It is hard to see his speeches as a clear definition of liberalism or even of Gladstonianism because although years before he had opposed Don Pacifico he wanted something done about Naples. It was more a concentrated attack on everything Disraeli had done, on ‘Beaconsfield-ism’, and was ruthlessly partisan. Equally, it was high-minded and, no doubt in Gladstone’s mind, inspired by God but it was important because it made it clear that in spite of his resignation Gladstone was the only leader of the Liberal Party and that he understood the need to communicate to the new electorate. Magnus’s phrase that it is about who Gladstone was rather than what he did once again comes to mind and it saw him at the peak of his popularity. It paved the way for people to view him as the grand old man, the sobriquet that was later reversed from GOM to MOG, or murderer of Gordon.
In addition to which, God played His part in Gladstone’s campaign. Gladstone’s ideas and his energy were inspired by God, because he was God’s agent and he was needed at Downing Street. So Gladstone thought, at any rate. His popularity at this moment can be glimpsed in paintings appearing in the years that followed. For example, Alfred Morgan’s An Omnibus Ride to Piccadilly Circus, Mr Gladstone Travelling with Ordinary Passengers portrays a soulful Gladstone perched amid a crowd of typical passengers on a London omnibus. A wildly improbable scene but a vision which reflects his status as a man of the people. All this, his pamphlets, his speeches, his campaigning, his thunderous denunciations, unsettled Disraeli, and set the scene for Gladstone’s victory in the General Election of 1880, which also marked the end of Disraeli’s political career. After all the needling, Gladstone had had the last word.
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Gladstone’s advocacy regarding the state of the prisons in Naples was driven by a sense of moral outrage not accompanied by any particular political gain and his reaction to the atrocities in the Balkans was energised by a similar sense of political morality, though in this case his advocacy brought with it considerable political profit. The extent to which a sense of morality governed his politics in general is apparent, although it is worth noting that it is sometimes difficult to see the coherence in this great moral plan. The Liberals came to power in 1880 determined to step back from the overly imperialist foreign policy pursued by Disraeli yet it was Gladstone who fought and defeated the Boers in South Africa and who asserted British control over Egypt by means of invasion in 1882. Not that these decisions always came accompanied by political advantage. Gladstone’s policies in the Sudan, embodied in the shape of Gordon of Khartoum, were both militarily and politically disastrous.
The Irish Question, which dominated the latter phase of Gladstone’s long public career, came with little by way of political advantage and a great deal of political cost. Gladstone had been thinking about Ireland for many years and his political career had intersected repeatedly with Ireland, as did so many Victorian careers, before he engaged fully with the country as the central crusade of his political life. When Gladstone assumed the premiership late in 1868, one of his first legislative acts was the passing of the Irish Land Act, designed to protect Irish tenant farmers from unfair treatment at the hands of landlords and to provide for financial compensation in the event of eviction. It was in itself a modest Act. It made no provision for security of tenure and history shows that its effects were even more modest, for its measures were ineffective and widely ignored. It is important to note that the Act passed the Commons with an enormous majority, Liberals and Conservatives alike recognising the need to address the injustices swirling around the ownership and control of land in Ireland. Events in the wider economic world, moreover, also militated against the success of the Act. The agricultural sector went into depression in 1875, with the result that rents that had been affordable in 1870 now became unaffordable and tenants were now liable to be summarily evicted for non-payment.
For all its failings, however, this first Land Act was a sign of things to come. It was an indication that the system was not blind to the existence of a besetting problem in Ireland, that the system of land tenure did not support investment either by landlord or by tenant. It also indicated that British politicians were aware of warnings from history. They were aware that Ireland’s Great Famine of 1845–9, described by Lord John Russell as a ‘famine of the thirteenth century acting upon a population of the nineteenth’, indicated the need for change, investment and reform in rural Ireland. A million people had died in that famine, over a million more had emigrated so this was not an issue that could be simply sidestepped.
