by Simon Schama
As Gladstone read on in his temple of peace at Hawarden, something crucial for him and for the history of British liberalism began to make itself felt: that there were places in the empire – India, Ireland and probably the dark places of industrial England, too, for that matter – where the old gospel of pure self-reliance had become a bankrupt platitude. Not that this new awareness made Gladstone a radical interventionist. The main thrust of the Irish reforms in his first administration was still the dismantling, not the building, of state institutions – especially the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. But even as a pragmatist (not a radical) he was beginning to understand the force of the Birmingham Liberal activist Joseph Chamberlain’s arguments that good local government in the industrial cities of Britain often meant the aggressive assertion of public power to provide for the basic social needs of citizens – adequate housing, transport and medical welfare. The test of righteous liberalism in modern Britain, then, could not just be freedom of trade and property. Or rather those freedoms, if they were to survive, would have to be complemented by attention to social justice. For it was, as Campbell had said, the sense of being robbed of that justice that drove men to fury and violence – whether in the relief-camp strikes on the Deccan, in the dockyards of Britain, or, especially, in the countryside of the west of Ireland. ‘Ireland is at your doors,’ Gladstone told the House of Commons in typically prophetic manner, introducing a land bill that took a modest step towards protecting tenants from eviction for reasons other than default of rent; ‘Providence has placed it there. Law and legislature have made a compact between you and you must face these obligations.’
At every stage in his long career Gladstone (like Moses, to whom his faithful often compared him) had found the True Path from moments of revelation, especially of the adversary – ‘the hosts of Pharaoh’, whom he was called on to smite hip and thigh. (Sometimes that adversary was himself and, after meetings with the many fallen women he felt he had to redeem, beginning in his days at Oxford, he would flog the impurity out of his flesh.) Political and theological enemies received merely the lashing of his verbal or written rhetoric. Those first foes had been ‘rational Christians’ – Unitarians and their like, allied with the iniquitous reformers of 1832 – whom the young, solemnly High Church Gladstone believed, along with Wordsworth and Coleridge, were leading Britain down the primrose path to godless egalitarianism. (His hostility to the Reform Act of 1832, an acute embarrassment to the franchise reformer of the 1860s, he later put down to excessive youthful zeal and ‘delusion’.) The second cohort of villains consisted of those wicked men – especially, of course, Disraeli, whom Gladstone from the beginning detested as a self-glamorizing opportunist – who had crucified his sainted Peel. For Gladstone, who himself came from a manufacturing background, Peel’s no-nonsense plainness, his self-evident integrity and the tormented way he had put devotion to the truth before personal power or even party was the epitome of virtue in politics. Those who had destroyed him while purporting (in Disraeli’s case, he thought, preposterously) to represent the ‘traditional’ interests of landed Britain were guilty of a masquerade that was not only stupid but wicked.
What especially stuck in Gladstone’s craw was the pretence by the likes of Disraeli to represent an authentic Britain of rolling acres and the true Church. The true Church! Disraeli! Who never went down on bended knee (much less applied the penitent lash) except with a wink and a nod to pure form. And by what right did he apostrophize the working people of Britain as their true friend and protector while appealing, as had the generally disgraceful Palmerston, to the worst instincts of their belligerent vanity? It was he, Gladstone, along with the real soldiers of God like Cobden and Bright, who represented the genuinely moral Britain. In his own origins and apprenticeship were woven the fibre of the true Britain – Scotland, Lancashire, Oxford; the factory and the theological college, the university and the loom. Everything he had done he had done, he felt, responsibly: not deceiving the working class into expectations of imminent full democracy, but counselling patience; offering the reward of the franchise to those who, by dint of industry, education and hard-earned property, truly merited it and could be expected to use it with wisdom and temperance.
