Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  This more than outweighed the summer dispute about peerages, of which Sir Lionel de Rothschild was the only casualty. The Queen, although grumbling about the substance, had been helpful to the government in the crisis of the late summer with the Lords about the Irish Church Bill. She decided that she would prefer the sacrifice of a few Leinster bishops and deans to a major clash between the Lords and the Commons in the first year of a strongly supported government. So on balance the first year of the government did not pass at all badly between them, and a pre-Christmas letter which the Queen wrote as soon as she got to Osborne on 18 December was more of a budget of chat than a letter of business to her Prime Minister:

  The Queen hopes Mr Gladstone’s cold is much better? Here we have a dreadful gale but the Queen had a good passage.

  The accts of the dear Dss of Argyll are a little better.

  Still it is a most anxious state – the Queen’s heart bleeds for the dear Duke! –

  Pce Leopold is quite well again.7

  Moreover she displayed during that Christmas recess two of her rare shafts of liberalism, both on ecclesiastical matters. In December she wrote that ‘the exhibition of illiberality in the Church towards Dr Temple79 is a disgrace and shows how ignorance & bigotry blind people and destroy all real spiritual religion wh is quite lost sight of’.8 And in January 1869, when a new bishop for St Asaph was under consideration, she laid down the simple principle that ‘The Queen believes that a Welshman is almost necessary for a Welsh see on acct of the language.’9 As Gladstone was moving towards appointing Dr Joshua Hughes, who was an indisputably Welsh Welshman who did a good deal for the promotion of Welsh language and education, this was welcome if original doctrine. From Llandaff to Bangor and from St Asaph to St David’s most recent prelates had been ignorant of the language of eisteddfods.

  The Queen’s next touch of liberalism, and as it turned out of sound political sense, came before the budget of 1871. Lowe introduced a tax on matches. The Queen wrote expressing great doubt about its fairness between rich and poor.

  Above all it seems certain that this tax will seriously affect the manufacture and sale of matches wh is said to be the sole means of support of a vast number of the very poorest people & little children, especially in London, so that this tax wh it is intended shld press on all equally, will in fact be only severely felt by the poor, wh wld be vy wrong – & most impolitic at the present moment. – The Queen trusts that the Govt will reconsider this proposal, & try & substitute some other wh will not press upon the poor.10

  Three days later the Queen’s remonstrances, aided by those of East End match girls, induced the Cabinet to make the Chancellor give way and substitute twopence on the income tax for the match duty.

  The Queen also showed signs in May 1872 of being a moderate on the Alabama arbitration issue80 and loath to see any chauvinistic break with the United States on this vexed question. These fairly isolated manifestations apart, she was, whether agreeing or disagreeing with Gladstone, replete with nearly all the conventional English prejudices. She hardly ever had a good word to say for the Irish. The French were a ‘nation wh, with but few exceptions seems to be entirely devoid of truth, & to live upon vanity, deception, amusement and self-glorification’.11 John Stuart Mill’s 1870 revival of a female franchise bill led her ‘to call Mr Gladstone’s attention to the mad and utterly demoralizing movement of the present day to place women in the same position as to professions – as men’. She was particularly horrified with the thought that they should be medical students. ‘But to tear away all the barriers wh surround a woman, & to propose that they shld study with men – things wh cld not be named before them – certainly not in a mixed audience – wd be to introduce a total disregard of what must be considered as belonging to the rules and principles of morality.’12

  Predictably she was wholly opposed to the release of Fenian political prisoners, which Gladstone was anxious to push through in 1870–1, and, less predictably and not very attractively, she was almost obsessively vindictive towards a half-demented youth called Arthur O’Connor who made a mock assassination attempt against her in February 1872. He had no weapon more offensive than an unloaded imitation pistol, and John Brown was able to cover himself with glory and earn a £25 annuity for life by seizing it from him. It was about as serious as the 1982 invasion of Buckingham Palace by an amiable lunatic which discomfited Home Secretary Whitelaw but did not greatly excite Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Victoria, on the other hand, besieged Gladstone with letters complaining about her special exposure, the state of the law, the leniency of the sentence and the general weakness of the judge who, finding O’Connor an inadequate, gave him only a year’s imprisonment just as, according to the Queen, he had recently given only three months to a man ‘who [had] pushed his wife under a Dray Cart’. She demanded that O’Connor be deported, and eventually he agreed to go abroad voluntarily, provided, as he shrewdly negotiated, thereby raising doubt about his degree of mental deficiency, that it should be to a healthy climate.

  There had also been a depressing little incident in February 1870 when the Gladstones had the Waleses (the Prince then aged twenty-eight, but already looking immensely self-indulgent, although benignly so) dining with them at 11 Carlton House Terrace, and the Prime Minister very circumspectly wrote to the Queen to ask whether they might be permitted also to ask Princess Louise, her fourth and eldest unmarried daughter, then aged twenty-one. The Queen’s reply, maybe occasioned by slight resistance to the thought of a direct relationship between the heir to the throne and the Prime Minister, was at best unequivocal and at worst slightly snubbing: ‘It is very kind of Mr and Mrs Gladstone to ask Pnss Louise – but she never dines out except at Marlborough House.’13 It is impossible not to append the comment that if the poor girl had been allowed to range a little more widely she might not have made such a disastrously unhappy marriage as that which she contracted in the following year with Argyll’s heir, the Marquess of Lorne.