Gladstone was as well aware as anyone else of the need for sweeping changes in Ireland. Gladstone being Gladstone, this was much more than an issue of agricultural economics, it was also a question of considerable moral weight. It attracted his eye as a politician, a Treasury boffin and a Victorian moraliser. He had, in addition to all of these factors, been shamed by the remark flung at him by Schwarzenberg of Austria that the state of Ireland was as great a stain on the British body politic as were the foetid prisons of Naples on the face of Europe. This concatenation of circumstances combined with his belief that he possessed a God-given destiny to solve problems so the effect was a desire to act.
He was out of power for the latter half of the 1870s but once he returned to Downing Street at the head of a majority Liberal administration in 1880 his path was clear, and this decade marks the beginning of a new phase in his politics. As he wrote in a letter to his brother Sir Thomas Gladstone in 1885, ‘My profound desire is retirement, and nothing has prevented or will prevent me giving effect to that desire, unless there should appear to be something in which there may be a prospect of my doing what could not be as well done without me.’ That ‘thing’ was Ireland in general and the cause of Home Rule in particular.
The germ of the idea must have been in Gladstone’s mind for some time before it emerged publicly in 1885. A second Land Act took further steps towards regularising issues of tenancy and ownership in rural Ireland but by now a tide of Irish nationalism was rising and an upsurge of political violence in Ireland focused Gladstone’s mind. In particular, the assassination of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish and his under-secretary, Thomas Burke, close to Dublin’s Viceregal Lodge in May 1882, sent shockwaves through Westminster and convinced Gladstone that radical actions would be needed to ‘settle’ Ireland.
At first he sought consensus, suggesting discreetly to prominent Tory Arthur Balfour that the Conservatives ought to introduce a Home Rule bill for Ireland. The party had, after all, piloted Act after radical Act through the Commons, from Emancipation to the repeal of the Corn Laws to the Reform Bill of 1867, so why not Home Rule too? In December 1885, however, all of Gladstone’s cross-party hopes came to naught when his son, the MP Herbert Gladstone, flew the so-called ‘Hawarden Kite’. He announced to The Times that ‘Nothing could induce me to countenance separation, but if five-sixths of the Irish people wish to have a Parliament in Dublin, for the management of their own local affairs, I say, in the name of justice and wisdom, let them have it.’ He simultaneously briefed the Pall Mall Gazette to the effect that ‘Mr [William] Gladstone has definitely adopted the policy of Home Rule for Ireland and there are well founded hopes that he will win over the Chief Representatives of the moderate section of the party to his views.’ We cannot know what Herbert Gladstone was thinking in speaking so indiscreetly but the effect was to shatter any possibility of a consensus over the Irish Question. Thereafter, Home Rule was identified explicitly with sections of the Liberal Party, and especially with Gladstone himself.
Gladstone did not succeed in introducing Home Rule, though it was not for want of trying. The issue drove him to the very end of his political career. In 1892, at the age of eighty-two, he formed his last government still with Ireland on his mind. He split the Liberal Party on account of Ireland and he watched the Liberal Unionist faction come into being and complicate the arithmetic of the Commons, also on account of Ireland. At this point, it is worth emphasising that the fate of the Li
beral Party was never Gladstone’s principal concern, for he was never explicitly a party man. He began as a Tory, became a Peelite, joined and then split the Liberals. Whereas Disraeli was an assiduous builder of the Conservative Party organisation, Gladstone had no such interests. It was policy that drove him forward, policy put through a prism of morality, and Ireland must be understood as one of his great moral political crusades, even if an unsuccessful one. It is only by viewing the relationship between Ireland and Gladstone in these moral terms that it can be properly understood.
