Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  It cannot be said that when he returned ten weeks later he was like a giant refreshed. But he had enjoyed himself and he was at least in a calm mood as he approached the great test of what must surely be his last general election and the determinant of whether or not his life’s work was crowned with success. He awaited it more like a gambler with good nerve watching the slowing revolutions of a roulette wheel than like an athlete making a desperate effort in the last lap. There was no attempt at a repeat of the first Midlothian campaign. He remained in London for six weeks after his return and made about a speech a week in the House of Commons, but none of them of much note or even length. Then he went to Hawarden for an Easter fortnight, and began a run of physical ill luck with a not very serious carriage accident on the way to Euston. This was followed by another couple of months in London, although with May spent mostly at Dollis Hill. For the whole of that spring there comes through an unprecedented sense that he was marking time, waiting upon events, and experiencing a perceptible, but steady rather than dramatic, diminution of powers.

  The 1892 election began in late June. Gladstone wrote his election address on the 22nd and left London for the campaign on the 25th. He went first to Chester for one of his very few speeches outside Midlothian (the others were whistle-stops on the way to Edinburgh and a big Saturday-afternoon meeting in a Glasgow theatre). At Chester he suffered a nasty eye injury and missed only by a narrow margin having effective blindness inflicted upon him. As he drove in an open carriage from the station to the Liberal Club ‘a middle aged bony woman’ (he was very precise in his description) threw at him ‘with great force and skill’12 a small missile from a distance of about two yards. The missile sounds innocuous. It was a hard-baked piece of gingerbread about one and a half inches across. But it inflicted considerable damage. It cut the skin of the nose and, much worse, lacerated the pupil of his only serviceable eye. Gladstone felt a heavy blow on the eye and sank back with a curiously measured comment to a companion in the carriage. ‘It was a cruel thing to do,’ he said. Later he told a doctor that he had never seen ‘a woman throw with such spite and energy’.13 She was not only spiteful and energetic but agile as well. She disappeared into the crowd and was never identified.

  Gladstone’s reaction was robust. ‘After a few minutes of rest & assurance from two casual doctors I went on & made my speech, short of an hour, only reading when needful with the utmost difficulty.’14Then he had the eye bound up at the Chester Infirmary and retired to three days of bed and darkness at Hawarden. On the fourth day he went to Edinburgh (Dalmeny again this time) in dark spectacles – which mafia- or Garbo-like accoutrement seems peculiarly inappropriate to Gladstone – and on the seventh day, after his major Glasgow speech, he recorded that ‘I thought small thin flat scales were descending upon me: & afterwards observed with some discomfort that there was a fluffy object floating in the fluid of my serviceable eye.’15 He then decided that he had to give up all reading that was not strictly and officially necessary (a great sacrifice), and even two months later abstained throughout a whole journey from London to Hawarden. Some but not much improvement resulted from this abstinence.

  His expectations of the election had also improved, almost inevitably as a natural reaction from the deep gloom following the Parnell smash. When Hamilton saw him on 15 June and again on the 24th he found him ‘very sanguine about the result of the fight’.16 Nor did Gladstone appear to pick up the adverse signs on the ground, even in his own constituency. His campaign from the opening meeting in the Edinburgh Music Hall to a final one at Penycuik and a cavalcade through eighteen villages was in accordance with pattern, as were most of his comments. The only exception was that after the Penycuik day he wrote: ‘Thank God all this is over.’ And so it was. He never campaigned again.

