They saw too much of each other. As Prime Minister, Gladstone had to be in regular attendance upon the Queen but instead of weekly audiences plus a short annual weekend at Balmoral, as is enjoyed by our premiers in this era, Victorian Prime Ministers were obliged to put in a great deal more time with the Sovereign. Trips to Balmoral often lasted a fortnight. Even Disraeli disliked these because rural Aberdeenshire was invariably so very cold. There were also regular stays at Osborne, frequent visits at Windsor became de rigueur and all these combined with long audiences and even longer letters meant that the Queen and Gladstone were forced into each other’s society too often for comfort. The letters in particular were argumentative as well as voluminous. Gladstone would never let a point be lost or accept the blessings of the tactful silence. Both he and Victoria enjoyed arguments and both possessed surprisingly emotional temperaments. This in an age supposed to have epitomised sangfroid.
In correspondence with Vicky in Prussia, Victoria wailed that Gladstone was ‘so very arrogant, tyrannical, obstinate, with no knowledge of the world or human nature’. When Gladstone left office in 1874, she confided in her diary that ‘I then took leave, giving him my hand to kiss, and expressed my thanks for his services and every wish for his health. It was a relief to feel that this rather trying interview was over.’ How different a tone from the clear pleasure she received later the same day when ‘Mr Disraeli … then knelt down and kissed my hand, saying “I pledge my troth to the kindest of mistresses.” ’
A monarch is permanent but a politician, as Sir Robin Day so memorably put it, is here today and gone tomorrow. Gladstone’s poor relationship with the Queen saddened and distressed them both. When he resigned office for the last time in February 1894, Victoria recorded in her journal ‘and then Mr Gladstone, who was looking very old and was very deaf. I made him sit down and I said I had received his letter and was sorry for the cause of his resignation. He said very little about it, only that he found his blindness had greatly increased since he had been at Biarritz. Then he talked about the honours for his friends but not many … then discussed various other topics.’ Gladstone himself noted that ‘she had much difficulty in finding topics for an adequate prolongation: but fog and rain and [Victoria’s] coming journey to Italy all did their duty and helped … She was at the highest point of her cheerfulness. Her manner was personally kind throughout.’
The ending of a multi-decade relationship of physical closeness but personal estrangement was finally concluded when Princess Louisa arranged for the Gladstones to meet the Queen for tea in Cannes. The Queen noted that they came in for a moment and Gladstone called it ten minutes but it quickly ended.
When Gladstone died Victoria’s feelings were restrained. She recorded in her journal, ‘Heard at breakfast time that poor Mr Gladstone, who has been hopelessly ill for some time and had suffered severely had passed away quite peacefully this morning at 5. Poor man, he was very clever and full of ideas for the bettering and advancement of the Country, always most loyal to me personally, and ready to do anything for the Royal Family, but alas! I am sure involuntarily, he did at times a good deal of harm.’ Victoria’s journal entry on the day Disraeli died records that ‘I am most terribly shocked and grieved, the Dear Ld. Beaconsfield was one of my best, most devoted, and kindest of friends, as well as wisest of Counsellors. His loss is irreparable, to me and to the Country. To lose such a pillar of strength at such a moment is dreadful! … I was full of hope that he might be my Minister again.’ Perhaps neither Gladstone nor Victoria liked people who treated them as equals and thus clashes were inevitable. Gladstone was theoretically devoted to the Queen but he was equally desperate to persuade her that he was right and here we can glimpse the human frailty of a gentleman too accustomed to lecturing and being listened to, too accustomed to regarding women, even his Sovereign, as the weaker sex and unable to change his ways. The Queen in the end was capable of a degree of fairness. In her final note on Gladstone, she recognised ‘the power of his oratory, he had a wonderful power of speaking and carrying the masses with him’.
