by Roy Jenkins
The other vacancy, it had been decided, was to go to Dilke. Gladstone probably neither understood nor liked him very well, at this or any other time. He greatly preferred Bright, and even after the latter’s resignation, in protest against his own Egyptian policy, he could still remark: “Just compare his (Blight’s) high principles with those of Chamberlain and Dilke and the new style of radicals, who are all opportunism.”14 Gladstone was nevertheless capable of treating Dilke with great courtesy and consideration—when the latter was ill for a few weeks in 1880, for instance, the Prime Minister had been quick to pay a call of enquiry to 76, Sloane Street—and he had slowly acquired a great respect for Dilke’s parliamentary and administrative ability, if not an equivalent one for his “high principles.” Indeed, at about this time, if we are to believe the testimony of Lord Acton, Gladstone began to look on Dilke as a possible successor, at least as leader of the House of Commons. Looking to a time when he himself would have retired and Hartington would have become Devonshire, Gladstone is reported as saying: “The future leader of H. of C. was a great puzzle and difficulty. Sir Charles Dilke would probably be the man best fitted for it; he had shown much capacity for learning and unlearning, but he would require Cabinet training first.”15
If this was Gladstone’s view it was obviously sensible that he should make the “Cabinet training” available as soon as possible. Early in November Dilke was confident that promotion was very near, and he wrote to Mrs. Pattison discussing the prospects of his re-election for Chelsea.[7] On the 16th of that month he had an interview with the Chief Whip, Lord Richard Grosvenor, who asked Dilke whether he thought that the Queen would now be prepared to have him in the Cabinet. Dilke replied saying that he believed she would (perhaps his “jingo” attitude to the Alexandria riots in June had helped), and he had the authority, for what it was worth, of the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Albany for saying this. What in fact proved to be the case was that the Queen was prepared to have Dilke in the Cabinet, but only in an office which minimised his contact with her. The Chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster she did not regard as being within this category; it was a “peculiarly personal” post, she held, and one which should be filled by “a moderate politician.” The original plan by which Dilke was to take over this sinecure office from Kimberley (and use it to become a general parliamentary spokesman of the Government) had therefore to be abandoned.
There was then a great searching around for alternative arrangements. On December 12th the Prime Minister (whose talent for rubbing Chamberlain the wrong way was always considerable) suggested to Dilke that he should approach his Birmingham friend with a view to a switch of offices. “Would you take the Duchy and let me go to the Board of Trade, you keeping your Bills?”16 Dilke wrote. This course was also strongly pressed by the Prince of Wales, who, Sir Sidney Lee has told us, “engaged with infinite zest in (these) confidential negotiations.”17 It was not a course which commended itself to Chamberlain. He received Dilke’s letter at Highbury on the morning of December 13th and replied immediately:
“Your letter has spoilt my breakfast. The change will be loathsome to me for more than one reason and will give rise to all sorts of disagreeable commentaries. But if it is the only way out of the difficulty, I will do—what I am sure you would have done in my place—accept the transfer. . . . Consider however if there is any alternative. I regard your immediate admission to the Cabinet as imperative, and therefore if this can only be secured by my taking the Duchy, cadit quaestio, and I shall never say another word on the subject.”18
Chamberlain went on to suggest two possible alternative courses of action. The first was that they should try to force the Queen to accept Dilke for the Duchy by both threatening resignation unless she did so. “Personally I would rather go out than take the Duchy,” Chamberlain added. The second was that Dodson, the President of the Local Government Board, might be persuaded to switch to the Duchy. “He might like an office with less work, and he might be influenced by the nominally superior rank,” Chamberlain wrote hopefully. Dilke, somewhat surprisingly, appeared satisfied with this highly grudging reply. “I have your letter which is exactly what I expected and exactly what (I hope) I should have written if the places had been changed,”19 he wrote in turn. Fortunately Chamberlain was not called upon to pass what he described to Morley as the hardest test to which friendship was ever put. The Queen saved him by announcing firmly that as an attempt at a moderate politician she regarded him as no improvement on Dilke. The Prince of Wales then came on the scene with a much more attractive suggestion. “What he would like to see,” Francis Knollys wrote to Dilke on December 15th, “would be Lord Northbrook at the India Office and you at the Admiralty.”20 But the India Office was already filled, and in any event, Northbrook showed no desire to abandon the amenities of Admiralty House. So the Prince tried again, and arrived at the solution which Chamberlain had suggested as one of his alternatives four days earlier. “H.R.H. thinks matters might be arranged as follows,” Knollys wrote again on the 17th. “Mr. Dodson to go to the Duchy of Lancaster, you to the Local Government Board, and Chamberlain to remain where he is. What do you say to this arrangement?”21
Dilke did not say anything very enthusiastic, for the prospect of the Local Government Board did not excite him. But the situation was becoming too difficult for any solution to be excluded, and in the outcome it was the Prince’s (or perhaps Chamberlain’s) plan which was adopted. By December 23rd it had been accepted by the Prime Minister, the Queen and Dodson.
