Gladstone: A Biography
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Aberdeen became Prime Minister of a Whig–Peelite coalition. Russell was a used-up man and the Queen and the Prince were set against Palmerston. So a Whig premier was effectively excluded. These two eagles of Whiggery occupied the two senior secretaryships of state, but Palmerston was kept out of the Foreign Office because of his rashness over Prince Louis Napoleon (who had in the meantime become the Emperor Napoleon III) and Russell was kept out of the Home Office because of the mess he had made of the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill. So they each went to the department for which they were less suited. For the rest the Peelites, who provided barely a tenth of the new government’s parliamentary backing, got the pickings. Apart from the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, they filled the War Office, the Admiralty and the Colonial Office, as well as holding the Privy Seal.
For the chancellorship Russell as the leader of the Whigs would have preferred Graham (who, however, preferred the Admiralty), and Delane of The Times tried to promote Charles Wood, who had been at the Treasury from 1846 to 1851. The most resolute for Gladstone were the Queen and Prince Albert. Aberdeen was content to fall in with their wish, and Gladstone for once accepted without demur or agonizing or conditions. In reality it would have been nonsense to have had anyone else. He had destroyed the previous budget and he obviously had to make the next one. After two and a half days at Hawarden, where he arrived in a hurricane at five o’clock on Christmas morning, he went to Windsor to be sworn in on 28 December, one day short of his forty-third birthday. His introspective musings on the year which was past, while mildly self-critical, were only a tithe in length (and self-abasement) of what had been his recent annual habit. It was a sign of his absorption, for the moment at least, in public business. He prepared to engage with the nation’s finances, the control of which he was to dominate for most of the next twenty years. But first he engaged between January and March 1853 with Disraeli about the furniture of 11 Downing Street (then numbered 12) and the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s robe.
Disraeli had paid his Whig predecessor, Wood, £787 12s 6d for the furniture of the house, and had subsequently got a refund from the Office of Works of £479 16s for that part of it which related to the public reception rooms. He therefore wanted £307 16s 6d from Gladstone for the rest. (The figures help to put Don Pacifico’s claims into perspective.) Gladstone thought that Disraeli should get the money from the Office of Works, which under a new disposition had assumed responsibility (subject to charging ministers for wear and tear in the private rooms) for the whole. Disraeli thought that this should apply only to future transfers, knew that the Office of Works was dilatory and was probably not averse to a private casus belli with Gladstone, to whom he had hardly been endeared by the events of the previous December. He may also have wished to create a diversion under the smoke of which he could hope to escape from the obligation to transfer the Chancellor’s robes, which he believed had been made for Pitt, and which he wished to keep.
As a result there occurred the most childish epistolatory quarrel. Gladstone wrote courteously if stiffly on 21 January (‘My dear Sir. . . . I remain, my dear Sir, faithfully yours, W. E. Gladstone’) proposing Office of Works payment for the furniture (on which point he was probably in the wrong) and requesting the transfer of the robes on the normal terms. Disraeli replied only on 26 February in nominally courteous but even stiffer terms (‘I have the honour to remain, dear Sir, your obedient servant, B. Disraeli’) rejecting the role of the Office of Works and ignoring the robes. Gladstone wrote again two days later, sticking a little woodenly to his two points. Disraeli on 6 March mounted into the high and disdainful saddle of the third person. ‘Mr Disraeli regrets very much that he is obliged to say that Mr Gladstone’s letter repudiating his obligation to pay for the furniture of the official residence is not satisfactory. . . . Mr Disraeli is unwilling to prolong this correspondence. As Mr Gladstone seems to be in some perplexity on the subject, Mr Disraeli recommends him to consult Sir Charles Wood,36 who is a man of the world.’
Gladstone the next day wrote a pained reply, also in the third person. He agreed to pay ‘without in any degree admitting the justice of Mr Disraeli’s assumptions’, and by omission gave up on the robes. He concluded: ‘It is highly unpleasant to Mr. W. E. Gladstone to address Mr. Disraeli without the usual terms of courtesy, but he abstains from them only because he perceives that they are unwelcome.’10 Gladstone sent his cheque, but Disraeli kept his robes, wore them during his two subsequent chancellorships, and left them as treasures of Hughenden Manor, his Buckinghamshire house.