  The early results came in on 4 July and were deceptively good. ‘At first they were even too rosy,’ Gladstone wrote; ‘afterwards toned down but the general result satisfactory, pointing to a gain in G Britain of 80 seats. This may be exceeded.’ But the next day it was a different story: ‘Election returns unsatisfactory,’ he bleakly wrote. And on Wednesday the 6th: ‘The returns of tonight were a little improved: but the burden on me personally is serious: a small Liberal majority being the heaviest weight I can well be called to bear. But all is with God. His blessed will be done.’17

  The overall result was that the Liberals had 273 seats (or 274 if Keir Hardie be included) against the Conservatives’ 269. The 269 were firmly buttressed by 46 Liberal Unionists, who by this time had become both more reliable and more comfortable allies for them than were the 81 Home Rulers, still divided by the Parnell schism, for the Liberals. There was therefore a majority of forty for a Liberal rather than a Conservative government and, somewhat less enthusiastically, for Home Rule. But this majority was inadequate in size for intimidating the House of Lords and deficient in coherence for giving a Liberal Cabinet a firm command over its legislative priorities.

  Within this disappointing national result, Gladstone’s own strength in Midlothian collapsed dramatically. In the 1885 general election (the first on the extended franchise) Gladstone had a majority of 7879 to 3248. In 1886 he was unopposed. In 1892 he was returned only by 5845 votes to 5155. Gladstone dismissed this as ‘a small matter’, compared that is with the disappointment of the overall result. He explained it in a letter to Harcourt: ‘Two thousand voters seem to have gone over from me in a mass. It is simply due to the question of Scotch Disestablishment.’18 No doubt that vexed question did play a significant and adverse role. But is is difficult to believe that it could have been exclusively responsible for a result so sharply at variance with the general trend. There must surely also have been a feeling that Gladstone was both over the hill and obsessed with Ireland.

  He was of course over the hill and in one sense knew this perfectly well himself. The day after his letter to Harcourt he confided to his diary: ‘Frankly from the condition (now) of my senses, I am no longer fit for public life: yet bidden to walk in it. “Lead thou me on.”’19 Others took an even harsher view of Gladstone’s condition. When Harcourt saw him for two hours on 27 July he was reported by his son as ‘much shocked at the physical and mental change for the worse in Mr. G. since he left the H. of C. in June. He thinks him confused and feeble.’20 On the other hand, Sir Andrew Clark, though he had not seen Gladstone since his eye accident, took a more optimistic medical view about his patient’s capacity for office, if not about its likely effect upon his longevity. Clark, from the closest knowledge over nearly twenty-five years, was a great admirer of Gladstone’s physique and resilience. He had told Granville ten years before that ‘Gladstone was not only sound from head to toes, but built in the most beautiful proportion he had ever seen of all parts of the human body to each other – head, legs, arms, and trunk, all without a flaw, like some ancient Greek statue of the ideal man. He added that of all the persons he had treated, Gladstone . . . had the best chance of living to be a hundred.’21

  On 12 July 1892 Clark gave to Edward Hamilton, not in casual gossip but in a formal statement, his physician’s judgement:

  He could see no sign of mental deterioration. Mr. G.’s powers of argument and construction were as great as ever. His powers of hearing and sight were not what they were, no doubt; and he would probably feel the strain of worry; but sometimes even worry braced people up instead of breaking them down. He therefore could see no reason why, if necessary, Mr. G. should not embark again on office life. It might hasten his end; but in any case that could not be very distant. He was constitutionally unfit to stand aside.22

  Apart from his retreat from the view that Gladstone might live to be a hundred this was a favourable prognosis,132 more sanguine probably than Gladstone’s view of his own capacity during the period between the election result and the meeting of the new Parliament, for which the Queen’s Speech was on 9 August. Yet, despite his frailties and his disappointment at the weakness of the victory, he never appeared to waver in his determina
tion to form and preside over a government. The explanation, it is easy to assume, must have lain in his sense of Irish mission and his fear that no alternative Liberal Prime Minister would give Home Rule an adequate priority and momentum. But the amazing paradox was that, while he did not contemplate stepping aside, what he most certainly did contemplate was relegating Irish business to a lower order of priority. From the disappointing election result he drew the almost Chamberlain-like conclusion that not enough attention had been given to ‘British questions’.

