Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  This halfway house closely matched Gladstone’s own evolving attitude. He was coming to accept the inevitable but his reluctance persisted. ‘. . . I am almost tempted to say,’ he wrote to Coleridge with a characteristically fine if convoluted shade of meaning, ‘it would be impossible, after my long connection with Oxford, to go into a new controversy on the basis of what will be taken and alleged to be an absolute secularisation of the colleges. . . . I incline to think that this work is for others not for me.’13 This bill got much further than Goschen’s had done, but foundered between the two Houses in July. Gladstone, further evolving, then agreed to its being made a government measure for the following session. And then, with his curious capacity once he had decided to bite a bullet to bite it hard, himself introduced the measure on 10 February 1871. In April and May he resisted with considerable indignation attempts by Salisbury substantially to amend it in the Lords. Eventually, on a second consideration, the Lords voted Salisbury down by 129 to 89, and all academic appointments at Oxford and at Cambridge (which had already been a little more liberal), with the exception of those with a specific religious function such as the deanship of Christ Church and the theological professorships, became open to those of all beliefs or none.

  The immediate effects should not be exaggerated. Roman Catholics by their own abstention remained for some decades almost entirely absent from Oxford, despite Newman’s first fleeting return visit in 1878. Those of non-Christian faiths, except for a few home-grown eccentrics and (later) maharajahs, nawabs or their equivalent, were hardly envisaged, and even the Nonconformists remained peripheral to the University. They made their own Oxford encampments (Mansfield College, founded in 1886, and Manchester College, founded in 1889), as well as gradually becoming strong in colleges such as Queen’s with a large northern intake. Jews, epitomized by Herbert Samuel and L. B. Namier at Oxford and Edwin Montagu at Cambridge, were probably the greatest early beneficiaries. But until well into the twentieth century the majority of Heads of Houses were in Anglican orders, college chapels were regarded as obligatory until a new wave of post-1945 colleges dispensed with them, the University church of St Mary’s continued to be both Anglican and geographically central to Oxford, if not as doctrinally so as in the days of Keble’s Assize Sermon and Newman’s incumbency, and Christ Church remained the only college in Christendom which contained the cathedral church of a diocese within its purlieus. Gladstone could claim without remotely straining his well-known capacity for sophistical argument that he had avoided ‘an absolute secularisation of the colleges’.

  Nevertheless the passages of the Elementary Education Act of 1870 and of the University Tests Act of 1871 were far from exhilarating experiences for him. They exemplified the burdens rather than the pleasures of office, and they also demonstrated the difficulties which flowed from the contradictions between his past and his present, his beliefs and his followers, his emotions and his intellect. There was, however, an important difference between the two issues: the University Tests boil, once lanced, subsided satisfactorily; the Elementary Education issue, once raised, reverberated on to weaken the government and to exacerbate Gladstone’s relations with his party.

  Compared with these lacerating if parochial issues (but at a time when the British parish was the most famous and observed one in the world), the problems of the Franco-Prussian War must have been almost a relief for Gladstone. It started on 19 July 1870 within a fortnight of the appointment of Granville as Foreign Secretary following the death of Clarendon, and therefore involved the Prime Minister more than might otherwise have been the case in those days of departmental devolution and the prerogatives of secretaries of state. It came, even more than 1914 and incomparably more than 1939, out of a clear blue sky. It was not only Edmund Hammond, permanent undersecretary of the Foreign Office, who totally misjudged the prospect in his initial report to Granville. Bismarck, five months before, was equally unprescient. ‘The political horizon as seen from Berlin’, he had informed the King of Roumania in the February of 1870, ‘appears at present so unclouded that there is nothing of interest to report. . . .’ Hammond, however, was merely a weather forecaster, whereas Bismarck was a rain king. If he found ‘nothing of interest to report’ he had the power to fill the gap and according to popular retrospective judgement he proceeded so to do.

