The Victorians

by Jacob Rees-Mogg

  As any Victorian sage would, Dicey wrote a book, England’s Case against Home Rule, in defence of his cause and it became a bestseller. This was a book speaking to the faithful and not embarking on a fruitless effort to reconcile the irreconcilable. Moreover, the book marshalled Dicey’s argument against the weak case made for Home Rule. Dicey rehearsed all the arguments everyone had always used in opposition to Butt and Parnell before Gladstone’s conversion to their cause but he also despaired of the soft-headed, well-meaning Englishmen who canvassed solutions which were no solutions at all and hopes which were misplaced. Many sought to answer the demand for Home Rule by offering Ireland the measure of local government possessed by England. Dicey saw at once the absurdity of such arguments. He recognised that they would sate no Home Ruler.

  Dicey was also all too aware of the part that cynicism was playing in the debate. In particular he saw clearly that there existed English MPs who were weary of the Irish Parliamentary Party and frustrated by their politics of obstruction. They would be glad to see them gone for good from the chamber. Such cynicism was immoral in Dicey’s eyes. As he put it scathingly, ‘Cowardice masks itself under the show of compromise and men of eminent respectability yield to the terror of being bored concessions which their forefathers would have refused to the threat of armed rebellion.’

  He was also aware of the issue of Ireland’s northern province of Ulster. The north-east of Ulster formed the country’s industrial heartland and Protestant unionists made up the bulk of the population in these prosperous areas. Dicey was perspicacious in seeing immediately the lethal flaw Ulster constituted for nationalism. If the prospect of Irish secession from the Union was contemplated and conceded, what principle militated against Ulster’s secession from Ireland’s secession? It is a backhanded tribute to note that Irish nationalists did not even try to answer the ‘Ulster Question’. They knew what they were about and what they wanted. Dicey, in contrast, never lost sight of what breaking the Union would mean for those who had been loyal to it but who were now to be denied the rights they once had.

  The First Home Rule Bill was, for Dicey, pure Gladstonian chicanery. It had the effect of degrading British sovereignty, by proposing the creation of another body separate from the British Parliament and a body which could not help but think of itself as sovereign too in the sphere it claimed for itself. The bill rendered Parliament a practical nullity, whatever Gladstone claimed, and plainly its passage would do nothing for those to whom equal British justice was owed too. Home Rule, Dicey predicted, would not secure the place of beleaguered, unpopular, law-abiding minorities such as the unionists of Ulster. As for the complex position of Irish unionists in the rest of Ireland, this, after the partition of Ireland in 1921, was something Dicey himself would live to see. Dicey was clear that the maintenance of the Union equalled the maintenance of the law for all and the rights and freedoms conferred on all by the law. It says much about the unpopularity of the cause to which he attached himself that to this day Dicey’s memory is supposed to be tarnished by it.

  It also says something about the teleology of history and historians that Dicey is reckoned to have been ‘negative’ in his stance, when he was defending the status quo, while those who assailed the status quo are seen blandly as being a positive force. History may not always be written by winners but it is invariably written for them. Dicey stood by what existed already, while others sought to destroy it. He saw himself as the guardian of the Union, freed from petty party squabbles to make the case for it, but he was gloomy about its fate. He understood that to lose one great part of the state was a grim prospect. Any government could potentially bring this about and this, he was to come to see, was the great problem in the British Constitution. It could be undone, were ever statesmen foolish or venal enough to be minded so to do. Another charge which was made in his own time against Dicey and which has been amplified ever since is that he was a ‘catastrophist’, speaking the language of doom and dissolution. He did, because this is simply what he foresaw. It is an odd thing that markedly more violent and fear-laden arguments from his opponents have not likewise been tutted about for a century. In defending the Union, Dicey did something history and historians find hard to forgive. He stood by a cause that lost and made gloomy forecasts that were broadly right.

  Sales of England’s Case against Home Rule did not delude Dicey. ‘One check on vanity,’ he wrote to Eleanor, ‘is that though the book is a success, the day when a book could have real effect on politics is gone … The voters don’t read books and the book-reading classes are, I suspect, ceasing to have political interest.’ As the Home Rule crisis developed, Dicey refined his arguments to their essence and concluded that the problem of Home Rule was a question so fundamental no compromise could be attempted. This was not an easy matter for the English heart to contemplate. Yet it was true both for Dicey’s nationalist opponents as for him. What was the nation? Was it the Union or was it its parts? While the Union could be four nations in one, Ireland outside the Union could only be herself. These propositions were irreducible. It had to be one or the other.

  In June 1886 the First Home Rule Bill was defeated in the Commons courtesy of Liberal Unionist votes and a Tory government came into office with this faction’s lusty support. The constitutional arrangements of the United Kingdom seemed secure again but Dicey was adept at taking the longer view. The Vinerian Professor continued to pay attention to what the Home Rulers wanted beyond Home Rule. This was both in the sense of what they freely admitted and in terms of their unspoken, ultimate goals. In 1891, the Spectator called Dicey the ‘keeper of the Liberal Unionist conscience’ and he remained consistent in his vision. Thus, when Gladstone returned to office the following year and again failed to pass Home Rule, but this time thanks to the House of Lords, Dicey’s arguments were the same.

