Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  First Chamberlain insisted on having a letter of contract such as might have been drawn up between two business partners. The opening paragraph, written by Chamberlain, stipulated that he should ‘retain unlimited liberty of judgment and rejection on any scheme that may ultimately be proposed’. The second, inserted at Gladstone’s request, testified to Chamberlain’s willingness ‘to give an unprejudiced consideration to any more extensive proposals which may be made’.7 The value of these vague avowals was more than neutralized by Gladstone’s distaste for the whole concept of such a distrustful letter. However, it having been agreed, he proceeded to offer Chamberlain the Admiralty. The first-lordship scored relatively high in prestige but wildly low in relation to Chamberlain’s interests. Birmingham was hardly a great naval city, but more important was the hopelessness of Admiralty House as a base from which to mount a campaign for domestic Radicalism, which still appeared to be Chamberlain’s main concern. Had there been mutual trust, such a campaign might also have suited Gladstone’s interest. It could have guarded one flank of his concentration upon Ireland.

  Chamberlain appears to have seen Gladstone again on the day of the letter of contract (Saturday, 30 January) and a third time on the Sunday after his written refusal of the Admiralty. The slight imprecision derives from these meetings, most unusually, not being specified in Gladstone’s diary and from Chamberlain not being a diarist. At the Sunday meeting Gladstone asked Chamberlain what office, in lieu of the Admiralty, he would prefer and was told that it was the Colonies. This of course touched a sensitive nerve in relation to Gladstone’s unconcluded negotiations with Granville. But it did not excuse his response, which was to look up in surprise and say, ‘Oh! a Secretary of State,’ thereby implying that such a grand rank – there were only five of them in those days – was a bit over the odds for Chamberlain, whom he saw as a natural occupant of one of the more workaday posts in the second half of the Cabinet. This impression he confirmed by suggesting that Chamberlain might like to go back to his old job as President of the Board of Trade, to which the reply was that he would not like it but would if necessary accept.

  The single source for Gladstone’s devastatingly revealing reply to Chamberlain is the Dilke papers. It is there further recorded that Chamberlain, after the exchange, was ‘furious and will never forgive this slight’.8 On this reasonably secure but narrow foundation the snub has found its way into at least two lives of Dilke, two of Joseph Chamberlain and three of Gladstone, as well as into Hammond’s study of Gladstone and the Irish Nation. It is a formidable burgeoning from such a small source, uncorroborated from the Gladstone side, although there seems no reason to doubt that something very similar was said, particularly as it entirely fits in with Gladstone’s general attitude to Chamberlain. But the exact words are not wholly verifiable.

  Two days later Chamberlain agreed to join as President of the Local Government Board, preferring this to a return to the Board of Trade. He was number eleven in the hierarchy in a Cabinet of fourteen. Having got this far with securing but not elevating Chamberlain, Gladstone might surely have been expected to give him every assuagement which was compatible with the somewhat lowly status but potentially interesting content of his office. He did the reverse. First, in one of his fits of penny-pinching economy, he tried to reduce (from £1500 to £1200) the salary of Chamberlain’s junior minister, the temporarily ubiquitous Jesse Collings, who if anything deserved a bonus for having his amendment so conveniently available to bring down the Conservative government. Chamberlain successfully resisted the salary cut, but the argument, which it was almost incredible that Gladstone had ever raised, had driven yet another nail into the coffin of their relations.

  Then, on a second issue, and one of more substance, Gladstone managed to behave with equal insensitivity and even greater lack of tactical sense. Chamberlain was still a strong domestic Radical, although becoming implacable on Ireland partly because his view of Parnell had been poisoned by using O’Shea as an unsatisfactory intermediary and partly because his imagination on Ireland was limited almost to a municipal horizon. His broodings on ‘the illimitable veldt’ came much later and in a different context. In the middle 1880s he was still primarily a ‘gas and water’ man who could embrace schemes of town councils and county councils and land purchase and drainage and harbour developments for Ireland, though not the more elusive but also more emotive concept of nationhood. This limitation, however, in no way disqualified him from being the agent of utilitarian advance in England. Measures for local government reform and land schemes along the lines of the Collings amendment were part of the Liberal programme. Furthermore they became much easier to get through a Liberal Cabinet as a result of the departure of Hartington and several others who had clashed with Chamberlain in the 1880 government.

  In these circumstances Gladstone’s tactical plan might be thought almost to have written itself. He needed to keep the gulf between Chamberlain and Hartington as wide as possible, and he needed to get Chamberlain so engrossed in and satisfied with his departmental work that he became reluctant to leave the government. On this basis Gladstone might have been the Emperor of the West, dealing with Ireland more or less as he wished, and Chamberlain, if not the Emperor, at least the semi-independent Viceroy of the East, pursuing reform in England. Such a dual approach would also have had the advantage of keeping Liberals – both MPs and active supporters – a good deal happier. Out of respect for Gladstone provincial Nonconformists embraced the cause of Catholic Ireland with remarkable enthusiasm, but they did not want all their eggs in that basket.

  Gladstone, however, was perhaps the greatest concentrator of eggs in the history of politics. Once a cause had fought its way to the front of his mind, whether it was Neapolitan gaols, budgetary economy, the tribulations of the Bulgarians or the urgent need for an Irish Parliament, it engaged his whole force and took priority over everything else. So, at the beginning of March 1886, he took away the parliamentary draughtsman who was working with Chamberlain on a local government bill and redeployed him on Irish work. It is difficult to imagine a more wanton gesture. Once he had done it, Chamberlain’s departure from the government, perhaps always more likely than not, became a racing certainty. It is difficult to avoid the view that, so far as Chamberlain at least was concerned, Gladstone in the terms of his January conversation with Harcourt was not merely prepared to go ahead without him, but almost preferred to do so. Yet, once Chamberlain had resigned on the issue and had added a Radical defection to a Whig one, the chances of getting a Home Rule bill through the Commons, let alone the Lords, became slim.

  For the preparation of the bill Gladstone took central and detailed responsibility. He used John Morley, in office for the first time as Irish Secretary, as an assistant, but Morley, distinguished man of letters although he was and senior if querulous statesman although he was to become, had no legislative or administrative experience. The Prime Minister did not much consult with other colleagues, except on broad issues with Spencer, and in particular not with Chamberlain. It was rather the same as his reason for not seriously considering him for the Exchequer: he might too easily resign and it was therefore desirable first to minimize the impact of his going (by not giving him too prominent an office) and second to limit the amount of inside knowledge that he might take with him (by not consulting him about the form of the Home Rule Bill). The disadvantage of these protections against severance was that they made it more likely. Ironically it was Harcourt who in late February nearly resigned well in advance of Chamberlain, but on a question of his budgetary prerogative and not on policy. Harcourt was just as hostile to Home Rule and the Irish as was Chamberlain, but even more strongly did he believe in political partisanship, our side against theirs. His internal rows were more about defending his own area of authority than about policy. But it was nonetheless an indication of how fragile was Gladstone’s base at this stage that he nearly lost his Chancellor, who was cynical about the main thrust of the government, before he even came
to the crunch with his two ‘conditional’ ministers, Chamberlain and Trevelyan.

  When the outline of a Home Rule bill was disclosed to the Cabinet in March Chamberlain took exception to four main points. He was against the exclusion of Irish members from Westminster, and he was against the handing over to Dublin of control over Irish customs and excise. In a sense these two points were linked, although they looked out in very different directions, because the ghost of the Boston tea party would have been raised by reserving such indirect taxes to London without Irish members in the Imperial Parliament. Thirdly Chamberlain wanted to keep the appointment of Irish judges and magistrates in British hands. And fourthly he took an interesting but somewhat theoretical federal-confederal point. He wanted an Irish authority only to be able to do such things as it was delegated to do and not, as provided by Gladstone, everything which was not specifically reserved to London. Trevelyan added that he objected to a putative Irish government being given control of its own police force. The form of self-government which would have emerged had all these objections been allowed would of course have been extremely attenuated. The result would have been a county council without control of revenue, the bench or the constabulary, and only exercising such powers as were graciously sent down to it. This would clearly have neither satisfied the Irish nor justified the upheaval in the Liberal party. Chamberlain’s objections were wrecking, as was no doubt the intention.

  The issue which Chamberlain at this stage chose to make central, the presence or absence of Irish members at Westminster, was a tangled one, although not that which had most occupied Gladstone in the preceding weeks. This had been Irish finance, both the general arrangements for a semi-separation and the specific ones for financing the buying out, if they so wished, of Protestant Ascendancy landowners by a British government loan of £50 million – a vast sum by the standards of the day, the equivalent of half the annual budget.

  One reason for the entanglement which surrounded the question of whether or not Irish MPs should, post-Home Rule, sit at Westminster was that it led on to very treacherous constitutional ground. If answered negatively, as in the bill, it blocked the way to the Dublin Parliament being the first wing of a federal structure in which Scotland, Wales and maybe even England could later be brought into the same design. It also pointed towards Home Rule being a step towards full independence, rather than a final settlement under which the Irish would be content to have at least foreign and defence policy run from London.

  If, on the other hand, the answer was positive, then what nearly a hundred years later and in the Scottish context became known as the ‘West Lothian question’ reared its awkward head. Why should Irish members have the right to vote on, say, an education bill for England and Wales, when English and Welsh members had surrendered all rights over such matters in Ireland? And if an attempt were made to get round this problem by providing that Irish members could vote only on issues which affected all parts of the Kingdom, might not the result be, apart from the difficulty of drawing a satisfactory border line, that one party might command a majority on one set of issues and the other on a second set? Which then should form the government? Furthermore the retention of the Irish members would remove what was almost the sole attraction of Home Rule for some of its more cynical supporters, represented in the heart of the Cabinet by the all too solid flesh of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Harcourt never made any bones about his indifference if not hostility to Home Rule except insofar as it meant seeing the back of the Irish.

  Another reason for the surrounding entanglement was that the ‘to retain or not to retain’ (the Irish members) question, strong passions though it aroused, was also one, perhaps because there was no really satisfactory answer, on which the crucial individuals were constantly changing their minds. In November 1885, as we have seen, Gladstone’s Dalmeny outline of a Home Rule scheme provided for the retention of Irish members ‘for Imperial purposes only’. (Parnell’s memorandum of two weeks before treated the question indifferently, although by the following May he had become ‘stiff against retention’.) Yet by the time of the formation of his third government Gladstone had moved to their exclusion. ‘I scarcely see how a Cabinet could have been formed, if the inclusion of the Irish members had been insisted upon,’ he retrospectively wrote to Granville on 30 April.9 It was certainly true that all the Whig peers who retained their Gladstonian allegiance, as well as Harcourt, attached great importance to the exclusion of the Irish. Almost inevitably therefore the bill was so drafted. And Gladstone, as was his way, embraced the new position with an excessive enthusiasm. By the end of May, however, he was back to accepting inclusion and envisaged a complete recasting of the relevant Clause 24. And, seven years later, when it came to the drafting of the second Home Rule Bill, the provision from the beginning was for the retention of eighty Irish members who were, however, to be excluded from voting on purely English or Scottish questions. That exclusion in turn proved indefensible, and with Gladstone’s acquiescence the limitation was removed during the 1893 committee stage.

  Chamberlain’s position on the issue was as unstable as Gladstone’s, but his progression from the autumn of 1885 to the spring of 1886, probably by intention, was in diametrically the opposite direction. On 3 January 1886, he wrote to Labouchère that ‘the worst of all plans would be one which kept the Irishmen at Westminster while they had their own Parliament in Dublin’.10 Yet when he resigned in March he made the opposite position the first of his reasons, and between then and his vote against the second reading of the bill on 6–7 June he kept the issue of Irish exclusion in the forefront of his objections. What was his essential motive? Had he come to feel with genuine strength on a point on which his position had been the direct opposite only a few months before, or was he tactically pressing on the weakest point in the Gladstonian lines? Probably the latter. Thirteen years later Barry O’Brien closely questioned Chamberlain for his Life of Parnell and in particular pressed him about why he had concentrated on that issue. Chamberlain replied with a splendid harshness: ‘I wanted to kill the Bill.’ And when O’Brien followed with ‘And you used the exclusion of the Irish members for that purpose?’, Chamberlain said: ‘I did. . . .’11

  Chamberlain always knew how to find an opponent’s solar plexus. Once he had lost his desire to stay in the government, although he nominally retained an open mind about his vote, he was in reality eager to find reasons for casting it against. His killer instinct fastened on the point to which there could be no wholly satisfactory answer and he was further attracted to it by the fact that, although insoluble, it was on the surface an issue easy to grasp. There were none of the intricacies of the financial settlement or of the abstractions of whether powers had to be specifically reserved or specifically devolved. Just as, until he had lost him from the government, Gladstone did not appreciate the implacable force of Chamberlain’s debating powers, so he did not understand his ruthless search for the weak point. Gladstone paid heavily for these underestimates and incomprehensions, but there was probably no way in which he could have out-manoeuvred Chamberlain on retention or exclusion. Once ‘battling Joe’ was lost to the government, the bill was at his mercy. And the indictment of Gladstone’s tactical handling is not what he did or did not do in the run-up to the fatal second reading in June but that he did not make it worth Chamberlain’s while in February–March to stay in the government.

  Gladstone’s oratorical performance on the first Home Rule Bill was uneven, but far from uneventful. His high point was on 8 April when he moved the first reading, a parliamentary stage now fallen into desuetude, but which then gave an opportunity for exposition without decision, for the practice was not to oppose in the division lobby a motion of leave to bring in a bill, even when it was as controversial as this one. But no decision in this instance was far from meaning no tension. Edward Hamilton described a commotion which makes a modern House of Commons day sound a sad anti-climax.

  Yesterday was indeed a notable day – the most
notable day probably in the annals of the present Houses of Parliament [that is, since the completion of the rebuilding in 1852]. . . . There being rumours that Members were going to appropriate the seats set aside for Strangers, I went down to the House [early]. . . . The scene in the lobby was a lively one. Princes, Ambassadors, Peers, and distinguished strangers were jostling one another and besieging the doorways, ready to rush in the moment entrance was permitted. The Speaker took the Chair at 3.50; and then came the rush without respect to persons. . . . The scene in the Chamber was not less extraordinary than the scene outside. Every seat had been bespoken hours before; and up the floor of the House were ranged rows of chairs. . . Mr. G. arrived punctually at 4.30; and his arrival was greeted with a perfect storm of applause – a reception which visibly told upon him. Members stood up, waved their hats and literally shouted. No one dared to put a Question; and in five minutes time . . . Mr. G. rose, his rising being the signal for renewed shouts. He spoke for 3 hours and 25 minutes; and held the rapt attention of the House throughout. I have often been more carried away and moved by speeches of his; but as a masterly exposition, as a piece of rhetorical construction, and as a tour de force the speech will always mark among his finest efforts. The old Parliamentary hand had certainly notyet lost its cunning.12