  At the time, however, British opinion started strongly pro-Prussian, and regarded the French Emperor as having behaved like one of his imperial bees and killed himself as a result of delivering an unprovoked sting. Queen Victoria, for instance, who admittedly had strong family reasons for partisanship, wrote to Gladstone on 19 July: ‘It is not a question of Prussia agst France but of United Germany most unjustifiably attacked, fighting for hearth & Home – so no one can help feeling warmly for them.’77 Again on 3 August she assured him that ‘Germany as a real & natural ally would always be safe – never aggressive.’ And on 2 October, with the French army crushed, Napoleon III a prisoner, his Empress a refugee in England and Paris invaded by Prussian troops, she was still animadverting: ‘What a dreadful exhibition of falsehood and boastfulness the French continue to make! It shows a corruption wh is the cause of the Country’s downfall – & one of the most disgraceful exhibitions is the way in wh all turn agst the Emperor and Empress & all about them!’14 Meanwhile, from the other end of the political spectrum, the young Sir Charles Dilke, who was just about to mount his British republican campaign but before doing so was rushing around the battlefields as well as witnessing the proclamation of the Third Republic in Paris, was also full of vague feelings of nordic solidarity with the Germans.15 It was one of the few issues on which he agreed with the Queen.

  Gladstone took a more restrained position. ‘On the face of the facts France is wrong,’ he informed Brand, his former Chief Whip, ‘but as to personal trustworthiness the two moving spirits on the respective sides, Napoleon and Bismarck, are nearly on a par.’16 Gladstone, with this view, had three objectives in relation to the war. First, he wished to keep Britain out. In retrospect this does not sound too difficult. It is indeed not easy to see on which side Britain might have intervened. To have supported Prussia could have been a work of supererogation, and to have supported France would in the decisive days between July and September have been so unpopular as to be impossible. But at the time there was great concern that Britain would in some way or other be drawn in, accompanied by calls, mainly from those who were so predisposed, for a substantial increase in British military capacity. Gladstone was equally concerned to resist this.

  The danger point was Belgium. Both on grounds of strategic interest and of sentiment an invasion of that somewhat ramshackle kingdom by either belligerent would have transfixed any British government. The matter was dramatized by The Times on 25 July (six days after the French declaration of war) publishing the text of a secret Franco-Prussian treaty of 1867 or 1869 (there was some dispute about the date) which included a provision that Prussia would not object to France swallowing Belgium and Luxembourg. The Prussians admitted to Granville that there had at any rate been such a draft, done they said in the hand of Benedetti, the somewhat over-active French ambassador to Berlin. The matter was complicated by the fact that the text as published by The Times was in less than the perfect French which it was difficult to believe that Benedetti, in spite of his Italian name and his German immersion, would have produced. This pointed to Prussian origin (Bismarck’s Chancery while respecting the language of diplomacy was less immaculately francophone than the court of Frederick the Great a hundred years earlier).

  With France at war with Prussia, however, it was difficult to see that the treaty, whether of draft or stronger status, of French or Prussian origin, had any continuing relevance. The more present danger was that the Prussian generals, as were their descendants forty-four and seventy years later, would be attracted by an axis of advance up the Meuse valley and past the forbidding fortresses of Namur and Dinant. This sufficiently worried Gladstone that he modified his anti-mili
tarism and urgently encouraged the War Office to study means of sending 20,000 troops to Antwerp. Also, on 30 July, he persuaded the Cabinet to propose to France and Prussia a treaty by which, if either of them violated the neutrality of Belgium, Britain would co-operate with the other for its defence. This might have been regarded as a classic example of an initiative taken too late, but oddly it worked. Prussia accepted immediately. Moltke’s war plans, unlike those of Schlieffen and Rundstedt in the two world wars, did not involve Belgium. And France hesitated only until the battle of Wörth had been lost, and then signed on 9 August. Gladstone thus achieved the second of his objectives.

