Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Towards the end of his month at Biarritz Gladstone increased the tension, probably deliberately, by sending to Welby (the permanent secretary of the Treasury) a request to know immediately the minimum number of days between (i) dissolution and the assembly of the new Parliament, and (ii) that assembly and the taking of votes on the various estimates, including the naval ones. It was a good gamesmanship ploy. He also sent back, via his own chief of staff, Algernon West, who had come out for a few days, a definite proposition for an immediate dissolution on the accumulated sins of the Lords. It was turned down unanimously, and Gladstone made no attempt to act unilaterally. Harcourt nevertheless described Gladstone’s proposal as ‘the act of a selfish lunatic’.27

  There was ambiguity about Gladstone’s mood during that last visit to Biarritz. The weather was mostly wet, although ‘wild but soft’ in his rather good oxymoron for one aspect of the Basque climate. He made numerous expeditions, which did not point to low spirits, to St Jean de Luz, to San Sebastián, to Bayonne, to Cambo-les-Bains, to St Jean Pied-de-Port, and when one of these drives was not on the agenda he got pleasure out of going with his wife to the Rocher or the Phare (two Biarritz promontories) to look at the fierce seas.

  On the other hand when Algernon West came out (instigated by Harcourt) to try to persuade Gladstone to give way, or at least to compromise, he got short shrift. Hamilton, who saw West after he got back wrote: ‘[He] was in the depths of despair. Nobody knew, he said, what he had been through at Biarritz; he never got a civil word out of Mr. G., who either fulminated against everybody as if they were all criminals or treated everything with the greatest levity.’28 Gladstone provided some confirmation by writing (20 January): ‘I had with W[est] my tenth [?] long conversation on the coming events. . . . He is most kind and loyal: but weary talk casts no light whatever on the matter.’ And even with his son Herbert (by now Asquith’s under-secretary at the Home Office), who also came out, there was some trouble. ‘Polemical talk with Herbert. He argued as well as any. I hope I have now nearly done.’29

  Also at Biarritz he engaged spiritedly but not generously in a final honours joust with the Queen. The Marquess of Lansdowne was about to return after five years as Viceroy of India. Before that he had been Governor-General of Canada, so that his public service (although he was still under fifty) was great. On the other hand he had led the flight of the Whigs from Liberalism by his 1880 resignation from a junior position in Gladstone’s second government. He obviously had to receive some high honour. The Queen was in favour of a dukedom or a Garter, or maybe both. But there was no Garter vacancy. He would therefore have had to be given an ‘extra’ one for which there was no precedent since the Duke of Wellington. Gladstone thought there was no question of his deserving this. He saw his record as Viceroy as ‘very chequered’. Nor did he want to make him a duke (about which Lansdowne himself was also reticent). On both issues Gladstone entered into an elaborate defence in depth. A step from a marquessate to a dukedom, he argued with more pedantry than persuasiveness, was qualitatively different from any other elevation in the peerage. He thought a Grand Cross of the Bath would do perfectly well. The Indian Secretary, Kimberley, was doubtfully on his side. It was in a way the encapsulation of Gladstone’s relations with the Queen. He was probably by a narrow margin right on the merits, although he would have been very hard put to it to explain why his own Westminster dukedom was more appropriate than a Lansdowne one would have been. But Disraeli, had he been alive, in office and aware of what the Queen wanted, would have happily given Lansdowne the dukedom, the ‘extra’ Garter, and the GCB as well. In this little final skirmish Gladstone, while convincing himself that he was discharging his duty to maintain the value of honours, exhibited many of the traits which, in combination with her prejudices, ruined his relations with Victoria.

