Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  Nor were Gladstone’s critics to be found only among Conservatives. In October 1884 Chamberlain, rebuked by the Prime Minister at the instigation of the Queen for using provocative language about Lord Salisbury, responded by bursting out (about Gladstone) to Dilke: ‘I don’t like him, really. I hate him.’23 108 Dilke could also make more detached but fairly sceptical comments about Gladstone. After Granville in 1882 had urged him and Chamberlain to remember who the GOM was and not to push him too hard in discussion, he commented: ‘In other words told [us] to remember [we] were dealing with a magnificent lunatic.’24 Harcourt could also mingle his occasional acts of tribute, such as attending at Charing Cross station, with highly acerbic comments when he disagreed with Gladstone, as over the control of the Metropolitan police. Yet, whatever their occasional exasperations, all his colleagues, including Hartington, the displaced person of 1880, agreed by this middle phase of the government that Gladstone’s continuation in office was essential. There was no impatience during his 1883 six weeks in Cannes. They would much rather he had stayed away for another month over Easter than that he resigned and left them to schism. A cynical explanation could be that they needed him as a figurehead, but quite enjoyed his being an absent one. His being away did not however promote the orderly conduct of business, as was the case when Attlee presided over the 1940–5 War Cabinet in the absence of Churchill. Few effective decisions about the government’s programme for the 1883 session (which opened on 15 February) had been taken by the time that Gladstone returned in early March. He was then by no means successful in lancing all the festering boils, but at least the Cabinet and the country felt that the most famous statesman in the world – Bismarck was the only possible rival – was back in charge.

  It was largely due to his fame and popular authority that this government, divided and luckless although it mostly was, maintained at least until the beginning of 1885 a fair degree of public support. London drawing rooms might be hostile, but Gladstone’s public appearances rarely failed to attract enthusiastic crowds, and the Liberal record in bye-elections (of which there were then about twenty-five a year), while patchy, was far from one of uniform retreat. There were even occasional gains above the 1880 tide-mark. Particularly if the proposed measure for the extension of the county franchise were carried, the Liberals looked set to be the natural majority party. It was only the danger of a post-Gladstone split which threatened this prospect. The idea that Gladstone’s leadership could itself provoke a twenty-year Tory hegemony was remote from the conventional wisdom of 1883.

  THE CLOUD IN THE WEST DARKENS

  ALTHOUGH GLADSTONE came into office in 1880 with his mind much further away from Ireland than in 1868 it was quickly wrenched in that direction by the scale of the agrarian distress and the threat to civil order which went with it. The number of evictions for non-payment of agricultural rent had risen from 483 in 1877 to 1238 in 1879, with the rate doubling again in the first six months of 1880. In most cases nonpayment followed inexorably from the collapse of his income leaving the rural tenant without any available resources. The Land League had been set up by Parnell and Michael Davitt in October 1877, and its doctrine of the ‘boycott’ (although the name did not come into use until a little later when Captain Boycott, Lord Erne’s agent, became an early target), by which anyone concerned with taking the land of an evicted tenant should be treated like a leper, was proclaimed by John Dillon and Thomas Brennan. Although these leaders were against violence there was also a mounting wave of agrarian crime (or ‘outrages’ as they were normally then called), particularly in Connaught.

  Within eight weeks of taking office the Cabinet reluctantly decided to introduce a Compensation for Disturbance Bill, which not very strong measure of protection for tenants was nonetheless strong enough to frighten three peers – Lansdowne, Listowel and Zetland – into resignation from junior posts, and nearly to drive Argyll out of the Cabinet. Only determined cosseting from Gladstone kept the Duke. All four of them need not have worried unduly for the bill lost its momentum through a considerable Liberal revolt. In the Commons it secured a second reading by a majority of seventy-eight, but this was essentially a majority provided by the Irish (which English arrogance always regarded as making it slightly spurious, particularly on an Irish issue), for twenty Liberals went into the Conservative lobby and another fifty abstained. This left the bill a sitting target for the Lords, who proceeded to throw it out almost contemptuously by a vote of 281 to 51. This outcome could not even be presented as an exercise in Tory obscurantism, for if the whole of the opposition had abstained the defection of Liberal peers would in itself have been sufficient to defeat the government.

  This was a severe setback both for Gladstone and for his Irish Secretary, W. E. Forster. Forster was a much more formidable figure than Chichester Fortescue, who had occupied this office in the 1868 government. And the effect on this stubborn man of losing his ameliorative bill was the somewhat paradoxical one of making him see coercion as the only alternative way of governing Ireland. From the autumn of 1880 Forster became a hardline man on Ireland. He settled into an intransigent groove which led to his resignation eighteen months later. In the interval, however, he got a lot of Cabinet support, which made matters awkward for Gladstone, whose instincts were all against Crime Bills and special powers. Morley (not then even an MP, let alone a minister, but already a favoured Gladstone familiar) captured the anguish which Forster’s views and the strength of his support imposed on Gladstone by writing to Chamberlain in Birmingham an account of a New Year’s Eve (1880–1) dinner in Downing Street at which Granville and Frederick Cavendish were also present:

  Gladstone was interesting as usual; talked about Dante, Innocent the Third, house property in London, the true theory of the Church, the enormity and monstrous absurdity of our keeping Ascension Island, etc., etc., etc. Then after dinner he took me into a corner and revealed his Coercion [scheme] much as a man might say (in confidence) that he found himself under the painful necessity of slaying his mother – it was downright piteous – his wrung features, his strained gesture, all the other signs of mental perturbation in an intense nature. I walked away in a horribly gloomy state. . . .’1

  To balance this misfortune Gladstone reaped considerable benefit from his wisdom in giving himself a second string to the Compensation for Disturbance Bill by setting up in the summer of 1880 the Bessborough commission of enquiry into Irish land tenure. Bessborough (the sixth earl) was one of the most enlightened of the landowners with large Irish holdings. He was quick as well as enlightened and produced his report by January 1881. It provided a more solid basis on which to get a land bill through both Cabinet and Parliament, and this was successfully achieved in the session of 1881. But it had to be run in double harness with coercion, which indeed was given first legislative priority, with land coming only second. This was the most which was acceptable to the Cabinet. But it was not a happy combination, for while the Cabinet would accept land reform only if it was accompanied by coercion, the Irish party would not try to make it work if it was.

  The 1881 Land Act therefore, while a considerable measure with far-reaching and beneficial long-term effects, could not hope, because of its companion, to produce a dramatic relaxation of tension and a new mood in Anglo-Irish relations. The Act broadly conceded the famous Three Fs, Fair Rent, Fixity of Tenure and Free Sale (of tenant right). There were some limitations, particularly those which excluded leaseholders and tenants who were already in arrears with their rent, and several further amending measures were required before the Act reached its full effect. It was also subject to some fluctuation of judicial interpretation, although the specially created Irish Land Commission, with the status of a High Court, established a good general reputation for consistent justice. The Act eventually affected tenure in 65 per cent of the land of Ireland and therein permanently destroyed both the absolute power of the landlord and the doctrine of free contract in rents. Although its provisions for tenant proprietorship (raisin
g the proportion of the purchase price which the state could advance from two-thirds to three-quarters) had little direct effect, the indirect effect over a period was considerable. The restrictions on rent-fixing and evictions made many estate owners eager to divest themselves of their land, and the new mood of withdrawal encouraged the Conservative party towards land-purchase schemes for Ireland which started with the Ashbourne Act of 1885 and continued during its twenty-year post-1886 hegemony.

  The 1881 Act was both positively and negatively seminal. Positively it sowed the slow-ripening seeds of a prosperous peasant agriculture in Ireland, although ninety years and Ireland’s enthusiastic entry into the European Community were required before that could fully mature. Negatively the Act marked the beginning of the end of the Peelite-Whig Liberal party which Palmerston and Russell had created in 1859. The 1881 Act made a perforation along which it was easy for the Home Rule issue to tear in 1886. In no way, however, could that Act be regarded as a minor or ephemeral piece of legislation.

