sombre report from Waterhouse, the great accountant, he set himself to raise gifts of £10,000 each (£500,000 today) from magnates who had been Granville’s associates. It was a club with a stiff entrance fee and for membership of which social and political cachet was also required. The prospective list makes interesting reading. Ten appear at first to have been approached: Westminster, Devonshire, Spencer, Lansdowne, Rothschild, Brassey, Northbrook, Sefton (Derby’s rival as an owner of Liverpool ground rents), Derby himself and Burton (originally Bass, the brewer). Later Gladstone added Currie the shipowner, Aberdeen, Rosebery and Northbourne. They responded with varying degrees of generosity. Westminster declined absolutely. Devonshire on the other hand, despite the political separation, ‘behaved right ducally’. The others dribbled out differing (in fact rather substantial) amounts so that £18,000 (£900,000) had been subscribed by the end of 1892 and Gladstone was able with a final modest subvention from himself and the skilled services of Mr Waterhouse to avoid any technical state of bankruptcy.

  With these preoccupations, as well as semi-blindness and semi-deafness, it is amazing that Gladstone had any time at all to spare for the premiership. Yet, although he managed to avoid London between 16 August and 28 September, and again for most of October, he nonetheless showed almost surplus energy in his pouring out of memoranda to his Foreign Secretary (of whose forward policy in Uganda he was deeply critical), his India Secretary (on bimetallism), his Chancellor of the Exchequer and his Home Secretary, his Lord Chancellor and his Irish Secretary on a variety of topics, but above all, in one great effusion, to the Queen. For the middle ten days of September he went from Hawarden for a North Wales holiday, partly at the Beddgelert ‘chalet’ of Sir Edward William Watkin MP, who had become a Liberal Unionist in 1886 but who was nonetheless interesting to Gladstone as the leading advocate of the Channel Tunnel, and partly at the Marine Hotel, Barmouth. Watkin believed in elevated as well as subterranean routes and had just made a road to the summit of Snowdon, which he persuaded Gladstone to open before a crowd of 2000 and from a platform on a boulder which has since been known as Gladstone’s Rock. He also provided David Lloyd George, then aged twenty-nine and an MP of just over a year’s standing, as a guest at dinner in the chalet. On the last day of that holiday Gladstone began to write a major memorandum for the Queen and continued to play around with it (although giving priority to his Romanes lecture) until it was eventually submitted five weeks later.

  It was a strange document to have sent to an unsympathetic and not very subtle sovereign. The premisses were a lament for what Gladstone regarded as recent deteriorations in the politico-social structure. This part was written with a stark force and honesty, but, so far from being likely to move the Queen’s mind, was almost perfectly crafted to elicit from her a murmured ‘Whose fault do you think that is?’ or ‘I told you so’ at the end of each paragraph. His central theme was the dangerous degree of class confrontation introduced into politics by the alienation of property from the Liberal party:

  The leading fact, to which he [Mr Gladstone] would point, is in his judgment a very painful one: it is the widening of that gap, or chasm, in opinion, which more largely than heretofore separates the upper and more powerful from the more numerous classes of the community. Such an estrangement he regards as a very serious mischief. This evil has been aggravated largely by the prolongation and intensity of the Irish controversy.

  But it began to operate years before the present Irish controversy began in 1885–6. There were at least six ducal houses of great wealth and influence, which Mr Gladstone had known to be reckoned in the Liberal party at former times, and which had completely severed themselves from it before Home Rule had come to be in any way associated with the popular conception of Liberalism.

  After 1886, however, this division ‘widened and hardened’:

  Such was the character of this movement of Liberal dissent, that the supporters of the present Government in the House of Lords cannot be estimated at more than one tenth or one twelfth of that assembly. As regards landed property, Mr Gladstone doubts whether Liberals now hold more than one acre in fifty, taking the three kingdoms together. In the upper and propertied classes generally, the majority against them, though not so enormous, is still manifold.

  Yet, for the first time in our history, we have seen in the recent election . . . a majority of the House of Commons, not indeed a very large, but also not a very small one, returned against the sense of nearly the entire Peerage and landed gentry, and the vast majority of the upper and leisured classes. . . . The moderate Liberal (and by moderate Liberal Mr Gladstone means such a person as Lord Granville and Lord John Russell) has not quite become, but is becoming, a thing of the past.