Gladstone had to have a new set made, which descended without difficulty until Sir William Harcourt in 1886. Harcourt, however, took these ‘Gladstone’ robes with him when the government went out. Lord Randolph Churchill therefore had another new set made, but Goschen, who quickly succeeded him, declined to buy and preferred to have yet another set made. The ‘Churchill’ robes were subsequently worn only by Winston Churchill in 1924–9. These ‘Goschen’ robes appear to be the ones still in use today. There have therefore been at least three breaks in the apostolic succession since Pitt, even assuming the uncertain fact that Disraeli’s robes were Pitt’s.
On 3 February, robeless and with the furniture still unpaid for, Gladstone had moved into 12 (11) Downing Street, which house or its next-door neighbour he was to have at his disposal for twenty-two of his remaining forty-five years of life. He had already overcome the first obstacle to the success of his chancellorship, which was the need to get re-elected by Oxford. This was more than a formality, for clerical opinion was distinctly unenthusiastic both about the defeat of the short-lived Conservative government, in which event Gladstone had played so notable a part, and about the Peelite decision to coalesce with the Whigs. Archdeacon Denison of Taunton, Gladstone’s senior by a year at both Eton and Christ Church and one of his leading High Church mentors, had written him a terrible letter on the day after Christmas. ‘I wish to use few words’, Denison wrote, ‘where every word I write is so bitterly distressing to me, and must be little less so, I cannot doubt, to yourself and to many others whom I respect and love. I have to state to you, as one of your constituents, that from this time I can place no confidence in you as representative of the university of Oxford, or as a public man.’11 37
Denison was naturally disputatious, and was soon to get involved in a quarrel with his diocesan of Bath and Wells which led to his being prosecuted before an ecclesiastical court, but on the occasion of his letter to Gladstone, unattractively though he licked his lips over the pain it caused, he had some legitimate grievance against the author of The State in its Relations with the Church, the extremism of which work had contributed to Gladstone being elected for Oxford in the first place. Now Gladstone had just joined a government which was overwhelmingly dependent on Whig parliamentary votes, of which the Prime Minister was a Scots Presbyterian, the Foreign Secretary, who was also leader of the House of Commons, was the nominator to Hereford of the allegedly heretical Bishop Hampden as well as the heir to all the Erastian and despoiling traditions of the Russells, and the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (important for ecclesiastical patronage) was the Radical Sir William Molesworth, who was accused of being a Socinian, which was more or less the equivalent of a Unitarian.
At the by-election which followed from Gladstone’s appointment as Chancellor, a standard-bearer for these grievances was found in the shape of Dudley Montagu Perceval, son of the assassinated Prime Minister of 1812. Spencer Perceval is not (except for his end) one of the most remembered heads of government, but he was a model both of statesmanship and of amiability compared with his son, who mounted a scurrilous but damaging campaign against Gladstone. He polled 892 to the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s 1022, the narrow result a temporary relief but an early harbinger of the mutual disenchantment of the University constituency and its member which was to end in divorce twelve years later.
Once this hurdle was surmounted, even if narrowly, Gladstone got down to the l
ong straight run of preparation for his first budget, which he presented on Monday, 18 April. Even by his own Herculean standards he worked unusually hard in those spring weeks, although Morley’s claim that he put in ‘thirteen, fourteen, fifteen hours a day’ at his Treasury desk seems an exaggeration. Most nights Gladstone needed seven or eight hours of sleep, and he continued to dine out frequently, to give almost daily Latin lessons to one or other of his two elder sons, to go to two if not three church services on Sundays, to attend Cabinets, to discharge his normal House of Commons voting duties, and even to do a little ‘rescue’ work. So Morley’s arithmetic does not quite add up, even though Gladstone compensated for his excursions into both social and sinful London by many hours of subsequent late-night work on income tax or customs duties.
