by Simon Schama
Despite the two measures cancelling each other out, Parnell and Gladstone did not yet break off their covert collaboration. Katherine O’Shea continued to bear messages and babies. (By this time Gladstone certainly knew, if he hadn’t before, of her relationship with Parnell.) There was, the prime minister thought, a way out: through local government boards; these, the pet project of Joseph gas-and-water Chamberlain, could be directly elected by the Irish without affronting the constitutional principles of undivided sovereignty. Under the scheme, however, there was also to be a Central Board in Dublin for all-Irish business, appointed by the British government. The Central Board was a sop to those who thought local devolution was the thin end of the wedge. But it was taken by Conservatives and Unionists in precisely the opposite sense: as the embryo of a true Home Rule government. Red flags went up. The measure went down.
Parnell never quite believed that Gladstone had done everything in his power to promote it; or, if he had, that he no longer had the political muscle to make it happen – much less the substantial Home Rule measure he really wanted. The Old Man was frequently ill; at the height of a crisis he had fallen in the snow and cut his head badly, prompting him to say that he could feel the bleeding inside his skull. Who knew – perhaps there had been some serious damage? He seemed no longer master in the house of his cabinet: Whigs and Radicals were at each other’s throats and both sides suspected the prime minister of bad faith. Chamberlain – whose allegiance to true devolution seemed, as the years passed, less and less solid – was waiting impatiently in the wings to seize the leadership. What was more, Gladstone, the scourge of imperialists, had, in South Africa and especially in Egypt, revealed himself to be just as partial to gunboat diplomacy and impetuous military expeditions as the vainglorious Beaconsfield. In 1881 there had been an uprising of military officers against the Khedive, whose profligate government – even after the sale of the Suez Canal shares to Britain – had amassed so huge a debt that it had put even a pretence of sovereignty into receivership. And the receivers were of course the Western powers, Britain and France, who assumed control over the revenues of Egypt to ensure proper service of the debt. (This was, in fact, an almost exact African replay of the beginnings of British rule in India in the 18th century, with European colonialists insisting on intervening to clean up the mess that they had been largely responsible for creating in the first place.)
The Egyptian revolt – a mix of military and Muslim unrest – put both powers in the position of either cutting their losses or going in for the kill, and for the long term. When the French rather shrank from the logic, not to mention the expense of the latter, Gladstone, to the amazement of many, dived in with guns blazing. The Royal Navy bombarded Alexandria. An army sent on a lightning 40-day expedition annihilated the Egyptian rebels. Gladstone the anti-imperialist ordered victory bonfires to be lit around the country. Many of his oldest friends were aghast at the apostasy, especially when Gladstone, like any colonial proconsul – or, indeed, like Disraeli – went on and on about how the expedition had been launched only in the interests of ‘peace’ and ‘stability’ and not to establish a British colony in Egypt, heavens no, merely the restoration of the ‘legitimate’ rule of the Khedive. He would, of course, need the odd British soldier or two for the foreseeable future to maintain that legitimacy, as well as to collect on funds owing to the likes of the Barings. No one was more distressed at Gladstone’s foray into imperialism than his old comrade John Bright. At least Disraeli was candid about his imperialism. Gladstone, on the other hand, seemed pathetically deluded, wrote Bright: ‘He seems to have the power of convincing himself that what to me seems glaringly wrong is evidently right and tho’ he regrets that a crowd of men should be killed, he regards it almost as an occurrence which is not to be condemned as it is one of the incidents of a policy out of which he hopes for a better order of things.’
Instead of the ‘better order’ in Egypt, Gladstone got the General Gordon disaster at Khartoum. To be fair, this was not of his making, for Gordon, faced with the huge jihadi army of the Mahdi – the Chosen One – sweeping up from the southern Sudan, had been ordered to evacuate Khartoum smartly but had chosen instead to stay and court martyrdom. Furious with Gordon, Gladstone was personally prepared to grant him his wish; but it was politically unthinkable. Lord Wolseley was sent on a relief expedition up the Nile, which arrived at the end of January 1885 just a few days too late to save Gordon. Gladstone bore the odium for having ‘sacrificed’ the Hero, not least from Queen Victoria, reinforced in her aversion for everything about William Ewart Gladstone.