And now, in 1876, with his old adversary raised into the realms of Beaconsfieldism, but a prime minister still capable of mischief and iniquity, Gladstone felt summoned once again to undeceive a public who might have been bewitched by Disraeli’s ‘Judaic’ manoeuvres into believing that a policy designed for an ‘Asiatic empire’ – supporting the Turk; buying an Egyptian canal; putting a notorious opium-addicted madman like Lytton in charge of the destinies of the Indian empire – that all this exoticism could actually be worthy of the greatness of Christian Britain! The brutality of the Ottoman onslaught on the civilian population after an uprising in eastern Roumelia (modern Bulgaria) – the burned villages, rapes and sodomies; the mutilation of women and children – hit the British press in the spring of 1876 and triggered an immediate outcry against Disraeli’s pro-Turkish foreign policy. Hundreds of meetings were convened up and down the country. Far from leaping into the breach, Gladstone (who was formally supposed to do what he was told by the Whiggish leaders of the party, Lord Granville and the Marquis of Harrington) held back until late in the year. But the opportunity for a politics of impassioned virtue finally proved too much to resist. His ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ pamphlet, written in the temple of peace, was an immediate best-seller and a few days later Gladstone was on the stump, sermonizing the faithful in an electrifying address on London’s Blackheath in a rainstorm. Whatever effect it may or may not have had on the politics of the country, those who were there, like the radical journalist W. T. Stead, remembered it as a moment of conversion.
The charismatic re-emergence of the blazing prophet may have deceived Gladstone into thinking he could do no wrong (however much hurrumphing the Hartingtons and Granvilles did). He was wrong. His attack on Disraeli for taking the country to the edge of conflict when Russia went to war with Turkey badly misjudged the public mood, whipped up by Disraeli’s campaign into a lather of belligerent jingoism. Returning from his peacemaking at the Congress of Berlin in 1878, having obtained concessions from both Russia and Turkey, Disraeli was crowned, not stoned. By the end of 1879, however, the public mood had changed again with the expensive disasters in Zululand and Afghanistan. Innocent blood – both British and native – had been spilled, Gladstone thundered, in the name of vain adventurism. ‘The sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan’ was ‘as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God’ as that of every Briton at home.
And at home, the Liberals were presented with the political gift of a severe and sudden depression. The Almighty, Gladstone implied, was punishing those who indulged in the fleshpots for the wickedness of their Conservative rulers. Modern plagues were upon the back of Britain: bankruptcies, soaring unemployment, collapsing agricultural prices, stoppages of trade – even a potato blight in southwest Ireland. Basking in his popularity as the man who had brought ‘peace with honour’, and enjoying the divisions in the Liberal party, Disraeli had written Gladstone off as a tedious crank. But he had not reckoned with the extraordinary bolt of electrifying, almost messianic energy that seemed to have struck his old adversary, setting his oratory on fire – nor with the strikingly contemporary means he used to broadcast his withering attacks on the bungling extravagance of Beaconsfieldism. On 24 November 1879, Gladstone, accompanied by his wife, Catherine, boarded a train from one of his political heartlands, Liverpool, and travelled to another, lowland Scotland. Travelling through Wigan, St Helen’s and on to Carlisle, Galashiels and finally Edinburgh, the old boy became a political locomotive himself; the pistons of his magnificent self-righteousness pumping away, the orator roared from platforms, waved from train windows, was escorted to hotels by rapturous crowds where he made speeches from balconies. In Glasgow, Gladstone gave his inaugural address as rector of the university and was treated to the spect
acle of a torchlight parade, as if he were the prophet of a great evangelical revival – which, indeed, Gladstone thought he was. Some 85,000 people at 15 venues heard him in two weeks. The Midlothian campaign was the most American campaign Britain had ever seen, and it was an undoubted triumph.
When he had called the general election in March 1880, Disraeli assumed he would have no trouble in getting another Conservative majority. It turned out to be a massive miscalculation. The Liberals were returned with more than 100 more MPs than the Tories. ‘Beaconsfieldism’, Gladstone wrote jubilantly, ‘vanished like some vast magnificent castle in an Italian Romance.’ Italian romances were not the Grand Old Man’s sort of thing.
