by Roy Jenkins
Dilke . . . . 7,374
Hoare . . . . 7,183
Russell . . . . 4,177
Freake . . . . 3,929
Dilke’s moderation had apparently been more successful in conciliating the general Liberal vote than in reassuring his father. Indeed it could be claimed that his own feigned moderation was more successful in winning votes than was his father’s genuine moderation, for at the same election Wentworth Dilke lost his seat at Wallingford. Despite his son’s opinions and the often strained relations between them, Wentworth Dilke was probably well enough satisfied with the exchange. He knew his own political limitations, and, as was shown by his work on the proofs of Greater Britain, he was eagerly ambitious for his son. Within three months of his election, in July, 1865, he had written to Charles Dilke: “We will talk about the H(ouse) of C(ommons). I fear I cannot make a hit there—you could, after a little maturity comes on you, and that will come whether you like it or not.”20 His attitude in 1868 was probably well summed up by a note which Lord Granville, who knew the family well, wrote to him immediately after the results were known. Granville wrote to Wentworth Dilke “to condole with you and to congratulate you. I suspect,” he added, “that the cause of the latter gives you more pleasure than the cause of the former gives you regret. How very well your son seems to have done!”21 At this election Mill, also, lost the seat at Westminster which he too had held since 1865.
Neither of these defeats did much to mar Charles Dilke’s sense of triumph and opportunity—Mill, of course, he had not met at this stage. He was still only twenty-five. He had added a world tour to his Cambridge achievements. He had published a most successful book. He had been elected with gratifyingly large support for a constituency of note. His name was known; his presence was in demand; and his future seemed assured. With all this to contemplate he set off for a brief visit to Paris and Toulon, the latter the centre of an area which he now saw for the first time and with which he was later to be closely associated. By December 10th he was back in London for the meeting of Parliament and the swearing-in of members.
Chapter Three
Member for Chelsea
The General Election of 1868 not only brought Charles Dilke into the House of Commons; it also produced the only clear-cut party majority since 1841 and made Gladstone Prime Minister for the first time. The Liberals had 112 seats more than their opponents, and a still greater preponderance in the country. They polled more than one and a half million votes, the Conservatives less than a million. Gladstone’s personal triumph was less marked than that of his party. He was defeated in South-west Lancashire, his seat in the previous Parliament, but he had also been nominated for Greenwich, where he was elected, in Dilke’s words, “as junior colleague to a gin distiller.” Undeterred by these setbacks, he received the Queen’s intimation that he was to form a Government with the statement, “My mission is to pacify Ireland,” and returned briefly to the tree-felling upon which he had been engaged when interrupted. Of the Cabinet which he subsequently formed, Lord Morley tells us, he always spoke as “one of the best instruments for government that ever were constructed.”1 Lord Clarendon, against the opposition of the Queen, was Foreign Secretary, Robert Lowe Chancellor of the Exchequer, Lord Granville Colonial Secretary, and the Duke of Argyll Indian Secretary. John Bright entered the Cabinet for the first time as President of the Board of Trade, and W. E. Forster, who did not come into the Cabinet itself until two years later, was Vice-President of the Council, in charge of education.
This Government commanded less admiration from Dilke than from its chief. “The Cabinet is somewhat behind the party, which is bad,” the former wrote on December 10th, adding laconically, “Too many peers.”2 Even the party, however, was not greatly to Dilke’s liking. He noted with approval that it had shed most of its “Adullamites,” but thought it equally bereft of radicals. At first, indeed, either through arrogance or pessimism, he believed himself to be the only member to whom this label could be applied. It soon became clear that he was wrong in this view, and he worked during the parliament in shifting alliance and varying degrees of closeness with Harcourt, Fawcett, G. O. Trevelyan and Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, as well as with a group of nonconformist provincial radicals which included Peter Rylands from Warrington, Llewellyn Dillwyn from Swansea, Henry Richard from Merthyr Tydfil, George Anderson from Glasgow, George Dixon from Birmingham and Peter Taylor from Leicester. The members of this group saw eye to eye with Dilke on most home policy questions, but in foreign affairs they were “peace-at-any-price” men of the Bright school, and as such had little in common with him. Furthermore, they were socially and personally much less close to Dilke than were the Cambridge radicals, Harcourt, Trevelyan and Fitzmaurice, and, a little more doubtfully, Fawcett.
Trevelyan, who was at this time Civil Lord of the Admiralty, recorded long afterwards his recollections of his early friendship with Dilke.
“I was a very young Minister,” he wrote in 1911, “worked hard all day by Mr. Childers, a very strict but very friendly taskmaster, and never, according to the Treasury Bench discipline of those heroic times, allowed to be absent from the House for a single moment. I used to come to the House unlunched and desperately hungry; and I got my dinner at four o’clock in an empty dining-room. Afternoon after afternoon, Charles Dilke used to come and sit with me; and a greater delight than his company, young to the young, I can hardly describe. But it does not need description . . . for never did anyone’s talk alter less as time went on.”3
Harcourt, who was then new to the House of Commons and not in the Government, although possessing a considerable outside reputation, was Dilke’s closest associate at the time. Brilliant in phrase, tempestuous in character, patrician in manner,[1] and radical in view, his make-up was nicely calculated to appeal strongly to the young member for Chelsea.
Dilke, in his early days in the House, had little social contact either with the Tories or with the Whigs on his own side. This was despite the view, which he expressed half seriously a few years later, that “in politics one always personally prefers one’s opponents to one’s friends.”4 But he was fascinated by Disraeli (who attracted him far more than did Gladstone), and he had the highest respect for Gathorne Hardy, whom he considered the most genuinely eloquent Englishman to whom he ever listened, and whose services he thought were not fully used by the Conservative party.
From his first days in the House, Dilke was a most regular attender in the Chamber; and this regularity quickly became a habit which never left him throughout his parliamentary career. In an age when members were far more willing to listen to the speeches of others than is the case to-day, he was noted for his almost unfailing attention to all aspects of the business of the House. He sat below the gangway, on the front bench on the Government side, and he soon acquired a proprietary right to the corner seat—a position separated from the official Government front bench above the gangway by the shortest physical distance but by a rather wider political gap. From this seat he first addressed the House on March 9th, 1869. The subject he chose was a typically complicated one. Harcourt had moved to appoint a Select Committee to enquire into the system of registration of electors in parliamentary boroughs, and Dilke spoke in support of this motion, drawing in great detail on his French and Australian observations. As a maiden speech it was a ponderous effort, and could not possibly have been considered an oratorical triumph. But it showed the House that he had a capacity for mastering a subject, and he soon attained more fame through the heterodoxy of his opinions than even the most flamboyant rhetoric would have brought him.
Within a month or so of his first speech he was sharply at odds with the Liberal Government, which he found excessively timid, on an election expenses bill, on a move to disenfranchise a corrupt borough, on university tests, on competitive entry to the civil service, and on the navy estimates. On the first four points he was strongly radical, but on the last he supported a technical criticism put forward by the former Conservative First Lord
of the Admiralty. These displays of independence brought remonstrances both from the Chief Whip, George Glyn, and from Sir Wentworth Dilke. He was disinclined to listen to either. “I don’t mean to let either you or Glyn frighten me into supporting the Government when I think they are wrong,” he wrote to his father in April, “but I vote with them when I am at all doubtful. I voted with them against Groves on d. postage which was a very tight fit for my conscience.”5
This was one of the last letters he wrote to his father. Sir Wentworth Dilke was at that time on a tour of northern Europe with his younger son. He reached St. Petersburg, where he was to be English Commissioner at a Horticultural Exhibition, but almost as soon as he got there he was attacked by what was described as a “deadly form of Russian influenza.” Charles Dilke was summoned from London by telegram and set out immediately for Russia. Before he could complete the long train journey across Europe, his father was dead. In St. Petersburg he could do no more than arrange for the transportation of the body back to England, and make some useful Russian contacts which he was to follow up in a series of seven return visits in the following three years.[2]
In the course of his twenty-sixth year, therefore, Charles Dilke not only became a member of Parliament, but also succeeded to his father’s baronetcy and to a large part of his family fortune. Wentworth Dilke divided his property into two unequal parts, two-thirds going with the tide to his elder son, and one-third to his younger son. Three years later Charles Dilke was to alter this arrangement by voluntarily making over a sixth of the total to Ashton Dilke and thus placing himself and his brother upon an equal footing. In the subsequent decade Ashton Dilke, largely as a result of successful newspaper proprietorship, became a very much richer man than his brother. But Charles Dilke was never badly off. He did not, of course, have the income of a great landed magnate or a famous financier, but for a member of the top ranks of the upper-middle class, pursuing throughout most of his life no gainful occupation, he was extremely well placed. In 1870 his unearned income was £8,000. By 1872, when the new arrangement with Ashton Dilke had been made, it had fallen to £7,000, and by 1880, owing to the “depression of trade,” it had fallen further to £5,700. In this last year, however, it was supplemented by an official salary for part of the year which amounted to £980. He saved little, as indeed, with a capital of £100,000 at his disposal, he had small need to do, but in most years he lived within his income. 1872, the year of his first marriage, when he spent £9,330, was an exception, but 1880, with total outgoings of £5,050, was a more typical year.
About half of Dilke’s income came from journalistic properties with which his grandfather had been concerned. In 1880, which was a bad year, these provided £2,845—£1,900 from the Athenœum, £620 from the Gardener’s Chronicle, and £325 from Notes and Queries. Of the remainder, nearly £1,800 came from dividends and interest on various Stock Exchange securities, £700 from house and other property in London, and the remaining £1,150 from miscellaneous sources, including one or two small family trusts. Greater Britain, twelve years after publication, produced a royalty of £8 12s.
Despite this comparative affluence to which he succeeded, Charles Dilke did not respond to his inheritance by any immediate increase in his scale of living. On the contrary, one of his first actions was to dispose of Alice Holt—“a mere shooting place”—and of Hawkley, another Hampshire property which his father had acquired. 76, Sloane Street, on the other hand, now became Charles Dilke’s own home, and remained so until the end of his life. Mrs. Chatfield, his grandmother, continued to run the house, as she had done in his father’s lifetime, and her niece, Miss Folkard, and Ashton Dilke, when he was not at Cambridge or abroad, continued to live there.
Dilke’s activities in English politics were reduced neither by the death of his father nor by the rearrangement of affairs and the Russian visits to which this gave rise. During 1869, his first session in Parliament, he succeeded, with Jacob Bright, in restoring to women ratepayers the right to vote in municipal elections which they had lost in 1835. He also took the lead in securing the abolition of hanging, drawing and quartering in New Zealand. At the end of that year, he worked hard for Odger, who was supported also by Fitzmaurice and Fawcett, at the Southwark by-election. Odger stood as a radical working man’s candidate against an official Whig, and the result of the contest was to hand to the Tories what was normally a safe Liberal seat. Another result was to strengthen Dilke’s sense of isolation from the main body of his party, and to turn his thoughts increasingly towards some sort of independent radical organisation.[3]
During the session of 1870 Dilke was again active in the cause of women’s suffrage, and succeeded, once more in association with Jacob Bright, in obtaining a Second Reading for a measure providing for this. The bill died in Committee, but it was the only time until 1897 that the House of Commons pronounced in favour of the principle. In this year, too, Dilke became chairman of the Commons Preservation Society, which fought a largely successful campaign, both inside and outside Parliament, to stop the enclosure of open spaces—a process which had been going on fast for the previous quarter of a century. “We saved Wisley Common and Epping Forest,” Dilke noted. Another office which Dilke took on at the same time was that of secretary of the newly-formed Radical Club. The club was to have forty members, half of them in the House and half outside. Mill was the leading member, and others of note were John Morley, Leslie Stephen, Frank Hill (the editor of the Daily News), and Henry Sidgwick. It never attained quite the influence which was anticipated by its founders.