The budgetary prospect in the spring of 1853 was more strategically challenging than tactically menacing. Nineteenth-century Chancellors, at least in peacetime, were subject to none of the short-term pressures by which, in the decline of the British economy, their post-1930 successors have been frequently buffeted. In the 1850s there was no danger of a weak budget leading to a run on sterling. Furthermore, and with greater particularity, the short-term financial prospect had become relatively easy. The official estimates on which Disraeli had framed his December 1852 proposals were pessimistically false, a somewhat persistent Treasury habit. On the basis of them he had to perform some considerable sleights of hand to pretend that he had a surplus, and on those premisses Gladstone had been right in criticizing its hollowness. But by the spring the out-turn had produced a genuine surplus of £2½ million and Gladstone had no immediate problem.
The challenge which he had to meet, if he was to be a major Chancellor, was at once a more subtle and a longer-term one. Whig financial policy between 1846 and 1851 had been unimpressive, and Charles Wood, the Chancellor throughout these years, had not compared in influence within the government with Russell himself, with Palmerston as Foreign Secretary, with George Grey as Home Secretary or with Lansdowne as Lord President of the Council. (The low regard in which his chancellorship was held did not, however, prevent Wood as President of the Board of Control from being a querulous Cabinet critic of Gladstone’s 1853 proposals.) Then Disraeli, in his two 1852 budgets, had been looking more for a smokescreen under which his party could escape from the incubus of protection than for a rational framework of finance for the country. The result was a series of unconnected improvisations. The second Disraeli budget particularly had been a conjuror’s rather than a philosopher’s or even a political economist’s budget. That at least was the ground on which Gladstone had destroyed it.
This left him, as the incoming Chancellor, with a heavy obligation to coherence, as well as an heir’s desire to revive the Peel tradition of probity and courage. His need was not so much a budget for a year as a system of finance for the third quarter of the century. This he was held to have produced, and his achievement in this respect, made the greater by his having to get his proposals through a disparate Cabinet made up of men unused to working together and a House of Commons in which the government had no secure majority, laid the foundation of much of his subsequent reputation. And rightly so, it may be said, for the 1853 budget (and its two 1854 successors) enabled the country to go through the Crimean War, which subverted the public finances of France and Russia, in such a way that when he returned to the Exchequer in 1859 he found a platform of sound fiscal strength and a national wealth which had increased by nearly a fifth since his first impact on the Treasury.
Alternatively it could be argued that the 1853 budget was a triumph more of personality than of prescience, that Gladstone got at least as many things wrong as Disraeli had done, and that the centre-piece of his presentation was just as much of a rabbit out of a hat as anything which Disraeli had produced. What Gladstone indisputably did, however, was to set his proposals in a schematic framework, and to argue for them from first principles, as well as with a wealth of historical and comparative fiscal analogy. The result was that he gave the impression of having brought a large ship into a constricted harbour with unusual deftness controlling latent power.
The speech in which these qualities were displayed fully matched the importance of the ship which it steered. It took four and three-quarter hours, from approximately five o’clock to just before ten on the evening of Monday, 18 April. The speech occupied seventy-two columns of Hansard and was the longest (although not by a very wide margin) that he ever made in the House of Commons or anywhere else. Yet the sums of money with which it dealt were by modern standards derisory. The total size of the budget was £52 million. Even making a full allowance for the change in the value of money and applying a factor of fifty, this would be the equivalent of a modern budget of just over £2½ billion, about 2 per cent of today’s actual total. The income tax, the treatment of which was the central issue of suspense and controversy in Gladstone’s budget, brought in £5½ million, the equivalent, after the application of the fifty factor, of £275 million today, an amount shifted by the most minor modern adjustment of allowances.