  When he got back to London on 10 February (‘Luxurious journey: but bad [Channel] passage’),30 Gladstone continued to keep his colleagues on tenterhooks. Except for Asquith as a minister, Morley as a companion and Spencer as a grand seigneur he did not have much of a view of them, and was at least half happy that they should swing in the wind. He held a brief Cabinet on the 12th, to which he gave no hint of his intentions. There was a sense of anti-climax when he adjourned it after merely an hour’s discussion on the Lords’ amendments to the Parish Councils Bill. On Saturday the 17th he held a Cabinet dinner. Every member came. They were eager more for the news than for the food. But again nothing happened, even when Rosebery, with perhaps less than his vaunted subtlety, suggested that they ought to make sure that the doors were closed and that there were no waiters or others behind the screens. Gladstone wrote: ‘I believe it was expected that I should say something. But from my point of view there is nothing to be said.’31

  Algernon West thought that he was waiting to see what the Lords did with the Parish Councils Bill: ‘and they may alter things, for in the case of a dissolution I should go to the country with them’ – ‘them’ referring not back to ‘they’ but to his Liberal colleagues. As, however, the one thing his Liberal colleagues were determined not to do was to ‘go to the country’ this was not a meaningful promise or threat. And it has to be set against the view of Hamilton, who for all his occasional Roseberyite disloyalty both knew and understood Gladstone better than did West. Hamilton recorded on 17 February that he was ‘convinced that Mr. G. has never really vacillated since the Admiralty decision was taken by Cabinet before he went to Biarritz’.32 He was going, but he nonetheless felt at least enough resentment against his colleagues to enjoy playing a game with them on the way.

  There was no further Cabinet until Friday, 23 February. On this occasion, after the attitude of the government to the Lords’ amendments to the Local Government Bill (hostile acquiescence) had been fixed and the Prorogation speech (end of the session) agreed, Gladstone announced that its delivery would be the moment of his resignation, but did so only as the Cabinet was breaking up, so that no one else had a chance to say anything. However, there was another Cabinet on the Monday, and nobody seems to have said much on that occasion either, although Gladstone had seen both Harcourt and Rosebery (together; it cannot have been an easy triangle) to tell them of an interview which he had had with Ponsonby, the Queen’s secretary. The purport of this interview was for Gladstone to authorize Ponsonby to tell the Queen he was about to resign, provided that the Queen would agree to pass the information on to no one else. The Queen refused to give the assurance. It was a preposterous refusal to a farcical request. The idea that the Sovereign would not agree to accept a confidence from her Prime Minister was disgraceful. Equally it was not very fruitful to make an issue of secrecy about an event which was the gossip of London. Like the issue of Lansdowne’s honours it showed that they never could fail to rub each other the wrong way.

  On Wednesday, 28 February, he eventually saw her, most exceptionally and conveniently at Buckingham Palace (where she had not come, needless to say, to effect an easy changeover but to hold a drawing room). By the time of the formal replacement of Gladstone by Rosebery she had retreated to Windsor. Of this first resignation interview, however, Gladstone provided a very good throw-away account on the borderline of irony, which was not normally his strongest weapon:

  I had an audience of the Queen, for 30 or 35 minutes today: doubtless my last in an official capacity. She had much difficulty in finding topics for an adequate prolongation: but fog and rain and [her] coming journey to Italy all did their duty and helped. I thought I never saw her looking better. She was at the highest point of her cheerfulness. Her manner was personally kind throughout.33

  The next event was the so-called ‘blubbering Cabinet’ of the following day, Thursday, 1 March. The sobriquet was the dismissive title which Gladstone himself subsequently gave it, although at the time he wrote of it as ‘a really moving scene’. However, I prefer the account of the occasion given by Asquith, a man of cool judgement who had been given a great opportunity by Gladstone, who admired his historical resona
nce, but was at that time a friend and ally of Rosebery’s, and with his brilliant career ahead of him naturally looked more to the future than to the past. Thirty years later Asquith wrote:

  Before the Cabinet separated, Lord Kimberley (the senior member), who was genuinely moved, had uttered a few broken sentences of affection and reverence, when Harcourt produced from his box and proceeded to read a well-thumbed MS of highly elaborated eulogy. Of those who were present there are now few survivors; but which of them can forget the expression of Mr. Gladstone’s face, as he looked on with hooded eyes and tightened lips at the maladroit performance?34

