Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  The Sunday, however, appeared to be the more highly charged day. It began naturally enough with a service at the local church, which was Cranborne, but continued strangely, there being no service in the afternoon, with Mr Thistlethwayte ‘reading a Sermon of over an hour’. There was also a walk with Mrs Thistlethwayte, in addition to which she ‘came to my rooms aft. and at night’. Then the lushness of Tennysonian romanticism took over, which was always a bad sign with Gladstone: ‘Miss Fawcett [a maid or a guest, and whose hair?] let down her hair: it is a robe. So Godiva “the rippled ringlets to the knee”.’33

  On the Monday he drove to and from a meet of foxhounds with his hostess, before she saw him and Arthur Kinnaird off at Fordingbridge station. He was back at Waterloo at 7.15 p.m., in time for dinner with his Chief Whip, which comprised ‘3 hours with Fortescue [Irish Secretary] and Sullivan [Irish Attorney-General] on Irish land’. The next day he satisfactorily surmounted a three-and-a-half-hour Cabinet (three hours of it on Irish land) and got the main provisions of the bill agreed. He had emulated Drake in completing his game of bowls before engaging with the Spaniards.

  Moreover his Boveridge expedition had on the whole been emotionally calming rather than disruptive. He had obviously got himself far into what he had described a little earlier as ‘deep matters’ and he wrote on his return of ‘how far [he] was at first from understanding her history or even her character’. However, that Dorset weekend, with whatever intimacies which did or did not take place, appeared in retrospect to have been the high-water mark rather than an instigation to further emotional plunges in their relationship. Letters continued to flow. Gladstone wrote to her nine times during the Christmas and New Year month that he spent away from London. But there was no mounting frenzy. Following a pattern familiar from some of his ‘rescue’ cases, and one which obviously exposed him to a charge of hypocrisy, Gladstone had decided that it was his duty to urge the restoration of full relations with her husband, but this did not prevent the continuation, although on a gradually diminishing scale, of correspondence and meetings. There could, however, be bursts of resurgence, as in the early summer of 1871, when he lunched with her (without a party) in Grosvenor Square on seven occasions within six weeks. She lived until 1894, latterly in somewhat straitened circumstances and sharing a Hampstead ‘cottage’ with a sister of General Ponsonby, Grey’s successor as the Queen’s secretary. Gladstone, mostly then accompanied by his wife, used occasionally to take a long afternoon’s drive from Downing Street during his last government, with a call upon her providing the destination. He did not however attend her funeral, and there was a sense that he felt some relief at her departure.

  Three questions remain. First, how much did she divert Gladstone’s attention and energies from affairs of state during this crucial early period of his first premiership? Professor Matthew, whose judgement on any matter relating to Gladstone must always be given first consideration, puts his preoccupation with her lower than that of Asquith with Venetia Stanley. Gladstone never got near to Asquith’s occasional outpourings of four letters a day. Nor did he write them during Cabinet meetings. On the other hand the tone of Asquith’s Stanley epistles was consistently lighter than anything which emanated from Gladstone. Asquith provided social and political gossip, laced with amusing and somewhat cynical comment upon his colleagues. Gladstone by contrast was often peering into the dark places of the soul. What was also true, however, was that in both cases they were bicycling towards the edge of the cliff without much risk or intention of going over it, or, apart from a brief wobble on Asquith’s part in May 1915, of allowing their capacity for the transaction of public business to be affected by their infatuations.

