Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  It could be said that he was too tired to resign. Resignation, certainly of a Prime Minister from his own Cabinet, would be an energy-demanding process, and Gladstone for once was at the limit of his reserves. So he acquiesced. Admiral Beauchamp Seymour was authorized to send Arabi an ultimatum. If he did not desist from strengthening his forts, a bombardment would commence. Arabi sent no reply, and on 11 July British naval guns pounded the Alexandria waterfront for ten and a half hours. There were not vast casualties (although when Arabi then withdrew from the city there followed substantial death and destruction from rioting), but the action was rough, and was widely seen to be so, both at home and abroad. Bright said in private that it ‘was simply damnable – worse than anything ever perpetrated by Dizzie’, but his resignation statement on 18 July was moderately couched, so that Gladstone was able to go on referring to him as ‘dear old John Bright’ and describing him as ‘sound as a roach’ (a curious comparison). This was in sharp contrast with Gladstone’s attitude to Bright when they separated on Home Rule in 1886.113 The difference was that on Home Rule Gladstone was passionately convinced of his own rightness, but shared much of Bright’s hostility to the bombardment of Alexandria.

  Once the Egyptian intervention was launched, however, Gladstone accepted it with mounting enthusiasm. On 11 July he made a heavy-hearted statement in the House of Commons and did not enjoy being baited by his old love, the politically (at least) heartless Arthur Balfour. By the 25th, when he moved a vote of credit to deal with the financial consequences of sending out a land expedition to back up the bombardment, he was on much more certain form. It was a full-scale operation which was to be mounted, with 15,000 men to be sent from England and another 10,000 from India, and Sir Garnet Wolseley, the premier general, to be put in charge. The costs were correspondingly large. Gladstone’s vote of credit provided for £2.3 million, paid for by raising income tax from fivepence to eightpence for half the current financial year. The whole undertaking was treated as a proper war (although without a declaration) and not as a colonial expedition engaging only the locally available regular troops. The Prince of Wales, for instance, in his early forties, wished to offer himself as an already somewhat corpulent volunteer officer. (Gladstone and the Queen were agreed – for once – that he should not go.)

  Unlike nearly every other British military enterprise between Waterloo and 1914, the Wolseley expedition was a neat, quick and resounding success. He met the Arabi army at Tel-el-Kebir, fifty or so miles to the north-east of Cairo, on 13 September and gained a complete victory with few casualties. Arabi was captured and exiled to Ceylon, and Tewfik was maintained as Khedive, but as a client of the British agent-general (soon to be Baring). Within two months, only half by intention, Britain had put a lid on Egyptian nationalism, which was to be kept down for more or less seventy years, extruded French political and military if not linguistic and cultural influence, and assumed responsibility for the most populous and sophisticated country in Africa.

  Gladstone was full of immediate satisfaction with the victory. Hamilton, having dined with him (and Sir Reginald Welby of the Treasury and Granville) at the Garrick Club and then gone on to Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience at the Savoy Theatre, recorded: ‘I never remember seeing him in higher spirits.’ He noted that Gladstone had been cheered on both entering and leaving the Savoy and that it was noteworthy that ‘any popular signs should be manifested in his favour in a London theatre of all places, where the audience is certainly not much given to Gladstonianism’.5 Gladstone also ensured that the Secretary of State for War organized major Saturday salutes in the London parks (‘I hope the guns will crash all the windows’)6 and rallied the senior prelates (Canterbury being ill, he wrote to York and London) to suggest suitable church thanksgivings on the Sunday. It was a curiously exact forerunner of Churchill’s commemoration almost precisely sixty years later of another battle which took place only 150 miles to the west of Tel-el-Kebir.

  Yet there were important differences. No one could doubt Churchill’s total commitment to the North African campaign, in which the battle of El Alamein was the turning-point, as well as being one, even if the lesser (the other being Stalingrad), of the two 1942 hinges of fate in the Second World War. Tel-el-Kebir by comparison was a minor event. Furthermore Gladstone’s enthusiasm might have been regarded as opportunistic and even hypocritical: he embraced the campaign when it was won.

  Judgement here must turn somewhat on exactly what in his own mind he was celebrating. Was it that British casualties had been so small? Was it that at any rate the first phase of what might have been an immensely messy undertaking had ended so cleanly? Was it relief rather than triumphalism? Positive answers to these questions, combined with his natural naive enthusiasms, could provide a respectable explanation of his volte face. But the probability is that no simple interpretation of motives is satisfactory. Egypt in 1882 occasioned almost as deep and turbulent a struggle between Gladstone’s anti-militarist conscience and his belief in the imposition of international authority (preferably by a concert but, if not, by the most responsible power) as did that between his intense sexuality and his pervading sense of sin in his more virile decades. The clashing contradictions of his style and behaviour are brilliantly portrayed by a contemporary cartoon showing him, dressed in the most civilian and almost parsonical of habits, belabouring a wretched Egyptian with his umbrella.

