Gladstone: A Biography
Page 86
101. After the contributions which his father made at Newark, Gladstone never spent any significant sum of his own money on election expenses. Oxford was cheap, and after that those who were begging him to stand for this or that constituency were always the demandeurs and had to finance the campaign if they wished to have any chance of his accepting. This was in sharp contrast with the position of his father, his brother and his brother-in-law (Stephen Glynne), who had to buy their seats, and often did not get delivery when they had paid. Furthermore, Gladstone had the indifference of a great man (Churchill was another) to being beholden, to Rosebery for a seat, or Donald Currie for providing a yacht for cruises, or Aberdeen (in the late 1880s and 1890s) for lending him the Dollis Hill villa. It never occurred to him that they could expect anything in return except for the pleasure of knowing and serving him.
102. Kimberley, although only the first Earl, was not a South African diamond merchant but a member of an old Norfolk family. It is one of the many confusions of British titled nomenclature that while in the case of peerages of metropolitan territorial origin the men were named after the towns (or counties), in the colonies it was the towns which were named after the men, as in Melbourne, Sydney, Wellington, Auckland, Salisbury (Rhodesia) – and Kimberley.
103. Littleburys was an Aberdeen-owned house at Mill Hill where Gladstone spent several weekends that summer.
104. The internecine Connemara murder of a family of five in August 1882 led to the hanging of three men and the deportation of five others. The guilt of one of the three hanged men was open to serious doubt. The case became a long-reverberating cause of dispute and bitterness between the Irish executive and the indigenous population.
105. A striking exception was provided by Lord Carlingford (as Chichester Fortescue, the unesteemed Irish Chief Secretary in Gladstone’s first Cabinet had become). On Argyll’s resignation Gladstone brought him back into the Cabinet as Lord Privy Seal. By the autumn of 1884, however, the Prime Minister was anxious to be rid of Carlingford both because of his lack of serious contribution and because he wanted to bring in Rosebery without upsetting the balance between peers and commoners. Despite strong hints, and even the offer of the Constantinople embassy, Carlingford simply sat tight, and Gladstone doubted his right to dismiss him. By exhibiting what Hamilton called ‘skin . . . made of buffalo hide’, he survived until the end of the government, reluctantly yielding up the Privy Seal in March 1885, when Rosebery at last joined, but continuing as Lord President.
106. Benson was a successful archbishop for just under fourteen years before dying suddenly and with dramatic irony at morning service in Gladstone’s pew in Hawarden church. It was almost exactly the death which Gladstone, still alive at the time of Benson’s death but with only eighteen declining months to go, had wished for himself three years before Benson’s appointment. (See p. 430 above.)
107. Figures given by Herbert Gladstone in his engaging and, as its title implies, still almost wholly filial memoir, After Thirty Years, published in 1928, puts a more precise gloss on Hamilton. Gladstone wrote 1017 letters to the Queen, excluding those relating to honours or the formation of the government, in 1880–5. The Queen sent him 207 letters and 170 telegrams.
108. Chamberlain’s median attitude to Gladstone was perhaps better represented not by this display of petulance but by a rather good piece of doggerel, which he composed during a Cabinet meeting inMay 1884 and tossed across the table to Dilke:
Here lies Mr G., who has left us repining,
While he is, no doubt, still engaged in refining;
And explaining distinctions to Peter and Paul,
Who faintly protest that distinctions so small
Were never submitted to saints to perplex them,
Until the Prime Minister came up to vex them.
109. See pp. 199–214 above.
110. Of O’Shea’s general good faith. How early he knew of his position in the triangle is another matter. Parnell was subject to close police surveillance. Harcourt as Home Secretary was fascinated by police reports (particularly on Irish matters, to deal with which he set up the Special Branch in March 1883), was prurient and a natural gossip. It is inconceivable that he was not told of Parnell’s irregular arrangements and unlikely that, having been told, he did not pass on the information to his senior colleagues.
