by Roy Jenkins
This friendship was within a year to become important in connection with the Distribution of Seats Bill, but at the beginning, early in 1884, its chief result was the election of Dilke, on Salisbury’s proposal, to Grillion’s. Grillion’s was (and is) a dining club composed mostly of senior politicians of both parties, which had been founded in 1812 and had since enjoyed an illustrious life.† Indeed Dilke wrote sharply that “the Club considers itself such an illustrious body that it elects candidates without telling them they are proposed.” Rather typically—he did the same at the Athenaeum a month or two later—he refused membership. “I was elected on Saturday to Grillion’s, which is a mere dining club which dines every Monday,” he scribbled on a note tossed to Chamberlain at a Cabinet meeting. “I had not solicited the honour—most Cabinet ministers and ex-ditto belong to it. I have declined to take up my membership, as I think these things a bore.” Chamberlain replied to this not very tactful note—the President of the Board of Trade had never been asked to join—by more particularised acerbity: “Yes, it is no great inducement to dine with Hicks Beach or to see Cross drinking himself to death.”24 But Carlingford remonstrated with Dilke, told him that nobody before had ever rejected membership, and persuaded him to send a letter (albeit a rather ungracious one) withdrawing his previous refusal. Within a year or so he had become a regular attender, and towards the end of his life Grillion’s was one of his centres of interest.
At the beginning of 1884 the Egyptian question again became important in British politics. Since 1881 a movement of religious revolt under Mahommed Ahmed, called the Mahdi, had been in progress in the southern Soudan. The Egyptian hold over the area had always been loose and the government was of an appallingly low standard; but these facts did not make the Khedive’s ministers in Cairo any more anxious to evacuate. In the autumn of 1883 they sent an Egyptian army under the command of a British officer, Hicks Pasha, to attack the Mahdi in his own territory. The result was a dismal failure. The army was almost annihilated. A new set of problems were thereby created for the British Cabinet. Egypt was in effect a British protectorate, and Sir Evelyn Baring, who two months before the defeat had been appointed agent and consul-general, the real ruler of the country. Responsibility for Egyptian policies had eventually to be taken in London. This applied as much to the Soudan as to Egypt itself, even though there was nominally no British control there.
After Hicks’s defeat there were two possible courses for the Cabinet. They could mount a full-scale British offensive to crush the Mahdi and establish effective control as far south as the Equatorial Province—the policy pursued under Kitchener fourteen years later; or they could arrange for the evacuation of Khartoum and the other scattered garrisons and abandon the whole area south of Wadi Haifa. The choice was overwhelmingly for the latter alternative. Hartington and Sel-borne might have preferred the more forward policy, but no one else in the Cabinet was with them. Gladstone saw in the Soudanese, as he had failed to see in the Egyptians, “a people rightly struggling to be free,” and was violently against incurring either the expense or the moral opprobium of a campaign of conquest. He was strongly supported by Granville and Harcourt; and the majority of the Liberal back-benchers took the same view. The radical imperialists—Dilke and Chamberlain—did not dissent. They were to have their differences with Gladstone on the issue, but about the execution rather than the conception of the policy. Evacuation seemed to them both inevitable and desirable. This was partly because they regarded the Soudan as a useless and burdensome piece of territory, which, at least through the agency of Egypt, we were incapable of administering efficiently; and partly because Dilke, at any rate, was by no means a universal imperialist. “I am as great a jingo in Central Asia,” he was to write in 1885, “as I am a scuttler in South Africa.”25 What he liked was a decisive, perhaps rather ruthless policy, whether it was backwards or forwards. And a firm resolve to evacuate seemed to fulfil this qualification.
