by Roy Jenkins
52. Gladstone in fact used the one Greek word in place of the last five English words.
53. The issue was largely procedural. Russell wished to change a despatch, relating to whether an international conference should be proposed, which the Cabinet had approved and the form of which the Queen had accepted. The matter was resolved at a ‘holiday’ Cabinet on 29 August.
54. Gladstone in reply to this put up a sensible argument against the concept of the vast battleship, though it required about another hundred years to become acceptable to professional naval opinion. ‘Is it really wise’, he wrote to Palmerston, ‘to continue the present outlay on so great a scale for the building of these maritime castles which we call line of battle ships and which seem to be constructed on the principle precisely opposite to that of all land fortifications, and to aim at presenting as large a surface as possible to the destroying fire of an enemy?’ (Guedalla, Gladstone and Palmerston, p. 113.)
55. It was in this conversation that Palmerston made to Gladstone the surprisingly particular statement that he ‘had had two great objects always before him in life: one the suppression of the Slave Trade, and the other to put England in a state of defence’. (Diaries, V, p. 495.)
56. Eventually she had to be paid off with the very considerable sum of £5000, which led to Gladstone, who was the intermediary in making the payment, being quite falsely accused in an Irish newspaper of making it to cover up his own immoral activities.
57. A party of distressed mill operators was provided with shelter and some agricultural work at Hawarden, and Catherine Gladstone actively organized relief schemes in Blackburn and other Lancashire towns.
58. Longley had recently been translated from York to Canterbury, with Gladstone’s strong approval. Thomson, after only a year at Gloucester, had replaced him at York, but against Gladstone’s wishes. Gladstone had written a long but good letter to Palmerston urging the claims of Wilberforce. It was vintage Gladstone, urging Wilberforce’s appointment on the highest grounds of principle: he was a fine bishop, a great preacher, a unifying influence within the Church, maybe a bit social but how desirable it was to have a prelate who could ‘maintain the hold and influence of religion upon the higher circles of civil life’. And then Gladstone’s jesuitical side came to the surface, and he slipped in a good fall-back defence: ‘But those who think he meddles too much in London would gladly see him removed to a spot where he would no longer be within an hour of the Metropolis.’
It was unavailing. Wilberforce, who had been at Oxford for seventeen years, did not go to York, and Thomson, once his curate and a diocesan for only a year, did. Gladstone might be the most dominating Chancellor of the century, but Palmerston was still Prime Minister, and liked so to remind Gladstone.
59. This led to a current anti-Gladstone joke which the Economist, at that time very pro- Gladstone, recalled and printed when it turned away from him at the time of the Home Rule split. In response to a not very serious suggestion that there would be much to be said for a marriage between General Garibaldi and the Duchess, it was pointed out that the General already had a wife at home. ‘Oh, there is no problem,’ it was countered, ‘Gladstone is here, and we could get him to explain her away.’ (Ruth Dudley Edwards, The Pursuit of Reason: A History of the Economist, p. 378.)
60. On the other hand this clear evidence not only of Helen’s commitment to the Roman Church, but also of her strong position in it, did nothing to counter his fanatical conviction twenty years later that she must have reverted to her Anglican faith, and to arrange for her burial accordingly.
61. Although in the following session Baines pressed a similar bill to a vote and was defeated by 248 to 214, with Gladstone voting in the minority.
62. Not then strictly ducal, for the Marquess of Westminster did not get his ‘step’ until 1874.
63. As Monckton Milnes (for this was he after his 1863 ennoblement) was regarded as one of the great nineteenth-century wits, he might not have been too pleased by this qualified accolade.
64. See pp. 179–80, above.
65. When the Speaker (Denison) dined with Palmerston in his (Palmerston’s) eighty-first year he was much struck by the Prime Minister consuming two plates of turtle soup, a dish of cod with oyster sauce, a paté, two entrées, a plate of mutton, a slice of ham, and a portion of pheasant. (Guedalla, Gladstone and Palmerston, p. 453.)