One of Gladstone’s other failings was in his dealings with General Sir Charles Gordon, almost entirely Gladstone’s fault. He agreed for Gordon to be sent to the Sudan, even though others thought it was madness to send an inspired warrior to lead a retreat. Even Gladstone soon realised his error, telling his family that Gordon could lead to the fall of the government and he started receiving troubled messages from the Queen. He had plenty of time to order a rescue of Gordon to be organised but he delayed, fearing, even when he finally authorised such a mission, that it would add 2d. to income tax. Perhaps Gordon and Gladstone were too alike. Both believed that they were on a divine mission and that the Almighty directed their works. Unfortunately, God seemed to give the two of them entirely contradictory instructions hence Gordon’s heroic martyrdom which plunged Gladstone into the depths of unpopularity, somewhat unfairly as Gordon directly disobeyed his clear orders. This allowed no respite for Gladstone and the music hall sang out ‘the MOG when his life ebbs out, will ride in a fiery chariot and sit in state on a red hot plate between Pilot and Judas Iscariot’.
This must have been a disagreeable time for Gladstone, who had clearly enjoyed the crowds’ admiration and now had the reverse. It perhaps shows the truth of William Forster’s swipe, ‘I attribute his [Gladstone’s] not being convinced [of Gorden’s being in danger] to his wonderful power of persuasion. He can persuade most people of most things, and above all he can persuade himself of almost anything.’ Gladstone had a stubbornness and self-righteousness that were thoroughly exposed by Gordon’s insubordination.
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Current scholarship has favoured Gladstone over Disraeli. Gladstone is seen as high-minded, liberal and far-sighted. Yet so much of what he did failed. Irish Home Rule was defeated, income tax was not abolished, the Liberal Party was left divided and Gordon died while the Sudan was invaded. Balfour in his eulogy, delivered in the Commons on the day of Gladstone’s death, said that the erstwhile Prime Minister ‘raised in the public estimation the whole level of our proceedings’ and perhaps he was right. Gladstone made politics and politicians seem honourable, important and honest. His relative absence of cynicism was no ploy but the genuine article and as his night prowls through London were a real effort to save fallen women, so his political career was devoted to helping mankind. Disraeli’s focus on the condition of the people may have been more materially successful and his cynicism rather more an act but history has been the judge of both men. Disraeli’s legacy has been scarred but Gladstone’s legacy, his failures notwithstanding, has remained unsullied. Perhaps this is the lesson he leaves us, that which Gladstone was is indeed of greater importance than what he did and that a public and articulated morality is the best tool politicians can have at their disposal for their posthumous reputation.
Gordon: Servant of the People
Too late! Too late to save him,
In vain, in vain they tried.
His life was England’s glory,
His death was England’s pride.
The scene is one common enough in the annals of Empire: the valiant British officer leading his troops in defence of civilisation and in the face of surely insurmountable odds. Sometimes, these odds prove to be in fact surmountable and a story of valour is forged in the heat of battle and victory. At other times, the context and setting prove too much, even for the doughtiest of warriors. The officer falls in the face of superior numbers and victory becomes defeat. Glory is equally possible and with death comes a story of heroism.
Such was the case with Charles George Gordon (28 January 1833–26 January 1885), better known as Gordon of Khartoum, who was struck down as he led a small British force fighting against all the odds in the Sudan. An image was memorialised by the painter George William Joy, and soldered into the Victorian imagination: General Gordon’s Last Stand portrays a British hero standing upright at the head of a staircase, imperious, dismissive of danger and of his enemies, careless of death. He bids his enemies begone, turns and is struck in the back with a spear and topples from the staircase to his death.
The real circumstances of his death are even more brutal. The consensus is that Charles Gordon was hacked to death and his head paraded around Khartoum on a stick. Yet the image of Gordon on the stairs was caught and endures and, as is the way with the stories of heroes, the real history of Gordon of Khartoum was occluded by myth. He was, for example, another Eminent Victorian unfortunate enough to catch the spiteful eye of Lytton Strachey, with the usual consequences for Gordon’s reputation in the twentieth century. Nonetheless, ‘Send for Gordon!’ He has retained something of his mystique, in spite of the critics.