  That afternoon Gladstone also made his last appearance in the House of Commons. He was there for one and three-quarter hours. He answered questions and then spoke on the Lords’ amendments to the Local Government Bill. He withdrew the government’s opposition to them ‘under protest’, and warned that if, as seemed likely, the Lords had abandoned their traditional ‘reserve and circumspection’ then the conflict between them and the elected House ‘when once raised, must [in due course] go forward to an issue. . . . Having said this, and thanking the House for the attention they have given me,’ he concluded, ‘I have only to signify that it is the intention of the Government to acquiesce in the amendments which have been made by the House of Lords.’35 These were the last words that he spoke in the chamber, where in its different guise before the great fire of 1834, he had first spoken sixty-one years earlier. Indeed he never again entered the Palace of Westminster, although he retained his nominal membership until the general election fifteen months later. It appeared to suit his Edinburgh constituents better that way.139

  Twenty-four hours later he went to Windsor to ‘dine and sleep’. His conversation with the Queen, as part of the general company, was, he wrote ‘long and courteous, but of little meaning’. The next morning he was waylaid by Ponsonby on his way to the St George’s Chapel service. Ponsonby trailed the disadvantages of having a peer as Prime Minister. Gladstone refused to be drawn, either then or at a resumed conversation an hour later. If the Queen asked his views direct or if Ponsonby did it at her express command, he would of course give them; ‘but . . . otherwise my lips must be sealed’.36 Ponsonby could not say he had been so commanded and so nothing more was said. Nor was there the slightest mention of the succession when Gladstone later saw the Queen and formally handed over his letter of resignation. She thanked him profusely – but only for what he had done in the matter of the Duke of Edinburgh (become Coburg) retaining his British annuity. She also opined that German oculists were better than English ones. And so, after fifty-three years as a Privy Councillor, twenty-seven of them in the service of the Crown, and twelve of them in the highest office, it was all over. Ponsonby informed him that the Queen had sent for Rosebery, to whom he could not object on the ground that he was a peer, for as we know he would, if asked, have advised Spencer. Nor was the news of the beginning of Rosebery’s unfortunate premiership in any way a surprise to Gladstone, although he obviously felt deeply the complete absence of any consultation or even direct prior information on the point.

  He then went back to London on what he described as ‘the Council train’ (there had been a Privy Council at Windsor that morning), finished off his translation of the Odes of Horace (‘But what is it worth?’) and dined with Lord Kimberley.37 He still had to receive the Queen’s jejune reply to his letter of resignation,140 which perhaps hurt the most of the lot, and then to begin a very leisurely move out of 10 Downing Street. Rosebery at least had the advantage of not being in a hurry for that perquisite of office; he did not occupy it for nearly a year.

  THE CLOSING OF THE DOORS OF THE SENSES

  THERE WERE JUST OVER fifty months between Gladstone leaving office and his death. During this twilight zone he was half-blind and half-deaf. The first infirmity greatly restricted his reading but not to any comparable degree his writing. Equally the second made him an inhibited listener (and transactor of any form of business) but left his ability to talk, in favourable circumstances, mainly anecdotally and reminiscently but sometimes analytically, largely unimpaired. He was untormented by the loss of office and, with the exception of one issue, viewed the political scene with detachment, feeling little enthusiasm for the Rosebery–Harcourt government, which staggered on for fifteen months, and only limited virulence against its successor, the third Salisbury administration, which included Liberal Unionists. Only one issue, and that at one remove a nostalgic one, the Armenian massacres, constituted enough of a jerk upon his memory to cause him, once in 1895 and again in 1896, to make his final political speeches. This state of semi-infirm equilibrium persisted until the autumn of 1897 when, at the age of almost eighty-eight, he became afflicted with a painful disease, which after a few months was diagnosed as terminal, and which made him long for the end, an event for which over many years previously he had regarded it as necessary, and even easy, to be well prepared.