“Dodson ‘put himself in Mr. G.’s hands,’” Dilke wrote to Mrs. Pattison from the Foreign Office that evening, “so I shall be in the Local Government Board by Wednesday I think, as I shall not after Chamberlain’s kindness put him into an office which he likes less than the Board of Trade. Shan’t I hate it after this place—but it will ‘knock the nonsense out of me.’”22
Dilke’s appointment was announced on December 23rd, and he took up his new duties on December 27th. He was fortified with a letter from Gladstone dealing with the delicate subject of the new minister’s relations with the Queen.
“Notwithstanding the rubs of the past, I am sanguine as to your future relation with the Queen,” the Prime Minister wrote. “There are undoubtedly many difficulties in that quarter; but they are in the main confined to three or four Departments. Your office will not touch them; while you will have in common with all your colleagues the benefit of two great modifying circumstances which never fail, the first her high good manners, and the second her love of truth. I am the more desirous to do her justice, because, while she conducts all intercourse with me in absolute and perfect courtesy, I am convinced, from a hundred tokens, that she looks forward to the day of my retirement as a day, if not of jubilee (sic), yet of relief.”23
There were some immediate difficulties, but these were mostly removed by a combination of Lord Granville sending again to Sir Henry Ponsonby, the Queen’s private secretary, a copy of a slightly unctuous little letter[8] which Dilke had written, nominally to Granville but in fact for royal eyes, at the time of the Government’s formation; and by Dilke himself, in his campaign for re-election in Chelsea, making speeches which were mild and narrowly restricted in the subjects which they covered. He secured his re-election, unopposed, on January 8th, having kissed hands on his appointment and been sworn of the Privy Council, at Windsor, a few days previously.[9] He was thirty-nine years of age and the youngest member of the Cabinet. His nearest rivals in this respect were Chamberlain, who was forty-two, and Hartington, who was forty-nine. His post was not exciting, but members of the
Cabinet were in those days concerned relatively less with their own departments and more with the business of the Government as a whole; and the prospect before him was extremely promising. Amongst his letters of congratulation was a rather quavering note from old Lord Barrington, who had been Disraeli’s Whip. “I like watching your political career,” it ran, “as besides personal feeling, it makes me think of what my
dear old Chief used to say about you, viz: that you were the rising man on the other side.”24 So, indeed, appeared again to be the case after a period, not perhaps of setback, but of hesitation, in Dilke’s career.
