by Roy Jenkins
Where Dilke’s judgment was curiously at fault—and where Harcourt may well have been to blame—was in discounting the return of Gladstone to the lead. Admittedly the Queen was bitterly opposed to such an eventuality. On April 4th she had written to her private secretary that “she would sooner abdicate than send for or have anything to do with that half-mad firebrand who would soon ruin everything and be a Dictator.” But the electorate had spoken equally clearly in Gladstone’s favour; and in such a situation the constituencies were already more powerful than the sovereign. She conducted a strong rearguard action, but it was a battle against the inevitable. On April 22nd, the day after Lord Beaconsfield’s unhurried resignation, she sent for Hartington and requested him to form a government. He at once suggested Gladstone, but the Queen forced him to attempt the task, at least to the extent of formally enquiring of Gladstone whether he would be prepared to accept a subordinate position. Gladstone replied that he would not, and when Hartington and Granville jointly took this intelligence back to the Queen (who added considerably to the inconvenience of these negotiations by remaining at Windsor), sweetening it with the suggestion that Gladstone would be unlikely to bear the strain of office for long, she accepted her defeat. The new Prime Minister kissed hands on April 24th, and immediately demonstrated a view of his strength somewhat different from that of his colleagues by announcing that he intended to be his own Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Dilke remained at Toulon until April 22nd. While there he received a sulky letter from Chamberlain, written on April 19th.
“I am glad to see that all the Papers speak of you as a certainty for the Cabinet,” this letter ran. “These reports are unauthentic, but they have a tendency to secure their own fulfilment. I feel that you may have a rather difficult question to decide, viz., whether you can safely take the sole representation of the radical element in the Government. If Fawcett is given office he may be a rather uncertain ally. For myself, I am absolutely indifferent to office and the only thing on which I am clear is that I will take no responsibility which does not carry with it some real power. Another point on which I have made up my mind is that I will not play second to Fawcett—or to any one of the same standing except yourself.”6
In other words, if Dilke alone were to be offered the Cabinet, Chamberlain would prefer him to refuse, and, even if he accepted, was giving notice of a possibly independent and critical attitude towards the Government.
Dilke reached London on the evening of April 23rd and immediately saw Harcourt (a telegram from whom had summoned him home) and Frank Hill, the editor of the Daily News. From these two sources he gathered that the prospects were not as favourable as he had hoped. Gladstone, he was told, was strongly under the influence of Lord Wolverton, his former Chief Whip—“the evil counsellor of 1874” in Dilke’s phrase—and was taking the view that his own position as a radical Prime Minister made a predominantly Whig Cabinet both necessary and acceptable. Furthermore, he was inclined to take his stand on what he called “Peel’s rule” and allow no one into his Cabinet who had not previously served in subordinate office. This meant that the best for which Dilke could hope was the Financial Secretaryship to the Treasury or an under-secretaryship to a minister in the Lords, with Chamberlain in a roughly similar position. Harcourt, who had already been appointed Home Secretary, saw Dilke again on the following day and made him an informal offer—apparently on the Prime Minister’s behalf—of the Financial Secretaryship. Later in the evening the offer was changed to that of the under-secretaryship for the Colonies—the Secretary of State being Lord Kimberley. The first offer Dilke had not accepted; the second he indignantly refused. At this stage his mind, too, was moving towards a discontented independence, and he telegraphed to Birmingham to urge on Chamberlain the need for immediate consultation with a view to a joint refusal of office.
Chamberlain at first refused to come and telegraphed back to this effect. Dilke then wrote a slightly testy letter and sent it off to Birmingham by special messenger:
“I have your telegram refusing to come to-morrow,” he wrote. “If I were not so tired after my journey I’d come down. You see you talk of consultation, but I can’t consult you by telegram, and in Gladstone’s stand and deliver kind of business there is no time for exchange of letters with Birmingham. My telegram of this evening was intended to mean that it was certain that Gladstone would not offer either of us the Cabinet, and to ask you whether it was clear that we ought to refuse all else. I dare not telegraph at length or openly as all telegrams get out to the other side. . . . Also I thought that when asked to take minor office, as you will be on Monday—you would probably have to come up and say no in more haste than if you came up to consult to-morrow. Harcourt urges that it is of special importance for me to take office to get over the Court hitch now and for ever—once and for all—but there are strong considerations the other way on that point which apply more to me than to you—but apply to both of us in some part.”7
Chamberlain received this letter on the Sunday morning, and decided to come to London on the afternoon of the same day. Dilke met him at Euston Station and drove him to 76, Sloane Street. They spent the evening in consultation, Chamberlain taking the view that he stiffened Dilke to refuse office unless one of them were in the Cabinet, but Dilke recording that Chamberlain merely concurred in his own view to this effect. But there is no doubt that they were agreed. On the Monday morning Dilke stayed at home and received visits from Childers, Shaw Lefevre and Fawcett, and a letter asking him to call upon Mr. Gladstone at Lord Granville’s house at 4 o’clock. Chamberlain, meanwhile, went to see Harcourt and informed him in rather truculent words of the minimum terms that would be acceptable to Dilke and himself, and of the consequences—the organisation of a “pure left” party—which would follow if the Prime Minister were to reject them. He also indicated, in the account of this interview which he wrote immediately afterwards to Jesse Collings, that he was accepting with some reluctance the possibility of being lower in the hierarchy than Dilke:
“Finally I said that, out of friendship for Dilke, I would if he were in the Cabinet take the Secretaryship of the Treasury—but, of course, an arrangement of this kind would not be so satisfactory as a frank recognition of the Radical wing with two at least in the Cabinet. . . . If Dilke is in the Cabinet,” Chamberlain added to Collings, “I shall have the satisfaction of having helped most materially to place him there. I am still almost inclined to hope that we may all be out and independent.”8
After luncheon Dilke went to Carlton House Terrace for his interview with the Prime Minister.
“When I got to Lord Granville’s,” he wrote, “I found Lord Granville, Lord Wolverton, and Mr. Gladstone in the room, and Mr. Gladstone at once offered me the Under-Secretaryship for Foreign Affairs. I asked who was to be in the Cabinet. I was told Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville, Hartington, Harcourt and Lord Spencer. Further than this, they said, nothing was settled. I asked, ‘What about Chamberlain?’ Mr. Gladstone replied to the effect that Chamberlain was a very young member of the House who had never held office, and that it was impossible to put him straight into the Cabinet. I then said that this made it impossible that I should accept the Under-Secretaryship for Foreign Affairs, or any place. Mr. Gladstone said he would see whether anything could be done, but that he feared not . . . and I then left.”9
The Prime Minister, however, discovered that something could be done. Dilke’s refusal of junior office unless Chamberlain were in the Cabinet was highly inconvenient for the Government. It was a difficulty which might have been overcome either by a better offer to Dilke himself or by accepting his terms with regard to Chamberlain. Against the former course was the consideration that Dilke was still highly objectionable to the Queen—a good deal more than was Chamberlain[2]; and this consideration was buttressed by the fact that it was Dilke who, in the view of both Gladstone and Granville, had been tiresomely irritating at that afternoon’s interview. He had been irritating about Chamberlain, but
that was not sufficient to spread the guilt evenly between them. When, therefore, John Bright, the only radical whom Gladstone regarded as thoroughly respectable, saw the Prime Minister later the same day and urged the solution of the difficulty by bringing his Birmingham colleague Chamberlain into the Cabinet, his advice was readily accepted. On the following morning—Tuesday, April 27th—Gladstone wrote to Chamberlain in characteristic terms and sent the letter by hand to 76, Sloane Street.
“I have made some progress since yesterday afternoon,” he wrote, “and I may add that there is a small addition to my liberty of choice beyond what I had expected. Accordingly, looking as I seek to do all along to the selection of the fittest, I have real pleasure in proposing to you that you should allow me to submit your name to Her Majesty as President of the Board of Trade in the new Administration with a seat in the Cabinet to which you will be glad to know your friend and colleague Mr. Bright already belongs.”10
The Prime Minister’s messenger missed Chamberlain, but he found Dilke, to whom he communicated a summons tQ see Mr. Gladstone again at 1 o’clock that day. When this second interview took place the Prime Minister informed Dilke of his invitation to Chamberlain and again offered him the under-secretaryship at the Foreign Office. Dilke immediately accepted and went off to the Reform Club, where he met Chamberlain, still ignorant of Gladstone’s letter, and informed him that the Board of Trade was at his disposal. Chamberlain left at once to see Gladstone, and heard of the offer from the Prime Minister’s own lips. Then, he tells us, he became greatly worried against his elevation above Dilke, and offered to avoid the difficulty by himself becoming Financial Secretary to the Treasury, while Dilke remained at the Foreign Office. This offer, which it is difficult to believe was not a little rhetorical and which is in any event uncorroborated from any source other than Chamberlain’s own writings, was refused by Gladstone. Chamberlain then accepted the Board of Trade; and, the difficulties with the radicals being thus temporarily removed, the completion of the Government was able to proceed quickly.[3]
The Prime Minister’s preference for Chamberlain over Dilke aroused widespread surprise and comment. Dilke’s own files of incoming letters for the period are full of complaints that he had allowed himself to be most unfairly treated; and Chamberlain, looking back eleven years later upon these events, wrote:
“As I expected, the announcement of this arrangement excited a good deal of discontent and ill-feeling. Dilke himself, although he must have been disappointed at not receiving the offer of a higher office, behaved admirably; but there were many other Radicals who thought that their claims were as good or better than any that I could put forward and were inclined to resent the quick promotion which I had, however unwillingly, secured.”11
Most people believed, and continued to believe for many years, that Chamberlain had treated Dilke badly. J. L. Garvin set himself to refute this view, and did so with some success, although not sufficiently so to justify his innuendo that it was in fact Dilke who behaved badly to Chamberlain. No doubt both men found it difficult to maintain a perfect balance between friendship and ambition; but the hard facts are that Dilke entered the period of negotiation well in the lead, that he emerged from it well in the rear, and that the decisive impetus to Chamberlain’s advancement was given by his own ultimatum to Gladstone. Although this had not been his original intention, Dilke forced Chamberlain into the Cabinet over his own head; and no theory that he behaved with doubtful loyalty is compatible with this fact.
Furthermore, despite the temptations of jealousy, Dilke was far more emotionally involved in their friendship than was Chamberlain. Whatever may have been the position politically, personally Dilke needed Chamberlain more than Chamberlain needed Dilke. Dilke was ambitious and vain, but he was wholly lacking in Chamberlain’s capacity for the ruthless subordination of personal emotions to political purposes. As a result he was far more liable to bursts of sudden, perhaps rather self-conscious generosity; and his attitude to Chamberlain was sometimes almost that of an anxious lover rather than a political ally.
“I’ve not heard from you since the 18th (a letter written on the 16th),” he wrote on December 21st, 1882, “and had hoped to have heard from you this morning. I have not vexed you, have I, by anything I have done or left undone?” . . . “I was worried and cross until I saw you,” he wrote again two days later. “You dispelled the clouds in a moment—I suppose it will not do for one politician to say to another—by your smile—but so it was.”12
Dilke was sometimes capable of making more critical judgments of Chamberlain. In a letter to Mrs. Pattison in October, 1881, he refers to “Chamberlain—with the unforgiving ferocity he displays when people don’t do as he and I wish”13; and six months later he was complaining in his confidential diary: “I cannot always depend on Chamberlain to oppose foolish things in the Cabinet. At to-day’s Cabinet Bright was the only Minister who opposed the prosecution of the Freiheit[4] and Chamberlain positively supported it!”14 Again, in November, 1882, Dilke’s comment on a parliamentary situation was: “Chamberlain will of course have but one object—i.e. to damn Forster. He always cared more about damning Forster than about anything else at all.”15 But these are three isolated comments from private papers and letters covering a period of thirty months. On the whole, Dilke’s judgments of Chamberlain were remarkably favourable—there was hardly a hint of jealousy and never a sneer at any aspect of Chamberlain’s “provincialism,” this despite or perhaps because of the fact that the latter insisted on regarding Dilke as his “arbiter elegantarium,” who could advise him on his dealings with foreign royalties and similar difficult problems. In all Dilke was not exaggerating when he wrote to Chamberlain in September, 1881: “. . . it is curious that in spite of what people believe about the jealousies of politicians you should be one of the two or three people in the world about whose life or death I should care enough for that care to be worth the name of affection.”16
Chamberlain’s replies were always a little less warm. However, he did go so far as to write in December, 1882:
“The fact is that you are by nature such a reserved fellow (a curious phrase to use in view of Dilke’s letters) that all demonstration of affection is difficult, but you may believe me when I say that I feel it. . . . I suppose I am reserved myself—the great trouble we have both been through[5] has had a hardening effect in my case, and since then I have never worn my heart on my sleeve. But if I were in trouble I should come to you at once—and that is the best proof of friendship and confidence that I know of.”17
Chamberlain gave some proof of his own friendship by taking Dilke’s son, who was by no means an easy child, to live with his own children at Highbury. He remained there for more than two years until he went to school.
The new Government, to which Dilke and Chamberlain had been admitted after so much travail, was very much of a Whig affair. Gladstone compensated for his own incipient radicalism—and also gave full play to his “Scottish toadyism”—by giving six Cabinet posts (of a total of fourteen) to peers, five of whom were hereditary magnates, and a seventh to Hartington, who certainly counted as a nobleman despite the accident that he sat in the House of Commons. Still worse, Gladstone began his premiership on this occasion without any-clear sense of purpose. In 1868 he had announced that his mission was “to pacify Ireland.” The Parliament of 1880 was to be dominated by Irish affairs to a far greater extent than that of 1868, but Gladstone had no conception of this when he took office. His policy was the negative one of undoing as quickly as possible the moral harm of “Beaconsfieldism.” But in foreign affairs he found it difficult in practice not to accept the status quo in most fields—quite apart from the fact that he was soon bombarding Alexandria with an enthusiasm which Disraeli himself would have found it hard to surpass; and at home the fact that he was his own Chancellor of the Exchequer concentrated his mind upon the pettiest details of government expenditure in a most undesirable way. In Ireland he improvised rather than struck out along a cons
istent line of policy, and the result was a series of violent and confusing oscillations between conciliation and coercion.
In addition, the Parliament, which would in any event have been a bitter one, partly as a legacy of the Prime Minister’s, own Midlothian campaign and partly as a result of the rise of “Parnellism,” was bedevilled by the Bradlaugh controversy. Whether the militantly atheistic member for Northampton should be allowed to take the oath of allegiance or to affirm, whether he should be allowed to sit at all, whether the majority of the House of Commons should dictate to Northampton or to any other constituency whom it could or could not elect—these were all questions which racked the House for more than three years, which aroused some of its worst instincts, which frequently placed in a minority the Prime Minister, who despite his hatred of atheism was consistently liberal on the issue, and which acted as an open wound draining away much of the strength of the Government.
In these circumstances the Administration could not in any event have been a happy one in which to serve. It was made worse by internal dissension. All British Governments are coalitions, but this was a more rickety one than most, with the perforation between the Whigs and the Liberals always clearly apparent to all the world. Within three months one Whig magnate in junior office—the Marquess of Lansdowne—had resigned on the Irish land issue, and his defection was followed, still within the first year, by that of the Duke of Argyll. A year later the Chief Secretary, W. E. Forster, resigned as a protest against conciliation in Ireland, and three months after this John Bright resigned because of the forward policy in Egypt. In addition, Chamberlain and Dilke kept the Government in constant agitation by a series of threatened resignations. Gladstone’s own practice under other Prime Ministers did not entitle him to much consideration in this respect, but even making full allowance for this, Chamberlain and Dilke behaved almost intolerably. “The only way in which I can get anything done is by threatening resignation,” Dilke wrote on one occasion in 1882. “Lord Granville is so sick of these threats,” he added, “that he tells me that nothing should be so sacred as the threat of resignation.”18