  The second question is to what extent was Gladstone’s reputation, and therefore his authority, damaged by inner-circle knowledge of his temptations. A comment which the newly succeeded fifteenth Earl of Derby, then a Tory but later to serve as Colonial Secretary under Gladstone in the 1880 government, wrote in his diary for 11 December 1869 is a good indication of the mixture of knowledge, amusement and mildly mocking tolerance which characterized the attitude of the political class:

  Strange story of Gladstone frequenting the company of a Mrs Thistlethwaite [sic], a kept woman in her youth, who induced a foolish person with a large fortune to marry her. She has since her marriage taken to religion, and preaches or lectures. This, with her beauty, is her attraction to G and it is characteristic of him to be indifferent to scandal. But I can scarcely believe the report that he is going to pass a week with her and her husband at their country house – she not being visited or received in society.34

  The third question is that of how far this extravagance with Mrs Thistlethwayte damaged Gladstone’s relations with his wife. The answer to this must be ‘somewhat’. Catherine Gladstone can hardly fail to have been at least half aware of some of his peregrinations. She had, for instance, arrived in Carlton House Terrace from Hawarden shortly before his return from Boveridge on 13 December. However, she was used to him, and there was no evidence of any approach to crisis in their relations. The year ended with the Gladstones apparently in good shape mentally, although less so physically. Mrs Gladstone was laid up with the family complaint of erysipelas from Christmas Day onwards, and Gladstone took to his bed, this time with some sort of bronchial infection, for a few days over the period of his sixtieth birthday on 29 December. But he greeted that milestone, which was certainly then regarded as the entry to old age, with aplomb.

  My sixtieth birthday. Three score years! And two score of them at least have been full years. My retrospect brings one conclusion. ‘Mercy Good Lord is all I seek’ for the past; for the future grace to be Thine instrument if scarcely Thy child.

  My review this year includes as a prominent object L. T. the extraordinary history, the conflicting appeal, the singular avowal.35

  Two days later, on New Year’s Eve, he wrote:

  At midnight listened to the bells which closed this for me notable year. Its private experience, in the case mentioned on Wed., has been scarcely less singular than its public. May both be ruled for good. Certainly my first 12 months as Minister have passed with circumstances of favour far beyond what I had dared to anticipate. Thanks to God.36

  IRISH LAND AND EUROPEAN WAR

  EIGHTEEN-SEVENTY WAS a less rewarding session than that of 1869. Irish land proved more intractable than the Irish Church. The French and the Prussians fought each other, and the British government became preoccupied with maintaining its neutrality. The legislative haul was again considerable, but several of the measures did not arouse the enthusiasm of the Prime Minister. Nevertheless, the year as a whole was one in which he and the government maintained their zest.

  The Irish Church Bill settled the issue to which it was directed, and its passage united the Cabinet and the Liberal party. The Irish Land Bill signally failed to settle the Irish agrarian issue. Such a settlement was indeed almost impossible within a United Kingdom in which any attempt to deal with the largely different problems of Irish rural society was vitiated by the fear of the English (and Scottish) governing class that making life tolerable for the Irish tenantry would feed back across St George’s Channel and undermine the much less oppressive landlord system in Great Britain.73 Furthermore, the Land Bill of 1870, so far from solidifying the majority, came near to breaking up the Cabinet and was always at risk from Liberal defections. It did however pave the way to the more effective Irish land legislation of Gladstone’s second government.

  The paradoxes surrounding Gladstone in his first years as Prime Minister were manifold. The force of his personality, both public and private, and the authority of his parliamentary command were essential to the holding together of the government and the carrying through of the many and disparate measures of reform which it initiated. His position as first minister was therefore unassailable, partly for this reason and partly because, exceptionally, there was no one who wished to assail it. Although it was a strong government (Morley thou
ght, possibly with a touch of exaggeration, that it was the strongest Cabinet that was ever assembled), it contained no future Prime Ministers. This was unusual. To take three quick historical cuts, Peel’s main government contained Derby, Aberdeen and Gladstone himself. Gladstone’s last government, in contrast with his first, contained Rosebery, Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith. And Asquith’s government contained Lloyd George and Churchill. Perhaps more important from the point of view of Gladstone’s impregnability, it contained no one who urgently wanted to be Prime Minister.