66. See pp. 23–4, above.
67. Odo Russell, later ambassador in Berlin at the time of the 1878 Congress, who became first Lord Odo Russell when his father became Duke of Bedford and then Lord Ampthill, was in 1866 unofficial British representative at the Vatican.
68. A rash prophecy: Disraeli was dead after fourteen years and Gladstone was Prime Minister for nearly twelve of the twenty.
69. Disraeli’s House of Commons words of 16 February 1844 were:
‘I want to see a public man come forward and say what the Irish question is. One says it is a physical question, another a spiritual. Now it is the absence of the aristocracy. Now it is the absence of railways. It is the Pope one day and potatoes the next. A dense population inhabit an island where there is an established church which is not their church, and a territorial aristocracy, the richest of whom live in a distant capital. Thus they have a starving population, an alien church, and in addition the weakest executive in the world.
Well, what then would gentlemen say if they were reading of a country in that position? They would say at once, ‘The remedy is a revolution.’ But the Irish could not have a revolution and why? Because Ireland is connected with another and a more powerful country. Then what is the consequence? The connection with England became the cause of the present state of Ireland. If the connection with England prevented a revolution and a revolution was the only remedy, England logically is in the odious position of being the cause of all the misery of Ireland. What then is the duty of an English minister? To effect by his policy all those changes which a revolution would effect by force. That is the Irish question in its integrity.
70. In December 1905, Asquith, who had just become Chancellor of the Exchequer and was already the obvious future Liberal leader, stayed four nights at Hatfield, travelling up to London by train each day and trying to unravel the foolish ‘Relugas Compact’ under which he and Edward Grey and Haldane had agreed that they would not serve unless Campbell-Bannerman retreated to a nominal premiership in the House of Lords. From this distraction he returned each night to various Hatfield festivities including a fancy-dress ball.
71. Wilberforce to Winchester; Mackerness (a staunch Liberal) to Oxford in his place; Lord Arthur Hervey (a younger son of the first Marquess of Bristol – the Herveys were then a more devout family than subsequently) to Bath and Wells; and Temple to Exeter (an appointment which proved very controversial because of a combination of the high apostolic and anti-Erastian tradition of the diocese and of Temple’s having contributed to the 1860 Essays and Reviews, which some regarded as semi-heretical).
72. This recommendation, which was for Sir Lionel de Rothschild, who had eventually won his battle over the parliamentary oath which had kept him, although a several times elected member, out of the House of Common, was however blocked by the Queen; and her objection, despite a long and powerfully argued letter from Gladstone, was persisted in. In the course of resisting the arguments of the government (Granville was also involved, although in a more light-footed way than Gladstone) she permitted herself several animadversions. ‘But she cannot consent to a Jew being made a Peer – tho’ she will not object to a Jew baronet – and she is quite certain that it wld do the Govt. harm rather than good,’ she wrote on 24 August. And on 1 November, for the argument was long drawn out: ‘she cannot think one who owes his great wealth to contracts with Foreign Govts for Loans, or to successful speculations on the Stock Exchange can fairly claim a British Peerage. However high Sr L. Rothschild may stand personally in Public Estimation, this seems to her not the less a species of gambling, because it is on a gigantic scal
e – & far removed from that legitimate trading wh she delights to honour. . . .’ (Guedalla, The Queen and Mr Gladstone, pp. 249 and 254.) Lionel de Rothschild died without his peerage. His son Nathan Meyer Rothschild became the first Lord Rothschild (and the first Jewish peer) in 1885, again on the recommendation of Gladstone.
73.The essential difference was that in Britain it was in general the landowner who made capital improvements, whereas in Ireland, with its multiplicity of holdings, it was mostly the tenants who had effected such drainage, fencing, making of farm-roads and construction of farm buildings as had taken place.
74. See p. 594, below.
75. He took the view, much at variance with more recent practice, that incoming governments should accept the legislation of their predecessor.
76. Bishop Colenso of Natal (although of Cambridge provenance) then occupied a position in the Church roughly equivalent to that of Bishop Jenkins of Durham in his high days.
77. These emotions did not however weigh with the Prince of Wales, who preferred the glitter of la ville lumière to German hearths and homes, and was regarded by his mother as dangerously pro-French.
