Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  His attitude to Greenwich, and still more his retreat from provincial speaking, made the end of his first government a period when he was more cut off from his natural reservoirs of support than at any time since 1859, maybe even since he first became Chancellor in 1853. And this, combined with his too enthusiastic embrace of Treasury negativism, helped to set him off on his chase for a Britain without income tax which proved as electorally ineffective as it was programmatically sterile for the Liberal party. Hammond may have exaggerated, but he got hold of a piece of essential truth when he saw that Gladstone, once he had become party leader, was much better away from the Exchequer.

  The most interesting letter which Gladstone wrote during the campaign was to Lord Fermoy on 28 January. Fermoy, who appeared to have written one of those tiresomely tentative letters which combine a general inclination to support with a need for reassurance on a particular issue, was told: ‘With respect to Home Rule I have not yet heard an authoritative or binding definition of the phrase, which appears to be used by different persons in different senses. Until the phrase comes to have a definite and certain meaning, I have not thought myself justified in referring to it. . . .’7 The reply was a remarkable paving exercise for his 1886 conversion: nothing he wrote to Fermoy was inconsistent with the attitude he took twelve years later.

  Whether Gladstone believed the election would be won is not certain. He wrote to Bright on 27 January that ‘the feeling of our friends is excellent’, which could be regarded as cheerfulness in the bunker. Michael Foot might have said it during the 1983 campaign. On the next day, however, after his first Greenwich expedition, he wrote: ‘An enthusiastic meeting. But the general prospects are far from clear.’ And a week later, when the results, with his own coming early, were beginning to trickle out, he was more disenchanted than usual with Greenwich and recognized the certainty of national defeat: ‘The general prospect was first indifferent, then bad. My own election for Greenwich, after Boord the distiller, is more like a defeat than a victory, though it places me in Parliament again.’85 Two days after that he concluded the tale of declining hopes with: ‘The issue of the Elections is now irrevocably bad.’8 It was by far the worst Whig–Liberal result since 1841.

  What Gladstone greatly minded was not so much the loss of office as the sense of rejection. This was exacerbated by his persistent belief in the meretriciousness of Disraeli. On the whole he was clear-headed about the causes and consequences of the defeat. But the one raft of unreality to which he clung was the conviction that Disraeli’s government would be quickly seen through. ‘. . . I am confident that the Conservative Party will never arrive at a stable superiority while Disraeli is at their head,’ he wrote to the Lord Advocate at about that time.86 He was somewhat self-exculpating, as is almost inevitable, about the reasons for defeat. ‘We have been swept away, literally, by a torrent of beer and gin,’ he wrote to Spencer, his Irish Viceroy. ‘Next to this comes Education: that has denuded us on both sides for reasons dramatically opposite; with the Nonconformists, and with the Irish voters.’9

  He had three competing preoccupations to prevent his brooding excessively on the ingratitude of the electors, although none of them, except perhaps for the last, provided him with much comfort. The first was the question of whether he would await defeat in Parliament before resigning or whether he would accept dismissal direct from the electorate. Precedent was in favour of the former course, although not overwhelmingly so. Disraeli had gone precipitately in 1868. But Gladstone was never much in favour of following Disraeli. ‘The leaning of my mind is in favour of the old constitutional course,’ he wrote on 9 February. The Queen leant otherwise. ‘I had a letter from the Queen which seemed to me to be of scant kindness,’10 he noted five days later. Its central message was clear. ‘She thinks’, so she wrote in the third person, ‘that whatever advantages there may be in adhering to usage & precedent, that it is counterbalanced by the disadvantages of nearly 3 weeks delay, for the Country and the public Service.’

  Furthermore Gladstone had perpetrated the insensitivity of not remembering that the meeting of Parliament would coincide with the return of her second son the Duke of Edinburgh from his St Petersburg marriage to a daughter of the Tsar. ‘The Fêtes etc’ would make it physically impossible for the Queen to contemplate a change of government at the same time. ‘People are apt to forget as she told Mr Gladstone the other day, that the Queen is a woman who has far more on her hands & far more to try mind & body than is good for anyone of her sex & age.’11 Once she was off on this line she was potentially unstoppable, and on 20 February Gladstone wisely went to Windsor and resigned. ‘H. M. very kind: the topics of conversation were of course rather limited,’12 he ambiguously recorded. But she acknowledged his loyalty to the Crown, and offered him a peerage, which he emphatically did not want and the acceptance of which would have been much more in her interest than in his.87 After 1874 there were to be three Prime Ministers in the House of Lords, but it was not a forum which would have suited Gladstone. As Lord (or even Earl of) Hawarden he would have been hobbled.