Along with 351 Liberals and 239 Tories in the parliament of 1880, however, were 65 Irish Home Rule MPs. They did not, as yet, hold the balance of power; but, disciplined as a force by their new leader, Charles Stewart Parnell, who had replaced the Irish Tory Isaac Butt, they could not exactly be ignored either. Even if their presence had not been so numerous, it is unlikely that Gladstone could, in fact, have stayed aloof from the open sore that was ‘The Irish Question’. For one thing the country, especially in the west, seemed to be disintegrating into lawlessness as a result of the anti-eviction campaign mobilized by the Land League. Its founder, the formidable Irish activist Michael Davitt, came from County Mayo, the heart of the pro-French uprising in 1798 and among the worst-hit of all the famine counties. He had gone to Lancashire to find work, had lost an arm in an industrial accident at the age of 11 and been imprisoned for gun-running before travelling to the United States to raise funds and consciousness about what needed to be done to change the lives of the Irish poor and the destiny of the nation. By the late 1870s, he and militant comrades had set up the Mayo Land League in the west, which, as the expanded Land League of Ireland, spread rapidly through the country. Its enemy was billed as ‘landlordism’, and its goals were rent reductions – by intimidation if necessary – and resisting eviction. In fact, the pace of evictions in Ireland had slowed markedly from the all-out dispossessions of the 1850s. Charles Trevelyan’s vision of a modernized Irish agriculture dominated by commercially minded large farmers, whether graziers in the west or arable farmers in the east, was well on the way to materializing. But capitalist farming is seldom socially pretty. The more profitable Irish agriculture became, the more inequitable was the distribution of its profits. And when – as at the end of the 1870s – it hit a slump, those who had depended on it for wages were of course the first to go; and those who were hanging on to their smallholdings were the first to be pressed with higher rents.
There was ample recruiting ground, in other words, for an army of the indignant. The Land League’s tactics, officially at any rate, were supposed to be aggressive but non-violent: the social ostracism of landlords who were known to impose summary evictions. The wretched Captain Charles Boycott, an English farmer who leased land from an Irish absentee aristocrat, Lord Ernle, but collected both his own and the landowner’s rents, was selected for exemplary and shockingly successful ostracism. Ernle was actually murdered. And despite the League’s protestations of innocence there were epidemics of livestock mutilation, rick-burning, shots fired into houses as ‘a warning’ and the occasional assassination. Faced with this chronic lawlessness, many of Gladstone’s own colleagues in the cabinet, especially the new chief secretary of Ireland, William Edward Forster, were in favour of an equally fierce counter-campaign of ‘order’, including, if necessary, the selective suspension of habeas corpus and detention without trial. They were also deeply suspicious of Parnell, who, they believed, condoned the violence even as he pretended to deplore it.
For Gladstone, matters weren’t as simple as a choice between passivity and repression. Even though, as yet, he had nothing to do with Parnell personally, he understood that the Land League was no longer a mere movement of aggrieved tenant peasants. Parnell himself, the half-American, Cambridge-educated, ostensibly Protestant (but actually agnostic) gentleman–landowner from the rolling hills of conservative County Wicklow (all horse shows, cucumber sandwiches and fêtes), was evidence that Davitt had succeeded in attracting all kinds of Irish people – teachers, shopkeepers, publicans, doctors, lawyers – to its ranks as the voice of Irish national, as well as social, aspirations. ‘We created Parnell and he created us,’ said another Leaguer, Tim Healy, a little boastfully but not inaccurately.
Years before he was formally committed to Home Rule, Gladstone had already understood the gathering Irish crisis as a fork in the road for the history of Britain itself: a test to see whether the constitution of the Union, both in respect of the land reform that Ireland needed and the more independent local government that it deserved, could take the strain and still survive. Previous generations of liberals like Charles Trevelyan had assumed that, whatever the sorrows of past history, there could be no greater fortune than to be part of the greatest empire the world had ever seen. But Trevelyan’s son, George Otto (historian as well as politician), was now in Gladstone’s government and he, like the prime minister, could see that some measure of land reform was needed to make continued membership of the Union legitimate. As a taster, in 1870, Gladstone had presented to parliament a bill designed to compensate evicted tenants for improvements they had made to their plots (although, as Roy Foster has pointed out, the kind of peasants who were ‘improvers’ were those least likely to be evicted). In any case, although this modest proposal was passed by the Commons it was shot down in the Lords as an unconscionable interference with private property. Taken aback by the tactical failure, Gladstone began to listen more carefully to his cabinet colleagues who insisted (as the tempo of rural violence increased) that coercion had to precede land reforms. In January 1881 a Protection of Persons and Property Bill went before the Commons, authorizing preventive detention. Outraged, the Irish bloc went into obstructionist mode, filibustering through the night; they tied up the business of the House so completely that on 3 February a resolution was passed to ‘set aside’ ordinary procedure. Infuriated Irish MPs, including Parnell, had to be forcibly removed.
