Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Less than three months later James Graham died unexpectedly at sixty-nine. Gladstone had not been as emotionally close to Graham, a less highly strung character, as to the other two, but he had been the one upon whom he most depended for sensible advice, and Graham’s last significant Commons speech, in support of the 1861 budget, had been made in response to a direct appeal from Catherine Gladstone that an intervention from him would make her husband feel less isolated. Newcastle, Gladstone’s contemporary like Herbert, survived only three years after Graham. In June 1862, Charles Canning, another contemporary and the son of Gladstone’s first political hero as well as himself a former Governor-General of India, also died, and the Peelites, apart from Gladstone himself and Cardwell, who although able and ambitious, was never central to the group, became collectively extinct. Thereafter Gladstone had no partners with even a claim to equality.

  Not only the Peelites were vulnerable in the early 1860s. Within the government, Campbell the Lord Chancellor died in June 1861 and George Cornewall Lewis the Home Secretary in April 1862. Office is normally a preservative, and it was unique for a Cabinet to have a third of its members struck down in office, four of them within a year. It was made the more remarkable by the fact that its chief, healthily imperturbable, sailed on to an age at which nobody had previously contemplated presiding over a government. (Gladstone overtook him when he formed his fourth administration.)

  Outside the British government, Cavour went of a fever in June 1861, the Prince Consort of, maybe, another one in December of the same year, and John Neilson Gladstone in February 1863. Of these deaths, that of the Piedmontese statesman who had so kindled Gladstone’s Italian enthusiasm in 1859 was affecting (‘What a deathbed: what a void’2 was his characteristic comment on reading an account of Cavour’s end) and that of his brother with whom he had first seen Italy thirty-one years before much more so. The attention which he devoted to performing every possible fraternal service at and after the death of J. N. Gladstone was remarkable by any standards, and particularly so for someone carrying Cabinet responsibilities. He went to Bowden Park, near Chippenham, three days before his brother’s death and stayed there for ten days, returning to London only after the funeral. He wrote long harrowing accounts of the deathbed scene, the tone of which can be judged from his concluding sentences:

  The chamber of death was cleared: and then the loud weeping went through all the house: but when it had sounded in the room it was hushed again; they [his brother’s daughters] restrained themselves lest at the solemn moment of his passage to his God, he should be intruded on by human earthly woes. But we are near the break of Saturday’s dawn.3

  Gladstone then spent a week comforting his seven orphaned nieces (and one seven-year-old nephew), arranging the funeral, and clearing up the estate, both legally and physically. His slightly officious sense of family duty, his morbidity and his religious commitment united to make him an exceptional mourner. Tom and Robertson Gladstone were also present at the death and the funeral, as indeed was Helen, but they, although largely unoccupied, neither stayed for long nor took the central responsibility.

  It was nonetheless the demise of Prince Albert which not only carried its extraordinary panoply of national mourning but also made the greatest difference to Gladstone’s future. He had been staying at Windsor only fifteen days before the Prince’s death, and although he was subsequently to pass many long weeks as minister in attendance at Balmoral as well as continuing to make occasional one- or two-day semi-official visits to Windsor, his position as one of the Queen’s favourite politicians, his diligence and loyalty as a minister fortified by her interest in and close knowledge of his wife and children, began to decline almost as soon as the Prince became a sacred but frozen memory and not a present adviser. This was well before Disraeli had major opportunities to ingratiate himself and poison the springs of the Queen’s relationship with Gladstone.

  The papers-duties issue and the antipathy to the Lords which arose out of it gave Gladstone what was, until then, one of his few popular causes. The issues on which he had hitherto fought his strongest parliamentary battles were not calculated to make him a hero of the people. Standing out against anti-papist hysteria, denouncing the excesses of Lord Palmerston’s jingoism as in the Don Pacifico debate, resisting an enquiry into the mismanagement of the Crimean War and then advocating an early peace with Russia rather than outright victory, keeping divorce as a wholly exceptional upper-class privilege, defending small boroughs as ‘the nurseries of statesmen’, and upholding the full rigour of church rates on Dissenting parishioners may all have been appropriate issues for thundering speeches from the member for Oxford University. But they were not likely to win him a mass popular following.

  Yet his personality as it was developing in his sixth decade, and above all his vibrant and declamatory speaking style, began to cry out for the stimulus and indulgence of mass popular audiences. The House of Commons was where he had made his reputation and where he exercised his power, but the capacity of the chamber was no more than 500 rather blasé members, a handful of ladies behind a grille and a few hard-scribbling reporters. And Gladstone, just in the way that some runners are better at a mile than a sprint, and some reviewers at 3000 rather than 1000 words, was developing into a natural 5000- or even 15,000-, arena man. The Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, let alone the London banquets and lectures, at which he increasingly often recorded himself as ‘giving thanks for the House of Commons and/or Ministers’ or for the quality of the (frequently) episcopal address, could not begin to fill his needs in that respect.