  The second preoccupation arose from his conviction that, out of office, he must give up 11 Carlton House Terrace. As was so often the case with Gladstone, it was the reverse of the normal pattern. Most Prime Ministers, if they do not already have one, acquire a London house when they are deprived of 10 Downing Street. Gladstone never greatly used the official residence, extravagantly kept up his ‘Carltons’ base (in which highly patrician quarter he had lived for thirty-five years) when he did not much need it, and then decided, when he did need it, that it had become far beyond his means. His means were indeed heavily diminished, partly because of over-investment in building up the Hawarden estate for his descendants, partly because of the mismanagement of his Seaforth property by his brother Robertson, and partly because, like all sound curators of the public finances from Pitt through Asquith to Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain, he had no golden fingers for the conduct of his own affairs.

  A few months later he worked out with pessimistic precision his financial position. It showed that the affluence of the previous twenty years, since the recovery from the Oak Farm débâcle, had been allowed almost completely to dissipate itself. While admitting that he was still rich in mostly unrealizable assets he arrived at a depressing income position following the loss of his £5000 official salary, ‘which supplied the greater part of my expenditure’. His total income for the future he estimated at £6050, of which the Flintshire estates provided £4900. But against this had to be set debt interest amounting to £2250. Then he put ‘necessary allowances’ for his wife and five children (two were presumably excluded because marriage settlements had been made) at the modest sum of £1530. He next subtracted £670 as the minimum amount which he could give to ‘Charity and Religion’ and £600 for keeping up the house and policies at Hawarden, which led to a residue ‘for all general expenditure whatsoever, in which is included everything relating to myself’ of £1000. He could increase this to £2500 by letting Carlton House Terrace for the season, and he did indeed proceed to do this in 1874, but to do it regularly ‘would be like publicly advertising need’. On the other hand, if he sold the house and its furniture and at least part of his collections of porcelain and paintings, he estimated that he would realize £50,000 (or approximately £2½ million at today’s values). His estimate was close, for he did in fact raise £48,000 by various sales over the following couple of years. This would enable him to put his income back to over £6000, which would be perfectly tolerable, although he would have to provide for some sort of London residence out of it.

  This more or less forced change of circumstance became intertwined in his mind with the third preoccupation, which was his desire to give up the leadership of the Liberal party and to withdraw into being (more or less) a private member of Parliament. They were both part of the ‘winding out of the coil’, as he obscurely but dramatically put it. Catherine Gladstone was not initially enthusiastic about either, but she c
ame to see the need for the change of house more quickly than the desirability of withdrawal from the leadership. ‘Conversation with C. G. on the probable changes in our position and consequent measures,’ Gladstone wrote for 7 February; ‘at first she was startled.’13 Then a month later he recorded: ‘Conversation with C. on the situation: she is sadly reluctant to my receding into the shade.’14 His own reasoning was cogently summed up in a memorandum which he wrote, only it appears as a mind-clearing exercise for himself, on Saturday, 7 March. That day he breakfasted at Grillion’s, the political dining club, which also then assembled for Saturday breakfasts, a double indication of how different official London patterns still were in 1874 from those of this century. He read part of Disraeli’s early novel Vivian Grey, which when he had finished it he categorized as ‘the first quarter extremely clever, the rest trash’. He saw and discussed the question of the leadership with a mystifyingly diverse (and mostly irrelevant) collection of people. And he wrote the following sketch:

  (1) To engage now, is to engage for the term of Opposition, & the succeeding term of a Liberal Government. . . .

  This is not consistent with my views for the close of my life.

  (2) Failure of 1866–8 [that is, his realistic appraisal of his lack of success as either leader of the House of Commons in a government of which he was not Prime Minister or as leader of the opposition].

  (3) My views on the question of Education in particular are I fear irreconcilable with those of a considerable proportion of [the Liberal party].