Chapter Eight
A Radical amongst the Whigs
DILKE’S ENTRY into the Cabinet coincided with the median point of Gladstone’s second administration. Its first half had been singularly barren of liberal achievement. Ireland, Bradlaugh, and the perpetually festering split between Whigs and radicals had combined to put an almost complete stop to controversial domestic legislation. Had the Government resigned at the beginning of 1883 it would have been remembered for the occupation of Egypt and for little else—an ironic achievement for a Prime Minister who had swept to office on an anti-Beaconsfield platform. The prospect for the future was a little more encouraging. In the autumn of 1882 important amendments to the rules of the House of Commons had been made. After much controversy a procedure of closure by simple majority, strongly supported by Harcourt and Chamberlain within the Cabinet and by Dilke outside it, had been carried; and a system of delegating work at the committee stage of legislation to “Grand” or “Standing” committees of the House was instituted. At the beginning of 1883 there seemed a good chance that the work of Parliament would be less clogged by Irish disputes and Irish tactics than in the preceding years. Furthermore, the Prime Minister’s mind was turning towards a great measure of franchise reform which would extend the vote as widely in the counties as the Act of 1867 had done in the towns.
The mind which was turning was temporarily a tired one. Gladstone had not been sleeping well, and in the middle of January, having refused the Queen’s hopeful offer of a peerage, he left for six weeks’ rest at Cannes. Dilke was at Toulon for his post-Christmas holiday, and he several times travelled along the coast both to dine and to attend church with the Prime Minister. Before the end of January he returned to England to join with Chamberlain in an attempt, by correspondence, to persuade the Cabinet to give priority for the session to the franchise bill. They were unsuccessful. The Whigs, worried by the strengthening of Parnell which would inevitably follow from the extension of household suffrage to the Irish counties, all said that a franchise bill might needlessly endanger the life of the Government and that a measure of local government reform should be the first objective. Weakened by the absence of the Prime Minister, the radicals were forced to yield. But Dilke’s self-confidence was not abated. “My first Cabinet,” he recorded on February 6th, “I wrote most of the Queen’s Speech.”1
This claim was neither quite so extravagant nor quite so arrogant as it appears, for much of the legislative programme which it announced touched upon Dilke’s departmental responsibilities. There was to be a general local government bill, which, according to the draft subsequently supplied by Dilke, provided for the setting up of both district and county councils; there was to be a separate Government of London Bill; and there was also to be a Corrupt Practices Bill, rather surprisingly entrusted to Dilke and not to the Home Secretary. This was the only measure of the three to pass into law, and proved almost as important as the Ballot Act of 1872.
The Government of London Bill foundered on the violence of Harcourt’s opposition to placing the Metropolitan Police under local control. The existing position (which still prevails to-day) was that the City Corporation, like a provincial town council in an incorporated borough, managed its own separate force through a Watch Committee, but that outside the square mile of the City itself there was direct Home Office control. The difficulty arose out of the Government’s intention to change the nature of the City Corporation and to extend its jurisdiction to cover most of what is now the County of London. To continue with two separate police forces within the same local authority area would be manifestly absurd. To deprive the City of a control which it had exercised for fifty years would neither be popular nor in accordance with any obvious liberal principle. But the third solution, that of giving the extended Corporation authority over the whole Metropolitan force, was totally unacceptable to the Home Secretary, who, in Dilke’s words, “thought himself a Fouché.” Harcourt’s own justification was that London as a capital was too liable to political crime for popular control to be contemplated. “Suppose, for example,” he wrote, “that news arrived either from America or Ireland which required instant and secret action by the police throughout London against a Fenian outbreak. Is it to be contended that a meeting of the Watch Committee is to be summoned . . . a debate to be raised and a vote taken?”2 Dilke’s reply was to point out that Liverpool was “by far the most Fenian town in England,” but that control by Watch Committee worked quite satisfactorily there. “To this reasoning (of Harcourt’s),” Dilke noted, “neither Mr. Gladstone nor Chamberlain nor I yielded.”3 But Harcourt proved equally unyielding, and after three months of his irascible but determined opposition the whole bill was abandoned in the early summer.