  The third was more elusive, partly because it was another issue on which he failed to carry his Cabinet. When the French had lost the war (and when public sympathy in England had substantially swung back to their side) Gladstone wanted to rally the neutral powers of Europe against the German annexation of Alsace and half of Lorraine on the ground that no such change should be made without the consent of the population. This differed from the basis on which the French government was objecting. It took its stand on the inviolability of established frontiers, particularly if they involved French soil. This was a hazardous position in view of the French annexation, little more than a decade before, of both Nice and Savoy. But it was also a position preferred by some members of the British Cabinet, while others dissented from Gladstone on the ground of traditional Whig realism. Protests were not going to make Bismarck give up the opportunity to annex two of the richest provinces of Europe. Why, therefore, invite failure by ineffective intervention? As a result Gladstone had an unusually humiliating Cabinet on Friday, 30 September: ‘Cabinet 2¼–6. I failed in my two objects 1. an effort to speak with the other neutral powers against the transfer of A. & L. without reference to the populations. 2. (Immediate) release of the Fenian prisoners.’17

  Gladstone was far from all-powerful as Prime Minister. He had, nonetheless, attained two of his three objects in relation to the war. He had also done a couple of very odd things, which between them illustrate some of the contradictions of his bewildering character. When war became virtually certain on 14–15 July, British government stocks including Consols fell heavily. At a long Cabinet on Saturday the 16th reports were received and dispositions made which caused Gladstone, as he informed the Queen by letter, to be more confident that France would respect the neutrality of Belgium and that Britain, partly in consequence, would be able to keep out of the conflict. These of course were both bull points for Consols, and on the Monday Gladstone calmly bought for his own account £2500 of them at the temporarily depressed price of 90. It was a shrewd speculation, and it is unlikely that it ever occurred to him, through his carapace of innocence and faith in his own motives, that he was doing anything remotely improper. He made no effort at concealment.

  His second action was utterly different but equally surprising. That year, as in the previous one, he did not go to Hawarden when (on 10 August) he had disposed for the session of both Parliament and Cabinets, but went as in 1869 to ‘Granville’s hospitable abode at Walmer’. There he remained, with a short London interlude, until 6 September. On 23 August he began to read a recently published work of Emile de Laveleye, a Belgian savant who then enjoyed considerable international fame, entitled La Prusse et l’Autriche depuis Sadowa. On the 26th he wrote to Reeve, the editor of the Edinburgh Review, to ask whether he would like a substantial anonymous review of this book for his October number. Reeve accepted on the 29th (who would not in the circumstances?), and on 1 September Gladstone began to write, although he did not finish reading Laveleye until the 6th, and continued through and beyond his Walmer holiday. He was still sending ‘revises’ to Reeve from Hawarden as late as 7 October.

  The result was an 18,000-word article which used Laveleye’s book only as a launching pad and was indeed rightly entitled Germany, France and England, rather than Prussia and Austria, with which latter country it had relatively little to do. It surveyed with great frankness, and equal orotundity the behaviour of France and Prussia before and during hostilities, and did so in a way which was sufficiently pro-Prussian and anti-French as to meet even the exacting standards in this respect of Queen Victoria. There was, however, one exception, and that was the rumoured (at that stage) Prussian intention to annex Alsace-Lorraine. That was castigated as ‘harsh, almost brutal’. He concluded with a survey of England’s position in the shaken-up world which followed from France’s loss of ‘ten great battles running’ culminating in Sedan and the capture and overthrow of the Emperor. Here he attempted to ride two very different and difficult circus horses. The first was one of simple rejoicing at the good luck (not the moral superiority, he was quick to add) which flowed from his own country’s geographical position. ‘Happy England!’, he actually wrote, and attributed this happiness, without eschewing even the most hackneyed of clichés, to ‘that streak of silver sea’.