  (4) In no case has the head of a Govt. considerable in character & duration, on receiving what may be called an emphatic dismissal, become Leader of Opposition.

  (5) The condition of the Liberal party requires consideration.

  a. It has no present public cause upon which it is agreed.

  b. It has serious & conscientious divisions of opinion, which are also pressing, e.g. on Education.

  c. The habit of making a career by & upon constant active opposition to the bulk of the party, & its leaders, has acquired a dangerous predominance among a portion of its members. This habit is not checked by the action of the great majority, who do not indulge or approve it: & it has become dangerous to the credit & efficiency of the party.15

  Upon the basis of these thoughts, reinforced by one additional issue separating him from the bulk of the Liberal party which came to the fore in the summer of 1874, Gladstone shaped and maintained his determination to disengage. His colleagues resisted. It would have been insulting had they not done so. But their dismay was more than formal, although not perhaps as strong as that of the Liberal adherents in the country. It was, however, nearly another year before he could get the shadow Cabinet to accept his resolve and settle upon Hartington as the replacement leader. Gladstone was therefore nominally still leader throughout the session of 1874 and up to the threshold of that of 1875. Nevertheless his effective disengagement began at Easter 1874.

  He performed his routine duties at the opening of the session and spoke twice. ‘I am tempted to say, I wish it were the last,’ he wrote of his first speech in the new Parliament. Then on Good Friday, 3 April, he ‘wound up [Carlton House Terrace] with a good deal of labour:88 and closed my door, perhaps hardly now mine, behind me.’ He left for Hawarden that afternoon and in the remaining nine months of that year spent only thirty-nine nights in London, most of them staying with the Frederick Cavendishes in 21 Carlton House Terrace, a familiar neighbourhood. Until midsummer he was largely at Hawarden. Then Stephen Glynne died suddenly in London (he had been searching for antiquities in Shoreditch High Street). There was a great local funeral at which the estate and the neighbours said farewell to the last Glynne to preside over Hawarden. The nominal ownership passed at once to Willy Gladstone, but that was more a fiction than a fact. He was to predecease his parents, and from 1874 until their deaths around a quarter of a century later, William and Catherine Gladstone were the undisputed squire and chatelaine of Hawarden. Their second son, Stephen, whose own son was eventually to become the third-generation Gladstone heir and the route by which the property has since descended, was already rector of the parish.

  Although Glynne’s death bound the Gladstones even more closely to Hawarden in the medium run, it made the ‘dear place too sore’ for Catherine Gladstone in the short run, and they were not there much between the funeral and the autumn. In the final month of the session, despite it being a record-breakingly hot July, Gladstone engaged for the first time with the new House of Commons. Two out of three of the subjects on which he chose to do so were divisive rather than unifying within the Liberal party, and even on the third his motives were not those of the mass of his followers. The first was the Scottish Patronage Bill, on which he ‘spoke (long)’ on 6 July. The issue of how ministers of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland should be appointed was, to say the least, a remote one to call forth the first speech for nearly four months of the leader of the opposition. The second was the Public Worship Bill, an anti-ritualist measure, which Archbishop Tait had promoted in the Lords and which came to the Commons, with Disraeli’s rather ill-informed support, only at the end of the session. Gladstone intervened, as Robert Blake put it, ‘like a thunder clap and moved six portentous resolutions’16 outlining the proper liturgical position of the Church of England but designed primarily to undermine the Archbishop’s bill, which, discreditably popular though it was with the Queen, the Prime Minister and the majority of both Houses, was later widely agreed to have been foolish and divisive for the Church.