  On balance, however, relations jogged along tolerably if exhaustingly until the summer of 1871. Then what might have been expected to remain a minor dispute suddenly sent out ripples of resentment and left lasting grievances on both sides. The contentious political issue towards the end of that session was an Army Regulation Bill, which Gladstone would have liked to be a more far-reaching measure of reorganization and reform but which was largely confined to the abolition of the purchase of commissions (and also of promotions), with provision for the compensation of officers who lost presumed property rights. (The militia was also brought by the bill under more effective War Office control.)

  This bill ran into obstructive tactics in the House of Commons, which made Gladstone, who then had no idea what he was going to experience from the Irish in his next government, as angry as he was surprised. He wrote to the Queen on 14 June: ‘at the morning sitting today the House went into Committee for the tenth time on the Army Bill. Much of the same obstruction, which it is difficult to characterize by the epithets it deserves, but of which there is little doubt that it is without precedent in the present generation, was continued.’14 And on another occasion he complained to her that while he had:

  during his whole parliamentary life . . . been accustomed to see class interests of all kinds put themselves on their defence under the supposition of being assailed, he had, he regrets to state, never seen a case where the modes of operation adopted by the professing Champions were calculated to leave such a painful impression on the mind. . . .15

  It was something that in June he was still hopeful of her sympathy against these tactics. In July they had a slight altercation about the behaviour of the Duke of Cambridge on the issue. The Queen was ‘sure that Mr Gladstone & the Govt must feel very grateful to [him] for the support he has given to the Army Bill’. Gladstone in fact thought Cambridge was distinctly equivocal. The best he could do in the House of Lords, after speaking, was to abstain. The Queen herself was never at direct loggerheads with the government over the Army Bill
and the abolition of purchase. At first she was in favour of the government’s proposals, but probably lost her enthusiasm when she discovered how deep-seated was the latent opposition of the old officer class, from the Commander-in-Chief downwards. She was even more impatient when she realized that the delay would keep Parliament sitting into late August, and her irritation was then about equally directed towards the government for raising the tiresome issue and the opposition for opposing.

  She did not however resist the government’s tough tactic for circumnavigating the obstruction. When, on top of the Commons delay, the bill foundered in the Lords, the Cabinet simply decided to proceed by prerogative. The purchase of commissions had been made illegal by an Act in 1809, except where it was regulated and the price kept under control by royal warrant. The warrant had merely to be cancelled, and the deed was done. It was a tactic at once daring and clever. It was open to a strong charge of constitutional arrogance because it cocked a snook at the parliamentary process. Legislation being in danger of failing, the government coolly declared it unnecessary, which raised the considerable question why they had started on the process in the first place. On the other hand it was a brilliant manoeuvre for it left the enemy forces not merely frustrated but dangerously outflanked. The abolition could be achieved without the bill, but not the compensation, which was the last result which the officers and their supporters wanted. The Lords were humiliated as well as outraged, for they had no alternative but to turn round like squirrels in a cage and pass the bill.

  This masterful display of executive power was a fine sample of Gladstone’s ruthlessness when, as was frequently the case, he was convinced of his own rightness. The Queen’s acquiescence was perhaps surprising and it may have left her with a certain residue of resentment which contributed to the bitterness of the consequential dispute on the apparently trivial issue of the date of her departure for her 1871 Balmoral autumn. Parliament that year dragged on to 21 August. There had the day before to be a meeting of the Privy Council to approve of the speech which was read on her behalf by the Lord Chancellor to bring the session’s proceedings to an end. She was prepared, under great protest, to stay in the south until the 18th, but not a moment longer. If that did not suffice, as it did not, a quorum including at least one Cabinet minister had to be assembled on Deeside, which was what eventually happened.

  The Queen and the Prime Minister became locked in mutual misunderstanding. He did not appreciate that she was for once genuinely unwell. He had a good deal of excuse for not doing so. She had cried ‘wolf’ so often, even at the beginning of 1870 putting forward for not opening Parliament the wonderfully blanket reason that ‘It is a very unwholesome year.’ In 1871, however, she arrived at Balmoral in a genuinely poor state and suffered two weeks of severe illness, of which the symptoms appeared to be a constriction of the throat, an abscess on the arm and a general state of debility. Jenner took it seriously enough to send for Lister, the founder of antiseptic surgery. Ponsonby, partly because he disagreed with Jenner on almost everything, took a more optimistic view and recorded the hope that she would soon be better, accompanied by the odd thought that ‘Here away . . . from all her children she feels comfortable.’16 There seems no doubt, however, that she was seriously ill for two to three weeks after her arrival at Balmoral, and low for the whole of September.

