Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  There is not a cannibal in the South Sea Islands, whose indignation would not arise and overboil at the recital of that which has been done, which has too late been examined, but which remains unavenged: which has left behind all the foul and all the fierce passions that produced it, and which may again spring up in another murderous harvest from the soil soaked and reeking with blood, and in the air tainted with every imaginable deed of crime and shame. . . . No Government ever has so sinned; none has proved itself so incorrigible or, which is the same, so impotent for reformation.

  The Turks had indulged in ‘abominable and bestial lusts’ and were responsible for scenes ‘at which Hell itself might almost blush’. At Blackheath on the Saturday after publication Gladstone balanced his use of somewhat less emotional language by the effect of his physical presence and his half-terrifying, half-inspiriting gaze. Morley caught brilliantly his oratorical technique and impact when he wrote of Gladstone addressing himself ‘in slow sentences to imaginary Ottomans, whom he seemed to hold before his visual eye’.6 Gladstone was always addicted to what may be called the second-person argumentative case, and he used it both sonorously and memorably on that damp Saturday afternoon in south-east London at a time when oratory was more popular than football:

  You shall receive your regular tribute, you shall retain your titular sovereignty, your empire shall not be invaded, but never again as the years roll in their course, so far as it is in our power to determine, never again shall the hand of violence be raised by you, never again shall the flood-gates of lust be open to you, never again shall the dire refinements of cruelty be devised by you for the sake of making mankind miserable.

  In the course of this speech he also probably went further in a pro-Russian direction than in any of his other pronouncements and did so in terms which now sound curiously reminiscent of Churchill’s June 1941 offer of alliance to Stalin: ‘I, for one, for the purposes of justice, am ready as an individual to give the right hand of friendship to Russia when the objects are just and righteous, and to say, in the name of God, “Go on and prosper!”’7

  Gladstone was stronger on the rhetoric of indignation than on detailed knowledge of what was happening in the Balkans, and Disraeli’s desire to burst the bloated bladder of expostulation with a sharp pin of mocking deflation is understandable. Disraeli’s danger was that he might prick not only the monstrous engine of Gladstone’s indignation but also his own repute with serious-minded middle opinion. His remark on 10 July that he was sceptical whether ‘torture had been practised on a great scale amongst an oriental people who . . . generally terminate their connection with culprits in a more expeditious manner’8 was thought to show more wit than heart. So was his dismissal three weeks later as ‘coffee-house babble’ of the claims (which turned out to be more or less accurate) that 12,000 had been massacred. The same applied to his September quip that Gladstone’s pamphlet was the greatest of the Bulgarian atrocities. They were both near to the style of Bishop Wilberforce’s 1860 request to T. H. Huxley to tell him and the audience which of his grandparents he regarded as most closely descended from an ape. They were more provocative than persuasive.

  Equally Disraeli’s violent private attacks on Gladstone belied the view that his calm was unruffled while Gladstone went over several tops. Disraeli was recorded as saying in October 1876 to Lady Derby: ‘Posterity will do justice to that unprincipled maniac Gladstone – extraordinary mixture of envy, vindictiveness, hypocrisy and superstition; and with one commanding characteristic – whether preaching, praying, speechifying, or scribbling – never a gentleman!’9 Then in the summer of 1878, after Gladstone had exaggeratedly condemned the occupation of Cyprus, Disraeli produced the second most memorable of his anti-Gladstone aphorisms, which ranks only just behind those ‘exhausted but still menacing volcanoes on the coast of South America’ because it was more contrived and ended with a dying fall instead of a swish. On 27 July the Prime Minister told a Saturday-evening banquet in the Knightsbridge Riding School (the venue could hardly have been better chosen to epitomize Gladstone’s denunciation of the West End of London as being increasingly unsound in its political values)93 that his antagonist was ‘a sophistical rhetorician inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself’.10

  Behind this clash of persons and of styles there was a profound difference of approach to the problems of a Britain moving out of that secure, prosperous, yet unostentatious third quarter of the nineteenth century, for which Peel had laid the foundations, helped by Gladstone, hindered by Disraeli. It had been a period somewhat analogous to the forty years of the Federal Republic of Germany and its quiet bourgeois successes. Those German successes were achieved under the threat of the Soviet Union in its days of apparent strength. Mid-Victorian England only had the challenge of the somewhat tinselly Second French Empire, whereas late-Victorian England faced the much more solidly based economic rivalry leading to superiority of the United States and Germany.

