Victoria: A Life

by A. N. Wilson

  The Government told Gordon to hang on in the Sudan until the summer, when they would send in military reinforcements. It now became apparent, however, that this might be extremely difficult. Baring begged the Government not to wait, and the Queen added her voice to his: ‘Sir E. Baring is evidently not pleased at what the Queen must call the miserable, weak and too late action of the government.’18

  Gordon was now trapped in Khartoum, in an extremely volatile situation, without Egyptian troops, without British troops, and without the native Sudanese support which he had arrogantly assumed would be the natural consequence of his reappearance in that city. Baring, who was ill, was summoned back to London to give Gladstone and the Foreign Secretary advice. He took the chance, while there, to spell out to them the dire financial straits of the Egyptian Government, and to urge them to join forces with the French in securing further international loans.

  They had a short conference with the French during July and decided they should try to force the Egyptians to accept international financiers as the controllers of Egypt’s exchequer. The sums involved were enormous, and the British Government was appalled to discover that Baring had all but committed them to lending the Egyptians £8.7 million to pay off current debts and to invest in new irrigation schemes.19

  Gordon, meanwhile, was still in Khartoum. Far too late, the Government and Baring realized they needed to rescue him, and they dispatched a relief expedition, headed by Sir Garnet Wolseley. The Nile floods had crested and water levels were beginning to fall. The Mahdi had reached Khartoum. On New Year’s Day 1885, Baring received a message, dated 14 December, which was written on a piece of paper the size of a postage stamp. It read: ‘Khartoum all right. G. C. Gordon.’ Baring telegraphed Gordon telling him to abandon the city and make a dash for it across the desert from Suakin. Gordon refused. He had already written, ‘Now MARK THIS, if the expedition . . . does not come in ten days, the Town Hall May Fall and I have done my best for the honour of our country. Goodbye. G. C. Gordon.’ On 26 January 1885, the Mahdi’s soldiers burst into the palace in Khartoum and speared Gordon to death. The rescue party began to arrive a few days later. On the night that this modern hero suffered martyrdom, when rumours were already flying round that Gordon might be dead, Gladstone had gone to the theatre in London to watch a play called The Candidate – ‘capitally acted’, as he told his journal.

  The Queen was understandably angry. It did, apart from the tragedy of the thing, make the British look so incompetent. Before the fate of Gordon had become clear, she sent telegrams to Gladstone, Granville and Hartington, and she sent them en clair, that is uncoded and open for any village postmistress to read. Gladstone was handed his stinker by the station master at Carnforth, the Lancastrian railway station later to be made famous as the setting for Noël Coward’s film, Brief Encounter: ‘These news from Khartoum are frightful and to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.’20

  It was a calculated insult and one which openly and deliberately lined up the monarchy with the public against the Government. ‘The country will be furious,’ she told Ponsonby, ‘and we are bound to show a bold front.’21

  Gladstone was indignant and humiliated, knowing himself to be so deeply in the wrong, and considered resignation on the spot. He might well have resigned, would such an action not have scuppered all his aspirations for Ireland. He wrote the Queen a very long letter, dated 5 February 1885, which missed the point entirely. Huffing and puffing, and weighing up General Wolseley’s chances of relieving Khartoum, Gladstone failed to address the nub of the question: namely his personal responsibility for the fate of Gordon. He and his Foreign Secretary had reacted too late to the situation and failed to send the relief in time. These exchanges, between the sovereign and her Prime Minister, took place at a time when they were all still hoping against hope that Gordon might be rescued. By the time the truth was known, that Gordon was dead, and that Wolseley was asking to be made Governor-General of the Sudan until the situation was brought under control, the Government was still dithering, and still unable to decide whether Wolseley was the right man for the job. ‘The Queen laments this want of decision and firmness in the Government,’ she told Gladstone, ‘which gives her the greatest anxiety for the future.’22