111. Not really; an experienced speaker can nearly always get it right within a very few minutes.
112. Blunt got his own back in 1885 by writing a fairly derisory (and maybe imaginary) account of Gladstone’s calls upon Catherine Walters (‘Skittles’), a grande horizontale who captivated, among others, the Prince of Wales and Hartington, in her well-placed nid d’amour in South Street, Mayfair. ‘Nothing improper seems to have happened,’ Blunt wrote of Gladstone’s visits. He portrayed him as being archly amatory, congratulating Miss Walters on the smallness of her waist and suggesting that he might manually measure its size. (Elizabeth Longford, Pilgrimage of Passion, pp. 217–18.) There is, however, no mention of visits to Miss Walters in the Gladstone diaries, and he concealed few secrets from them.
113. See p. 558, below.
114. See p. 579, below.
115. He was engaged in writing for the Nineteenth Century a courteous but highly convoluted and argumentative riposte to an article of T. H. Huxley on the relationship
116. ‘The whole stream of public excitement is now turned against me,’ it began, ‘and I am pestered with incessant telegrams which there is no defence against but either suicide or Parnell’s method of self-concealment. The truth is I have more or less of opinions and ideas but no intention or negotiations.’ (Diaries, XI, p. 451.)
117. Gladstone could, however, have deployed good excuses. Chamberlain had been to Hawarden on 7–8 October with ‘three hours of stiff conversation’ but that was before the election. And Hartington had been invited for an early post-election visit, but had declined on the ground that he was engaged to meet the Prince of Wales in Lincolnshire; no alternative meeting was suggested from either side.
118. This qualification opened a large can of worms. Was a vote of censure against a government on, say, Welsh Church disestablishment or excise duties in Great Britain (the Irish ones being different) an imperial question, or was it not?
119. He denied that it was a ‘conversion’ in the sense that he had undergone one on Irish Church disestablishment. It was more an evolution of mind. (See Matthew, Gladstone, 1875–1898, pp. 211–12.)
120. See p. 378, above.
121. Trevelyan, unlike Chamberlain, changed his mind in 1887, accepted Home Rule and moved back into the Gladstonian communion.
122. Sir Reginald (later Lord) Welby was permanent secretary of the Treasury 1885–94 and, a surprising progression, chairman of the London County Council in 1900. Hamilton is already a familiar. It was before the second reading debate a month later that, despite his high mandarin quality, Hamilton’s figures turned out to be one of those rare cock-ups which bring forth the profuse apologies of civil servants and the (fairly) gracious tolerance of ministers.
123. Which Morley, in an uncharacteristic lapse, cites the wrong way round: (Life of Gladstone, III, pp. 313–14.)
124. Dilke, however, gave what turned out to be his last vote for six years to the government, thereby marking the end of his partnership with Chamberlain.
125. He was also elected on the same day and equally unopposed for the separate constituency of Leith. This was a surprising but not inadvertent development. It was done with Gladstone’s full if sudden concurrence. Suspicion developed that the intended Liberal candidate (Jacks) was lurching towards Unionism. Gladstone colluded with a few prominent local Liberals to elbow Jacks out of the way by allowing his own name to be put forward. After the election he opted for his normal seat of Midlothian, which led to an August bye-election in Leith. By that time, however, a satisfactory Home Rule candidate in the shape of Ronald Munro-Ferguson (later Lord Novar) had been procured, so that the manoeuvre served i
ts purpose.
126. Lord Randolph Churchill, a master of anti-Gladstone jibes, had in his June 1886 election address bestowed upon him the unforgettable epithet of ‘an old man in a hurry’.
127. The starkly memorable phrase is Sir Robin Day’s.
128. He saw her three times in 1882, and in the subsequent six years wrote her twenty-five letters.
129. Francis Birrell was the son of Augustine Birrell, the famous wit who was Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1908 to 1916, but whose bons mots were inadequate to stop the birth of ‘a terrible beauty’ in the Easter Rebellion.
130. These defeats (the victors were the candidates put up by Healy and McCarthy as the acting leaders of the majority of the Irish parliamentary party) accurately presaged the result in Ireland of the 1892 general election, when the anti-Parnellites won seventy-one seats and the supporters of the dead leader only nine.
131. He had gone there direct from Worksop, accomplishing the whole swing from London via Retford in seven hours, a tribute to the railway system of 1890 and, for once, his restraint in the length of his speeches.