  Gladstone and Disraeli fought their battle of the late 1870s on the hinge between these two periods. Disraeli reacted by putting on the show of a dawn raid on the shares of the Suez Canal Company; of proclaiming the Queen Empress of India; of threatening to go to war to keep the Russians out of Constantinople (even if this involved treating Turkish oppression of Christian provinces as inventions prompted by Liberal lack of patriotism masquerading as conscience); of himself theatrically dominating the Congress of Berlin, though hobbling across the scene rather than bestriding it (‘der alte Jude, das ist der Mann’, as Bismarck was alleged to have said); of occupying Cyprus; and of waging two blatantly imperialist wars, one against the Zulus and the other in Afghanistan.

  Gladstone’s reaction was to play the ‘moral force’ card and to reforge his links with popular Radicalism and mass audiences, which links had been largely in abeyance since the beginning of his previous government. First, he saw with singular clarity that relative decline was inevitable for Britain. The United States in particular would ‘probably become what we are now, the head servant in the great household of the World, the employer of all employed’.11 For an 1878 article, even though written for an American audience, this was remarkably prescient, particularly for one who never crossed the Atlantic and therefore never fell under the almost electric spell of the New World. And, in these circumstances, his thought continued, nothing could be more dangerous than to extend an empire which was already somewhat beyond the sustaining force of the metropolitan country. This was a recipe for overstrain, conflict and eventual disorderly defeat.

  It also led to the debauching of the public finances. Between 1874 and 1880 the Disraeli government turned an inherited surplus of £6 million into a deficit of £8 million. Just as Gladstone as a young Peelite in the 1840s abhorred the laxity of Whig finance, so in the 1870s as an old (in years not in party commitment) Liberal he denounced the budgetary consequence of Tory imperial adventures. Conservative profligacy played almost as large a part as Conservative aggression in the thundering denunciations of the Midlothian campaign.

  Gladstone also decided that he had to rouse ‘the masses against the classes’ and the provinces against the metropolis. This was not an easy or a natural decision for him, for his cast of mind was instinctively hierarchical. He respected rank. He strained his own finances by building up the Hawarden estate for his heirs. He liked filling his Cabinets with grandees. When the Duke of Sutherland denounced him as a Russian agent in 1878 (which gave particular pain because of his friendship with the Duke’s dead mother) his greatest solace was that the Duke of Westminster drove over to Hawarden to signify his support, and (privately) rebuked Sutherland from the platform of an even better endowed if more recent dukedom. Gladstone maintained the slightly ludicrous view that he was not rich enough to be a peer (which was one-third an excuse which suited him well, one-third an expression of
modesty, and one-third a disdainful gesture). In his four premierships he made 101 peers, an experience which made him loath to include himself in the mêlée.

  At first he moved cautiously in form if not in language on the Turkish question. He believed that writing pamphlets was more restrained than making speeches, and that if a speech were made at all it was different doing so in one’s own constituency from doing so on a barnstorming tour. Hence the Blackheath afternoon on 9 September, despite his having already decided (although not announced) that, whatever else the future might hold, he was not again going to contest the unesteemed and ungrateful Greenwich. During that late summer and early autumn there were nearly 500 meetings up and down the country, mostly organized by the Eastern Question Association, which was non-party and indeed largely non-political in the sense that it was inspired and run not by parliamentarians but by men of letters and clerics: Carlyle, Ruskin, Burne-Jones, the historians E. A. Freeman and J. A. Froude, the Bishop of Manchester and Canon H. P. Liddon. Typically they passed resolutions abhorring the atrocities and condemning the moral detachment of the government. This detachment had been well summed up by Disraeli’s August statement that ‘our duty at this critical moment is to maintain the Empire of England’:12 in other words to be pro-Turkish and anti-Russian.

  Gladstone spoke at none of these autumn demonstrations other than at Blackheath. His nearest to public visibility was when on his September–October tour of North-eastern country houses he was greeted by welcoming crowds at the railway junctions or the castle gates and delivered himself of some brief polemics. Alnwick was a striking example of this, which cannot greatly have pleased his firmly Tory host, the Duke of Northumberland. On 8 December he ‘spoke (I fear) 1½ hours, with some exertion, far from wholly to my satisfaction’ to the culminating London convention of the campaign. This was in the St James’s Hall, and was intended as a riposte to what Gladstone regarded as some grossly provocative remarks by Disraeli at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet a month before. The convention was a gathering of intellectual leaders presided over by grandees, thereby rather contradicting the demotic and (allegedly) demagogic nature of the campaign. The Duke of Westminster took the chair at one session, and the Earl of Shaftesbury at the other. Anthony Trollope spoke (as did, inter alia, James Bryce, Henry Richard, G. O. Trevelyan, the Bishop of Oxford, and Henry Fawcett). Thomas Hardy, aged thirty-six and in the audience, noted with amusement the vain efforts of chairman Westminster to get Trollope to bring his remarks to an end. Gladstone even tried (unsuccessfully) to get the not quite empurpled Newman to come down from Birmingham and participate. It was to this audience that Gladstone with perhaps unconscious irony chose to denounce the ‘upper ten thousand’. When did they ‘ever lead the attack in the name of humanity’?

  In this early phase of the four-year clash, Gladstone could not justifiably be regarded as having either unduly savaged his country’s government or rocked the boat of the Granville–Hartington-led Liberal party. Nevertheless there was a lot of criticism against him for crashing in like a rogue elephant. Hartington required much massage from Granville, Spencer and other Whig figures to prevent him resentfully throwing in his hand, and Lady Frederick Cavendish, often the unhappy cushion between her revered uncle and her respected brother-in-law, had a worried time. Uncle William, she allowed was too ‘headstrong’, but she was sure that he was moved by ‘love of justice and mercy’ and not by ambition. The Court, poisoned by Disraeli and by a somewhat narrow concept of patriotism, thought otherwise. At a levee on 12 March 1877 Gladstone noted that ‘the Queen smiled: but had not a word’.13 A year later it was worse: ‘Went to the Levee. The Prince [of Wales], for the first time, received me drily: the Duke of Cambridge, black as thunder, did not even hold out his hand. Prince Xtn. [of Schleswig-Holstein, the impecunious husband of the Queen’s third daughter] could not but follow suit. This is not very hard to bear.’14

  In fact he minded it a good deal, although without the slightest thought that it might deflect him from his righteous course. And when, just over another year later, at the Royal Academy Banquet of 1879, he found that the frost had thawed and that ‘the P. of W. was just as of old’, it was difficult to know whether it was this or ‘Lord B[eaconsfield] not [being] warmly received by the general Company’15 which gave him greater pleasure. It should, however, also be recorded that, three weeks after that, he derived equal satisfaction, for he was generous as well as righteous, from the following incident: ‘Went by invitation to afternoon tea with Lady Derby. Found myself face to face with Lord Beaconsfield; & this put all right socially between us, to my great satisfaction.’16

  Gladstone’s social life embraced a wider dimension than these royalties, Lady Derby or even Lord Beaconsfield. On 10–12 March 1877, he spent a remarkable Saturday to Monday at the house of Sir John Lubbock near Farnborough, Kent. Lubbock, later the first Lord Avebury, was at that time Liberal MP for Maidstone, a fellow of the Royal Society and formidable as a promoter of reforming and philanthropic causes as he was successful as a banker. Among his other guests he had Sir Lyon Playfair, another FRS who was also MP for St Andrews and Edinburgh universities, T. H. Huxley and John Morley. It was the first time that Gladstone had met Morley, then aged thirty-nine and editor of the Fortnightly Review. Morley was to be not only his official biographer, but also the most devoted colleague of his last decade. After this initial encounter Gladstone wrote: ‘I cannot help liking Mr J. Morley.’17 (The touch of surprised reluctance presumably arose from Morley’s well-known agnosticism.) To add to this intellectual feast they walked on the Sunday afternoon to call on Charles Darwin in a neighbouring village. Darwin, according to Morley, was dazzled that ‘such a gentleman’ should have visited him. Huxley, using with Morley their mutual saving of time while Gladstone was at church, said of him: ‘why, put him in the middle of a moor, with nothing in the world but his shirt, and you could not prevent him from being anything he liked.’18