  Then there is the issue of his disproportionate holdings of Egyptian bonds. Did these affect his conduct in a way that today might be regarded as corrupt? About the remarkable size of the holdings there can be no doubt, as careful and original research by H. C. G. Matthew has recently made clear. At the end of 1881, when the Arabi crisis began to erupt, he owned a nominal amount of £51,500 of Egyptian Tribute loan, divided in the proportion of about two to one between the issue of 1854 and that of 1871. He had acquired about half of this stock by the end of 1875, and bought the rest in the late 1870s. In his meticulous annual accounts he entered the combined real as opposed to the face value of his two holdings as £40,567 on 31 December 1881. This was equivalent to about £2 million at today’s values. It was a very substantial sum for one who had as recently as when he left office in 1874 been complaining about his poverty, and acting upon it to the extent of selling his house (11 Carlton House Terrace), pictures, porcelain and some books. Indeed his going into Egyptians was occasioned by a combination of available funds arising from these sales and of his need for high-yielding stocks in order to correct his low (1874) ratio of income to assets. Nonetheless it was an extraordinary decision to place 37 per cent of his total portfolio (for such it was) at double risk from political instability in Cairo and Constantinople.

  Gladstone, however, was rarely a cautious investor. He seemed to have learnt little from his own trouble in clearing up the result of the Glynne family’s Oak Farm disaster thirty years before. And although his Egyptian investments turned out satisfactorily (partly as a result of his own political actions) they were at least balanced by heavy losses, realized in 1884, on an equally excessive holding of Metropolitan District Railway stock. Through what he then described as ‘one heavy mistake in buying largely into the District R. before it was in a paying condition’,7 he lost about £25,000 (or £I million if the factor of fifty is applied).

  While the lower Nile Valley paradoxically proved a safer investment haven than the Inner Circle and its offshoots, the Egyptian loans were nonetheless a volatile stock, with their movements closely following politico-military events. When Gladstone bought the 1871 bonds they stood at 42. By 1881 they had risen to 62, but had fallen to 57 when in the early summer of 1882 first the Concert of Europe failed to work and then even the Anglo-French Dual Control fell apart. But by the end of that year, with Alexandria bombarded, Wolseley victorious at Tel-el-Kebir, and the territory of the pharaohs under British occupation, they had risen to 82. On the 1871 stock alone Gladstone thus made a capital gain (unrealized however until a few years later) of £7500 (£375,000) ov
er the period of the hostilities.8

  Superficially this looks a clear case of improper financial interest. By modern standards and with modern press attention, without even intrusive investigation, for his holdings were never concealed, his position would have been wholly untenable. Yet I do not believe for a moment that his primary or even his significantly supporting motivation sprang from financial self-interest. Any contrary view can be refuted both objectively and subjectively. Objectively there was the fact that, with the exception of Bright and Harcourt, Gladstone was the most reluctant of the fourteen members of the Cabinet to accept the need for intervention. Furthermore, when over the next couple of years he had occasion to influence the interests of bondholders, he threw his weight against them, so far as both their coupon return and their priority of security were concerned. He believed strongly that, in the interests of future lending, foreign debts should be honoured, but not elevated above their station.

  More important were the subjective considerations. Gladstone’s blend of innocence and grandeur transcended the possibility of corruption. It was all of a piece with his purchase and sale of Consols during the Franco-Prussian War; with his rash rescue operations with prostitutes, particularly late in life when his carnal flame had burnt down but the desire of his political opponents to traduce him was stronger than ever; and with his willingness to borrow houses from rich friends and take holidays at their expense without it ever occurring to him that they could expect any return except for the pleasure of his company. In his own mind at least, and to some substantial extent in reality, his purposes were too high for petty corruption to be a possibility. Knight of the Garter although he never aspired to be – it was an honour for the more patrician of his adjutants, not for himself – there was no one for whom the order’s motto of ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ was more instinctively appropriate.

  For a year or so after the excitements of the summer and early autumn of 1882 Egypt receded from a central position on the London Cabinet agenda. This quiescence was something of an illusion, for behind only the thinnest of screens there was building up a combination of circumstances which gave striking support to the view that one commitment always leads to another. In the middle and upper Nile Valley there lay a vast territory which was then known as the Egyptian Soudan. Insofar as it was governed at all it was ill governed from Cairo. A self-proclaimed Mahdi or Messiah, who had some experience as both a slave-trader and a middle-rank Egyptian official, raised a banner of rebellion in 1881 and implanted it in soil which was fertile for revolt if not for crops. In 1883 the Khedive’s government attempted to put him down. They employed an English commander and 10,000 Egyptian troops. The expedition ought to have been vetoed by the British government, and probably would have been had Baring already been long enough in control. The result was almost an annihilation. Baker Pasha, to give him the title, at once commanding and self-indulgent, by which most Englishmen (but not Gordon, who was too fanatical to be a pasha) in Egyptian service were known, together with his army, was cut to pieces in November 1883. This defeat produced an edgy mood in London and led on, within two and a half months, to the disastrous despatch of Gordon to Egypt and the Sudan.