All these troubles persuaded Parnell that Gladstone’s power was on the wane, and that he should look elsewhere for the furtherance of at least his short-term aims. Although in retrospect the tactical turn towards the Conservatives seems perverse, Parnell was in fact being heavily (and irresponsibly) wooed by the Tory magnate Lord Carnarvon, to the point where he believed that, if his Irish bloc defected from the Liberals, they could, together with dissidents in Gladstone’s own party, bring down the government. His price to Lord Salisbury was the land bill and the dropping of a crimes bill that Gladstone had been unable to get through parliament. He got his wish. In June 1885, the Liberal government was defeated on a parliamentary vote through the abstention of a large number of their own number and the opposition of the Irish. But the Parnellite–Tory alliance was too unnatural a thing to last, especially since Parnell was plainly driving for full-scale Home Rule – an Irish parliament for everything except foreign policy.
This was a step too far, not just for Salisbury but for many among the Liberals, including the increasingly imperialist Joseph Chamberlain, for whom any talk of Home Rule was the same as secession and the end of the Union. But Gladstone had undergone another of those revelatory changes of heart. He had been deep amidst the stacks in the temple of peace again, and after intensive historical research had come to believe that, when the majority of the Irish people questioned the fruits of the Union, they had, in fact, a point: many iniquities and injustices had been inflicted on them. The choice – if not now, then at some inevitable stage in the future – was not between coercion and Home Rule, for coercion could not be perpetuated in a truly liberal Britain. It would be a choice between Home Rule and out-and-out separation. Conceding Home Rule was the best possible way to pre-empt a much more drastic break. Once convinced, he attempted to persuade the Queen (a hard case) that Irish self-government would be, in the truest sense, a conservative measure; agreed with Parnell (via Katherine O’Shea) that an Irish parliament was the way forward; and only then deigned to tell his own party what he might have in mind, informing Lord Derby at Hawarden that the Union was ‘a mistake and that no adequate justification had been shown for taking away the national life of Ireland’.
Gladstone’s tactics for bringing his party with him were at best peremptory. In mid-December 1885, with an election campaign under way, a kite was flown in the form of a newspaper story claiming to set out the Home Rule principles to which Gladstone was committed. He immediately repudiated it and insisted that what he had in mind was just a local-government scheme; but the shock waves inside the Liberal party were massively damaging. Both Whigs and imperialist radicals like Chamberlain were appalled that they were being committed to a policy without consultation or consent, and began to pack their political bags. Most seriously, to his radical friends and colleagues, Chamberlain began to present the causes of domestic social reform and Irish Home Rule as mutually exclusive; the necessary improvements to the ‘condition of England’ held hostage to the obsessions of one old man, himself bewitched by an Irish quasi-traitor.
The election produced an Irish bloc of 86 MPs, which precisely and arithmetically held the balance between the two parties. Gladstone offered to support Home Rule if proposed by a Tory government. But the young stars of the Tories, Randolph Churchill and Arthur Balfour, led the charge against it, playing on the already militant paranoia of Ulster Protestants who were fearful that
they were about to be swamped by a semi-independent ‘ignorant’ Catholic Ireland and that they would pay the price for generations of the Protestant ascendancy. Balfour, throwing scruples to the wind, told Unionists that Home Rule would mean they would be ‘put under the heel of a majority which is greater than you in number [but which] is most undoubtedly inferior to you in political knowledge and experience – you the wealthy, the orderly, the industrious, the enterprising portion of Ireland, are to supply the money for that part of Ireland which is less orderly, less industrious and less … law-abiding’. From the refined lips of the Oxford philosopher–scholar came the authentic strain of Ulster Red-hand Unionism.
When the Tories, unsurprisingly, opted for coercion Gladstone grasped the nettle himself. A bill providing for an Irish parliament within the empire was hastily prepared, much along the lines of what had been agreed between Parnell and Gladstone. Shortly afterwards another land bill was introduced to make good, in effect, on Mill and Campbell’s argument that tenancy in Ireland brought with it virtual proprietorship. Landlords who sold to their tenants were now given the chance of compensation from a government fund. It was perhaps the most revolutionary thing Gladstone had ever put his name to.
On 27 May 1886 the Strangers’ Gallery was packed early, and MPs crowded the chamber for the second reading of the Home Rule Bill. In a dramatic gesture of concession to dissidents in his own party Gladstone proposed that the vote be only on the principle of Home Rule; and that, if passed, a third reading would take place only after another election. Then followed, for 3½ hours, the speech of his life – the noblest thing he ever did, and the most doomed. This was, he told the House, ‘one of the golden moments of our history – one of those opportunities which may come and may go, but which rarely return’. And with the grievous hindsight of everything that has happened since, who is to say he was wrong? His oratory rose to Ciceronian heights as if he could overcome the adverse lobby arithmetic that was staring him in the face by sheer force of eloquence, embodying Quintilian’s definition of a true orator as a good man who speaks well. That day Gladstone spoke well, and perhaps all the sanctimoniousness, all the exasperating contradictions, all the acts of impulsiveness and intolerance that had marked his long, prodigious career faded away into nothing beside the deep truth and goodness of what he was saying, nowhere more urgently and more poignantly than when this most historically minded of all Britain’s prime ministers (until Churchill) asked parliament to forget, this once, British history. Ireland was asking, he said, ‘for what I call a blessed oblivion of the past. She asks also a boon for the future, and that boon … will be a boon to us in respect of her honour, no less than a boon to her in respect of happiness, prosperity, and peace. Such, Sir, is her prayer. Think, I beseech you,’ he implored in his peroration, ‘think well, think wisely, think, not for the moment, but for the years that are to come, before you reject this Bill.’
The prayer was not answered: 341 members voted against the second reading, 311 in favour. Voting against were 91 of Gladstone’s own party: a greater number than had been anticipated, even on the prime minister’s most pessimistic assessment, and including Chamberlain and the old warhorse of the liberal conscience, John Bright. Chamberlain was greeted by howls of ‘Judas!’ from the Liberal loyalists. The election that followed – the second in six months – was, as Gladstone honestly put it, ‘a smash’. The Liberals mustered only 191 seats; the Conservatives gained 316 and the Parnellites got 85.
It would be six years before Gladstone was back in power for the last time, a very old man, now with a chance to bring Home Rule before the country again. But everything had changed, not least the fate of the Irish party and its leader. In 1889, Captain O’Shea brought a suit for divorce from his wife on the grounds of her adultery with Parnell. The Liberals, including Gladstone, professed to be shocked. The Catholic Church, which had been a crucial supporter of his Home Rule leadership, now excoriated him as a wicked fornicator. His mass support in Ireland, except in Dublin, crumbled away to a small group of die-hards. In Kilkenny they threw mud at him. Two years later, on 6 October 1891, he died, just 45 years old, at Brighton, in the arms of Katherine, now his wife. But in 1893 it was not only Chamberlain, now a Conservative, who was a gung-ho imperialist and as such unlikely to countenance the break-up of the empire, the reduction of Great Britain to a ‘Little England’. ‘All Europe is armed to the teeth,’ Chamberlain said. ‘Meanwhile our interests are universal – our honour is involved in almost every land under the sun. Under such conditions the weak invite attack, and it is necessary for Britain to be strong.’ Besides, why should the social and economic interests of the solidly loyal Welsh and Scots, or for that matter Londoners and Mancunians, not to mention Canadians and New Zealanders, be sacrificed to the compulsion to accede to Irish nationalist blackmail? The Home Rulers were nothing but terrorists in thin disguise – they didn’t fool him – and, besides, he claimed outrageously, it was now common knowledge that Parnell had been behind the Phoenix Park murders all the time. The lesson of the defeat of Home Rule, Chamberlain declared, was that ‘the great majority of the British nation are proud of … the glorious and united British empire’. Many of the rising stars of Gladstone’s own party, like the Foreign Secretary Lord Rosebery, were just as hot for imperialism – and they could cite the Gladstone of Majuba Hill and Egypt as their precedent. Tolerating a third reading of the Government of Ireland Bill was just a matter of humouring the Grand Old Man (since its defeat in the House of Lords was a certainty) before he was pushed out of the leadership and before long into his tomb. Not everyone was prepared to let him go in peace, however. In adamant opposition, now Tory–Unionist, Chamberlain made a personal attack on Gladstone of such malicious ferocity that to the Irish politician T.P. O’Connor it seemed like the voice of a ‘“lost soul” in hell: the Prime Minister calls “black” and they say, “it is good”; the Prime Minister calls “white” and they say “it is better”. It is always the voice of a god. Never since the time of Herod has there been such slavish adulation.’