The mutual detestation between Gladstone and Disraeli has already been noted. Chalk and cheese seem as twins in comparison with these two dominant figures of the mid-Victorian political scene who spiced their political rivalry with a talent for mutual and gratifying needling. Disraeli, as we know, was especially good at being rude and, although we have a persistent image of the Victorians as bound by rigid rules of decorum and politeness, their politicians could be appallingly rude in ways that would be ruled out of order today and Disraeli was especially the master of the jibe.
In the aftermath of the General Election of 1868, this particular political rivalry set to work with a vengeance. Gladstone was now Liberal leader and Prime Minister. Disraeli, having all too briefly held the reins of power before the election, was now leader of the Opposition. Receiving the news that the Queen’s driver was on the way from Windsor and that he would be asked to form a government, Gladstone said only, ‘My mission is to pacify Ireland.’ At first, however, he focused on social and labour reform and on reform of the Poor Laws in order to emphasise the virtues of individual self-reliance. He assisted in the process of professionalisation in the armed forces by banning the sale of commissions, this a delayed reaction to the scandals of the Crimean War, in which some gentleman soldiers, with no experience or aptitude for their task, had led soldiers poorly. He also condemned Disraeli’s vision of a philanthropic and benevolent government and of an alliance between landowners and the working class as so much quackery. He warned anyone who would listen that the Conservatives would, given half a chance, ‘delude you with fanaticism, and offering you a fruit which, when you attempt to taste it, will prove to be but ashes in your mouth’.
Gladstone’s reforms were of a piece with the morality of individualism and independence that he espoused. Disraeli promised houses, fair wages and a generally better life, which in the 1874 General Election the people accepted. He had added to the tensions surrounding the election by labelling Gladstone a shoplifter, this on the basis of Gladstone’s offer to voters of a post-dated cut in income tax. Disraeli talked of a person who:
entered a jewellers and asked to look at a costly trinket … the customer threw a quarter of an ounce of snuff into his eyes, and when the unfortunate tradesman had recovered his sight and his senses he found his customer had disappeared, and his trinket too. And so it is that Mr Gladstone throws gold dust into the eyes of the people of England, and, before they clearly ascertain what it is like or worth, they find he has disappeared with a costly jewel as the price of his dextrous management.
The Times disapproved of such language but, as Gladstone privately referred to Disraeli as the ‘Artful Dodger’, it is clear that the insults were far from one-sided and that they demonstrate the limits of Gladstone’s ostentatious morality, once he found himself in the political bear pit.
Gladstone was out of Downing Street but his loss of power provided him with the chance to busy himself with his favourite occupations, looking about the nation and the world, identifying moral flaws and cogitating on how they might be mended – by him. He was after all a politician and a politician hungry for renewed power, so he was not unwilling to use moral outrage to his political advantage. This was certainly true of his response to a foreign-policy issue which helped to bring focus to the duel between these two skilled politicians. As noted above, Disraeli was applauded for the skilful diplomacy deployed at the Congress of Berlin, which had convened to settle contentious European issues and international borders in the Balkans. The Queen was pleased, public opinion was pleased and even some historians have been pleased, acknowledging the period of peace in Europe that followed the deliberations in Berlin. Gladstone was not pleased, because the Congress had played out against a specific context of massacres perpetrated by Ottoman troops against Bulgarian Christians, massacres which were well known to the British government and to Disraeli.
Disraeli was content to see the
Congress bolster Ottoman power as a bulwark against Russia and thus prevent the encroachment of Russian influence in the eastern Mediterranean and this was his bottom line, massacres notwithstanding. Gladstone, however, was scandalised by this example of what he regarded as cold-hearted realpolitik. The Balkans thus provided a morally charged issue with which he could pursue a deep-seated rivalry with his Tory enemy that was close to mutual loathing. Magnus suggested that Gladstone at one point was thought by his friends to have a ‘black hatred’ towards Disraeli, a hatred which caused him to discount any respect he might have felt in this case for the balancing act of British foreign policy.