  After turning a difficult corner with Hartington on franchise reform over the New Year of 1884 Gladstone went back to Hawarden for two and a half weeks, no doubt feeling he had earned a further respite. During this period ‘Chinese’ Gordon (as General Charles Gordon, a fifty-year-old major-general of engineers, was at the time generally known, because of his remarkable exploits on behalf of the Emperor of China during the Taiping rebellion of 1863–4) appeared briefly and, as it turned out, for the last time in England. After service in Egypt and the Sudan in the 1870s and in India (incongruously as private secretary to Ripon as Viceroy, but lasting in that post only for a few weeks), China again, then Mauritius and South Africa in the early 1880s, Gordon had spent 1883 in semi-retirement interspersed with biblical researches in Palestine. From there he committed himself to King Leopold II of the Belgians to take over from H. M. Stanley as administrator in the Congo. Granville and Hartington were asked for their approval and refused to give it. The telegram was drafted as saying that the Secretary of State declines to sanction the arrangement. It was transmitted as saying that he decides to sanction it. This was by no means the last of the confusions which clouded the final stages of the Gordon saga.

  To atone for the mistake the official British objections were withdrawn and Gordon accepted Leopold’s commission on 2 January 1884 and then returned to London five days later. He went immediately to stay with his sister in Southampton and was there pursued by W. T. Stead, Morley’s successor as the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette and the inventor of the so-called ‘new journalism’. Stead’s interview with Gordon, published first in his own paper and then in The Times, dramatically indicated the power of journalism, new or old. Although Gordon dissociated himself in it from the British government’s decision to withdraw from Khartoum and the eastern Sudan, the interview nonetheless created a clamour that he should be appointed to carry out the policy of which he had publicly disapproved. ‘Gordon for the Sudan’ became a catchphrase and also a brand which ignited a forest fire. The result was that, by 18 January, this crazy appointment had been decided upon.

  It was crazy because Gordon was temperamentally unsuited to be the agent of a cautious policy. He was the prototype of a Boy’s Own Paper hero, with an additional capacity to seize the attention and attract the admiration of many who had long passed the age of boyhood. He also saw himself as the hand of God’s purpose to an extent which rivalled Gladstone, although they seemed to have been revealed differing versions of that purpose. Furthermore, Gordon, whether or not subject to lost weekends of alcoholism (for which there is some evidence, but which his 1993 biographer contests),9 was undoubtedly a person of unstable mood who could plunge from bursts of almost manic activity into troughs of withdrawal and inertia. And on top of everything else – this the fault of ministers and not of Gordon – the instructions he was given were far from precise.

  Gladstone had little to do with the appointment of Gordon. In mid-December, with public opinion already febrile on the issue as a result of the massacre by the Mahdi of a British-officered army under General Hicks, he delegated Sudanese affairs to a Cabinet committee composed of Hartington, Granville, Northbrook, Dilke and Carlingford. Dilke said that it was ‘in order that Mr. G. might avoid writing to the Queen about the matter and get Hartington to tell her verbally’.10 Cowardice was not one of Gladstone’s faults in dealing with the Queen, but he may nonetheless well have wisely thought that a few inarticulate sentences from Hartington might provoke less royal extravagance of opinion than one of his own over-meticulous and over-argumentative letters. This was the origin of the committee which, minus Carlingford, on 18 January commissioned Gordon. It did so in a hurry, pressurized by Wolseley, the victor of Tel-el-Kebir and increasingly the panjandrum of the whole army, and rather against the initial reactions of Baring, who ought to have been taken more notice of in view of his central responsibility for British policy in the Nile Valley. Gladstone was equivocal. Two days before he had very sensibly written to Granville about Gordon: ‘While his opinion on the Soudan may be of great value, must we not be very careful in any instruction we give, that he does not shift the centre of gravity as to political and military responsibility for that country? In brief if he reports what should be done, he should not be the judge of who should do it. . . .’11 Equally Hamilton, who in general closely reflected Gladstonian opinion, wrote on 23 January: ‘[Gordon] seems to be a half cracked fatalist; and what can one expect from such a man?’12

  On the other hand Gladstone did not attempt to hold up the appointment. Indeed he wrote apologetically to Granville on the 19th: ‘I telegraphed last night my concurrence in your proceedings about Gordon: but Chester [telegraph office] would not awake & the message only went on this morning.’13 It would have made no difference whether it went late on the 18th or early o
n the 19th, for Gordon with the over-excited and half-ludicrous urgency which characterized the circumstances of his appointment and despatch, had already left London, en route for Brindisi and Alexandria, at eight o’clock on the evening of the 18th, within a few hours of his appointment. At Charing Cross station he had a send-off party at once magnificent and incongruous. Granville (presumably with Foreign Office funds) bought his ticket. General Wolseley performed an equally necessary and more eccentric service. Discovering as the departure whistle was blowing that Gordon had no money on him, he both emptied his own pockets and handed over his gold watch. Hartington and the Duke of Cambridge (still Commander-in-Chief) were also present, but confined to decorative roles.