By far the most important issue in home politics during these years was the education controversy. English popular education was appallingly inadequate. In Birmingham, which was to become the centre of a great agitation, less than half the children received any schooling at all, and that given to most of the remainder was irregular in time and indifferent in quality. In the rest of the country the position was little better. Such schools as existed were voluntary and denominational. The demand for a large measure of educational reform was greatly reinforced by the franchise reform of 1867. There were obvious political as well as commercial dangers in allowing the urban working class, now given the vote, to remain so largely illiterate. When the Liberal Government came into office, a number of its members and most of its supporters believed that one of its most pressing tasks was to introduce a national system of elementary education. And at least one powerful group amongst these supporters—the nonconformist middle-class element—insisted that the national system should be universal, compulsory and non-sectarian. Such religious instruction as continued in the schools should be confined to simple bible-teaching. This was the basis on which, at the beginning of 1869, the National Education League was set up, with George Dixon, one of the members for Birmingham, as chairman, Jesse Collings as secretary, and Joseph Chamberlain as vice-chairman.
Chamberlain, seven years Dilke’s senior, was then thirty-three years of age. He was a successful business man, with no political experience—he did not become a member of the Birmingham City Council until later that year—but with a pulsating, ruthless energy, and a clear if sometimes narrow sense of political purpose. He was by no means an uncultivated man. Indeed, for one of his background at the time he was very much the reverse. He spoke French well, he was widely read, and he was always willing to be interested in new subjects, from painting to wine, of which he had previously known little. But the pursuit of ideas and the acquisition of knowledge were completely subordinated, with him, to the achievement of results. He wanted power, although he was indifferent to place, and he was contemptuous of speculation that did not lead to action.
From the first he was the effective leader of the Education League; and he made it, in the words of his biographer, “the most powerful engine of agitation since the Anti-Corn Law League.”6 But it was not powerful enough to make the Government produce the sort of bill which it wanted. The Prime Minister was about as far from his nonconformist supporters on the educati
on issue as it is possible to imagine. Like many highly-educated classicists, he was never very interested in the subject, and least of all was he interested during the period of preparation of the Bill when his mind was wrapped in the Irish land question to the exclusion of almost all else. In so far as he did think about the matter his thoughts were those of a High Anglican who attached first importance to the proper teaching of the catechism. From this it followed naturally, as he was later laconically to tell a Hawarden audience, that he thought “voluntary schools the best.”
The member of the Cabinet most directly concerned with the issue was Lord de Grey, the Lord President. Although a man of firm Liberal views on most subjects, de Grey was soon to become a convert to Roman Catholicism, and was no better from the nonconformist point of view than Gladstone himself. The third minister involved was W. E. Forster, who had charge of the bill in the House of Commons. Forster, who shared with the Queen alone the great Victorian distinction of having a railway terminus[4] named after him, seemed more promising to the Education League. He was a Quaker by upbringing, and he had been excluded from that communion on the ground that he had married a sister of Matthew Arnold. He had spent twenty years of his life preaching the need for State action to remedy the deficiencies of English education, and he sat for Bradford, which had a strong radical tradition. But Forster was a complicated man. Despite his Quaker background and his marriage with Dr. Arnold’s daughter, his favourite recreation was card-playing and his favourite companion in this pursuit was the Duchess of Manchester. He developed a close sympathy for the Anglican church and a desire to preserve what was good in the existing order—which meant building a national education system around the framework of the voluntary schools. In addition he was a stubborn, irascible man, with a great capacity for defying his constituents or anyone else who disagreed with him.