  Something extraordinary had happened. The monarchy had not gained in executive power. But it had naturally associated itself with ‘popular opinion’ against the political class. The Queen hammered home what she perceived to be an advantage. Moreover, Victoria herself had changed very much indeed. Whereas in Gladstone’s first administration, in 1868 onwards, the problem for the Prime Minister had been how to coax the hermit-constitutional monarch out of her seclusion to play a part in national affairs, now in his second administration, the problem seemed to be how to shut her up. Whereas during his first Government, private grief seemed to overwhelm any sense of her public duty, in this period of life worry about public affairs appeared to overshadow private grief. At a dinner in Windsor Castle, Mrs Gladstone lamented to the Queen ‘over all the trouble and anxiety’ Victoria had had. Mrs Gladstone was referring, surely, not only to events in the Sudan, but also to such things as the deaths of the Queen’s favourite servant and of her son so comparatively recently. ‘I told Mrs Gladstone . . . that I should have been far less distressed had I felt that the right thing had been done, which would have prevented all this, and she shook her head, saying she hoped not, whereon I told her I was sure of it.’23

  Granville and Gladstone found the Queen’s attitude so tiresome that they simply ignored her, and failed to tell her what was going on over the next couple of months. While Wolseley was waiting at Suakin to hear from them whether he should reconquer Khartoum, news came from Afghanistan. The Russians had attacked and defeated an Afghan force on the Afghan–Turcoman border at Penjdeh.

  The Queen was holidaying at the time in Aix-les-Bains, but as ‘Countess of Balmoral’, she sent a telegram to Gladstone from her hotel: ‘IS IT DIGNIFIED THAT BRITISH COMMISSION SHOULD REMAIN IN THE AFGHAN BOUNDARY ANY LONGER?’24 For some days it looked possible that there might be war over the matter. Granville, with Gladstone’s backing, made a double decision – to withdraw any commitments in the Sudan, and to commit £11 million to the defence of the Zulfikar Pass and access to British India. Neither of these decisions were reported to the Queen until they were faits accomplis. ‘I hope you will not give way to pressure from St Petersburgh,’ she wrote to Gladstone,25 and she professed herself ‘greatly agitated. Directly after breakfast saw Major Edwards & asked him to go & tell Bertie to remonstrate with Lord Hartington for his neglect of duty, which has been repeated again & again.’26 Writing to Wolseley direct, she said, ‘Altogether the Queen’s heart is sorely troubled for her brave soldiers . . . Our soldiers fight and have on every single occasion in this exceptionally trying campaign fought like heroes individually, and she hopes he will tell them so from the highest to the lowest from her.’27 In the event, the problem of the Mahdi was solved by unforeseen means. He died in June 1885, and his successor, lacking his hypnotic power over the masses or his military panache, was easily defeated at Ginnis by a mixture of Egyptian and English forces. The threat of an invasion of Egypt by religious fundamentalists was averted.

  But if the wars and rumours of war in the Sudan and in Afghanistan revealed a gulf between the Liberal Government and the monarch, this was nothing compared with their difference over the Irish Question. It was Ireland and its future which dominated the political life of the nation for the next year, a period which has been described as the most dramatic in English party history. What was being debated was nothing less than the future of Britain – whether Ireland would be able to break away from the dominance of the Westminster Parliament. Home Rule was not total independence, but it would have satisfied the majority of the Irish. History would have been very different had Gladstone and Parnell successfully passed it through Parlia
ment. Probably, there was never a chance of doing so, partly because of the entrenched views of the Ulster Protestants, and partly because these views were so forcefully echoed, not only by Lord Salisbury and the Conservatives, but also by a substantial number of Gladstone’s own political allies.

  In June, at about the time that the Mahdi was dying in the Sudan, and about a month before Princess Beatrice married Prince Henry on the Isle of Wight, the Government suffered an unexpected defeat. They proposed to increase beer and spirit duties. The vote divided 264 to 252, Gladstone resigned as Prime Minister, and the Queen summoned Lord Salisbury to Balmoral, and asked him to form a minority administration. (Minority, because the House also contained all the Parnellite Irish members.) He was the first Prime Minister for seventeen years not to have been called either Disraeli or Gladstone. Fifty-five years old, compared with Gladstone’s now seventy-seven, Salisbury was a huge man, eighteen stone in weight, well over six feet tall, with a high domed bald head bursting with knowledge and a thick bushy beard. He was a natural pessimist, and he was also extraordinarily astute politically. He had hesitated for a long time before he accepted the Queen’s request; and while he was staying with her at Balmoral, they had actually sent Gladstone a wire, which was refused, begging him to reconsider his resignation. One reason for this was that the Queen was very anxious not to disrupt her holiday; Deeside is at its most beautiful in June. Salisbury, for his part, had mixed feelings about presiding over a Britain which was in political chaos. As the Queen put it in a letter to Gladstone from Balmoral, ‘We are near the middle of the stream at the moment – and a change of horses would be a very difficult operation.’28 He and most of his new Cabinet (the largest in British history, with sixteen members) went to Windsor and kissed hands on 24 June. They were to exercise what was, in effect, a ‘caretaker’ ministry.