  In 1894, after Gladstone had left office for the last time, Dicey wrote to his friend Leo Maxse, editor of the National Review and lodestar of all which was most Tory, in pungent terms: ‘The attack on national unity is to me very like an invasion being an attack on the life of the nation, & I feel as I should about an invasion, that the one paramount duty of every man is to repel it.’ The Lords had stopped Home Rule again in 1894 but Dicey could see the walls crumbling in the future. It was in anticipation of this blow that Dicey contributed his next great interpolation to the Constitution. The Vinerian Professor became the father of the referendum in British politics. Although it did not happen in his time, his case for referendums in British political life is as persuasive now as it should have been then.

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  In Dicey’s view, the role of the referendum in Britain stemmed directly from the decline of the House of Lords. Its standing had begun to sink in the mid-1880s, in the context of the First Home Rule Bill, when the movement of Liberal peers to the Conservatives led suddenly to a loss of a precious balance in the chamber. The Lords was now overwhelmingly unionist in nature and while this might be viewed in many quarters as desirable, such a unified power base could not be and was not positive in terms of its standing in the country. That it was of one such firm view on the issue of the hour put it at risk of contamination by party politics, rather than being, as it ought always to be, somewhat above the cut and thrust. It could not in such circumstances discharge its developing role of making the Commons think again and pointing that House back towards the people who had sent them there.

  Dicey observed this new constitutional danger. He could see clearly that the country’s constitutional arrangements had to be strengthened to deal with the risk of potential short-term Commons squalls inflicting lasting damage. He could also see that, while the Lords itself needed reform, its ultimate power of bringing about a General Election must remain intact. None of this happened. Rather, from Dicey’s standpoint, the worst thing possible occurred in 1911, in the wake of the rejection by the House of Lords of David Lloyd George’s so-called ‘People’s Budget’. The Liberal government of Herbert Asquith, dependent once m
ore on the votes of the Irish Parliamentary Party, pushed through the Parliament Act, which removed the Lords’ veto and placed the prospect of Home Rule on the table once more. The Parliament Act had stripped the Lords of its most valuable power, while at the same time doing nothing to reform a chamber that was chronically in need of it. The result was a risky imbalance in Britain’s constitutional arrangements and this saga converted Dicey to the referendum as a necessary mechanism in the life of the country.

  In essence, he now discovered the great merit of the referendum, a mechanism at which he had once sniffed as fit only for the Swiss. It was a fine safety net, for when the party system could not handle an issue, it could be taken out of the parties’ hands and put in those of the people. As he more neatly put it, a referendum could become ‘the People’s Veto’. Writing to Prime Minister Lord Salisbury in 1892, Dicey made his case thus:

  Constitutional devices can rarely do much positive good; they may however … avert some evil arising from unnoticed though very real alterations in the working of the Constitution … I have long been convinced that the Referendum [must] sooner rather than later be introduced into the Constitution in order to guard the rights of the nation against the usurpation of national authority by any party which happens to have a Parliamentary majority. The principle of the Referendum has two great merits. It is at once honestly democratic in theory & conservative in practice.

  It provided a ‘check on tyranny’ and history was to vindicate this analysis, in that polities in which referendums are a feature of life tend towards long-term stability. The people have a habit both of knowing best and being prudent and there is much to be said for modestly and respectfully deferring to their wisdom.

  In language which will be familiar, Dicey observed that even the greatest of issues were apt to get lost in the muddle of a General Election, when a ragbag of controversies would randomly veer this way and that, with neither particular rhyme nor reason as to why anything should be any more or any less prominent than anything else. The beauty of the referendum, always assuming, as Dicey never for a moment contemplated could be otherwise, one respected it, was that it focused on the great issue at hand. The thing which had proved itself to be beyond the party system would not be beyond the clear-sighted judgement of the people.

  Unfortunately it was not to be. Referendums were not sensibly, prudently and harmoniously introduced into the national life as Dicey wished. The party system alone confronted the crisis of Home Rule and failed in the process. Dicey watched in horror as the situation in Ireland spun towards civil strife, as opposing sides armed themselves and drilled in preparation for war, as the popular sovereignty that Dicey had parsed long ago at Oxford now took hold among the unionists of Ulster in the face of the looming reality of Home Rule.

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  In terms of his reputation, it is to the credit of Albert Venn Dicey that he remained a democrat. When across Europe national unity was threatened in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the posture of the democrat was not universally adopted as a response.

  Decline and disenchantment pervaded the end of Dicey’s long life and not just because of the fate of the Union for which he had fought heart and soul. Rather it was because he realised that something had been lost in his lifetime. Historians have pilloried his political opinions as having become those of a fossilised reactionary, abandoning the lines of his radical and academic youth. Instead of disapproving of Dicey, however, his political commitment is worth admiring and it is worth noting that he fought the good fight willingly because he recognised its overwhelming importance.