  Aided by the affront which his 1859 by-election had inflicted this created a conflict of constituency pulls. In the summer of 1861 he seriously contemplated an immediate withdrawal from Oxford and a transfer to another seat. South Lancashire, which became his destination after his 1865 defeat, was immediately on offer because a third seat was being created there, and deputations waited upon him. This constituency had the advantage for oratory of geographically embracing both Liverpool and Manchester (although not preventing their independent representation in Parliament), and thus holding out the enticing prospect of addressing great assemblies in the St George’s and Free Trade Halls. The other possibility was the not very demotic although at that stage safely Liberal one of the City of London, where the Foreign Secretary, one of its four members, had decided, on the threshold of seventy, to become a peer. He thus exchanged the name of Lord John Russell, to which he had given a unique reforming resonance, for the more routine ex-Prime Ministerial earldom, which has nonetheless descended through three generations of exceptional intellectual quality. Eventually, to the considerable relief of the Prime Minister, Gladstone decided to stay where he was until the next general election. Palmerston hoped Oxford would keep him at least half muzzled. Gladstone had to settle for the small step of resigning from the Carlton Club, which he did in March 1860 and which his faithful amanuensis Robert Phillimore thought a considerable mistake, particularly as Phillimore added encouragingly, ‘They hate Gladstone more at Brooks’s than they do at the Carlton.’.

  Relations between Gladstone and the Prime Minister proceeded on a superficially uneven keel. Their correspondence mingled the most crunching and forthright disputes, on matters both of substance and of form (the latter generally the more dangerous between colleagues), with bursts of consideration for each other. Gladstone would be delighted to defer to the Prime Minister on the date of the Whitsun recess and hence when his Finance Bill might start in committee. Palmerston was happy to make the Provost of The Queen’s College Bishop of Gloucester, and would Gladstone like to convey ‘the news to his constituent’? The Lord Chancellor had unfortunately died and what were Gladstone’s views about a replacement and consequent promotions among the Law Officers? They both of them showed a most admirable ability to argue vehemently without personal bitterness. When for the 1861 budget Gladstone finally got his renewed attempt at removing the paper duties through a Cabinet which the day before a
ppeared to have been almost unanimously against him, he added to his relief his appreciation of ‘Ld. P. yielding gracefully’.4

  Yet some of the disputes were very sharp. In late February 1861, just after the Estimates had been settled, Palmerston sent round a paper demanding an extra £3 million for naval defence. This would be the equivalent, in relation to today’s budget size, of a Prime Minister suddenly demanding an extra £10 billion of uncovenanted expenditure, rather comparable with the costs a century and a quarter later of another Prime Minister’s commitment to the poll tax. However, Chancellors were more robust in those days. Within an hour or so, Gladstone sent back ‘a strong paper of objection, amounting at one point nearly to complaint’, and Palmerston’s demand evaporated.

  Three months after this the Prime Minister was writing what could hardly be regarded as either a friendly or a supportive letter to his Chancellor: ‘You must be aware that your Budget is not much liked in the House except by the comparatively small Band of Radicals below the gangway, who are thought to be your Inspirers in financial matters. . . .’5 And another two months after that Palmerston was complaining that his rights as First Lord of the Treasury were being abrogated. He did not intend to assert them over the Chancellor to the extent that Sir Robert Peel had (a shrewd thrust), but: ‘I wish it to be clearly understood between us that I do not intend to be set aside as I have been on this occasion, and to be made without my Knowledge and Consent a virtual Party to Proceedings of which I intirely disapprove.’6

  This arose out of an obscure dispute about the financing of the new Law Courts in the Strand, which Gladstone for a variety of reasons, mostly but not all associated with the cost of the site, had wanted to be in Lincolns Inn Fields instead. Gladstone had to deal with this letter on the day on which he also gave his final decision to the South Lancashire deputation, conducted the committee stages of his Inland Revenue Bill for four hours, and made another Commons speech in a debate on the Italian situation, which concluded at 1.15 a.m. This did not cause him to delay in his ‘second and long letter to Ld. P. in reply to his indictment – [written] after consultation with Sir J. Graham’. The press of events did, however, lead him to write: ‘What a day, my brain whirled.’7

  His reply to Palmerston began as though it were going to be an apology: ‘I have read with much regret your letter of today.’ But the regret soon turned out to be more associated with Palmerston having written the letter than with Gladstone having provoked it. There next followed a substantial chunk of moderately convincing justification for Gladstone’s view that he had not acted discourteously or unreasonably. Then he reached his admonitory but not succinct conclusion:

  At the same time, meaning to speak without reserve, and not being certain that your letter has been written in momentary forgetfulness, and under the pressure of events, of the facts I have related, I cannot omit to say that its language appears to me to be of equivocal construction, and suggests the idea that you may have meant by its tone to signify that you thought the time may have come when the official connection between us ought to cease. If such is your intention I beg by this letter to leave the matter entirely at your choice, and I shall feel that at the close of the session, in the present state of our financial affairs, it can be done without any public inconvenience. If you have no intention of this kind, please to consider the last sentence as never having been written. I shall expect to hear from you before any Cabinet is held.8