  She, for her part, was even more impervious to the difficulties which Gladstone had to face on her behalf. Eighteen-seventy-one was the peak year of mid-Victorian republicanism. Dilke mounted a considerable campaign, and his friend G. O. Trevelyan (by no means as chastened ‘for life’ as Gladstone had assured the Queen that he was in 1869) had written an anonymous pamphlet entitled What Does She Do With It? which was an attack on the Queen’s parsimony and hoarding of money. In these unpropitious circumstances Gladstone had in the early summer to defend a marriage dowry of £30,000 (approximately £1.5 million at today’s prices) for Princess Louise and an annual allowance of £15,000 (£750,000) for Prince Arthur, later Duke of Connaught, in August. There was widespread impatience with the demands of the brood, exacerbated by the invisibility of the Queen. Had Gladstone been able to point to the Queen’s remaining for prorogation it would have eased his task, and it rankled that he could not. But what rankled still more was the way in which the Queen reacted to his well-intentioned and sensible advice.

  First she let off on 10 August a dithyramb of complaint and did it to Hatherley, the Lord Chancellor, rather than to the Prime Minister, which was in itself almost a manifesto of no confidence. The burden of her complaint was that ministers, and in particular Gladstone and Granville, apologized for her not performing more public duties instead of saying that it was a miracle that she managed as much as she did:

  She has opened Parliament this year & the fatigue and trouble & agitation of Princess Louise’s marriage, held all her Drawing-rooms, Investitures – Councils – received all the Royal Visitors who came, held 2 Reviews, & went to two public breakfasts, besides opening the Albert Hall & St Thomas’ Hospital. All these have been done in one year & the Queen would really ask what right anyone has to complain.

  They should also plainly state that the Queen cannot undertake any night work in hot rooms & when much talking is required, nor any residence in London beyond 2 or 3 days at a time as the air, noise & excitement made her quite ill, cause violent headaches & great prostration.

  It is really abominable that a woman, a Queen, loaded with care & anxieties, public & domestic which are daily increasing should be unable to make people understand that there are limits to her powers.

  What killed her beloved Husband? Overwork & worry – what killed Lord Clarendon? The same. . . .

  She concluded with dark hints of abdication:

  She must solemnly repeat that unless her ministers support her & state the whole truth she cannot go on & must give her heavy burden up to younger hands.

  Perhaps then those discontented people may regret that they broke her down when she might still have been of use.17

  What was worse was the letter which Ponsonby (despite his position as a firm ally of Gladstone’s and – privately – a stern critic of the Queen on all these public engagement matters) wrote to Gladstone on 15 August:

  May I venture to observe that it sometimes strikes me The Queen does not fully understand the case. I do not know what the Lord Chancellor said, but I think Her Majesty looks upon the question of her staying for the Prorogation as a very small matter. And one moreover that scarcely affects herself. I mean I think she looks on it as if she were being urged to do this for a political purpose – In order to help the Government. . . .18

  This drove Gladstone into resentful indignation, which he expressed in his reply to Ponsonby with perhaps some exaggeration springing from exasperation of the moment but also with an underlying bitterness which suggested permanent damage:

  I am surprised and sorry, that the Queen should think that we have had really in our minds, during this deplorable business, the benefit of the Government, an idea which I believe has never occurred to any of us. But I am much obliged to you for mentioning it. . . .

  Upon the whole I think it has been the most sickening piece of experience which I have had during near forty years of public life.

  Worse things may easily be imagined: but smaller and meaner cause for the decay of Thrones cannot be conceived. It is like the worm which bores the bark of a noble tree and so breaks the channel of its life.19

  Six weeks later Gladstone reached Balmoral for just over a week’s stay as minister in attendance. In the interval he had been in lodgings at Whitby in North Yorkshire, where his son Willy had become MP in 1868, for two weeks of sea-bathing and had spent another three weeks at Hawarden. On his way to Balmoral, moreover, he had made a political progress, with warm receptions at Perth and then at the intermediate stations to Aberdeen, where he had spoken three times, once in the main assembly rooms, once to a working men’s club, and once at a Lord Provost’s luncheon. ‘There wa
s much enthusiasm for the Government,’ he recorded.20 His main speech at Aberdeen, where he received the freedom of the city, might in fact have carried the Queen’s agreement, for it was one of the most anti-Irish that he ever made, accusing that nation of ingratitude in its lack of response to the two reforming measures of 1869 and 1870, and fifteen years later was singled out by Lord Randolph Churchill as the last anti-Home Rule speech that Gladstone ever made.

  Nevertheless this may not have been the most tactful way in which to approach Balmoral, particularly in view of the August interchange with Ponsonby, but there was no suggestion that it was the reason why she let him wait several days after arrival before seeing him. That was due more to her still making the most of her slowly recovering health and perhaps to continuing resentment on her part too. Altogether it is difficult to judge how frosty the atmosphere was during this Balmoral visit. When he eventually saw the Queen his diary entry ran: ‘Long interview with H. M. She was very kind: & much better.’21 And he wrote to his wife on the next day: ‘I bade farewell reluctantly to Balmoral, for it is as homelike as any place away from home can be, and wonderfully safe from invasions.’22