None of this prevented the budget of 1853 sending out large political ripples, and maybe a few economic ones too. Gladstone had difficulty in getting it through the Cabinet. In this respect, as well as in its length and in the near nullity of one of his principal measures, it was a worthy forerunner of the famous budget of 1909. Among those who were most querulous were Wood, the unsuccessful Chancellor of the Russell administration, and Graham, close Peelite colleague though he was, who might himself have become Chancellor, but did not, when Aberdeen formed his government. Palmerston also was strongly opposed to the succession duty on landed property which Gladstone introduced, and so indeed, in their hearts at least, were nearly the whole of the Cabinet.
On Saturday, 9 April, there began the nine-day climax of Gladstone’s several months of budgetary preparation. Fortified by a visit on the previous day to see the plans and site for Panizzi’s Round Reading Room at the British Museum, he expounded his proposals to Prince Albert from 1.00 to 2.00 p.m. (unlike the more recent practice a pre-budget visit to the Sovereign herself did not then seem to be necessary) and almost immediately afterwards gave the Cabinet a three-hour exposé. This left his colleagues sufficiently stunned (the Duke of Argyll, who was to sit in Cabinets with Gladstone for another twenty-eight years, wrote that he ‘never heard a speech which so riveted my attention’) that there was practically no discussion at that stage. But in the following week there were four argumentative Cabinets between the Monday and the Saturday. Morley summed up the position after the first of these with almost the blandness of a Cabinet Secretary (which official was not to exist for another sixty-three years): ‘At the end of a long and interesting discussion, there stood for the whole budget Lord John [Russell], Newcastle, Clarendon, Molesworth, Gladstone, with Argyll and Aberdeen more or less favourable: for dropping the two extensions of income tax and keeping half the soap duty, Lansdowne, Graham, Wood; more or less leaning towards them, Palmerston and Granville.’12
Gladstone seems to have dealt with this unpromising situation with exemplary patience. He did not fulminate and he did not for once threaten resignation, except on one point which he described as ‘the breaking up of the basis of the Income Tax’. He relied on his mastery of the detail and on the solidity and consistency of his scheme, which he rightly opined would lead to the waves of opposition breaking in contrary directions and leaving his steadily steered ship to sail down the middle. It took fifteen and a half hours of Cabinet discussion to get the budget approved, but it eventually emerged unscathed: ‘Thus the whole Cabinet after finding that the suggested amendments cut against one another ended by adopting the entire Budget – the only dissentients being Ld. Lansdowne, Graham, Wood, S. Herbert. Graham was full of ill auguries but said he would assent and assist. Wood looked grave and said he must take time.’13
It was permission to move to the next and public stage, but it was hardly a confidence-giving endorsement
for a young and first-time Chancellor. Clearly the other putative Chancellors, Wood and Graham, sat glowering like the two ugly sisters. Lansdowne was a very senior Whig, seventy-three at the time, who had himself been Chancellor nearly fifty years before. And Gladstone’s beloved Sidney Herbert, it might be thought, behaved with less than the loyalty of a close friend, particularly as he had just taken the Gladstones to the Herbert family house at Wilton for a four-day Easter week break, the Chancellor’s only interlude in the long run-up to the budget.38 Nor was the solidarity of the Peelite front wholly restored at this stage by the Prime Minister. Aberdeen’s salient comment, ‘You must take care your proposals are not unpopular ones,’ was no more notably constructive than it was supportive.
Gladstone was undismayed. On the Sunday after the last of the five Cabinets he went to church twice, wrote a small ration of letters, saw Herbert and Newcastle and read Dante’s Paradiso, but ‘was obliged to give several hours to my figures’. On the Monday he ‘devoted [himself] to working on [his] papers and figures for this evening’, but drove and walked with his wife before going to the House at 4.30 and starting his marathon oration a quarter of an hour later: ‘my strength stood out well thank God’. At eleven o’clock, about an hour and a quarter after sitting down, ‘the Herberts and Wortley’s came home with us and had soup and Negus [hot sweetened wine and water]’.39 By that time he knew that the presentation of the budget had been a triumph, but recorded it modestly, merely writing ‘Many kind congratulations afterwards.’ By the next day, however, he had graduated to: ‘I received today immeasurable marks of kindness, enough to make me ashamed. . . . But my life is wholly unworthy of these consolations.’14