78. Surprisingly, Gladstone himself bestowed this description upon his very definitely unmarried sister Helen. He so described her in a 22 July 1870 letter to the Prussian minister in London requesting on the outbreak of the war a laissez-passer from Cologne, and did so again at the time of her death.
79. The future Archbishop of Canterbury, whom Gladstone had just nominated to Exeter (see p. 305n, above).
80. See pp. 356–60, below.
81. Eight and a half years later Edward Hamilton, one of his most devoted private secretaries and later joint permanent secretary of the Treasury, after listening to him before the Leeds Chamber of Commerce, wrote in admiration of ‘the unrivalled style in which he manipulates figures and dresses them up in a wholly new light’. (Bahlmann (ed.), The Diary of Sir Edward Walter Hamilton 1880–1885, I, p. 174.)
82. See p. 315, above.
83. These had embraced not only the purge of the government but the tragic and dramatic death of Bishop Wilberforce, with whom Gladstone’s life had been closely intertwined for forty-five years. After a Cabinet on Saturday, 19 July, Gladstone had gone to Holmbury, near Dorking, to stay with Lord Edward Leveson-Gower. Granville and the ‘great diocesan’ (to give him at the end his more favourable sobriquet), were due to join them there. ‘We were enjoying that beautiful spot,’ Gladstone wrote, ‘when the Groom arrived with a message that the Bp. had had a bad fall.’ He had been riding up to the house from Leatherhead station with the Foreign Secretary. One and a half hours later Granville arrived to say that Wilberforce was dead. After his notable quartercentury as Bishop of Oxford he had enjoyed the lusher pastures of Winchester, Gladstone’s compensation to him for having missed York and Canterbury, for only three years. Both the loss and its circumstances were a heavy blow to the Prime Minister and a bad preparation for the next testing three weeks. But what an extraordinary vignette of Victorian life is provided by this confluence of events. The country’s most eminent bishop (and episcopal eminence then counted for much more) had been killed on a Saturday evening riding up a country lane from a railway station with the Foreign Secretary to dine with the Prime Minister. Even late-twentieth-century Sunday newspapers might have felt compelled to give the tragedy priority over their pet scandal of the week.
84. Two years later Bowen became Asquith’s pupil master. It is perhaps worth noting that when in the spring of 1914, following the Curragh ‘mutiny’, Asquith as Prime Minister took over the War Office, he assumed his exclusion from the House of Commons until he had been to East Fife for re-election.
85. Boord, then a thirty-five-year-old Tory gin-maker got first place with 6193 votes. Gladstone came next with 5968. The second Tory was 400 votes behind that, and the second Liberal another 300 votes short. It was easy to see why Gladstone did not feel triumphant.
86. The new government’s life of over six years was as long a span as that achieved by any Prime Minister between the death of Liverpool and 1895. But it did not win a second general election, which feat was not to be performed by a Conservative until Salisbury (Disraeli’s successor in the leadership of the Conservative party) was greatly aided by the disruptive effect on the Liberal party of Gladstone’s final years. In a sense therefore Gladstone was formally correct, although wrong in spirit, in his dismissive 1874 judgement.
87. There is no record that at this stage she suggested an earldom, which in spite of the Russell precedent and the shortly-to-follow Disraeli example was then much less part of the automatic Prime Ministerial rations than became the twentieth-century habit, from Balfour to Eden, until life peerages somewhat queered the pitch.
88. Apart from anything else, there were 3500 books to deal with.
89. Balfour was away on a six-month world tour before which he had been brought even closer to Gladstone by his behaviour when May Lyttelton, Gladstone’s niece and perhaps the only real love of Balfour’s life, died at the age of twenty-four. The amount of the rent for 4 Carlton Gardens nonetheless suggests an arm’s-length transaction and rather belies Gladstone’s later reputation for borrowing houses rather than paying for them.
90. See p. 621n, below, for an estimate of the remarkably few areas of England, Scotland and Wales which Gladstone had not visited by the time that the infirmity of age made him abandon travel except in search of health.