He had himself been Prime Minister, after all. He had insights in this specific context and he knew that British foreign policy had, in the years following the Crimean War, always favoured the Ottoman Empire over Russia. This meant overlooking certain aspects of Ottoman rule in their European territories, specifically the harsh treatment of the mainly Christian population of the Balkans. Successive British governments had acknowledged that the Ottomans must be supported. The alternative was to watch Turkish power crumble and Russia and Austria extend their spheres of influence into this strategically vital region. Few envisioned the option of independent nation states and it is certainly the case that Disraeli was content to favour the Turks. Britain must turn a blind eye to bloodshed. Russia must be kept at bay.
But Gladstone set realpolitik aside. He issued a pamphlet entitled ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East’. It proved to be a sensation and sold over forty thousand copies in a few days. The pamphlet was a personal appeal by Gladstone, rather than the Liberal Party, and it was a propaganda success backed by almost anyone who mattered, except the Queen, who was almost as anti-Russian as she was anti-Gladstone. The pamphlet’s power lies in its moral authority and it exudes a sense of genuine horror.
There have been perpetrated, under the immediate authority of a Government to which all the time we have been giving the strongest moral, and for part of the time even material support, crimes and outrages, so vast in scale as to exceed all modern example, and so unutterably vile as well as fierce in character that it passes the power of heart to conceive, and of tongue and pen adequately to describe them. These are the Bulgarian horrors.
The Turks, declared Gladstone, were ‘the one great anti-human specimen of humanity. Wherever they went, a broad line of blood marked the track behind them.’
He deployed his fury to castigate the government for its dissembling answers in Parliament and its lax view of Turkish behaviour, most especially in claiming that the persecuted Bulgarians were to some degree the aggressor. He forensically went through questions and answers to show how the government in general and Disraeli in particular had failed to respond to the facts concerning the massacre and then he set out the specific charges he wished to level against Disraeli’s administration. The first was inefficiency of arrangements for receiving information. The second was, even worse, the tardiness of gathering further information about the massacres and the third was the misleading answers which would have left Parliament and public alike believing that responsibility for the massacres lay elsewhere. Gladstone was outraged in particular by the claim that although the atrocities had been committed by Ottoman troops, by agents of the state, there was nevertheless fault on both sides. ‘This declaration is a gross wrong inadvertently done to the people of Bulgaria; and it ought to be withdrawn.’
Gladstone’s magisterial conclusion has resonated through the decades:
I return to, and I end with, that which is the omega as well as the alpha of this great and mournful case … I entreat my countryman … to insist that our Government, which has been working in one direction, shall work in the other and shall apply all its vigour to concur with the other states of Europe in obtaining the extinction of the Turkish executive power in Bulgaria. Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by carrying off themselves. Their zaptiehs and their mudirs, their bimbashis and their yuzbachis, their kaimakams and their pashas, one and all, bag and baggage, shall, I hope, clear out from the province they have desolated and profaned. This thorough riddance, this most blessed deliverance, is the only reparation we can make to the memory of those heaps on heaps of dead; to the violated purity alike of matron, of maiden, and of child; to the civilisation which has been affronted and shamed; to the laws of God, or, if you like, of Allah; to the moral sense of mankind at large. There is not a criminal in an European jail, there is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not rise and overboil at the recital of that which has been done.
The language is very much of its time, but the rhetoric shows Gladstone at his most masterful. He set out the case against the Turks clearly and he took apart the government’s actions and showed them to be not only wanting but far from straightforward. Disraeli was attempting a cover-up, this action being even worse and more malign than the initial policy failure. Then, with soaring rhetoric, he set about shaming people into accepting what he was certain was rightful. This pamphlet in itself reaffirmed his position as the greatest force in the Liberal Party, a politician who could hold the leadership at will.