  The elegiac quality to what Dicey’s life reveals about Victorian Britain is that he knew what he had lived to see, which was the loss of the true and fair liberalism of his youth. He had sought only to defend the state against violent and unreasonable schemes, he had loved Parliament only to weary of parliamentarians, in thrall to their parties as they were but had not been in his youth. Where progress once had meant only ever more freedom to do good, he lived to see a time in which socialism and collectivism rose in significance and where the state made it its business to decide what was good and what was not.

  From his chair as Vinerian Professor of Common Law at Oxford, Dicey reconstructed the prestige of the position he held and performed the role of secular oracle on public controversies. His opinion, however, was that he had simply done his duty, in this as in his other roles. He felt himself to be a ‘prophet of the obvious’, who lacked originality or inspiration. ‘Throughout life,’ he said of himself, ‘I have to an excessive extent, as I quite admit, followed the habit of expressing obvious thoughts on obvious matters, of which to my own knowledge I am by no means a complete master.’ This, his legal scholarship, was earnest hard work and it is for this that he is still applauded and was where his influence remained greatest. It still remains. It is not sullied by his unionism, which was principled and clear-sighted. He was a messenger whom naïve people wanted to shoot but his constitutional understanding has relevance today. It is his structure of Parliamentary Sovereignty and his understanding of referendums that provide the constitutional authority for the United Kingdom to leave the European Union. It is a sovereignty which ultimately is of the peoples which was not ceded because it could not be. Thank heavens for Albert Dicey.

  Grace: The Superstar

  On one level, the story which follows steps away from the ground so far trodden in this book. No House of Common debates, no Royal interventions, no military battles or diplomatic skirmishes, no bitter political rivalries and certainly no shadow of revolutionary France, no glittering edge of a guillotine.

  Instead, the story of a cricketing life.

  As every Englishman knows, there is more to the game of cricket than the sound, satisfying though it is, of leather on willow. More than any other sport, cricket at its best captures the soul of the nation. Fair play, etiquette and gentlemanly behaviour. It also exemplifies the reach and influence of English and British power around the world, for where the Empire went there also cricket went and there it remains to this day.

  The life of William Gilbert – W. G. – Grace (18 July 1848–23 October 1915) is also the story of cricket. He was its most famous English player, with a global name, true star quality and an extraordinary record of achievement and victory. Grace also complicates the story of cricket, and of England, in a way that is fascinating. His life is bound up, not only with cricket but with questions of class, money, etiquette, honour and raw ambition. All of these elements complicate the comforting image people may prefer to have of the game, of shadows lengthening across the outfield as a languorous, sunny English afternoon draws to a close. There was more, much more, to the Victorian game of cricket than this. There was more to England too, and in many ways Grace captures the swirl and tensions and contradictions of this Victorian world better than anyone else.

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  This chapter begins standing behind the stumps at The Oval cricket ground in south London on Tuesday 29 August 1882. Victoria had been on the throne for forty-five years, William Gladstone was her Prime Minister and under his direction British troops had just landed on the beaches of Alexandria, as the Anglo-Egyptian War exploded into life. On the field at The Oval Australia was playing England in the only Test of the summer tour. The skies, on this second day, were heavy and the light poor and a crowd of more than 20,000 had gathered to watch another struggle explode into life before their eyes.

  The Australians had won the toss on the opening day, elected to bat and promptly collapsed to 59 for nine wickets. By mid-afternoon, they were all out but when England came in to bat they too played badly. Fred Spofforth of South New Wales, the Australians’ most-feared pace bowler, known as the Demon, took seven wickets for 47 runs, with England’s famous W. G. Grace out for four. The first day of the Test concluded with England holding a slender lead. The second day saw Australia gradually inch up to 113 for the loss of six wickets. This was how matters stood midway through that second day
. It was finely poised and tense, with Billy Murdoch and Sam Jones holding steady against ferocious English bowling.

  Now, Murdoch hit a delivery and set off, with Jones running towards the stumps. There being no fielder nearby, the English wicketkeeper, Alfred Lyttelton, made his leisurely way out to retrieve the ball. He threw it to Ted Peate, who dropped it. Jones assumed the ball was ‘dead’ and stepped out of his ground. Strictly speaking, the ball was still ‘live’ and now Grace picked it up, broke the stumps and appealed to the umpire for a run out. Because the ball was indeed still ‘live’, the umpire had no choice but to award the wicket.

  If you are not a cricketer this scene requires some explanation, for it goes to the heart of what made the Victorian game so nuanced and coded. Today, Grace would be considered within his rights to act as he had done but on that late summer day in 1882 the situation was more ambiguous. For some observers, Grace had committed the cardinal sin of gamesmanship. He had violated the game’s code of honour, which demanded that he instead warn the Australians that they had made an error and would be punished if they did it again. In this argument, Grace’s action simply was not cricket. For others watching the scene that day, Grace had behaved honourably. He had stuck to the rules and that was that. In other words, it absolutely was cricket.