91. The Ailesbury house at Savernake latterly became the home of Hawtrey’s preparatory school until its rather scandalous demise in 1994. But it was with other schools that Gladstone had trouble when staying there. He went into Marlborough and addressed the boys of the then thirty-year-old College, making there almost the only anti-Etonian remarks of his life. He developed a theme, similar to that of Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875), critical of the impact upon Eton of the rampantly plutocratic standards of the 1870s, which new standards many, including the Queen, found offensive. He referred to ‘The constant influx of the wealthy, and the tendency of wealth and large money indulgences amongst boys . . . to corrupt and lower the tone of the school’ (Diaries, IX, p. 191n). This led to a defensive–offensive reply in the Eton Chronicle, and to a few years of shadow over his habitual relationship of excessive devotion to the school. No doubt the heightened political tension of the period contributed to the reaction.
92. This in the 1870s became an almost obsessive form of recreation. The Hawarden park must have been considerably denuded, and visiting deputations of supporters expected to be able to take souvenir chips away with them. But it was not only at Hawarden that he performed arboreal slaughter. He was liable to practise his skill on other people’s grounds; and it would have been a rash act for anyone who did not have substantial parkland with a few redundant trees to invite Gladstone to stay.
93. See p. 411, below.
94. The contribution to the Bulgarian pamphlet of Granville, the colleague most naturally disposed to support Gladstone, was to suggest the excision of ‘bag and baggage’ from the key paragraph, thereby illustrating the capacity of advisers, unless overruled, to destroy all the most resonant passages.
95. Although Gladstone was so sparing in the amount of time he devoted to the preparation of even his greatest (and longest) speeches, he compensated by often taking pains subsequently to correct and edit them into a publishable state (there was a strong demand for them as pamphlets). He always found this an irritating burden, neither relaxing nor intellectually constructive. Thus, twelve days after this occasion, he wrote: ‘Began the ever odious task of correcting my Speeches as made in the late Debate’. (Diaries, IX, p. 220.)
96. To defeat one’s former private secretary was not perhaps the most glorious of political big-game hunts. It was also the case that in the same autumn the Duke of Buccleuch had been elected Chancellor by the graduates of Glasgow; only undergraduates voted in the rectorship election.
97. With Bedford (the ninth Duke, 1819–91), whom he
described as ‘most worthy’, he acted in a very firm and, for Gladstone, surprisingly Whiggish way. Disraeli had offered a peerage to the Duke’s younger brother, Lord Odo Russell, for his special services as ambassador in Berlin at the time of the Congress. Russell accepted with enthusiasm, but was then warned off by his brother acting as Gladstone’s agent. ‘Great was therefore my surprise,’ Russell wrote to Gladstone, ‘when the Duke told me that in your opinion by accepting this peerage I was virtually repudiating the political principles of my family and of my party, and that you held that I should defer the acceptance of the Queen’s offer until our party was once again in power.’ (Diaries, IX, p. 346.) Nevertheless he reluctantly accepted the ukase, and the Ampthill title did not come into existence until 1881 – even after the change of government Gladstone made Lord Odo wait another year.
98. By then he had been tormented for a couple of years by Lord Randolph Churchill, particularly on the issue of Bradlaugh’s oath. He never knew Winston Churchill. The words, although quoted in Roy Foster’s admirable study of Randolph Churchill, do not sound quite authentically Gladstonian.
99. This at first sight sounds total hypocrisy in view of his relish for the past and future battles for which he was divinely armed. But an opaque and convoluted previous sentence suggests that what he really had in mind was an early retirement after he had won an election, probably formed a government, and corrected the evils of ‘Beaconsfieldism’.
100. This intimacy continued at least to the halfway mark between the Gladstone epoch and today. In the 1930s, when the author’s father was a South Wales MP, much of the social coherence between him and neighbouring members revolved around shared railway journeys between Paddington and Newport or Cardiff. Aneurin Bevan, the most notable if not the most popular among them, was always regarded as something of an outsider because he lived in London and did not travel on the normal pattern of ‘parliamentary’ trains. I think the intimacy ceased when compartments were replaced by open coaches. Greater speed may also have had something to do with it.