Dilke’s views on the issue were more important than Chamberlain’s, for he was more directly involved. On December 12th he noted: “Soudan dealt with outside Cabinet by Committee at War Office: Ld. G., Hartington, Northbrook, Carlingford, and self, in order that Mr. G. might avoid writing to the Queen about the matter and get Hartington to tell her verbally.”26 This was the origin of the Committee which, a month later and without the assistance of Carlingford, was to appoint and brief Gordon. How a Government resolved on retreat came to commission for the purpose such an unlikely agent as Charles Gordon is still shrouded in mystery. He was not asked for by Baring, who, on the contrary, at first resisted his appointment. He was not desired by Gladstone, who gave only a rather sceptical acquiescence from Hawarden. And Gordon himself had made it clear, in an interview given on January 7th to Stead of the Pall Mall Gazette, that his views diverged sharply from those of the Government. The probability is that Granville, having rather imperfectly informed himself about Gordon, decided that the appointment would be a good sop to public opinion, and found it easy to get the support of Hartington, who cared little for public opinion, but who on military matters was much under the influence of Lord Wolseley; and Wolseley favoured Gordon. Dilke, who two days earlier had protested to Granville against the idea of sending any British officer to conduct the retreat from Khartoum, appears to have offered no resistance to Gordon’s appointment. Whether this was because he had changed his mind in the course of forty-eight hours, or because he did not understand that Gordon was going to Khartoum, is not clear. In his confidential diary for January 18th he wrote: “Cabal at the War Office as to Khartoum . . . decided to send Colonel Gordon to Suakim to report on the Soudan.”27 But in his memoir entry for the same day—the memoir, it should be noted, was written up several years later—Dilke wrote: “Meeting at War Office summoned suddenly . . . Gordon stated danger at Khartoum exaggerated, that two Englishmen there had too much whisky. He would be able to bring away garrisons without difficulty. . . .”28
After another three days, however, Dilke had become more apprehensive that it was Khartoum that Gordon had in view. “I am alarmed at Gordon’s hints to the newspapers,” he wrote to Lord Granville on January 21st, “for I fear they must come from him. While I was at the War Office I heard nothing of his going to Khartoum, or anywhere except to Suakim. But if he goes up towards Khartoum, and is carried off and held to ransom—we shall have to send a terrible force after him even though he should go without instructions.”29 By this time Gordon was already on his way across the Mediterranean. He had left Victoria Station at 8 p.m. on the day of the War Office meeting, and had travelled overland to Brindisi, interspersing his journey with “a series of decrees which he telegraphed to us and we telegraphed to Baring.” The result of them was, first, to make it quite clear that Gordon was intending to go to Khartoum and not merely to Suakim, and secondly, to secure his appointment as Governor-General of the Soudan—a curiously executive post for an officer whose mission was only to report. What they did not make clear, in Dilke’s view, was that Gordon had already abandoned evacuation as a policy, although a subsequent re-reading of the decrees convinced him, with the hindsight which he then possessed, that this was already Gordon’s intention.
The discovery of Gordon’s deceit, had different effects upon Dilke and Gladstone. “Mr. G., from the first moment when Gordon broke his orders,” Dilke wrote, “was for disavowing him, stating that he was acting in defiance of instructions, and leaving him to his fate. Hartington was equally strong for an expedition.”30 Dilke was on Hartington’s side. He was firmly for evacuation, and he had no great respect for Gordon, of whose insubordination he was convinced, but he did not believe that the latter could be abandoned. On the contrary he was prepared to work hard for an expedition to cover Gordon. “Met at night with Hartington and Chamberlain,” he wrote on February 7th, “and decided on more vigorous action.”31 This secret and ill-assorted meeting was intended to prepare the ground for the Cabinet on the following morning. But it failed to secure a decision: “Ca
binet called at our wish,” Dilke reported. “I, Hartington, 2, Self, 3, Harcourt, 4, Chamberlain, 5, Northbrook, 6, Carlingford were for asking Gordon if a demonstration at Suakim would help him. Mr. G. and Lord G. very strong the other way, broke up the meeting sooner than agree.”32 Four days later, at another Cabinet, Granville weakened and Gladstone, standing alone, was overruled. A decision in principle to send British troops to Suakim was taken.