Gladstone’s actions, or rather his language in private, in the course of this episode left much to be desired. He saw fit to deploy anti-Semitic tropes against Disraeli. To his friend the Duke of Argyll he remarked that the Jews of the eastern Mediterranean had always hated the Christians, the implication being that it was therefore no wonder that Disraeli, with his Jewish heritage, would not lift a finger to assist European Christians. This is one of the nastiest thoughts of a self-proclaimed moral politician. The implication was that as Disraeli was a Jew in England so he was not in himself English. Thus no one could expect him to behave as an English gentleman would behave. Disraeli, remarked Gladstone, ‘was not such a Turk as I had thought. What he hates is Christian liberty and reconstruction.’ When Argyll commented that ‘Disraeli may be willing to risk his government for his Judaic feeling’, Gladstone replied, ‘I have a strong suspicion that … Dizzy’s crypto-judaism has had to do with his policy.’ Such unpleasant and racist discourse makes for deeply uncomfortable reading and would have had even greater insidious power in the context of Britain in the 1870s. This was by no means Gladstone’s finest moment.
In cold, hard political terms, however, his attacks hit their mark, for Gladstone was now focused on leading the Liberal Party to victory in the coming election and forcing Disraeli from office. Gladstone’s work began in 1879 in Midlothian, where he was, ostensibly, campaigning to be elected as the local Member of Parliament. The events in Midlothian were innovative in that they evolved into the first national General Election campaign and before Parliament had been dissolved. As manifestos had started with Peel’s address to the electors of Tamworth so the concept and practice of popular electioneering began within this Scottish constituency. Not that this ought to have been unexpected. The reforms of 1867 had increased the electorate so enormously that true campaigning, of the sort we would recognise today, was now necessary. The real surprise is that Disraeli did not innovate first but by now he was old and even less energetic. It was a shock to some, who saw this form of popular electioneering as coarse and potentially dangerous.
Gladstone began his tour on 24 November 1879, travelling by train from Liverpool to Edinburgh. Crowds gathered at every stop to hear him speak a few inspiring words against Disraeli. In Edinburgh itself, a vast flag-waving crowd appeared and Gladstone was escorted by a torchlit procession with fireworks and fairy lanterns as he headed to stay with Lord Rosebery at Dalmeny House. It was the sort of reception that today would be accorded to a rock star, not a politician. Gladstone clearly enjoyed the experience, recording that ‘I have never gone through a more extraordinary day’, but by the end of the fortnight of speeches, such dramatic receptions must have seemed almost commonplace. The crowds were huge, and they remained huge. Gladstone carefully made a note of each one, recording the
thirty gentlemen who assembled to listen to him on 4 December ‘at Sir J. Watson’s after dinner’, as well as the 20,000 who gathered at Edinburgh’s Waverley Market. Each one of these, regardless of context, received the full flow of Gladstonian oratory and full expression of Gladstonian intellect. In all he addressed 86,930 people, which Lord Jenkins pointed out in his biography was only slightly more than the number of words uttered by Gladstone, a total of 85,840, so nearly one word per person in the audience.
Nor did he patronise his audiences. He delivered complex arguments at considerable length, assuming that his listeners could keep up. At the Edinburgh Corn Exchange he spent seventy-five minutes addressing thousands of people on the details of Disraeli’s financial errors and this was only the first of several speeches that day. The speeches were reported nationally and as the total electorate in the General Election in Midlothian was only 3,260 the majority of Gladstone’s audience must have been from outside the constituency. Newspapers devoted column after column to Gladstone’s words and attacks on Disraeli. Some famous quotations have resonated down the decades. He said of the Zulu War that 10,000 had been killed for ‘their attempt to defend against your artillery with their naked bodies, their hearths and homes, their wives and families’. He attacked Disraeli for ‘jobbery’, a practice that was meant to have died out, for creating a post for a friend, Lord Hampton, as a civil service commissioner at a cost of £2,000 per annum. This he said was ‘to do what had been admirably done without that office before, and had not been … one bit better done since.’ He objected to the annexation of Cyprus and defended the rights of the Afghan: ‘the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan, among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eyes of Almighty God as can be your own’. This may not be what his listeners believed but he was willing to say difficult things such as reiterating his opposition to protectionism and other short-term solutions.
The Victorians Page 25