At this time Dilke found Harcourt equally difficult on other issues. “What a beast Harcourt makes of himself,” he wrote to Chamberlain at his first Cabinet meeting. “He’s quite as objectionable as I thought Fawcett would be.”4
“Informal Cabinet in Mr. G.’s room (in the House of Commons) which I am using till his return,” he wrote in his diary two weeks later. “Harcourt fought against Lord Granville, Childers, Carlingford, Northbrook and Kimber-ley for his violent views about Ireland. Carlingford said to him at last: ‘Your language is that of the lowest Tory.’ Harcourt then cried out: ‘In the course of this very debate I shall say that all this proves that there must be no more Irish legislation and no more conciliation and that Ireland can only be governed by the sword.’* ‘If you say that,’ replied Carlingford, ‘it will not be representing the Government, for none of your colleagues agree with you.’”5
And in May, when a few cases of cholera had been reported in the Thames Estuary, Dilke noted: “My cholera committee met to please Harcourt. He is as frightened now about cholera as he used to be about dynamite.”6
Harcourt’s bursts of violent enthusiasms and antipathies and the concentration of his interest upon police questions to which they led during this period had certain advantages for Dilke. He was always eager for more work and the power which went with it. In consequence he greatly welcomed Harcourt’s decision in March that the time of the Home Secretary should be fully occupied with police and security matters and that such normal Home Office subjects as the inspection of mines and factories, the operation of the Artisans’ Dwelling Acts, and the control of fire brigades, should be handed over to Dilke and the Local Government Board. This change was strenuously opposed by the permanent officials of the Home Office, who frustrated the original plan for a legislative transfer and substituted a personal and temporary arrangement between Harcourt and Dilke. Rosebery, who was at that time under-secretary in the Home Department, was also markedly unenthusiastic about the new arrangement. Rosebery was discontented about most things at this stage; in June he resigned from the Government and departed from British politics for half a year’s voyage around the world.
It was not only Harcourt’s sudden passion for repression which produced bitterness in the Cabinet. Dissension continued on almost every possible subject. Hartington, usually with the solid support of the Whig phalanx, could be relied upon to defend the rights of landowners, whether in Britain or in Ireland. But sometimes he over-reached and isolated himself, as in his opposition to a mild Agricultural Holdings Bill in the spring of 1883. “Much heat between Derby and Hartington,” Dilke wrote after a Cabinet on April 21st. “All my lords very radical indeed to-day except our Marquis, who was ferocious to the highest point, being thoroughly at bay. He gave us to understand that Derby was a mere owner of Liverpool ground rents, who knew nothing about land.”7 Occasionally, also, Chamberlain put himself in a position, and not necessarily a radical one, to which neither Dilke nor anyone else would follow him. After a Cabinet in this same April at which the Explosives Bill, one of Harcourt’s anti-
terrorist weapons, was discussed, Dilke noted: “Chamberlain was the only man in favour of making it retrospective!!!”
The most striking feature of Cabinet proceedings at this time was the frequent inability of the Prime Minister, “dictator” though he was considered to be by the Queen and by many others, to get his own way. Sometimes it was on important matters, as in the dispute with Harcourt over the London police, or Egypt or Ireland; and sometimes it was about matters small in themselves, but which were not in consequence less successful in filling the Prime Minister’s mind. “The removal of the Duke of Wellington’s statue from Hyde Park Corner,” Dilke wrote after a meeting on August 9th, 1883, “was the cause of the most severe fight that Mr. G. had ever known in Cabinet—as he said. The Cabinet voted, and the numbers were taken down by him three times over. He was in favour of the old statue and against removal. I supported him. A majority against us, and Mr. G. (was) trying to get his own way against the majority.”8 On another occasion, when the opposition wished to put down a vote of censure, Gladstone was against giving time to debate the motion, but found himself in a minority of one in the Cabinet. But he out-manoeuvred his colleagues by the simple if dangerous expedient of getting the Liberal back-benchers to vote against the Government. The proposal to give time to the vote of censure was defeated in the House of Commons. “How splendid is the discipline of our party,” the Prime Minister said complacently to Dilke on the Front Bench. “Not a man but voted against us. . . .”9