  From here he proceeded to argue that the effect of this was to make the Liberal party more radical and democratic (a development which he implicitly regretted), and that the history of at any rate the past sixty years showed that in the direction in which the Liberal party moved so sooner or later did the country. His remedy was to dispose (favourably) of the Home Rule question as quickly as possible. This he referred to as ‘eminently Conservative [deliberately using a capital and not a small c] in the highest sense of the term’. Such a quick cut offered the best hope of halting the two processes of property deserting the Liberals and that party consequently being pushed to the left. But he was not very sanguine of achieving the remedy, and perhaps not of the desired result following if he did. ‘. . . Mr. Gladstone therefore, well aware that his own time is short, does not confidently count upon success in bringing the great controversy to an early issue at a definite time.’34

  The Queen caused Ponsonby to send only a brief acknowledgement, which was courteous to the extent of saying that she ‘fully appreciates the motives which have led to his laying his views before her’. In her own journal she wrote on the fourth day after it had been despatched to Balmoral: ‘Reading a long memorandum from Mr. Gladstone about the political situation, which is very curious.’35 And that was that.

  Much of the work of the Cabinet (which met seven times between 27 October and 21 November) was concerned with the preparation of the Irish Bill, which it had been painfully agreed should be the priority for the session of 1893. It was difficult work. The old unanswerable questions of whether there should be Irish members at Westminster (this time the inclination was to say yes), and if so, how many, and what should they vote on, quickly reared their ugly heads. And their ugliness was fully matched by that of the moods of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. On 11 November Gladstone wrote that ‘Harcourt came early and poured out antiIrish opinions, declaring himself pledged to them’; and later that day: ‘Cabinet 2½–5. One person outrageous.’36And again, on 23 November: ‘Cabinet 2½–4. Something of a scene with Harcourt at the close.’37 It was a relief when the Prime Minister got further consideration of the Irish Bill delegated to a Cabinet committee composed, as he wrote, of ‘WEG; Spencer; Chancellor; Morley; Bryce; and Bannerman’; and an even greater relief that ‘Chancellor’ in this shorthand meant Lord Chancellor Herschell and not Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer Harcourt.

  Gladstone then retreated to Hawarden for three weeks, where he had acrimonious correspondence with Rosebery and worked with Morley on the bill, the co
mmittee apparently having been conveniently forgotten. Morley he found ‘so genial and effective’, as well as ‘a great stay in Rosebery troubles’.38 Morley unfortunately was less complimentary about Gladstone’s working habits at this stage, and also about some of his other attributes. His diary painted a much less noble picture of the Grand Old Man in decline than that which he chose to give, nearly ten years later, in the last chapters of his resonant biography. Altogether the government of 1892, even by the somewhat low standards of collegiality which are more the rule than the exception in British Cabinets of at least the last hundred years, cannot have been a happy one in which to serve or over which to preside.

  Nor was the interlocking support by a combination of Gladstone’s family and his private office as much of an assuagement as it had been in the government of 1880. Hamilton was no longer available, having been promoted too high to be a secretary, even to the Prime Minister. He was effectively the second man in the Treasury, and although he maintained close contact with Gladstone and was a ubiquitous figure on the Whitehall and social scene, it was not the same as being full-time in his service. Furthermore he owed departmental loyalty to Harcourt, and his old and close friendship with Rosebery became more difficult to combine with devotion to Gladstone as Rosebery became an independent political power and Gladstone’s likely (but by no means chosen) successor.

  As a substitute for Hamilton Gladstone paradoxically moved to a still more senior official. Sir Algernon West, who had been Gladstone’s private secretary in 1868–72, was due to retire as chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue, and in the run-up to the change of government Gladstone had persuaded him to do special post-retirement service as head of his private office. (Spencer Lyttelton came back to assist West.) But West was sixty in 1892, whereas Hamilton had been thirty-three, much nearer to the optimum private secretary age, in 1880. Moreover, and partly no doubt as a result, West was less skilled at melding official life with the idiosyncrasies of Gladstone’s household pattern. Maybe the family, Mrs Gladstone and the daughters, had become more difficult to deal with in the meantime. On 2 August Hamilton, possibly by this time a slightly malicious source, enjoying while sympathizing with the difficulties of his successor, had written: