by Roy Jenkins
Furthermore, Dilke was always prepared to threaten to go out whenever Chamberlain was restless. “Our relations are so close,” he wrote to Lord Granville, “that I should resign with him if he were to resign because he thought Forster did not have his hair cut sufficiently often.”19[6] Chamberlain, however, perhaps because he was more satisfied with his office, was not prepared to give quite such indiscriminate support to Dilke, and on two of the eight occasions between May, 1880, and July, 1882, when Dilke was threatening to go out, Chamberlain was not with him. These were both at the beginning of 1881, in January when Chamberlain was loath to go in opposition to a Coercion Bill for Ireland—“Chamberlain’s position at this moment was that he personally did not believe in coercion, but that the feeling in the country was such that any Government would be forced to propose it, and he was not sufficiently clear that it was certain to fail to be bound as an honest man to necessarily oppose it,”20 Dilke noted; and in March, when Dilke was insistent that the Government should give stronger support to Greek claims to frontier rectification against Turkey. On at least six other occasions, however, Dilke and Chamberlain were prepared to resign together: in support of an Irish Land Bill in July, 1880; against coercion without the Land Bill in November of the same year; against an aggressive policy towards the Boers of the Transvaal in March, 1881; against the carrying on of diplomatic relations with the Vatican through the agency of a private gentleman—the Errington mission—in February, 1882; against a marriage annuity for the Duke of Albany in March, 1882; and in favour of resolute action against Arabi, the Egyptian nationalist leader, in July of that year. They did not always secure complete victories. “I suppose there’ll be a compromise once more,” Dilke wrote on one occasion, and this was indeed what usually happened. But the method by which compromises had to be exacted is a dismal indication of the atmosphere within the Government, even in its early days.
Dilke’s mind, it is clear, ranged far beyond his departmental duties as under-secretary at the Foreign Office. He was automatically informed by Chamberlain of everything that passed in the Cabinet; and as he himself admitted:
“I was rather given to interfering in the affairs of other offices, which is not as a rule a wise thing to do; but then it must be remembered that I was in the position of having to represent the interests and opinions of the men below the gangway, and that they used to come to Chamberlain and me in order to put pressure upon our colleagues through us, and that I was the person approached in all Indian, Colonial, naval and military questions, and Chamberlain in domestic ones.”21
Sometimes Dilke’s methods of exerting pressure were unusual for a member of a government. Thus, within two weeks of taking up his duties, having discovered that Forster’s mind was moving rapidly in the direction of coercion, he used his henchman, Hill, the editor of the Daily News, to move against such a policy.
“On the night of May 13th, between one and two o’clock in the morning,” he wrote, “I did a thing which many will say I ought not to have done—namely, went down to a newspaper office to suggest an article against the policy of another member of the Government. Under the circumstances, I think that I was justified. I was not a member of the Privy Council or of the Cabinet, and the interests of the party were at stake, as subsequent events well showed. . . . The result of it was that the Daily News had an article the next morning which smashed Forster’s plan.”22
Against this unorthodox conduct must be set the fact that other members of the Government, including some in the Cabinet, were using the Press most freely at this time. Chamberlain used to pass a great deal of secret information to Escott of the Standard, and Forster used both The Times and the Leeds Mercury (of which Wemyss Reid, later his biographer, was editor) for his own purposes. In addition, both Chamberlain and Dilke were in almost daily touch with John Morley, who had just become editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. “It would be worth silver and gold and jewels,” Morley wrote to Dilke as soon as the latter had taken office, “if I could have ten minutes with you about three times a week.” And he added later, with a characteristic Morley touch:
“I should be very grateful if you would tell one of those brutal Cerberuses at the door of the House of Commons to let me pass to-morrow. If you have no time, never mind; but if it occurs to you it will save me quarter of an hour’s chafing and fuming at the indignities put upon the spiritual power by the d——d temporal.”23
In the midst of these preoccupations, Dilke did, however, find some time for his work at the Foreign Office. Here his relations with Lord Granville, the Secretary of State, were of paramount importance. “Puss” Granville was an indolent but highly experienced Whig politician of great charm of manner who combined easy relations with the Queen and Court with a deep if occasionally rather tolerant loyalty to Mr. Gladstone. He had been an intimate friend of Dilke’s father, but in spite of this (or perhaps because of it), Granville clearly disliked Charles Dilke at the time that the latter became his undersecretary. Dilke himself attributed the offer at one stage in the negotiations of the Colonial rather than the Foreign under-secretaryship to the fact that Granville would “like me in anybody’s office but his.” Later, after the interview at which he had been offered the Foreign Office post, Dilke recorded:
“Lord Granville made a disagreeable little speech in his most agreeable way as I went away, saying that he thought he had shown great forgetfulness of the past in being so pleased to have me in his office as his representative in the House of Commons; but for the life of me, I cannot remember what it was that had caused the coldness which seemed for some time before this to have existed between us, and there was no trace of it when we were in office together; although he may have been jealous of me—as people said.”24
Relations between the two men improved once they were in office together. There were occasional acerbities, usually beginning with an outburst of irritation from Dilke and ending with an apology from the same source;[7] and their correspondence suggests that they were never on terms of intimate friendship. But Granville gained a high respect for Dilke’s knowledge and assiduity, and found him less difficult to work with than he had anticipated. This may in part have been due to the Foreign Secretary’s decision, wise from his own point of view, to channel off much of Dilke’s assiduity into the detailed work of the Commercial Department. Dilke accepted this special charge with an expression of misgiving which goes some way to explain Granville’s anxiety that he should have it. “I should have preferred to keep free of all departmental work in order to attend to larger affairs of policy,” he wrote.
This special responsibility kept him very busy, especially during the long negotiations for a new commercial treaty with France, which lasted in one form or another for nearly two years, which took Dilke to Paris for three or four months, and which concluded, as he had always expected would be the case, in failure. It also detached him from Granville, who was not much interested in the minutiae of commercial arrangements, but brought him close to Gladstone, who most certainly was. The Prime Minister was impressed by Dilke’s work, was pleased to discover that his interest in the details of the tariff on printed calico squares or on ivory and pearl buttons was as great as his own, and wrote letters of warm commendation. Granville also wrote letters of commendation, but they were perhaps a little less warm. “Many thanks for your constant reports on the progress of the negotiations,” he wrote on one occasion. “They are as interesting as the lists of the betting in the newspapers just before the Derby. I hope you win the race.” 25
Whatever Lord Granville may have wished, Dilke’s work could not be confined to the Commercial Department. Except when the Prime Minister intervened, which was frequently, he was the spokesman of the Foreign Office in the House of Commons. This meant that he had to answer in the first instance all questions which were put down—Gladstone sometimes could not forbear from providing his own diffuse replies to supplementaries. These questions were not nearly as numerous as to-day, but there were usually several on
two days a week, and Dilke’s answers acquired a considerable reputation for succinct tact. His talent for satisfying the House without embarrassing the Government abroad was regarded as remarkable.
One of the most delicate subjects with which he had to deal in this way related to the appointment of a new French Ambassador to London. Léon Say, whom Dilke regarded as “by far the best French Ambassador that we ever had,” returned to Paris in June, 1880, to become President of the Senate. The French Government proposed the Marquis de Noailles, but, as Dilke wrote to Mrs. Pattison, “the Queen has been told that Mme. de Noailles before her marriage used to have four lovers, one for each season of the year, and that M. de N. was only the summer one.” In consequence the Queen refused her agrément and that proposal had to be abandoned. The alternative suggested was M. Challemel-Lacour. He was not on the face of it much better, for he was accused both “of living with a washerwoman who posed as his grandmother” and of having shot a large number of monks when he was Prefect at Lyons in 1871. Dilke discounted these charges, saying, not fully reassuringly, that Challemel was “really only objectionable because he had the worst temper with which perhaps any human being was ever cursed.” The Prince of Wales, however, who in Dilke’s view suffered in his knowledge of French politics from believing everything which he read in the Figaro, protested violently against Challemel, and tried to persuade Dilke to intervene with Gambetta against the appointment.
An Irish member then put down a question in the House of Commons which specified all the charges against Challemel. Dilke refuted the allegations, but the member concerned—O’Donnell—was not satisfied and attempted to press the matter on the adjournment. This led to a procedural debate of several hours, to general disorder, and to Gladstone moving that O’Donnell be no longer heard. Dilke received a note from Gambetta—“Let me thank you from the bottom of my heart for the lofty manner in which you picked up the glove thrown down by that mad Irish clerical”—suggesting that he had been wise not to intervene on behalf of the Prince of Wales. The Prince’s doubts he assuaged by telling him that Challemel was “not of the Clemenceau type”; but he was much surprised to discover that the Prince when he eventually met the new ambassador found him very agreeable.
During this period Dilke saw a great deal of the Prince of Wales and moved freely in what was known as the Marlborough House set. Their acquaintanceship began at a dinner party given by Lord Fife in March, 1880, just before the change of Government. “The Prince laid himself out to be pleasant, and talked to me nearly all the evening—chiefly about French politics and the Greek question,” Dilke noted. Thereafter they met frequently—at Sandringham, at Marlborough House, at Chiswick, in Paris and at various English country houses. The Prince cultivated Dilke partly because of a genuine social affinity, partly because of a perverse desire to know those of whom his mother disapproved, and partly because, disliking Granville, he wished to maintain a Foreign Office contact. This last aspect of their relationship was of considerable value to an Heir Apparent, hungry for inside knowledge, who was ordinarily frozen out of all public business. “Throughout Dilke’s official life,” the Prince’s official biographer has stated, “. . . the Prince privately derived from him a fuller knowledge than he enjoyed before of the inner processes of government.”26
Not all of Dilke’s endeavours to keep the Prince informed ended in success. In the spring of 1882 an arrangement was sought by which the latter might see copies of the secret Foreign Office telegrams (of which the secrecy was not such as to prevent their being seen by the private secretaries to all members of the Cabinet), but the Queen stamped upon the plan. The incident closed with a sharp exchange of letters between the private secretaries of the monarch and her son. “When the Prince of Wales desired me to write to you about the F.O. telegrams, etc.,” Francis Knollys wrote, sending a copy to Dilke, “he was under the impression (an erroneous one it appears) that the Queen was anxious he should be behind the scenes of what was going on as much as possible, provided that this did not interfere with her own authority.”27
There were other, less official, ways in which Dilke could provide information and contacts for the heir to the throne. Thus in 1882 he was summoned to travel down to Dover with the Prince for a brief inspection of the Channel Tunnel works and to bring with him a map (not of the works but of central Asia) for study and explanation in the saloon of the special train. In the preceding year, Dilke had undertaken a more delicate enterprise with the Prince and had arranged a “breakfast” at the shortly to be demolished Moulin Rouge restaurant in Paris for him to meet Gambetta. The occasion was apparently a success, and Knollys wrote in enthusiastic terms: “The Prince of Wales desires me to say how much he was interested by the breakfast which you were good enough to give to him yesterday and how well he thought it went off. H.R.H. would be much obliged if you would kindly let M. Gambetta know that it would give him great pleasure to possess his photograph. . . .”28 Inscribed “au plus aimable des princes,– the photograph was duly delivered. Later the Prince arranged, on his own initiative, another luncheon with Gambetta.
Both because he had a taste for fashionable life as such, and because his popularity at Marlborough House provided something of a counter-balance to the ill-favour with which he was viewed at Windsor, Dilke was far from discouraging the Prince’s attentions. But he allowed them neither to weaken his views about the Civil List nor to lead him towards an excessively favourable judgment of the Prince as an individual. “The Prince is, of course, in fact, a strong Conservative, and a still stronger Jingo, really agreeing in the Queen’s politics, and wanting to take everything everywhere in the world . . .” he wrote of him. “He has more sense and more usage of the modern world than his mother . . . but less real brain power,”29 he added. On another occasion he noted: “The only two subjects on which the Prince of Wales agrees with any Liberals are (1) Randolph Churchill (2) the government of London. But then, as I personally, though assaulted by Randolph, do not hate him—there remains only the government of London, which becomes well worn. He began it again last night at the Harcourts!”30 Dilke was even capable of making a somewhat adverse comparison between the Prince and his mother. In 1883, after a visit to Windsor, he wrote to Mrs. Pattison: “The Queen’s court is singularly dowdy by the side of the Prince of Wales’s, but on the other hand, though the servants are shabby, the people about the Queen are more uniformly gentlemen and ladies than those about the Prince.”31 Nor did he always find that the Prince’s guests compensated by the brilliance of their conversation for their doubtful respectability.
“Some of the parties to which the Prince of Wales virtually insisted that I should go were curious,” he wrote; “the oddest of them a supper which he directed to be given on July 1st, 1881, for Sarah Bernhardt, at the wish of the Duc d’Aumale, and at which all the other ladies present were English ladies who had been invited at the distinct request of the Prince of Wales. It was one thing to get them to go, and another thing to get them to talk when they were there; and the result was that, as they would not talk to Sarah Bernhardt and she would not talk to them, and as the Duc d’Aumale was deaf and disinclined to make conversation on his own account, nobody talked at all, and an absolute reign of the most dismal silence ensued. . .”32
All in all, indeed, the best thing that Dilke could find to say for the Prince was that, despite a somewhat discouraging reception at the time—“for he seems not to listen and to talk incessantly except when he is digesting”—it was often worth talking to him because he subsequently repeated, as his own remarks, what he had been told.
Another Liberal with whom the Prince was intimate, and whom Dilke, partly in consequence, came to know well, was Lord Rosebery. Rosebery in 1881 was a thirty-four-year-old Scottish earl who had been three years married to the principal Rothschild heiress of that generation. He had been Gladstone’s host and sponsor in Midlothian, where he exercised great territorial influence, and he looked forward with some impatience to rapid political prefer
ment. This impatience so impressed itself upon Dilke that, after a walk at Mentmore (the Roseberys’ Buckinghamshire house) one Sunday afternoon in May, 1880, he “came to the conclusion that Rosebery was the most ambitious man I had ever met.”[8] But Gladstone, normally so ready to reward peers, was curiously unforth-coming towards Rosebery. He offered him junior office when the Government was formed, but this was refused, from a mixture of motives. Just over a year later another offer was made and Rosebery came in as under-secretary at the Home Office, with a special responsibility for Scottish affairs. There was some feeling, and none participated in it more strongly than Rosebery and his wife, that Rosebery should be in the Cabinet, particularly in view of the resignation of Argyll. This led to growing bitterness and to frequent scenes, many of them noted by Dilke in his diary or in his letters to Mrs. Pattison, between Lady Rosebery and the Gladstones.
Dilke was inclined to think that Rosebery had been treated badly. In the last years of the Beaconsfield Administration and in the early days of the new Gladstone Government he and Chamberlain had thought Rosebery might be a useful radical ally in the Lords. But Rosebery grew bored with radicalism; his wife noted that by the early summer of 1881 his political relations with the “two Ministers of the Left” had cooled; and Dilke’s comments upon his character became sharper. In May of 1883 he wrote: “At the State Ball Rose-brry broke out to me against Mr. G. He swears he will resign, giving health as his reason. He is not a gendeman, for he reproaches Mr. G. with the benefits he has conferred upon him, but he has been ill-used.”33 Within a week Rosebery did resign and remained out of the Government for nearly two years. Throughout the early years of the Parliament he and his wife hovered over Dilke’s life, as discontented half-friends, constantly inviting him to visit them at their various houses.