Not a god, perhaps, but a prophet who had, for that matter, been prophetic. The chance of satisfying Irish self-government within the Union would never again in British history come so close to peaceful realization; certainly not in 1911 or 1917, when there were further last-ditch efforts and Ireland was even more hopelessly crushed between hard-line Republican separatism on the one hand and equally hard-line Unionism on the other. Those who care about both Ireland and Britain may be allowed just a touch of wistfulness (doubtless sentimental) that we are still living with the consequences of that missed opportunity.
The failure of Home Rule was in fact more than a turning point in Irish or British history. It also marked the epitaph of the much older Liberal ideal of gradualist self-government, mooted in all seriousness and all sincerity by Macaulay a half-century before. Although Joseph Chamberlain liked to believe that the empire would actually be stronger with the sacred cow of Home Rule slaughtered, frozen and locked away, he was, in the long term, staggeringly wrong. At the very moment when moderate Irish nationalism was attempting to find some sort of self-expression within the empire moderate Indian nationalists were doing exactly the same thing: 1885–6 was not just the moment of truth for Home Rule but the inaugural year of the Indian National Congress. It was founded, of course, by Allan Hume, the famine dissenter from Lytton’s government, who had finally decided that the good intentions on which the empire had supposedly been founded, and which continued to be trotted out as the justification for its massive military power, would never actually be realized; not, at any rate, voluntarily.
Apparently in both India and Ireland the Liberals couldn’t deliver on promises of self-government and economic and social justice, and the Conservatives wouldn’t. Instead of bringing on the educated classes of the colonized to take responsibility for their own justice and government, British imperial power, especially as embodied in the Men on the Spot who claimed a superior, tougher wisdom than th
e remote idealists in London, was more than ever determined to keep them out. When Gladstone’s genuinely liberal viceroy, Lord Ripon, perhaps the most decent India ever had, attempted to pass the Ilbert Bill, which would have allowed Europeans to be judged by Indian magistrates, cries of white outrage erupted from Calcutta to Madras. Inevitably the government was forced to beat a retreat; the presumptuous piece of legislation was withdrawn. In his sketch of the manners and mores of the post-Mutiny British, The Competition Wallah (1864), George Otto Trevelyan condemned ‘That intense Anglo-Saxon spirit of self-approbation, which, though dormant at home, is unpleasantly perceptible among vulgar Englishmen on the Continents [and which] becomes rampant in India.’ Nauseated by the snobbery, racism and hypocrisy of the sahibs, he saw only too clearly what had happened to the lofty ideals his father had hoped for in the 1830s. At the annual race meeting at Sunapur (originally an Indian festival of purification), where ‘The wife of the Judge of Boglipore looks forward for months to meeting her sister, the Collectrix of Gya’, amidst the croquet and the betting, Trevelyan saw ‘a tall raw-boned brute’ rush at a gathering of well-dressed, well-to-do Indians and flog them with a double-thonged hunting whip until they had fled from the enclosure. ‘One or two civilians said to each other it was “a shame”, but no-one seemed astounded or horrified, no-one interposed, no-one prosecuted, no-one objected to meet the blackguard at dinner.’ These were the kind of scenes that increasingly became commonplaces in the late-19th-century Raj, and in its literature, at exactly the time when lip service was being paid to the gradualism of self-government and sententious words were being uttered about the ‘unreadiness’ of the natives for the responsibilities of citizenship. Worse still, some of the most blatant race prejudice was articulated at home. The most shaming thing that can be said, perhaps, of British politics in the age of Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee is that those radicals like Sir Charles Dilke and Chamberlain, who were most eloquent on behalf of the underclass in Britain, should also have been most ferocious in their conviction about the manifest superiority of the white race and the self-evident altruism of the British Empire.