  This was as well, for Gladstone, although personally pre-eminent, held views which in a spread of ways were at variance with those of both his colleagues and his followers. Whereas in the last years of Palmerston he had appeared, although a recent convert to Liberalism, to be embracing advanced Radical positions, some aspects of his old Conservatism perversely reasserted themselves when he was himself in the supreme position and had no Prime Minister above him to needle. He was cool on the Elementary Education Bill of 1870, on the University Tests Bill of 1871 (which removed the Anglican monopoly from the governing of the two universities; that on their admissions policy had already gone) and on the Ballot Bill, which finally became law in 1872.

  Even on the issues where Gladstone was at one with his party he was mostly so for subtly different reasons. On Ireland, which he made his central purpose, he was unusual both in being willing to admit that Fenian outrages were what concentrated the otherwise complacent English mind upon the problem, and in regarding its damage to Britain’s reputation in Europe as a determining factor. And on continental problems, epitomized by the Franco-Prussian War, his attitude was neither that of the old Whigs, who believed in a mixture of Palmerston’s bluster and Russell’s pragmatic diplomacy, nor that of the Cobden–Bright tradition of keeping out of foreign quarrels at almost any cost. Gladstone believed in the Concert of Europe, the settling of disputes by the consensual authority of the great powers, and was as willing to bear burdens and risks on its behalf as he was unwilling to pursue chauvinist aims.

  His Cabinet may or may not have been the strongest which was ever assembled but it was not one which was easily led. His closest colleague ought in theory to have been Edward Cardwell, who was the only old Peelite Commons minister left. (There was also Argyll in the Lords.) But Cardwell, an able, self-confident, opinionated departmental minister, as strong on intellectual certainty as he was weak on oratory and easy-going charm, was more consistently in disagreement with the Prime Minister in Cabinet than was almost anyone else. At the War Office Cardwell carried through major army reforms, but also inevitably found himself at odds with the Prime Minister’s instinctive military parsimony. It was not only departmentally, however, that he and Gladstone were on opposite sides. They were so on Irish land, on English school education, on the final abolition of university tests and on the ballot.

  Lowe, who had been generously made Chancellor of the Exchequer in spite of his wrecking Gladstone’s leadership of the Commons in 1866, was expected to be awkward, and was. He did, however, have the advantage of being determinedly in favour of ending patronage in the civil service, and from his Treasury vantage point was able to bring to completion for all departments except the Foreign Office the reforms which Gladstone had initiated in 1853–5. Eventually and accidentally he was to do Gladstone a second grave disservice. In 1873, when the government was staggering and the Prime Minister was already exhausted to a point which impaired his judgement, Lowe was thought to have disqualified himself from continuing to hold the Exchequer by some irregularity in telegraph accounting for which the Postmaster-General and the First Commissioner of Works were more to blame. Gladstone dispensed with the two lesser ministers and transferred Lowe to the Home Office. Then, reverting to old fascinations, he could not resist adding the Exchequer to his own already excessive burdens. The outcome was not good for the final phase of the government.

  In addition to these two difficult colleagues, Gladstone, particularly on Irish land, was always vulnerable to the nervousness of the Whig magnates about any threat to landlords’ rights. Granville wrote to him on 25 September 1869, at the beginning of the preparation for the Land Bill, of ‘those who will take a purely landlord view’ and naming in this category ‘Lowe, Argyll, Clarendon, Cardwell, and very moderately so Hartington’.1 Granville himself was central to the Whig cousinage, but he had the advantage from this point of view of not being a magnate. For a nineteenth-century earl he had very little property. Indeed when he died in 1891 his estate was found to be bankrupt.74 Furthermore he gave every sign of having reached a conscious and sensible decision to exploit his greatest political asset, which was a unique ability to ease his and others’ relations with Gladstone. He could lead the Prime Minister on a light rein, always accepting his basic positions but getting him to see men and events in a calmer perspective than he might otherwise have done. This role owed more to Granville’s personality than to his office, but it was nonetheless somewhat enhanced when Clarendon died in June 1870 and Granville moved from the Colonial Office to the more central position of Foreign Secretary. He was a vital ball-bearing of the government, performing an important emollient role, particularly between Gladstone and the old Whigs but to some extent between the Prime Minister and all his colleagues.

  John Bright ought to have performed the same function between Gladstone and the Nonconformist Radicals, although they unlike the Whigs were on the back benches and prominent in the provincial cities rather than in the Cabinet. But Bright was both unwell and opinionated, so that he was often absent and when he was there generally had some pet scheme of his own, which he was more interested in pushing than in giving support to Gladstone’s contiguous but not identical positions. Gladstone was more pre-eminent than predominant in his first Cabinet, and on no issue were the hazards for him sharper than on the Irish Land Bill, which was intended to be for the 1870 session the great follow-up to the Irish Church Bill of 1869. But the issue was more tangled and, in addition, Gladstone for the 1870 session ignored Graham’s 1853 maxim about the avoidance of ‘overlapping business’, that is the danger of trying to run two major bills through Parliament at the same time. The second reading of the Elementary Education Bill came only a week after that of the Irish Land Bill.

  As has been touched on in the context of Mrs Thistlethwayte, Gladstone pursued a policy of intensive consultation in preparation for the session of 1870 and the Irish Land Bill in particular. There were ten Cabinets between 26 October and Christmas and another eight between 21 January and the Queen’s Speech (once again delivered by Commission and not in person) on 8 February. They were not exclusively concerned with the Land Bill, but most of the time of most of them was so directed. The issue was how far between the minimum and the maximum approach should the government go. The minimum approach was that the Irish tenant should, if evicted, be entitled to compensation for his own improvements to the property. This was not seriously contested. The maximum approach was what came to be called the ‘Three Fs’ – fixity of tenure, fair rent and freedom of sale (of the accrued rights of the tenant). This maximum, which was to be enacted eleven years later in the second Gladstone government, and which like all delayed concessions would have been much better done earlier, was regarded as beyond the bounds of practicality in 1870. As Gladstone wrote on 12 March 1870 to Manning, who had passed on the critical although constructive reactions of the Irish Catholic bishops to the bill: ‘. . . I am bound in frankness to say that the paper enclosed in your former letter proposes changes in the Bill, which neither the nation, nor the Parliament, nor the Cabinet, could adopt. We might as well propose the repeal of the Union. . . . Not one man has ventured to argue in the House of Commons for these changes.’2

  What Gladstone endeavoured to do was to build on the minimum to the greatest extent that was compatible with holding his Cabinet together. He avoided its disruption only by a narrow margin, and J. L. Hammond was probably correct in writing that ‘although he gained the consent of his
colleagues, he did not gain their conviction’.3 When on 25 January he finally got the bill through the Cabinet his diary entry ran: ‘The great difficulties of I.L. Bill there are now over, Thank God.’4

  Gladstone’s original instrument for building on the minimum was to take an ancient convention known as Ulster Tenant Right, to extend it to the other three provinces of Ireland and to turn it from a convention into a law. This right enabled the tenant to bestow or sell the title to occupancy. This concept of creating a form of property in the right of occupancy made it essential that the tenant should be protected from eviction, or at least compensated for it if it took place. There could be no property in a ‘right’ which could be terminated at the whim of the landlord. What the Irish tenants wanted was statutory protection from eviction, but the most that Gladstone could persuade his weak but stubborn Chief Secretary for Ireland, let alone the rest of the Cabinet, to give them was the right to compensation when it had taken place. To make even this right effective there had to be some public intervention in the rent-fixing process. If a tenant simply did not pay a manifestly fair rent his landlord could hardly be made to pay compensation for evicting him without making a mockery of the whole concept of land ownership. And that was about as likely to be accepted by a Whig Cabinet as was Church disestablishment by a Tory one. On the other hand if the landlord could fix any rent he liked and then freely get rid of those who did not pay it that would make compensation for disturbance meaningless.