  For all his appearance of aristocratic disdain for what was going on around him, Salisbury worked hard, often a fourteen-hour day.29 Much of his time was spent trying to disentangle the mess left by the Liberals in foreign affairs. He said that the Liberal Government had ‘achieved their desired Concert of Europe, they have succeeded in uniting the continent of Europe – against England’.30 The principal crisis of this short period in office was in Bulgaria. There was a revolution in Philippopolis (now Plovdiv), the capital of Eastern Roumelia. The Turkish Governor-General was expelled and the Bulgarian populace asked Alexander Battenberg – Sandro, Princess Beatrice’s brother-in-law – to be ruler of both the formally divided halves of Bulgaria.

  Serbia then mobilized against Bulgaria, and it looked as if there was going to be another outbreak of war in the Balkans, with the Russians threatening Sandro, and the British in danger of being drawn into a war, which Salisbury definitely did not want, with Russia.

  Sandro, who had fought alongside the Russians in the last Russo-Turkish War, detested his cousin Tsar Alexander III and looked to Britain to defend a ‘Big Bulgaria’ against the partitioned, truncated Bulgaria favoured by the Russians. Queen Victoria, who had regarded Sandro as a Russian spy when he had lunch with Affie back in 1878, during the Treaty of San Stefano, now saw him as ‘poor Sandro’, ‘dear Sandro’, a Sandro and a Bulgaria to be defended at all costs. Salisbury complained to Henry Manners, ‘Balmoral has got a telegraphing fit on just now, which is a great aggravation to the trials of life.’31 The Serbs invaded Bulgaria on 13 November and were roundly defeated in battle by Sandro and his troops a week later at Slivinitza: news, which in the Queen’s view, would rejoice the hearts of ‘all right-minded people and all who are not under the influence of Russia’.32

  But the Bulgarian crisis would last longer than Salisbury’s caretaker ministry. He stayed in office until January 1886 to oversee the next stage of events in Bulgaria, but he had already been defeated in a General Election, having held office for only five months.

  The election had been called in November, and it was the first since the Franchise Act of 1884. There were therefore 2 million extra voters, and Gladstone had been sure that this would work to his advantage. But this was a truth much complicated by the Irish Question, which now dominated both the large islands facing one another across St George’s Channel.

  The dominant Irish politician was Charles Stewart Parnell, campaigning for Home Rule. This was nothing so radical as wishing for a Republic of Ireland or a complete severance between Ireland and the rest of Britain. What Parnell proposed was a Parliament for the Irish, in which they could largely determine their own affairs; over the question of foreign policy, there was room for manoeuvre and discussion with the politicians of Westminster. One of the first converts to the idea of Home Rule among English politicians was the Tory viceroy, Lord Carnarvon. He was a great resigner, and realizing that he was out of kilter with Lord Salisbury over this issue, he resigned. He had come to the conclusion that Parnell was ‘singularly moderate’.33

  The real political bombshell, however, was Gladstone’s overt espousal of the cause of Irish Home Rule. Carnarvon’s views were expressed privately to the Prime Minister, and there was no possibility that the Conservative Party would ever, at this juncture, have adopted them. They went against all Salisbury’s Unionist notions, besides which Salisbury could see, as a pragmatist, that it would be impossible to persuade the Orange Lodges and the Ulster Unionists to accept the idea. For them, ‘Home Rule is Rome Rule’.