In this chapter, the aim is to re-examine this British exemplar, this military hero, this globe-trotting servant of the Crown, who gave his life in its service. In particular, to emphasise the forgotten aspects of his story, his deep and unique religiosity; his ability to understand and empathise with the peoples of the lands, from China to Sudan, he visited as part of his ostensibly ‘imperial’ mission; and the sense in which his life helps to explain elements in this mission that are too frequently ignored or misunderstood.
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Charles Gordon was born in Woolwich, south-east London, one of the eleven children of Major General Henry Gordon and his wife Elizabeth. The Gordons were a Scottish family and were steeped in British military tradition, with four generations of service to its name. Henry Gordon served with the Royal Artillery and there was never any question but that Charles and his brothers would also enter the armed forces. Elizabeth Gordon had been an Enderby, a family that had made its fortune in whaling in the seas south of Australia and in the Atlantic shipping trade. Travel and an understanding of the great world, therefore, ran in the blood. By all accounts, the Gordons were a stable and happy family. The little Charlie, who was noted from an early age for his ‘robust playfulness of manner’, was chiefly the charge of Nurse Cooper, a lady who, ‘though she loved the boys, [merely] tolerated the girls’. The Gordons were devoutly Christian and religion would play a pivotal role in the later life of Charles Gordon.
Henry Gordon’s postings meant that the family enjoyed, or at any rate endured, a peripatetic life. They lived by turns in Ireland, Scotland and Corfu in the Ionian Islands, which, as the life of Charles Napier records, were at this time a British possession. The young Gordon’s education was nonetheless English, culminating in his accession to the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich. In the summer of 1852, at the age of nineteen, he joined the Royal Engineers. He had shown an aptitude for the art and science of cartography and his training focused on skills to do with reconnaissance, managed retreats and the sudden storming of enemy strongholds, all tasks necessary for a life and career at the cutting edge of the British imperial adventure.
Even at this early age, Gordon was a man with considerable charisma, a natural leader, even if his strong will meant that he was not invariably held in high esteem by his superiors. He was restive under orders and was apt to follow his own mind, neither of which characteristics was necessarily embraced in the armed forces. Another glimpse of the man he would presently become is in the fact that he had already absorbed the evangelical Christianity of his older sister Augusta and now he adopted a decidedly universal attitude to organised religion, attending a Methodist service one day, a Presbyterian one the next, a Catholic one the next. ‘The church is like the British Army,’ he remarked to a Catholic priest, ‘one army but many regiments.’ Gordon never formally adher
ed to any Christian Church but continued his wide range of Christian experiences for the rest of his life.
It is important to focus on Gordon’s religion. Without knowledge of his relationship with God, Gordon the man cannot be fully understood. Strachey certainly lit on this issue, and interpreted it unpleasantly: ‘He was Gordon Pasha,’ Strachey wrote, imagining the final days of Gordon in besieged Khartoum, ‘he was the Governor-General, he was the ruler of the Sudan. He was among his people – his own people, and it was to them only that he was responsible – to them, and to God.’ Jeering words from the disagreeable Strachey, yet ironically apt too, for they do capture something of the man and his unique relationship with God.
Augusta Gordon had lent her brother her copy of the eighteenth-century commentator Thomas Scott’s Commentary on the Bible and this text had immediate and enormous significance for Gordon. ‘To me,’ wrote Scott as he ventriloguized the Epistle of Paul to the Philippians 1:21, and the young officer avidly read and assented, ‘to live is Christ, and to die is gain.’ To present-day sensibilities Gordon might seem morbid, if excessively influenced by such words, but present sensibilities are reluctant to contemplate the possibility of death, which Gordon, as with most Victorians, was accustomed to all around him.
That said, Gordon stood out distinctively in his own time even to other Christians. In 1865, as he sat dutifully with his dying father, Gordon wondered:
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