  Over the turn of the year 1876–7 there had been a European conference at Constantinople. This was much in accordance with Gladstone’s desires, for he believed above all in the Concert of Europe asserting itself. Such a view potentially separated him from his Radical allies, for they rightly saw the Concert as an essentially conservative concept, owing more to Castlereagh than to Cobden. However, the conference failed. The Turks rejected its demands, and there was no united will to impose them. Not only Britain, although Derby as British Foreign Secretary was a main instigator of the conference, but Austria and France were weak in their support, while Germany was mainly concerned to try to avoid too rough a rupture between Austria and Russia, which would destroy the Dreikaiserbund, united in favour of emperors but not of much else.

  As the hope of a concerted solution receded, so the two sharp swords of the Balkan Christian communities reacted in different but typical ways. Gladstone devoted himself to writing another pamphlet, this time on the sufferings of Montenegro. On 19 April he ‘finished, corrected and sent off my article on Montenegro which from the intense interest of the subject has kept me warm, even hot, all the time I have been writing it’.19 But it did not heat the British public. It sold only 8000 copies and was something of an anti-climax after the Bulgarian Horrors. Meanwhile the Tsar moved towards war, which he declared against Turkey on 24 April, five days after Gladstone had completed his Montenegrin pamphlet and three days before he took his next important step, which was to put down five resolutions (on the Eastern Question) for debate and division in the House of Commons.

  Typically Gladstone made up his mind during a day which he spent entirely in bed, with one of his sudden bouts of stomach upset and two visits from his physician: ‘This day I took my decision: a severe one, in face of my not having a single approval in the Upper official circle. But had I in the first days of September asked the same body whether I ought to write my [Bulgarian] pamphlet I believe the unanimous verdict would have been no.’20 94

  The resolutions declared that the Porte (that is, the seat and e
ntity of Turkish government) had offended against humanity; that, in the absence of adequate guarantees for the future, the Porte had accordingly lost all claim to moral or material support from the other powers; that British influences should be deployed in favour of local liberty and devolved government in the desecrated provinces; that the European Concert should reassert itself and exact all necessary changes from the government of the Sultan; and (in a wrapping-up procedural address to the Crown) that British policy should henceforth be based on these principles. Gladstone announced the exact form of the resolutions to the House of Commons three days later, saying: ‘I make this motion on my own responsibility, and not as the organ of any party or section of a party.’

  This disclaimer was hardly enough to prevent the motion being a deeply embarrassing one for the hesitant Liberal leadership. They were nervous of getting into a russophil position, but they were even more nervous of being assailed by the force of Gladstone’s oratory. And they would, of course, have to decide whether or not to vote with him, either course presenting grave disadvantages. As was usual, Gladstone and Hartington moved stiffly at arm’s length from each other while the more supple Granville attempted a compromise. ‘Puss’ Granville was lucky (although probably also cunning) in his timing, and caught Gladstone for a meeting with himself, Hartington and Wolverton (the former Whip) immediately after the Royal Academy dinner on Saturday, 5 May. About this dinner Gladstone struck an almost exultant note: ‘spoke for “Literature!” My reception surprised me, it was so good.’21 In this euphoric mood, post-applause as well as post-prandial, he was remarkably conciliatory. ‘What they ask of me is really, from my point of view, little more than nominal.’ He was wrong. His agreement to modify the second resolution and move only that and the first, although ranging over all five in his speech, produced a sense of let-down among both the hardline parliamentary Radicals such as Dilke and Chamberlain and the more utopian outside enthusiasts. It did however produce a more or less united Liberal division lobby, although a weak one for the key vote resulted in defeat by 354 to 223, a majority far in excess of the nominal Conservative preponderance.