  Nevertheless, three and a half years before the beginning of the 1897 plunge, he had experienced a significant and downward change of gear in his life. On 24 May 1894 he had a cataract operation. It was carried out in Rendel’s house at 1, Carlton Gardens by a young but leading St Thomas’s eye surgeon. Mary Gladstone (Drew) wrote a typically graphic account: ‘Mr. Nettleship came at 9 with Dr H[abershon] and without any delay drew out the cataract. Father had cocaine drops in his eye and was totally unagitated; it only lasted a moment and was perfectly done. Mama and I in the next room with the door open. . . .’1 This led to six weeks of rough convalescence, much of it lying in darkness. On 2 July he went to Pitlochry (which he had enjoyed after the 1892 election) for a brief convolecence, but he was back in London by 19 July, when Nettleship conducted an examination and pronounced that the results of the operation were not wholly satisfactory. A supplementary operation on 20 September at Hawarden was envisaged, but although Nettleship duly attended in North Wales at that time, he decided against a further attempt. Hope of a significant improvement was therefore abandoned, although Gladstone was substantially more physically mobile and intellectually active from early July than he had been during the six weeks following the operation. At the beginning of August he went to Hawarden and his regime there included a daily drive, an occasional short walk and making the maximum use of the hours of daylight (when he could see better) to sit at his desk and do written work. Against the habits of his lifetime he could no longer go each day to early church because bowel trouble somewhat obscurely prevented his getting up before ten o’clock.

  More important as a station on the way to the tomb than the partial failure of the operation, however, was the fact that it caused him (or maybe provided an excuse) to give up writing his journal. His last daily entry, after sixty-nine years and ten and a half months, was for 23 May 1894. He next made an entry for 19 July (there had been illness breaks before, but always much shorter), and then, after only two intermediate entries, he defined on 1 September his diary policy for the future: ‘After breaking up the practice of seventy years, I now mean to proceed by leaps and bounds, making an occasional note.’2 In fact he added only a dozen subsequent entries over the next two and a half years, his final one being on 29 December 1896, his eighty-seventh birthday.

  For the outside observer this drew across his life a new screen of opaqueness which was almost as obfuscating as the perpetual fog in which he had complained to Morley of having to live. It became no longer possible to trace his day-to-day movements and activity from a single source. Obviously a great deal can be put together from letters, from the records of others and from his own sporadic writings. But there was no longer a wholly reliable budget of time against which the recollections of others and indeed of himself could be measured. This had the objective effect of putting the short remainder of his life more in the shadows.

  It may also have had a considerable subjective effect. Once the discipline of the diary had gone, so a significant part of the framework and of the purpose of Gladstone’s life had gone with it.
The diary was not just a record. It was his account book with God for his expenditure of ‘the most precious gift of time’. As such its filling, particularly with items of duty, whether they were letters written or journeys completed or meetings conducted or books read or articles composed, gave him a sense of fulfilment, and indeed an incentive to keep his nose to the grindstone in order to be able to make the entries. Once that was gone his life was much more a matter of drifting towards the end. Minutes became more for passing than for saving.

  His vitality and the width of his interests were such that he could endure this loosening of incentive and framework without sinking into the torpor which most would regard as natural for the second half of their eighties (and some for their sixties or earlier). He abandoned his old pattern of travel. He no longer made expeditions, either at home or abroad, for sightseeing or political reasons, but only for those of health, which broadly meant avoiding the not very fierce North Wales winter. His Italian days were over. So with one exception were his Scottish ones. He stayed with Armitstead in Perthshire in the early autumn of 1897, but he never went for a last look at Fasque, or even to say goodbye to the Edinburgh constituents when he ceased to be their member in the summer of 1895. Just as he could accuse the Queen of treating him as he had treated his Sicilian mule of 1838,141 so others could have accused him of doing the same with his several constituencies.

  He abandoned also those tours of English cathedral cities, interspersed with halts at conveniently situated great houses, which had been an earlier feature of his life.142 The only exception was in the spring of 1895, when he went for four days to the Lincoln deanery, to which epitome of close splendour he had appointed his Wickham son-in-law in one of his last and entirely appropriate acts of patronage. He went only rarely to London, and then mostly as a staging post to somewhere beyond. An exception was in July 1896, when he perhaps unwisely attended a royal wedding (that of the Wales’s daughter to the future King of Norway) and thought that the Queen (in contrast to the Prince) took inadequate notice of ‘a lady [Mrs Gladstone] of 84 who had come near 200 miles to attend the service’.3 On this occasion, as on a few others, the Gladstones stayed, not out at Dollis Hill, but with their son Henry and his Rendel wife in Whitehall Court, part of the pinnacled palace, built by Waterhouse mainly for the National Liberal Club, of which Gladstone had laid the foundation stone in 1884. It was on the site of the house, among others, in which Peel had died forty-six years earlier.