132. There was an irony about Clark’s view that Gladstone could not in any event live long which was reminiscent of the macabre joke about that egregious doctor, Lord Moran, at the time of Churchill’s long-drawn-out death in 1965. Moran was in the habit of appearing outside the house in Hyde Park Gate each morning and giving lugubrious bulletins on the patient to the waiting press. Simple pleasure was given by the invention that one morning Churchill himself appeared in apparently restored vigour and said: ‘Gentlemen, I have very sad news for you. Lord Moran died during the night.’ Clark died, aged sixty-seven, in the year after he gave his appraisal to Hamilton, whereas Gladstone, nineteen years his senior, survived for another six.
133. It was almost as though he had to touch all his possessions in order to assure himself what a favour he would be conferring on a Liberal government if he agreed to join it. For the facts (not the judgements, with which he would not agree) see Robert Rhodes James, Rosebery, pp. 242–5.
134. The rhyme with ‘embargo’ stressing the silence of the final t and supplemented in subsequent stanzas with ‘cargo’, ‘argot’ (with its French silent t) and ‘far go’, recalls the famous exchange many decades later of Lady Oxford (as Margot Tennant had then become) with the ‘blonde bombshell’ Jean Harlow, who persistently addressed her as ‘Margotte’, until told: ‘The t is silent in my name, Miss Harlow, as I presume in yours.’
135. See p. 315.
136. Wolverton also refused the similarly proffered step to a viscountcy, giving the very respectable reason that it would look too much of a reward for hospitality given to Gladstone, and would bring discredit to both of them.
137. He did not, however, anticipate the much later attempt of his fellow Carltonian, George Nathaniel Curzon, to get the night chimes of Big Ben silenced because of their interference with his sleeping.
138. Explaining the budget of 1853 (his first). See p. 150, above.
139. Whether it suited the government Whips, who were operating on a fairly small and unstable majority, may have been another matter. They managed, however, to get him permanently paired with the even older Charles Villiers (b. 1802), who after several decades of never visiting his Wolverhampton constituency had since 1886, when following a Radical middle age he became a Liberal Unionist, decided rarely to visit Westminster either. Unlike Gladstone, however, he continued after the 1895 election, and was still an MP when he died aged ninety-six. He also established a record of drawing a ministerial pension for thirty-two years. Appropriately he had been chairman of the Poor Law Board in the long Palmerston–Russell government and was making sure that he did not swell the numbers of those for whom he had been responsible.
140. Windsor Castle, 3rd March 1894
Though the Queen has already accepted Mr Gladstone’s resignation and has taken leave of him, she does not like to leave his letter tendering his resignation unanswered. She therefore writes these few lines to say that she thinks, after so many years of arduous labour and responsibility, he is right in wishing to be relieved at his age of these arduous duties, and she trusts [he will] be able to enjoy peace and quiet, with his excellent and devoted wife, in health and happiness, and that his eyesight may improve.
The Queen would gladly have offered a peerage to Mr Gladstone, but she knows that he would not accept it. (Letters of Queen Victoria, 3rd series, II, pp. 372–3).
141. ‘There was the fact staring me in the face, I could not get up the smallest shred of feeling for the brute, I could neither love nor like it.’ (Memorandum written on 20 March 1894 and published in Diaries, XIII, p. 403.)
142. It could be said that by that stage he had no need for such tours, except that the pleasure of movement and sightseeing is not in general marred by having been there before. Gladstone knew Britain (excluding Ireland) exceptionally well. There was no English county that he had not visited, although his two Cornish visits came late in life, and were both, the one in 1880 and the other in 1889, in the form of landings from a cruise ship. His ubiquity was almost equally true of the Scottish counties. He may have missed Kirkcudbrightshire and Wigtownshire in the hidden south-west corner, but nowhere else. Nor is it easy to think of an old cathedral which might have eluded him. Ripon is a possible gap, and Llandaff a probable one, the latter not entirely by accident, for of all the economically important areas of Britain the South Wales coalfield was the only one which he never visited. In 1825 he went into the eastern edge of Monmouthshire. In 1852 he went to Pembrokeshire by boat from Bristol and then, fringing the valleys, to Brecon and rural mid-Wales. And in 1887 he made a major political visit to Swansea and delivered ‘whistle-stop’ speeches in Cardiff and Newport on the way back. But he never went to the Rhondda or Merthyr Tydfil or Aberdare. Those close-packed Glamorgan valleys already contained about half the population of Wales, but it was not untypically North Walian that they were almost the only enclave of Britain to which he never penetrated.