  The second horse was his devotion to the Concert of Europe. By a supreme irony, in that summer when the ultramontanism of Piux IX drove Gladstone’s anti-Roman Catholic feeling to its peak, he concluded by citing St Augustine’s already quoted maxim ‘Securus judicat orbis terrarum’. Gladstone used it in the context that ‘the general judgement of civilized mankind . . . has censured the aggression of France; it will censure, if need arise, the greed of Germany’.

  What was most striking about this article, however, was not its content, but the fact that he wrote it, and also his desire and belief that it might remain anonymous. The inversion of the habits of modern politicians is almost complete. Rare are the speeches without speech-writers, and rare too are the memoirs without ghost-writers, even when the putative author has the leisure of semi-retirement. And then it is hoped that the surrogates will so capture the style of the principal that their intervention may be concealed. Gladstone, on the contrary, had both the energy and the intellectual grasp to pour out the words from his own pen, but wished to suggest, for reasons of tact and diplomacy, that they were written by someone else. When he republished the essay, eight years later and then under his own name, he added the footnote: ‘This article is the only one ever written by me, which was meant, for the time, to be in substance, as well as in form, anonymous. Motives of public duty, which appeared to be of sufficient weight, both led to its composition, and also prohibited me from divulging the authorship.’18

  Once again, Gladstone’s naivety had reared it head. There was probably not much chance in any event of the anonymity holding. The temptations for Reeve, the editor, to drop delicate hints that he had a most notable contributor must have been considerable. Apart from this, Gladstone chose to write his ‘anonymous’ article in his most recognizable style. Even read today, it is impossible not to imagine him declaiming it in the House of Commons. The slightly prolix courtesy, the elaborate constructions, the Latin (and one Greek) quotations occurring at just the appropriate intervals are all there. But above all it is instinctively predicated on the assumption that the statements were in a sense ex cathedra, interesting because of who was making them. The secret of the authorship lasted at most for forty-eight hours. It was a characteristic Gladstone enterprise: born of surplus energy, intellectually interesting without being of the highest quality, simple in apparently believing in a utopian secrecy, yet sufficiently shrewd that nothing which came out was beyond what he really wanted to say.

  In spite of the war and its repercussions Gladstone’s 1870 autumn was calmer than those of the two previous years. He avoided Balmoral, although superficially his relations with the Queen were in quieter waters than in either 1869 or 1871, in both of which years he spent a substantial period there. He also had fewer Cabinets in preparation for the session of 1871 than in the two previous years. Although he did not get to Hawarden until late in September he nonetheless spent a total of sixty-eight nights there between 1 October and 12 January. He should have returned to London invigorated, but in fact he came back to observe the beginning of the decline of his government. It w
as a slow process, for the government still had another three years to run. Coincidentally, for neither was the cause of the other, there also began a deep disenchantment in Gladstone’s relations with the Queen, and vice versa. And that, once it took place, was irrevocable.

  SOVEREIGN AND PRIME MINISTER

  A SALIENT FACT of late-nineteenth-century Britain was that the two figures who most symbolized the nation and the age, Queen Victoria and Gladstone, did not get on. This had by no means always been so. While Prince Albert was alive Gladstone had been a Court favourite. And in the early years of the Queen’s widowhood, while she was withdrawn from all politicians, he was considerably preferred not only to ‘those two dreadful old men’ Palmerston and Russell, but also to Disraeli who, although he had progressed a good deal from being ‘that detestable Mr D’Israeli’ of 1846, was still regarded as a little exotic for full trust.

  The deterioration began during Gladstone’s first premiership, and was underpinned by Disraeli’s successful flattery and constitutional impropriety in deliberately turning the Queen’s mind against Gladstone in the six years after 1874. By 1880 she was a partisan Tory imbued with a deep dislike of the leading Liberal statesman, whom she nonetheless had to endure as her first minister for a longer cumulative period than any of the other nine who served her in this capacity. It was not Disraeli’s finest service to his monarch or his country.