  Divisive within political parties it certainly also was. Disraeli, who would have been wise to have kept a decent silence on Anglican disputes, denounced ritualism as ‘mass in masquerade’ and quarrelled on this issue with Salisbury, his Indian Secretary, whom he also denounced as ‘a great master of gibes and flouts and jeers’. Gladstone, whose primary feeling was against the Church and its liturgy being made a parliamentary football, went so far as to warn both Archbishops that if they persisted in supporting a particular amendment (against which Gladstone spoke on 5 August) he would regard himself as ‘altogether discharged from maintaining any longer the establishment of the Church’. This was not as extreme a lurch as it might at first sight have appeared, for Gladstone, at least since the Gorham judgement of 1851, had been distinctly conditional in his attitude to establishment. It was Erastianism, the subordination of Church to state, to which he was most opposed, and he regarded these debates as being a very bad example of parliamentary interference in matters with which legislators had no business. However, the most extreme Erastians were to be found among his Whig colleagues. Sir William Harcourt, whom he had recently made Solicitor-General and who was to be first Home Secretary and then Chancellor of the Exchequer in subsequent Gladstone governments, was insolently so. He liked to refer to what was to Gladstone the divine vehicle of apostolic religion as ‘the parliamentary church’. Sir Andrew Lusk, Liberal MP for Finsbury, went even further in saying that it was ‘a department of the state for the management of which the House is responsible’.17 When this sentiment on the opposition benches was joined to the opportunist populism of Disraeli’s support for the bill, Gladstone was in a hopeless minority and had eventually to withdraw his resolutions. However, he got considerable satisfaction out of his rebuke of the rumbustious Harcourt on 5 August: ‘it had become needful’. Needful it may have been, but it was hardly a contribution to rallying the Liberal party.

  On the third issue, Disraeli’s Endowed Schools Bill, which was designed to redress the balance of the 1871 settlement, Gladstone’s opposition was in accord with his party, although the grounds for his objection, primarily that it violated the duty of a government to accept the legislation of its predecessor in the previous Parliament, and secondarily that it was an attack on the endowed schools commissioners, of whom Lord Lyttelton was one, had a certain particularity about them. Altogether Gladstone’s month in London did little to reconcile him to parliamentary life, and on 7 August he set off fo
r a Penmaenmawr holiday, his first there for six years, with relief. He lunched that day in Grosvenor Square with Mrs Thistlethwayte, with whom relations had been active during this London interlude, and she drove him to Willesden Junction to pick up the five o’clock express from Euston.

  In North Wales he managed only fifteen sea-bathes that year, suspending the operation for a week from 11 August ‘on sanitary grounds’. (This presumably meant his own health rather than general pollution, for he spent half the next two days in bed and full of ‘physic’; though it did not prevent his being fairly boisterous during the half days when he was out of his bed: ‘we went up Moel Ynion: were wet to the skin: forded the stream knee deep: excellent tea in the cottage above Aber 9d a head’.)18His main intellectual activity was writing for the October number of the Contemporary Review a 10,000-word article on ‘The Church of England and Ritualism’, which put into literary form many of the thoughts he had developed and the points he had made in the July-August debates. He was also casting his mind forward to the visit that he was to pay to Ignaz von Döllinger in Munich in the following month, to the intense theological discussions he was to have there, and to the anti-ultramontane pamphlet, descriptively entitled The Vatican Decrees in their Bearing on Civil Allegiance: A Political Expostulation, which he was to launch upon the world in November, and which was to sell nearly 150,000 copies.

  His German journey lasted from 7 to 25 September, and was his first escape from Britain since 1866-7 and his first visit to Döllinger since 1845. He took two of his children – Willy and Helen (the future vice-principal of Newnham College, Cambridge) – with him to Bavaria, but not his wife, despite her temporary distaste for Hawarden.

  His first stop was Cologne, where he briefly saw his sister. He reached Munich on the evening of the second day, was put up and generally looked after by the British minister to Bavaria, Robert Morier (later a notable ambassador to St Petersburg) and then plunged into an orgy of discussion with Döllinger. On the next day he talked with him continuously from 10.30 a.m. to 6.00 p.m. The day after that they put in another six and a half hours. On Gladstone’s third and fourth days in Munich they had long afternoon walks (and talks) together. On one of them they encountered the Archbishop of Munich, who three years before had excommunicated Döllinger for his opposition to the Vatican decrees. Döllinger’s position had then become that of an Old Catholic, believing that Pius IX was doing immense harm to the ancient faith. This position Gladstone found both sympathetic and sustaining. It inspired him to write his expostulatory pamphlet on his return to England, and it caused him to make on the spot a significant addition to his ritualism article and to send it off for last-minute inclusion. As part of his argument that ritualistic practices in some Anglican churches carried no threat of the Romanization of England he added the following passage: