by Roy Jenkins
There was consequently no sense of upheaval. The premiership merely passed from a man who would have been eighty-one to one who was seventy-three. They were the two oldest of those who had ever then held that office. This was indeed perhaps one of Russell’s attractions for Gladstone. The only fault with him that Gladstone could immediately find was his inactivity in organizing a proper state funeral for Palmerston. Gladstone stepped in as soon as he got back to London and ‘a solemn and touching scene’ (taking three and a quarter hours) was arranged in Westminster Abbey for the following Friday. It was an appropriate final act of courtesy in the relationship of Gladstone and Palmerston, who, agreeing on little, behaved with considerable propriety towards each other.
Nonetheless Palmerston’s death, in relation to both the achievements and the pyrotechnics of his career, passed surprisingly quietly. The House of Commons, despite his fifty-eight years of membership, was not recalled for tributes. Yet his death did mark the effective end of mid-century politics, even though Russell, like a juggler performing at the end of a play, as was fashionable in Paris theatres of the time, kept the season open for another eight months.
DISRAELI’S FOIL
AT THE TURN OF THE YEAR 1865–6, Gladstone was fifty-six, no longer young but with not a hint of an old man about him either, his hair still black, his face hard and lined, that and his lithe movements giving an
(accurate) impression of great power. There was none of the fuzziness of line which became a characteristic of his appearance from the age of about seventy onwards.
Disraeli was sixty-one, old and stiff for his years, but in some ways welcoming this, for, as with Harold Macmillan a hundred years later, an affectation of age became part of his style. The Queen, prematurely dumpy, was still only forty-six, although already the grandmother of both Kaiser Wilhelm II and King George V, as well as of a few others who had less Kaiserliche und Königliche futures. Russell, as we have seen, was seventy-three (although with twelve more years ahead of him), and Palmerston was dead. Most of the other mid-century politicians were also dead, and the stars of the end of the century, Salisbury, Joseph Chamberlain, Rosebery, William Harcourt, Randolph Churchill, had not emerged.
Britain was still pre-eminent. Her manufacturing strength was not to be seriously challenged until the American north-east had bounded forward after the Civil War, and the new German Empire had digested its gains of 1866 and 1870. Although on Gladstone’s fifth-sixth birthday the horrors of the Prussian siege of Paris and still more the Commune could not be foreseen, the glitter of the Second Empire was already wearing thin, and the French challenge to Britain was finally ceasing to be military, and was moving into a ninety- or hundred-year period when it was cultural and social rather than industrial or commercial. At home the ‘respectable’ working class was continuing to rise above the abyss and to form itself into mechanics’ institutes and friendly societies and craft unions with an ethos which attracted Gladstone’s approbation. And Ireland, at once the running sore of the Britannic Isles and the most conveniently placed of all areas of colonial exploitation, was quiet. But quiet in a temporary and deadened way, in the aftermath of the famine and the mass emigration. Gladstone more than almost anyone, although Disraeli once made a brilliantly prescient speech, had the foresight to see this and to see also that Ireland was capable, with a population a quarter of the British total (it had been a third before the famine) as opposed to the 3 per cent in Northern Ireland today, of gravely weakening the whole United Kingdom polity.
However, at the beginning of 1866 the Irish threat was largely either in the past or in the future. Although in fact the threshold of a period of great change, political, industrial and social, the 1860s seemed a time of unusual stability. There were only a few who would have emulated Edmund (later Lord) Hammond, permanent under-secretary of the Foreign Office, who told a new Foreign Secretary (Granville) within days of the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in July 1870 that rarely had he seen such a lull in Europe. But Hammond was in tune with a generally confident mood in British political society.
Perhaps because of this wider sense of stability some changes in the pattern of parliamentary and associated social life began to set in, which, once made, broadly persisted at least until 1939, and in many respects until the present day. Gladstone’s diaries, with their obsessive parcelling up of time, are an exceptional source book for patterns of life. Every day is recorded and often divided into quarter-hour slots. He was exceptional in the amount that he accomplished, and exceptional too in the waging of his unrelenting battle with time, but the fixed points of his days and his years did not differ greatly from those of other committed and successful contemporary politicians. In the 1860s they still lived under a very different regime, both within a day and within a year, from that which came to prevail in the twentieth century. The pattern of the day changed within a decade or so, the pattern of the year took nearer half a century to do so. In both cases the change was associated with a shift in parliamentary habits.
There is a widespread view that Parliament in the mid-nineteenth century was an undemanding occupation for gentlemen of leisure. So far as its leading members were concerned, this is not true. And even in the case of the larger numbers who saw their duties as being to listen and to vote rather than to speak, their assiduity in providing an attentive audience was much greater than is the habit today. What is the case is that the parliamentary year was then divided much more equally into a six- or seven-month session of intense activity and an almost equally long recess of undisturbed calm. Between 1855 and 1870 there was only one very brief autumn session of Parliament. Prorogation almost invariably took place between the last week of July and the third week in August and both Houses then remained in recess until the last days of January or, more frequently, the first week of February. (This pattern of six months of guaranteed recess became somewhat eroded in the last decades of the nineteenth century and disappeared finally by 1914; 1907 and 1913 were the last years without an autumn session.)
These long intervals of opportunity for non-London life and non-political activity were however balanced by the most strenuous parliamentary demands between February and August. The parliamentary day was slung very late, but it was long, with many of the most crucial hours being those after midnight, and the weekend, a term which has since invaded French but was then many decades short of establishing itself in English, was accorded little protection. Apart from the short Wednesdays (the equivalent of modern Fridays), Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays were full House of Commons days, which meant beginning at 4.30, mostly adjourning for a brief dinner interval at 7.30, and then continuing with major debates until an average of about 1.30 a.m., but quite often until 2.30 a.m. or even later. Saturday sittings were not regular, but not very exceptional either. Between 1948 and 1987 there were only two occasions when the House of Commons met on a Saturday, one because of the Suez War in 1956 and one on the day following the Argentine invasion of the Falklands in 1982. Gladstone mostly experienced twice as many in the course of a normal session.
In addition, Saturdays, particularly under the long Palmerston premiership, were the normal Cabinet day. And, to compound the insult, as it would seem to someone used to modern indulgences, one o’clock was the normal time of meeting; 3.30 or 4.00 p.m. was the normal time by which the business was completed.
Despite these obstacles, and despite the non-existence of any term for it other than a ‘Saturday to Monday’ and even that hardly coming into use until a few decades later, weekending was nonetheless becoming something of a habit with Gladstone, and no doubt at least as much with other less vigorous ministers too. He would often go to Cliveden, or less frequently to other Thames Valley, or Surrey, or Kent, or Hertfordshire houses after a Saturday Cabinet. On one occasion indeed he went to Cliveden (then owned by the Sutherlands) after a Saturday evening Buckingham Palace banquet. Such short journeys, done by train to the nearest local station, Taplow for Cliveden for instance, took no si
gnificant time longer than they would today. The railways had become reliable and quite swift, although not comfortable for long journeys. There were a lot of smuts and no dining cars. (The first meal served on an English train was in 1874, in a Pullman car between London and Bedford, but it was the early 1880s before restaurant cars became at all widespread.)
This stage of railway development joined with the habits of official life to make Home Counties retreats essential for weekend entertaining during the session. The great houses of the North and Scotland were reserved for the autumn and early winter, with the visits more on a midweek than a weekend basis. At these seasons the Gladstones were considerable country-house visitors. To take ducal palaces alone, and to use again the fifteen-year span between 1855 and 1870, they stayed at Albury, Blenheim, Chatsworth, Clumber, Drumlanrig, Dunrobin, Eaton,62 Holker, Inverary, Raby, Trentham and Woburn, at most of them more than once, and apart of course from the innumerable Cliveden ‘session’ weekends already mentioned.
With these and other short excursions the late Saturday arrival was balanced by the return not normally being necessary until late on the Monday morning. Indeed there is an impression throughout the week of light morning work. Breakfast parties were frequent, and were Gladstone’s favourite form of entertaining, although he and his wife also gave small dinners, mostly for eight or ten guests, and occasional evening parties, including in June 1865 a ball to which the Prince of Wales came and stayed until half-past two.
The ‘breakfasts’ were however predominant. Gladstone did not do them on the relentless scale of Monckton Milnes, of whom it was said that his reaction to news of the Second Coming would undoubtedly have been to send the Saviour a card for one of these repasts. Gladstone would probably not have approved of the joke (although his sense of humour was often unpredictable), but he did enjoy Milnes’s parties, and his own were by no means entirely different. In late July 1863 he noted, perhaps with relief: ‘Eight to breakfast. The twelfth and last [of the session].’ A detailed and friendly description of one which took place in June 1866 was given by Charles Adams, American minister in London, a commentator capable of considerable astringency (although not as much as his son Henry Adams, whose satirical novel Democracy portrayed the Washington scene of the 1870s in far from flattering terms). Adams wrote after he had received an oral invitation from Mrs Gladstone:
I decided to go. I found no cause to regret the decision for the company was very pleasant. The Duke and Duchess of Argyll, Lord Lyttelton, Lord Houghton, Lord Frederick Cavendish and his wife, and one of his uncles and several whom I did not know. I forgot Lord Dufferin. We sat at two round tables, thus dividing the company; but Mr. Gladstone took ours, which made all the difference in the world. His characteristic is the most extraordinary facility of conversation on almost any topic with a great command of literary resources, which at once gives it a high tone. Lord Houghton, if put to it, is not without aptness in keeping it up;63 whilst the Duke of Argyll was stimulated out of his customary indifference to take his share. Thus we passed from politics, the House of Commons, and Mr. Mill, to English prose as illustrated from the time of Milton and Bacon down to this day, and contrasted with German, which has little of good, and French. . . . After an hour thus spent we rose. . . . this is the pleasantest and most profitable form of English society.1
The breakfasts took place in Carlton House Terrace and not in Downing Street, and in this as in other ways were wholly dissimilar from Lloyd George’s working and persuasive meals of that name which were held first in 11 and then in 10 Downing Street a half-century later. Gladstone’s breakfasts were social as much as political in intent, and did not involve bacon and eggs or toast and marmalade. They comprised meat dishes and wine, spread themselves over most of the morning, say from 10.00 or 10.30 to 11.30 or noon, and might just as well have been called early-luncheon parties. They were comparable with, although less Lucullan than, the ‘breakfasts’ which in the 1870s Charles Dilke gave for Gambetta and other guests at the Café Anglais in Paris.
These ‘breakfasts’ obviously precluded much serious morning work being done, either before or after them, particularly as at the latter end Gladstone often went on a picture-viewing or buying expedition. How much could be done before obviously depended on what time he got up, and on this his diaries are curiously uninformative. But it cannot have been very early. Although he could perform short-term feats of endurance, he needed on average a good deal of sleep. At Hawarden, where there was nothing to keep him up at night, he habitually began with church at 8.30. But that implied no more than a 7.30 or 7.45 rousing, and in London with the persistence of nights which began only at 2.00 or 3.00 a.m. it is difficult to believe that he was not later.
Once the breakfasts, whether they were social or private, were over, there was no question of any further meal distraction until dinner. The hours between one and three, in complete contrast with, say, Churchill’s habits even under the worst stresses of the Second World War, were free for meetings or other business. Apart from the ‘luncheon’ at the Seaforth Rectory in 185364 and one or two provincial public occasions (as at Burslem, Staffordshire, in October 1863, where the lunch with speeches went on until past seven, and was then followed by a dinner at eight), the first diary mention of a London ‘luncheon’ was on 13 July 1862 and took place at Lord Granville’s house. But it was a Sunday (and therefore not a day of normal pattern), the time was not specified and there was no subsequent use of the word until an occasion, again on a Sunday, at Lord Lothian’s in 1867.
If there was no Cabinet or other meeting, the early afternoon up to about 4.30, around which time Gladstone mostly went to the House of Commons, was thus free for Treasury work. But there is little evidence that he did it in any routine office way. He was constantly writing political letters, frequently acquainting himself with official reports and occasionally preparing papers for the Cabinet. But there is little record of his ever going into the old Treasury Chambers between Whitehall and 10 Downing Street. He operated from one or other of his residences, 11 Downing Street or 11 Carlton House Terrace, and this meant that his own private reading and writing was much more intermingled with Treasury business than would otherwise have been so, or would normally be the case today. He spent very little time sitting in the Chancellor’s official room, with his officials on call, and working systematically through Treasury papers.
Having gone to the House of Commons at 4.30 or so, he rarely stayed there continuously, even when he was making a major speech. Indeed he claimed towards the end of his sixty-two years of membership that he had only once dined in the House. This must have been more a matter of habit than of gastronomy for although a healthy eater he never showed much interest in the refinements of cuisine. His normal breaktime began at 7.30, although it could be a little later, and was sometimes as brief as half an hour. Thursday and Friday, 13 and 14 March 1862 provide a fairly typical pair of House of Commons days. For the first: ‘H. of C. 4¾–7½ and 8½–1’; and for the second, when he dined at Lord Russell’s, ‘H. of C. 4½–7½ and 10½–11’.2
The three hours for dinner which he took on the second day, assuming that the Russell dinner started as soon as the House was suspended (and dinners, while they had receded a lot from six o’clock, which was quite usual in the early part of the century, were still earlier than the 8.30 which became fashionable in the 1880s and 1890s), was generous. Often he would be away from a dinner party within an hour and a half of arriving, thus posing a difficulty of reconciling the great number of courses which were offered and at least sometimes consumed65 with the speed with which they must have been served. This was not only to meet the needs of importunate parliamentarians but also because of the press of post-dinner activity in which the beau monde then engaged. These were the opera, the theatre, a considerable round of late-evening parties at Cambridge House (Lady Palmerston), Stafford House (Duchess of Sutherland), Derby House (Lady Derby) and many other Mayfair residences, as well as the occasional ball.
The Gladstones participated surprisingly fully; and when it is remembered that he added to these, not only his considerable late-night parliamentary commitments, but also his ‘rescue’ activities, often involving a couple of nocturnal prowls a week, it is amazing that he got any sleep at all. The six months of a mid-Victorian parliamentary session were sufficiently strenuous that the balancing length of the recess was not so much an indulgence as a need.
The interval of just over three years between the death of Palmerston and the beginning of Gladstone’s first premiership was a period of political confusion and paradox. It was also one in which Gladstone did not cover himself with glory. First as leader in the Commons with Russell as Prime Minister in the Lords, and then as a slightly inadept leader of the opposition trying in vain to deal with the weaving manoeuvres of Disraeli, he was not happily placed. He avoided again being leader of the opposition until 1886, when he had become so senior that he could discharge his duties at least as loosely as Churchill did in 1945–51.
The confusion, paradox and opportunism were memorably caricatured in Trollope’s Phineas Redux (published in 1873–4), in which Mr Daubeny (Disraeli) explained to his bewildered but bewitched party that, in order to maintain the values of conservative England, the true duty of the party of squire and parson was to dish the Whigs by disestablishing the Church. Substitute the franchise issue for disestablishment and this was an almost exact description of Disraeli’s behaviour in first wrecking both the Reform Bill and the government of Lord Russell, and then carrying through a much more radical Reform Bill of his own. Gladstone was the bewildered (but not bewitched; his opinion of Disraeli was never lower) victim of these kaleidoscopic tactics. He was not nimble enough to deal with Disraeli’s opportunistic turn of speed. As a result the good humour of his speeches, on which Dean Stanley had so strikingly commented in 1854, temporarily deserted him and he was judged by many to be blundering and blustering. This applied particularly after the last Derby government, which elided into the first Disraeli government, came in at the beginning of July 1866. Until then Gladstone had his continuing authority as Chancellor, and while not adjudged to be quick-footed as leader of the House was counted as formidable. At the end of April 1866, less than a week before his last budget, he even managed to make, on an amendment to the Russell government’s Reform Bill, which had been debated over eight nights, one of the most remembered of all his parliamentary orations. He spoke from one to past three in the morning, but was rewarded only with a government majority of five, well below its nominal strength. Nevertheless, ‘it was a famous victory’, or at least a famous speech.