  The next Cabinet took place the following afternoon and proceeded normally, without any disruption of the government. Palmerston had presumably assured Gladstone that his admonition was in no way to be interpreted as a desire for a separation. Gladstone had made it clear that he was no man to accept a rather half-baked rebuke. On the other hand he may have been contributing to the impression in Palmerston’s mind that he talked about resignation too freely and frequently for there to be much need to take it seriously. Gladstone’s pattern, the Prime Minister disparagingly informed the Queen in the following year, was ‘ineffectual opposition and ultimate acquiescence’.9

  What was also the case was that as Gladstone’s budgets succeeded each other throughout the first half of the 1860s – he produced a total of seven under Palmerston – and as their financial skill made at least some of Palmerston’s extravagances compatible with modest surpluses, and as they also coincided, the severe trade hiccup of the American Civil War apart, with the continuation of mid-Victorian prosperity, so the idea of Gladstone performing his spring rites at the Treasury came almost to assume the status of a national institution. The university boat race in March, a Gladstone budget in April, the opening of the Royal Academy in May were all signs of stability. This gave a growing strength to Gladstone’s position, however much he might irritate Palmerston. It is reminiscent of the position in the Federal Republic of Germany a hundred years later when Ludwig Erhard’s economic management provided the essential foundation for Adenauer’s foreign policy successes, but earned no affection from his chief as a result. Gladstone, however, was a much more formidable political personality than Erhard, who knew how to run an economy but not how to run a government.

  Gladstone’s growing reputation for probity and indispensability provided his often unstable personality with necessary cushions for its rashness. This rashness, apart from his vertiginous sexual–charitable forays, showed itself in three bewildering political excursions during these last years of Palmerston. The first was his animadversions on the American Civil War, the second his attempt to tax charities, and the third his sudden lurch towards universal (male) suffrage.

  In April 1862 he began a new wave of provincial political forays. The first was to Manchester, and was not significantly different in form from the visit which he had paid to the same city nine years before. He stayed for three nights a little off-shore in the Cheshire residence of a rich manufacturer. On one day he inspected the factories of his host and of one or two others. On the first two evenings there were large dinner parties at which Gladstone held forth, or ‘conversed’ as he put it, on the distress of the cotton trade which was already resulting from the American Civil War. On the third evening he gave a major address, which was the central purpose of the visit and to which he had devoted far more effort of preparation than any House of Commons performance, other than a budget, had ever seemed to call forth. He was at it on the first evening, on the second afternoon, on the third morning, and then, an almost unheard-of practice, ‘read it aloud to C[atherine] by way of trial’. It was delivered in the Free Trade Hall ‘crowded with a most cordial auditory [sic]’. The subjects were the not altogether complementary ones of Prince Albert and the cotton trade. But most interesting was the nature of the audience for which he took such trouble. It was the Association of Lancashire and Cheshire Mechanics Institutes. There was nothing demagogic about what he said. Even the Queen was pleased, and somewhat moved, by his tribute to the late Prince Consort. And on distress in the cotton trade he was naturally as Chancellor rather defensive. But he was nonetheless paying high respect to what was essentially a working men’s organization.

  The next day he devoted himself to civic festivities: the presentation of an address at the Town Hall with a full-scale Gladstone speech in reply; a special service in the cathedral; a luncheon with more speeches; and then off to Hawarden in the afternoon. It was a visit, except for its more leisurely time-scale, such as any leading politician might have paid to any major provincial city a hundred years later. The difference was that in 1862 very few of them did. Gladstone was breaking new ground, and he did it still more noticeably in the North-east in the following autumn.

  The pattern there was similar to Manchester, except that the shipbuilding rivers of the Tyne, Wear and Tees introduced an element of water pageant, the enthusiasm was greater, and Gladstone was more indiscreet. He and Catherine Gladstone arrived from Carlisle (near where they had been staying with the then eighty-four-year-old Lord Brougham, to whom Gladstone had latterly become a devoted visitor) on Monday
, 6 October 1862, and were installed in the considerable establishment (Gladstone wrote of ‘the Park and Gardens of this beautiful place’) beyond Gateshead of William Hutt, who was then MP for that town. As at Manchester there were large dinner parties for local notables. On the Tuesday morning, as well as a myriad other activities, Gladstone ‘reflected further on what I should say about Lancashire [a curious choice of subject for Tyneside] and America’.10 Then to Newcastle where, after appraising Grey Street as ‘I think our best modern street’, he addressed at 6.00 p.m. ‘a crowded and enthusiastic dinner of near 500’ in the Town Hall. He commented that the hall was ‘not very easy to fill with the voice’. Nevertheless his words rang only too far and too fast, to London and across the Atlantic. The notorious passage, as it quickly became, was this:

  We know quite well that the people of the Northern States have not yet drunk of the cup and they are still trying to hold it far from their lips – which all the rest of the world see they nevertheless must drink of. We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South, but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made what is more difficult than either, they have made a nation.11