143. See pp. 610–11, above.
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
BOOKS BY GLADSTONE
The Gladstone Diaries, 14 vols, ed. M. R. D. Foot (vols 1 and 2), ed. M. R. D. Foot andH. C. G. Matthew (vols 3 and 4), ed. H. C. G. Matthew (vols 5–14)
The State in its Relations with the Church, 2 vols (1838)
Church Principles Considered in their Results (1840)
Translation of Farini’s Lo Stato Romano, 4 vols (1852)
On the Place of Homer in Classical Education and in Historical Inquiry, an Oxford Essay, (1857)
A Chapter of Autobiography (1868)
Juventus Mundi: The Gods and Men of the Heroic Age of Homer (1876)
The Church of England and Ritualism (1875)
Homeric Synchronism: An Enquiry into the Time and Place of Homer (1869)
Gleanings of Past Years 1844–78, 8 vols (1879)
Landmarks of Homeric Study (1890)
The Impregnable Rock of Holy Scripture (1890)
The Odes of Horace (1896)
The Works of Joseph Butler (ed.) (1896)
Studies Subsidiary to the Works of Bishop Butler (1896)
Later Gleanings (1897)
Together with innumerable long magazine articles in, inter alia, the Edinburgh Review, the Quarterly Review, the Nineteenth Century, the North American Review, on literary, religious, political and historical subjects, a few of which were published in Gleanings.
BOOKS DIRECTLY ABOUT GLADSTONE
Major works
John Morley: Life of Gladstone, 3 vols (1903)
Philip Magnus: Gladstone (1954)
Richard Shannon: Gladstone I: 1809–1865 (1982)
H. C. G. Matthew: Gladstone 1809–1874 (1986
H. C. G. Matthew: Gladstone 1875–1898 (1995)
J. L. Hammond: Gladstone and the Irish Nation (1938)
S. G. Checkland: The Gladstones 1764–1851 (1971) [a history of the family with much about W.E.G.’s father, Sir John Gladstone]
Collections of letters or speeches
Philip Guedalla (ed.): Gladstone and Palmerston (1928) [mainly letters]
Philip Guedalla (ed.): The Queen and Mr Gladstone, 2 vols (1933) [mainly letters]
A. Tilney Bassett (ed.): Gladstone’s Speeches (1916)
A. Tilney Bassett (ed.): Gladstone to His Wife (1936) [letters]
Agatha Ramm (ed.): Political Correspondence of Mr Gladstone and Lord Granville, 4 vols (1952–62)
D. C. Lathbury: Letters on Church and Religion of William Ewart Gladstone, 2 vols (1910)
Biographical essays or studies of Gladstone from particular angles
G. W . E. Russell: William Ewart Gladstone The Queen’s Prime Ministers Series (1891)
G. W . E. Russell: Mr Gladstone’s Religious Development (1899)
C. R. L. Fletcher: Mr Gladstone at Oxford, 1890 (1908)
F. W. Hirst: Gladstone as Financier and Economist (1931)
Mary Drew (née Gladstone): Acton, Gladstone and Others (1924)
Mary Drew: Diaries and Letters (1930)
Viscount (Herbert) Gladstone: After Thirty Years (1928) [his father seen in retrospect]
G. T. Garrett: The Two Mr Gladstones (1936)
Francis Birrell: Gladstone, Great Lives Series (1933)
E. J. Feuchtwanger: Gladstone (1975)
Penelope Gladstone: The Gladstones: Portrait of a Family 1839–1889 (1989)
Peter J. Jagger: Gladstone: The Making of a Christian Politician (1991)
Goldwin Smith: My Memory of Gladstone
GENERAL
Henry Adams: Charles Francis Adams
Evelyn Ashley: Henry John Temple: Life of Viscount Palmerston, 2 vols (1879)
H. H. Asquith: Fifty Years of Parliament, 2 vols (1925)
Walter Bagehot: Biographical Studies