After the stick, the carrot. With the Coercion Act in place Gladstone felt free to introduce his land bill in April without worrying about accusations of making concessions under pressure. None of its ‘three Fs’ – fair rent, free sale and fixity of tenure – was without its problems, not least for Gladstone himself, who fretted about their compatibility with the sanctity of private property. But the paramount need was to provide some sense of equity for the tenant smallholders of Ireland, and so to de-fang the violent wing of the Land League. Under the act, tenants who paid their rent could not be evicted (for example to enable the consolidation of small lots into large estates). More radical still, a government-appointed land court and a Land Commission were to arbitrate the ‘fairness’ of those rents. Gladstone needed to speak at 58 sittings of parliament to see the bill made law.
But if he had thought the bill would satisfy the Land League he was made to think again. Parnell (who supported the bill) continued to go on the attack, demanding rent reductions and an amnesty for arrears. More ominously, he began to talk of the connections between Britain and Ireland as if they were up for severance. Picking up the gauntlet, Gladstone in his turn threatened that any attempt to dissolve them would be met by the full weight of government. In October he went still further and had Parnell and other members of the Land League arrested and incarcerated in Kilmainham gaol on the outskirts of Dublin.
Cheering broke out from the hard men in the cabinet and the party. At last the Old Man understood what it took to lay down the law in Ireland (altogether reminiscent of Lytton’s 1878 Vernacular Press Act, which gagged the uppity and seditious Indian press). But, although Gladstone joked at a dinner party about becoming accustomed to coercion ‘much as a man might say (in confidence) that he found himself under the painful necessity of slaying his mother’, he was in fact deeply uneasy about governing by force, and never thought it could possibly be anything b
ut the shortest-term answer to Ireland’s distress and anger. In Naples in the early 1850s his stomach had been turned by the despotic Bourbon monarchy’s treatment of political prisoners, and he had written that such regimes were in violation of natural rights and God’s ordinance. Truly legitimate governments, he believed, could survive only so long as they were grounded in the ‘affections’ of the people. Whatever else liberalism meant in the age of the gunboat and the Gatling gun, it surely had to mean at least that.
So the prime minister opened secret negotiations with the imprisoned Parnell through the intermediary of Katherine O’Shea, the wife of another Irish MP but also the mistress of Parnell and the mother of his children. The oddest of couples, the two men needed each other – or at least, in 1882, thought they did. Gladstone needed Parnell to master the champions of nationalist violence, to try to persuade the Irish MPs that their wish for greater self-government could be met within the Union. Parnell needed Gladstone to deliver a more radical dose of land reform (especially a restraint on the collection of arrears) and to repeal or at least moderate coercion. An agreement – the secret ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ – was struck. Parnell would be freed, the better to bridle the hotheads; Gladstone would deliver the arrears bill. But in Parnell’s personal absence the hotheads, incensed by his imprisonment, had got fierier, not cooler. In May 1882 the brand-new chief secretary of Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and his permanent under-secretary, Thomas Burke, were murdered, while walking in Phoenix Park in Dublin, by terrorists committed to assassination and calling themselves the Invincibles. For Gladstone, the atrocity was doubly horrifying. Long surgical knives had been used to cut the victims’ throats from ear to ear, and Burke’s head had been all but severed from his body. And Cavendish was not just another political appointee; he was Freddie, a nephew of Gladstone’s wife and a frequent guest at Hawarden. Horrified, Parnell, who had just been released under the terms agreed at Kilmainham, now offered to resign his leadership of the Irish party. But it was precisely in situations like this that Gladstone’s instinct of Christian magnanimity served him well. He not only declined Parnell’s gesture but promised closer collaboration and moved ahead with the arrears bill just a week after the murders. For some of his colleagues this was further proof that the Old Man had gone mad. Revolt was only pre-empted by the passage of another Coercion Act, in direct response to the Phoenix Park murders, extending powers of search, arrest and detention and creating special tribunals to act without the inconvenience of an Irish jury.
