by Roy Jenkins
After a few more days of this Dilke returned to London for the post-Easter reassembly of the House of Commons. But he was back again in Paris on May 25th for the last agony of the Commune and the destruction by fire of large parts of the city. When he left finally several days later he was accompanied by his old opponent at Chelsea, W. H. Russell of The Times, and had seen as much of the war and its aftermath as almost anyone except for this redoubtable military correspondent. The pro-Prussian feeling with which he had begun had completely disappeared. The collapse of the Empire had removed the only obstacle to his natural feelings of affinity for France. Henceforward he was to be one of the most Francophile of Englishmen, assuming an almost proprietary interest in the fortunes of the Republic whose birth he had witnessed.
Chapter Four
An English Republican
Dilke’s Interest in republicanism was not confined to France. As a matter of general theory he had believed from his Cambridge days or earlier that a republic was the best form of government for any advanced country. “My grandfather was a conservative republican in old age,” he wrote, “a radical republican in youth, but a republican through life, and . . . my young ideas were my grandfather’s ideas.”1 Nor was his theoretical preference tempered by any excessive respect for the person of the Queen; despite, or perhaps because of, his father’s close association with the Prince Consort and the Court, he regarded her as at best an expensive nuisance and at worst a strong reactionary force. But it was tempered, during most of his career, by the conviction that constitutional monarchy was firmly established in England, and that, this being so, attempts to uproot it were likely to be both unsuccessful and politically disadvantageous. To the extent that the monarchy was constitutional such attempts were also less necessary, of course. “To think and even to say that monarchy in Western Europe is a somewhat cumbersome fiction is not to declare oneself ready to fight against it on a barricade,”2 he wrote; and this attitude of quiet detachment was that which he normally adopted towards the Throne.
During 1871, however, the roots of the English monarchy seemed a little less firm than usual. The Queen, in her tenth year of widowhood, remained almost totally withdrawn from public gaze and ceremonial duty. Much the greater part of her time was passed in her private residences at Osborne and Balmoral. She visited Windsor occasionally, but Buckingham Palace was untenanted from the beginning of a year to the end. She took no part in the entertainment of foreign visitors, and expended no substantial portion of the vast income she received from public funds upon the performance of State duties. “There is only one great capital in Europe where the Sovereign is unrepresented,” one of the Queen’s own equerries wrote to Gladstone, “and that capital is London.”3 The Prime Minister was not disposed to quarrel with this view, for he had tried three times during his premiership, on each occasion without success, to persuade the Queen to open or prorogue Parliament. But to the Parliament which she would not open she was constantly applying for marriage or coming-of-age grants to her sons or daughters.
The Prince of Wales did little to sustain the monarchy. Since his marriage in 1863 he had escaped from strict parental control and had become the leader of a section of London society. But he was allowed to perform no public duties, and his most notable public appearance had been in the witness-box, as a co-respondent, although one against whom no case was sustained, in the Mordaunt divorce suit of 1870. “To speak in rude and general terms,” Gladstone wrote to Granville at the end of that year, “the Queen is invisible, and the Prince of Wales is not respected.”4
In the following year, 1871, a great rash of republican clubs sprang up in the large towns and in some of the smaller ones too. More than fifty were established. Chamberlain became a member of one at Birmingham, and Fawcett founded one at Cambridge. Dilke took no part in this particular movement, and he also held aloof from a republican demonstration, largely under trades union auspices, which took place in Hyde Park in April. He sympathised warmly, however, with an anonymous pamphlet, written in fact by his friend G. O. Trevelyan and entitled What does she do with it? which appeared at about the same time. This was an attack on the Queen for her parsimony and her alleged hoarding of money. It achieved a large circulation.
In the same spirit Dilke opposed the two applications for Royal grants which came before the House of Commons during that session. The first was for a dowry of £30,000 for Princess Louise upon the occasion of her marriage with the Marquess of Lorne. Peter Taylor, the member for Leicester, took the lead in resisting this, and he was supported in the division lobby only by Dilke and Fawcett. The second was for an annual allowance of £15,000 to Prince Arthur, later Duke of Connaught, and aroused wider opposition. Fifty-three members voted for a reduction, and eleven for no allowance at all.
Encouraged to some extent by this vote and by the other manifestations of feeling (although certainly not to the extent of believing that the country was seething with republicanism and that he had merely to place himself at the head of the movement to achieve immediate success), Dilke decided to widen the front. He was engaged during the autumn of 1871 to make a series of speeches in the big provincial centres advocating a redistribution of seats. At the first of these meetings, in Manchester, he kept narrowly to his subject. But at the second, in Newcastle-upon-Tyne on November 6th, he led himself through the question of Princess Louise’s dowry to a broader discussion of the monarchy. He saw it as a centre of waste, corruption and inefficiency in the national life. He began with an attack upon its privileged troops. The Foot Guards he excepted, but the Life Guards and the Royal Horse Guards he pilloried as being markedly less efficient than the ordinary cavalry of the line. He proceeded to list some of the fantastic sinecures, many of them carrying heavy salaries, which still existed around the Court. In the nature of these appointments and in the way in which they were made he saw the corrupting influence of the monarchy.
“To return for a moment to the consideration of the cost with which I began this speech,” he said, “I have shown that it is enormous, and that the expenditure is chiefly not waste but mischief. . . . In the Army, we have a Royal Duke, not necessarily the fittest man, at the head of it by right of birth, and the Prince of Wales, who would never be allowed a command in time of war, put to head the Cavalry Division in the Autumn Manoœuvres, thus robbing working officers of the position and of the training they had a title to expect.”5
It does not sound very inflammatory material for a Tyne-side audience, but The Times, which reported the meeting as being largely composed of the working class, said that there was “great enthusiasm.”
In his peroration Dilke was at once cautious and tendentious:
“It is said that some day a commonwealth will be our government. Now, history and experience show that you cannot have a republic unless you possess at the same time the republican virtues. But you answer: Have we not public spirit? Have we not the practice of self-government? Are we not gaining general education? Well, if you can show me a fair chance that a republic here will be free from the political corruption which hangs about the monarchy, I say, for my part—and I believe that the middle classes in general will say—let it come.”6
The speech provoked no immediate storm. It was not even reported in London until three days later, when The Times gave its readers in the same issue a one-and-a-half column account of what Dilke had said and a first leader strongly attacking his views. The leader was written in terms that were both venomous and magisterial. It quoted Dilke’s peroration and commented: “Now we pass over the presumption which emboldens Sir Charles Dilke to speak in the name of the middle classes, and forbear to enquire how far he may be himself indebted to Royal favours. Looking only at the language as it is reported, and remembering that it comes from a member of the legislature, we cannot but recognise it as a recklessness bordering on criminality.” After going on to discuss Dilke’s detailed allegations of waste and nepotism, and suggesting in a more level tone that these might be proper points for
the House of Commons, it announced severely: “But even these are not fair and legitimate points, and many others touched by Sir Charles are eminently improper points, to be handled, and that with little candour or delicacy, before an assembly of working men.”7 This leader attracted plenty of notice and from then on the comment was voluminous. Newspaper reaction was summarised by the London correspondent of the New York Tribune.[1] After remarking that Dilke’s speech surpassed every other event of the day in popular interest, she wrote: “The Standard is in hysterics . . . The Saturday Review condemns the speech in an article which would be called bitter in any other paper. The Spectator, which allows nobody to be radical without its express permission and after its own manner, attacks Sir Charles Dilke with ferocity.”8
Verbal comment was if anything more severe. The wife of the Master of Trinity Hall, Mrs. Geldart, said that she had nursed her father on his death-bed, witnessed the dying agony of two sisters and the last moments of a beloved brother, but that she had never experienced any blow like that occasioned by Sir Charles’s speech. Other comment from Cambridge acquaintances ranged from horror at the thought that the commentator might be called upon to row in the same boat as Dilke to the clear view that he ought to be shot. Lord Chelsea, perhaps feeling that his title gave him a personal responsibility for Dilke’s utterances, regretted in a speech at Bath that the days of duelling were over. Chamberlain, almost alone, wrote a letter of firm support. “I am glad to see,” he said, “that you have roused the Philistine indignation of The Times by your speech at Newcastle, which, as well as that at Manchester, I have read with interest and agreement. The Republic must come, and at the rate at which we are moving, it will come in our generation.”9
No sooner had Dilke made his Newcastle speech than the Prince of Wales fell seriously ill. He was infected with typhoid fever while staying with Lord Londesborough near Scarborough. Lord Chesterfield and the Prince’s groom, who were both present at Londesborough Lodge, were also attacked, and both succumbed to the disease. The Prince became ill at Sandringham on November 9th, and on November 23rd the nature of his illness was made public. He became gradually worse until December 14th, the tenth anniversary of his father’s death from the same disease. During the last week almost all private and public hope had been abandoned, but on the morning of the anniversary a sudden improvement set in, and a week later all danger was pronounced past. The youth of the sufferer, the long-drawn out nature of the illness, and the dramatic repetition and then reversal of the death-bed experience of the Prince Consort all served to concentrate public sympathy upon the monarchy to a remarkable extent. During the six weeks in which he lay ill at Sandringham the Prince accomplished more for the popularity of his house than during the whole of his previous thirty years of life. Republicanism immediately became unattractive. “What a sell for Dilke this illness has been,”10 Lord Henry Lennox wrote to Disraeli.
The position was made more difficult by the fact that Dilke’s speaking programme continued throughout the autumh. At each stage of the Prince’s illness, he was due to expound his views in some provincial town. He was not always made very welcome, either by the audience, or, on occasion, by the sponsors of the meeting themselves. But he continued with his scheduled appearances. The first, after Newcastle, was at Bristol on November 20th. The chairman of the meeting was a brother of John Henry Newman, Professor F. W. Newman, who because of his habit of not reading the newspapers was apparently quite unaware of any special animosity against Dilke, and totally unprepared for trouble. Dilke commented that “the Cardinal himself could not have been more out of place than this feeble philosopher, who however tried to do his duty.”11 The meeting ended in uproar, a large part of the noise coming not from Tories, but from anti-Dilke Liberals.
Three days later, on the evening of the public announcement of the nature of the Prince’s illness, Dilke was at Leeds. Here he had a much better reception, and was able to re-argu some of his Newcastle case. He withdrew little, although he denied using discourteous words about the Queen herself. He concluded with a slight re-statement of his position:
“To say these things is not to condemn the monarchy, because they are no necessary part of the monarchy, although the opposite idea—that of promotion by merit alone and of the non-recognition of any claims founded upon birth—is commonly accepted as republican. I care not whether you call it republican or whether you do not, but I say that it is the only principle upon which, if we are to keep our place among the nations, we can for the future act.”12
Leeds was followed by an equally easy meeting at Middlesbrough, but Bolton, on November 30th, was the most difficult of the series. The meeting had been organised by the local Liberal Association, but this body, under the lead of J. K. Cross, later under-secretary for India, withdrew its support at the last moment, and the chairman also refused to appear. Perhaps encouraged by these defections, the opposition decided completely to wreck this meeting—and they succeeded. “There was a fearful riot,” Dilke wrote, “at which a man was killed and a great number of persons injured by iron nuts and bars being thrown through the windows by the Tory roughs outside the hall.”13 It was believed by some that Dilke himself was in danger of his life. George Harwood, who was present at the meeting and who was later Liberal member for Bolton, described the scene many years afterwards:
“The crowd was very thick and very fierce,” he wrote, “having declared that Sir Charles should not get away alive; but when the excitement was hottest, Sir Charles came out of the main door and stood quietly in sight of all, then struck a match and lit his cigar, and walked unguarded and unaccompanied through the thickest part of the crowd. His cool courage took everyone’s breath away, so not a sound was uttered.”14
Dilke, however, denied the story, saying that “there was a large force of police in the street when I lighted (sic) my cigar and the mob could only howl.”15 After the meeting eight of those who had started the riot were brought to trial. The principal defence put forward on their behalf was that Dilke’s opinions were so unpopular that his presence alone constituted an intolerable incitement. This was apparently accepted by the jury, who acquitted them all.
After Bolton, Dilke went to Birmingham. He spoke to a full Town Hall at the beginning of the week of greatest anxiety about the Prince’s health. The meeting was a noisy one, according to Chamberlain’s biographer, with the “monarchists” throwing cayenne pepper about the hall.16 But according to Dilke the opposition was dealt with in a typically ruthless Chamberlain way. “. . . (he) had the whole borough police force present or in reserve,” Dilke wrote, “and had every interrupter (and there were several hundred) carried out singly by two policemen, with a Conservative Chief of Police to direct them; after which I delivered an extremely humdrum speech to a very dull assembly.”17 The Birmingham Town Hall was then a safer place for radical politicians than it was to be when Chamberlain became an imperialist.
An excess of zeal on the part of the Birmingham police force was not required, however, to make Dilke deliver a dull speech. The excitement which his meetings aroused owed everything to his opinions and nothing to his oratory.
“. . . given the fact that my speaking was always monotonous,” he was later rather engagingly to write, “and that at this time I was trying specially to make speeches which no one could call empty noise, and was therefore specially and peculiarly heavy, there was something amusing to lovers of contrast in that between the stormy heartiness of my reception at most of these meetings, and the ineffably dry orations which I delivered to them between cheers of joy when I rose and cheers of relief when I sat down.”18
During the early months of 1872 Dilke did not continue his platform campaign. The Prince of Wales’s recovery was followed, on February 27th, by a national thanksgiving service in St. Paul’s, to which both the Queen and the Prince drove in procession, through scenes of great enthusiasm.[2] The tide was running strongly the other way, and Dilke was troubled by rumours that an official Liberal was to be put
into the field against him in Chelsea,[3] and by social ostracism. The first danger he took sufficiently seriously to discuss with Chamberlain the possibility of a move—Cardiff and Dewsbury being suggested as alternative constituencies. Social ostracism he certainly did not like, and, for a short period, it was so intense that, except for G. O. Trevelyan and Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice, he had no friends in London and lived in almost complete isolation.
Nevertheless, although Dilke was by now fully aware that a continuation of the agitation was politically pointless, he felt that he could not drop the subject until he had repeated in the House of Commons the arguments which had provoked so sharp a reaction outside. He sought to provide an occasion for this by moving to set up a Select Committee to enquire into the Civil List, but a day could not be obtained for such a motion until March 19th. Even then, George Dixon had something of a prior claim to be the mover, for he had given notice in the previous session that he wished to bring forward a similar proposal. In the event, however, he was only too anxious to leave the matter to Dilke. “Of course,” he added, according to Dilke’s report, “I shall go into the lobby with you if you divide the House”; “but . . . he did nothing of the kind,” Dilke commented bitterly. “Neither did George Trevelyan,”19 he added. Nor did Fawcett, who even spoke against Dilke during the debate, nor Cowen, who had been chairman of the Newcastle meeting, nor Fitzmaurice. Auberon Herbert seconded the motion and acted with Dilke as a teller, while the lobby was composed only of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, the temperance reformer—“the wit of the public platforms, but a dismal man enough in private,” as Dilke described him—and George Anderson, one of the Glasgow members.