  The General Election was fought in the closing weeks of November. Quite apart from Ireland, the Liberals were bitterly divided over the whole question of radicalism, Whigs such as Lord Hartington being quite unable to accept the radical proposals of candidates such as Joseph Chamberlain, who wanted to disestablish the Church of England, have free education for all, and reform the law relating to land ownership and rentals. But in spite of these divisions, the Liberals won by a substantial majority: 334 Liberal seats, with 86 Home Rulers, as opposed to a mere 250 Conservatives. ‘The elections not good, though there are some striking Conservative victories,’ the Queen told her journal.34

  But then came the phenomenon known as the Hawarden Kite. With the Liberals in office, and the Grand Old Man as Prime Minister for the third time, Gladstone let it be known that, rather than simply being friendly towards the cause of Parnell, he was now a convert to the cause of Home Rule, and intended it to be the chief aim of his administration to bring it to pass.

  He flew this ‘kite’ in the most extraordinary way – not by making a speech, or by telling the House of Commons, but by allowing his son Herbert to write a letter to The Times. It was written from Hawarden Castle, Mrs Gladstone’s seat: ‘Nothing would induce me to countenance separation, but if five-sixths of the Irish people wish to have a Parliament in Dublin, for the management of their own local affairs, I say, in the name of justice, and wisdom, let them have it.’35

  This ‘kite’, flown into the air so casually, changed the skyline of British politics for a generation. When offering men places in his new Cabinet, Gladstone gave them a short memorandum, telling them of his decision to set up ‘a legislative body to sit in Dublin and to deal with Irish as distinguished from imperial affairs’.36

  John Morley, one day to become Gladstone’s biographer, became Irish Secretary. His views had been no secret for a long time: he had advocated Ireland being given the same status as Canada or Australia, self-governing within the imperial umbrella. The complexion of the Liberal Party was changed completely by the alchemy of Home Rule. Whereas over questions such as education and land reform the radicals and the old-fashioned Whigs were poles apart, over the Irish Question, Whigs like Harty Tarty and moderate Liberals such as Goschen found themselves to be the allies of radicals like Chamberlain and G. O. Trevelyan, who were rigidly Unionist. The new Government proposed two Irish Bills, one for dissolving the Act of Union, and another for creating an Irish assembly. Trevelyan and Chamberlain immediately resigned from the Cabinet.

  The Queen watched the Government’s discomfiture with a certain quiet s
atisfaction. She wrote to Vicky from Windsor Castle, ‘Mr Gladstone only thinks of Irish affairs and nothing else. We have just heard Liszt who is such a fine old man. He came down here and played four pieces beautifully. What an exquisite touch.’37

  On 8 April, the day after the Abbé Liszt had so delighted his Windsor audience, Gladstone presented his Home Rule Bill to the House of Commons. It was one of the most dramatic days in the history of Parliament, as decisive a moment in party politics as had been Peel’s brave decision, in 1846, to abolish the tariffs on corn and thereby splinter the Conservative Party. Instantaneously, Gladstone lost Liberal mainstays such as Goschen and Hartington, as well as the radicals Chamberlain and Trevelyan. On 14 April, on the stage of the old Opera House in the Haymarket, there was a Unionist rally, where Lord Hartington and Goschen appeared on the same platform as Salisbury and W. H. Smith, a Conservative MP and grandson of the founder of the stationer’s. Chamberlain, not yet ready to be seen in such company, organized a smaller group of radical Unionists – though he seemed to be in very great confusion about what sort of government he wanted for Ireland, switching from one day to the next from some sort of British ‘federation’ to thinking that Ireland might enjoy a status comparable to that of Canada.38 From a narrowly political viewpoint, in terms of the interest of the Liberal Party, Gladstone seemed to have led his party over a cliff. One writer compared Gladstone to a desperate pirate burning his ship.39 No wonder, at Hatfield, that the Cecils had the joke that the initials G.O.M. (Grand Old Man) stood for ‘God’s Only Mistake’. ‘We hope to succeed in smashing the old lunatic,’ wrote Lady Salisbury on 19 April.40 As his seventy-seventh birthday approached, Gladstone became seriously worried that there would be no guests. It had been his custom to entertain the Prince of Wales on his birthday, but this year, he was afraid of asking Bertie and his son for fear that they would be compromised by seeming thereby to support Home Rule. The Duke of Argyll had already refused his invitation, and Gladstone feared that if he did ask the prince, Bertie would come into a room and find it empty, having expected to meet the peerage. In the event, Gladstone need not have worried. Bertie stayed away, but there were plenty of guests and Prince Albert Victor (Eddy) came and was, according to Gladstone, ‘most kind’.41