  Despite its far-reaching nature this 1881 measure had a happier parliamentary experience than its 1880 predecessor. This was partly because of the Bessborough report and partly because it was much more Gladstone’s measure, whereas the other had been more Forster’s. The Prime Minister fought the bill through an unenthusiastic Cabinet, and then steered it with a mixture of patience, courtesy, command of detail and unflagging energy through thirty-two days (many of them extending deep into the night) of committee stage. It would have been an unusual feat of knowledge and stamina for a young Cabinet minister trying to make his name with a piece of departmental legislation on which he was paid to be an expert. What was unique was for a Prime Minister aged seventy-one to display a mixture of towering authority and grinding application to detail. Although endless objections had been repetitiously deployed during this committee marathon, the third reading was carried virtually by default on 29 July. Only 14 voted against (and 220 for). This weak adverse vote, taking the sting out of the opposition, was a powerful factor in getting the bill through the Lords on 16 August.

  Had this measure been accompanied, as Gladstone had proposed in the autumn of 1880, by some opening towards greater Irish control over Irish affairs, it might have met with more Irish response. It is unlikely that the particular scheme then advocated by Gladstone, which provided for the devolution to Grand Committees of the House of Commons of most purely domestic legislation, not only for Ireland but also for Scotland and England, would have satisfied Irish aspirations. It might have been more successful in reducing filibustering on the floor of the House (which the Parnellites were then developing into an art form) than in taking the edge off their nationalism. But at least it would have been a more hopeful companion for the Land Act than the two Irish Crimes Acts which were the other main legislative hauls of the session. Gladstone, however, allowed the devolution scheme to be killed in the Cabinet. Chamberlain, a counter-productive advocate, had been his only enthusiastic supporter. It was not the greatest tribute to the Prime Minister’s foresight or boldness in Cabinet-making.

  As it was, the unfortunate juxtaposition between reform and the taking of arbitrary powers was underlined by the government deciding, within eight weeks of the Land Act becoming law, to lock up Parnell and two other recalcitrant Nationalist MPs in Kilmainham Gaol. No charge or process of law was involved, merely a unilateral decision of the Irish executive. The arrest in these circumstances of the leader of a parliamentary group of more than forty members (soon to be one of more than eighty) who was rapidly becoming, to put it at its lowest, one of the half-dozen dominating House of Commons personalities of the century was a strenuous step for any government to take, particularly as it was based on little more than the hope that it might reduce agrarian crime.

  Furthermore the next ten years, from that autumn of 1881 to Parnell’s death in October 1891, although this prospect was only dimly perceivable at the beginning, were to make Gladstone’s relations with the Irish leader still more important to his political successes or failures than had been those with Peel in the 1840s, with Aberdeen in the 1850s, with Palmerston in the 1860s and with Disraeli in the 1870s. With Parnell however the relations were much more personally distant, and followed a more fluctuating course, than with any of these four statesmen. Peel and Aberdeen, despite occasional hiccups, were always admired chiefs to Gladstone. With Palmerston the partnership, as has been described,109 was mostly a hostile one, although remarkably free from venom in the circumstances. With Disraeli there was never either alliance or much mutual admiration, although plenty of symbiosis.

  With Parnell there was little intimate contact. Even in the late 1880s, when the ‘union of hearts’ became the phrase which for a time epitomized the relations between the Liberals and the Irish Nationalists, direct encounters were limited to three or four long business meetings, a dinner with the Gladstones in London and, at the apex, a twenty-hour Parnell visit to Hawarden. But that was well in the future in 1881–2. At this period Gladstone’s encounters with Parnell were effectively confined to seeing him across the floor of the House of Commons and engaging in parliamentary exchanges, mostly unfriendly, with him. In his great Leeds oratorical jamboree of October 1881, Gladstone spoke more hostilely of Parnell than he was to do on any other occasion. ‘He desires to arrest the operation of the Land Act,’ the Prime Minister said; ‘to stand as Moses stood between the living and the dead; to stand there, not as Moses stood, to arrest, but to spread the plague.’ And he continued:

  If it shall appear that there is still to be fought a final conflict in Ireland between law on the one side and sheer lawlessness upon the other, if the law purged from defect and from any taint of injustice is still to be repelled and refused, and the first conditions of political society to remain unfulfilled, then I say, without hesitation, the resources of civilization against its enemies are not yet exhausted.2

  Parnell replied at Wexford with an equally memorable phrase, denouncing Gladstone as ‘this masquerading knight errant, this pretending champion of the rights of every nation except those of the Irish nation’. A week later, on the recommendation of Forster, but with Gladstone’s full approval, Parnell was arrested in his bedroom at Morrison’s Hotel, Dublin, and held in protective custody for the next six months. His conditions of imprisonment were not severe. Kilmainham Gaol, on the Phoenix Park edge of central Dublin, was convenient for visitors, and he had plenty of them, as well as books, writing material, no prison work (as indeed would have been wholly inappropriate for an uncharged and unconvicted prisoner), and a sitting room with two armchairs and a good fire. Nonetheless the six months of incarceration were a heavy deprivation for Parnell, for he was in the early stages of his famous passion for Katherine O’Shea.

  He had first met her in July 1880 and they appear to have become lovers in October of the same year. He was thirty-four at the time, nearly forty years Gladstone’s junior, and she was thirty-five. In the previous May, he had been elected chairman of the then loose-knit Irish Home Rule party, displacing William Shaw, the previous chairman, by a vote of twenty-three to eighteen. Possibly after an earlier miscarriage, Mrs O’Shea was by the time of Parnell’s arrest pregnant by him, and this child, who lived only a couple of months, was born in February 1882.

  At the time of the death Parnell was present at Eltham, Mrs O’Shea’s house on the south-eastern edge of London. He was on his way back from a parole visit to Paris to attend his nephew’s funeral, but he had to return almost immediately to Dublin to fulfil the conditions of his parole, which he scrupulously did. (Mrs O’Shea’s child was not of course acknowledged as his, not even by Captain O’Shea, so that he gained no further privilege by this second death.)

  The strength and constancy of Parnell’s commitment to Mrs O’Shea was never in doubt from 1880 until his death eleven years later. In the spring of 1882 his desire for freedom was therefore intense. To add to his emotional involvements, he could see the control of events in Ireland slipping away from him and in
to less disciplined and more violent hands. The Ribbonmen and other secret societies were gaining ground and ‘Captain Moonlight’ (an evocative portmanteau name, probably Parnell’s invention, for the organizers of agrarian crime) stalked the countryside. Gladstone also came increasingly to desire Parnell’s release. The Irish leader had been put in prison, not as the result of a judicial decision, but because of executive judgement that his being there would reduce agrarian crime. It did nothing of the sort. The reverse happened. And there was evidence that Parnell had moved to a position in which he was prepared both to advocate giving the Land Act (of 1881) a trial and to denounce violence. The main conduit through which this (broadly accurate) information came was the unfortunate one of Captain O’Shea, the detached but nonetheless intermittently conjugal husband of Katherine.

  William O’Shea, who was at that time MP for County Clare, was a classically unsatisfactory figure. He believed, without any foundation, other than that of having held a commission in the Hussars, he was too much of a gentleman for the Irish parliamentary party, and he was as shifty and self-seeking as he was vain, always looking to exaggerate his own importance and to gain benefits for himself. In other words he was the worst possible go-between. Parnell, perhaps for obvious reasons, was well aware of this and tried to replace him with Justin McCarthy as negotiator. Gladstone was less suspicious,110 but it was Chamberlain who at this stage reposed most faith in O’Shea. And Chamberlain was important, because Gladstone in the run-up to that year’s budget on 24 April (again the albatross of carrying the Exchequer as well as the premiership) left most of the discussions to him.