A decision in principle, however, proved quite different from a directive to action. It was August before the expedition sailed. It was October before it was ready to leave Wadi Halfa and advance into the Soudan. The intervening months had been passed in almost endless Cabinet discussion of what exactly was to be done. There was the dispute about Zebehr, the former slave-trader whom Gordon wished to commission as his principal lieutenant, a course which Gladstone—most strangely—was at first alone in favouring. There was a proposal that a minister should be sent out to Egypt to make decisions on the spot: “Chamberlain . . . suggested that I should go,” Dilke wrote. “. . . Hartington evidently thought that somebody should go, and thought he had better go himself. Lord Granville would not have either, as might have been expected, for it was doubtful which of the two propositions would make him the more jealous.”33 There was the question of timing, with five members of the Cabinet (Gladstone, Granville, Harcourt, Kimberley and Dodson) arguing until April that an autumn expedition would be premature. There was the associated question of its scope, in their approach to which ministers were greatly influenced by their varying views of the objects it was to achieve. Dilke and Chamberlain, who wanted a neat evacuation, were divided from Hartington, who wanted a prolonged occupation and consequently favoured a larger-scale enterprise. Indeed, in Dilke’s view, Hartington’s desire to mount a major offensive was an important cause of the long delay. “Hartington was determined to give Wolseley his big job,” he wrote after a discussion on May 31st. “If the early suggestion for an expedition by 1,000 picked men, or Roberts’s suggestion of a wholly Indian expedition, had not been vetoed by Hartington and Northbrook, Gordon would probably have been saved.”34
There were the questions of the interest on the Egyptian foreign debt, of whether the Cairo government should be made bankrupt, of whether the powers should agree to “cut the coupon,” of whether an international conference should be summoned. All these matters formed part of the Government’s Egyptian agenda and most took precedence over Gordon and the Soudan. At the beginning of August, Dilke wrote to Chamberlain: “We always have two subjects—(a) Conference, (b) Gordon”; and the latter replied: “The first always taking up two or three hours, and the second five minutes at the fag end of business.”35 Cabinets were frequently acrimonious and almost invariably long drawn out. Northbrook, the First Lord of the Admiralty, to whose views Dilke was usually opposed, was a particularly difficult man with whom to argue. On one occasion, “instead of sleeping (his usual practice at a Cabinet),” he fainted and had to be carried out.
As a background to these deliberations and delays, innumerable and confusing telegrams from Gordon poured into London. “Twelve telegrams from Gordon of the most extraordinary nature,”36 Dilke recorded on March nth. “We were evidently dealing with a wild man under the influence of that climate of Central Africa which acts even upon the sanest men like strong drink,”37 he summed up the situation at this time. Six months later the story was still the same. “A telegram from Gordon which shows he’s quite mad,” Dilke wrote in September, adding with faint surprise: “Some of the other telegrams from him sent at the same time are sane enough.”38 But by then the story was nearly over. Communications with Khartoum became increasingly sporadic and eventually ceased altogether. Meanwhile the expeditionary force was slowly making its way up the 850 miles of river between Wadi Haifa and Khartoum. It took three months to cover the distance, arriving on January 28th, 1885. The citadel had been stormed and Gordon killed on January 26th.*
Early on the morning of February 5th the news became known in London, and, in the words of Sir Philip Magnus, “Gladstone’s reputation touched the lowest point in his whole career.” The Queen sent him her famous unciphered telegram, which would be memorable for its syntax if for nothing else: “These news from Khartoum are frightful, and to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too fearful.”39 This was handed to Gladstone at Carnforth Junction when he was on his way to London from Holker, where he had been taken by Hartington to stay with the Duke of Devonshire. His reaction, Dilke tells us, was a mixture of annoyed dismay and a shrewd inquisitive-ness about the Carnforth station-master’s politics and hence the probability of the contents of the telegram becoming known. But it was not the displeasure of the Queen alone that the Prime Minister and the Government had to face. Public opinion, particularly in London, became hysterically jingo. There were crowds in Downing Street and outside the House of Commons, ready to hoot at Gladstone on every possible occasion; and he was execrated in innumerable music halls as the murderer of Gordon. In the House there was a general collapse of Liberal morale and some defection. A vote of censure against the Government’s Egyptian policy had been defeated by the fairly comfortable margin of forty-four in the previous May; but when a similar motion was put at four o’clock on the morning of February 28th, the Government majority fell to fourteen. Dilke wished to go out on the issue. “Mr. G. now wishes to be upset,” he had written to Grant Duff on February 20th. “He thinks the party will permanently suffer by the Soudan war if in power at the elections (Nov.-Dec, I fancy), and had sooner be out soon and come in again after them.”40 Dilke tended to agree with this view, particularly as Chamberlain, violently opposed to Hartington’s desire for full pacification and a long-term occupation of the Soudan, had been in a resigning humour for some time. Believing this, Dilke was inclined to interpret the cryptic “that will do” with which Gladstone greeted the result of the division as meaning that it was enough of a blow to justify resignation.
In Cabinet at noon the next day, the Prime Minister presented quite a different face. He appealed to the “manhood” of his colleagues and carried the day for continuance in office against the opposition of Granville, Derby, Hartington, Chamberlain, Northbrook and Childers. The Government had received a most damaging blow, for which the only compensation—the accession of Rosebery*—was hardly adequate. Internal dissensions were worse than ever. But there was still a majority in the House of Commons; the Parliament was more than two years short of its term; and the Prime Minister, aged seventy-five and at the nadir of his popular fortunes, preferred power to repose. Gladstone’s second Government had a few months still to live.
Chapter Nine
A Dying Government
During the summer of 1884 the Government—and particularly Gladstone—had been much more occupied with the problems of the franchise than with those of General Gordon. The third of the great reform bills of the nineteenth century, conducted mainly by the Prime Minister himself, completed its passage through the House of Commons on June 27th. It increased the electorate from three to five millions; household suffrage was extended from the towns to the counties; and for the first time since 1829 Ireland was treated upon a basis of full equality.
Neither Lord Hartington nor the Conservative party liked the bill. But just as the Whig leader thought it undesirable to carry his public opposition beyond a few growling speeches in the country, so the Tories judged it unwise to provoke a head-on collision upon the issue. Resistance in the Commons was half-hearted, and attention became concentrated upon what the Lords would do. On July 8th they gave their answer. They would decline to pass the franchise bill until the Government also presented them with a measure for the redistribution of constituencies. On the face of it this was not an extreme challenge. The Government was already committed to redistribution, and if the Lords had not existed, the Liberal party—and particularly the radical element—would have been almost as anxious for this as for the franchise bill itself.
It was nevertheless a clever manoïuvre, and one which Disraeli had recommended for exactly these circumstances. A redistribution bill would take some time to draft, and even longer to pass. It would arouse great local jealousies, in the midst of which both bills might founder. Furthermore, any period of delay carried with it the possibility that the Government itself might collapse. “The Tory game,” Dilke had written as early as May 24th when the first bill was still in the Commons, “is to delay the franchise bill until they have upset[1] us upon Egypt. . . .”1 The possibility of Gordon destroying Gladstone had not diminished by the time that the Conservative peers came to take their decision.
The apparent moderation of the Lords did not therefore make their attitude acceptable to the Government. There quickly developed a stronger tension between the two Houses than had existed since the great days of 1831-2. Gladstone earned an early rebuke from the Queen for the strength of his language against the peers, and was little comforted by her assuring him that the Lords reflected the “true feeling of the country” better than did the Commons. But the violence of the Prime Minister’s attack was as nothing compared with that which Chamberlain was to mount during the late summer and early autumn. He began, somewhat surprisingly, at a house dinner of the Devonshire Club, and he continued with a series of speeches at Bingley Hall in Birmingham, at Hanley, Newtown and Denbigh. He denounced the “insolent pretensions of an hereditary caste he threatened to lead a march of a hundred thousand Midland men upon London, and, if necessary, to give Lord Salisbury a broken head on the way; and he was implicated in the organised radical attack on Lord Randolph Churchill’s meeting in Aston Park, which led to one of the worst political riots in recent British history, to several serious casualties, and to the narrow escape from the mob of Churchill and Sir Stafford Northcote. John Morley was giving full expression to the Chamberlain point of view when he coined “mend them or end them,” the most memorable slogan of this period. The Queen’s anger at Chamberlain’s pronouncements made her even less grammatical than was her habit. “The Queen will yield to no one in TRUE LIBERAL FEELING,” she wrote to the Prime Minister, “but not to destructive, and she calls upon Mr. Gladstone to restrain, as he can, some of his wild colleagues and followers.”2