  Consequently, on 20 July and when staying as Armitstead’s guest at Fisher’s Hotel, Pitlochry (‘capital Inn: lovely place’), he drew up ‘a first view of the possibilities of 1893’. ‘It aims’, he wrote, ‘at obtaining a judgment upon the great Irish question without spending the bulk of the Session upon its particulars (viewing the unlikelihood as far as can now be seen of their at once passing into law): and obtaining a good or fair Sessional result for the various portions of the country. . . .’23 In other words he proposed to carry a resolution in favour of Home Rule, but to let the bill wait and to get on in the first session with a series of domestic reforms. This memorandum he circulated to a few of his shadow Cabinet colleagues. Spencer, the ex-Viceroy of Ireland, and John Morley, the putative Chief Irish Secretary, both thought it a major mistake. Spencer said it would look ‘faint hearted’ and asked what would the Irish say, the answer to which was that they would probably have rendered the issue of legislative priority academic by declining on such a basis to support a Liberal government. By the time that he saw Spencer and Morley on the 27th, the day of his arrival in London from Hawarden, Gladstone was moving to second thoughts.

  The trouble was that Harcourt, who was to be Chancellor and the effective leader in the Commons, very much liked his first thoughts, and tried hard to bully him into sticking to them. During the previous ten days Gladstone had written unusually warm letters to Harcourt, who had responded with appropriate friendliness. But as soon as they were both in London, relations deteriorated. Harcourt, with his usual truculence, was probably concerned to establish his defensible space at the Treasury as well as with the Irish point. After their first meeting (of one and three-quarter hours) Gladstone wrote: ‘Formidable especially at my age’;24 and a couple of weeks later: ‘Conclave 3–5. A storm. I am sorry to record that Harcourt has used me in such a way since my return to town that the addition of another Harcourt would have gone far to make my task impossible.’ But he added: ‘All however is well: it comes [from above].’25

  By all being well Gladstone meant that Harcourt had reluctantly acquiesced in his second and dramatically different draft which he had written on 1 August and which put a Government of Ireland Bill at the very top of the list. The logic of the situation pointed irresistibly in this direction. Apart from the government’s dependence upon the Irish, it would have made no sense for a nearly eighty-three-year-old Prime Minister, kept in politics only by a dedication to the Irish cause, to have postponed dealing with it for the first eighteen months of what showed every sign of being a short-lived government. The surprise is that Gladstone’s intention flickered in this direction for a couple of weeks of post-election sag. It is also surprising that Spencer, having been an upright but unimaginative Viceroy in 1882–5, should have become such a resolute supporter of the policy which had driven nearly all his fellow Whigs out of the Liberal party.

  Nevertheless the upset with Harcourt occasioned by Gladstone’s temporary wobble gave an unpleasant twist to the business of cabinet-making. This was accentuated by the behaviour of Rosebery, who was even more tiresome than usual. That spoilt Scottish earl and (through his deceased wife) Home Counties plutocrat, who had spent most of the first half of the 1880s agitating that he was not in the Cabinet by the age of thirty-six and had struck Dilke (no mean judge) as ‘the most ambitious man he had ever met’, now that he had achieved a certain indispensability as Foreign Secretary in a weak government, decided that he had a temperamental unsuitability for public office and would play very hard to get. His natural misanthropy had been increased by the Gladstones’ election stay at Dalmeny having apparently not gone well. Hamilton, whose loyalty to Gladstone was becoming tempered by his dazzlement by Rosebery, recorded on 11 July: ‘Evidently things have been very unpleasant at Dalmeny. R. says he has had a terrible week of it. It is evident that Mr. and Mrs. G. have got on his nerves, which are not in the best of conditions, and they have been apparently more than usually tactless.’26

  On 31 July Rosebery wrote to Gladstone declining office. ‘I am the best judge of my unfitness for public life,’ he started with a combination of sententiousness and mock modesty. He then disappeared to Dalmeny, followed by a flurry of appealing letters culminating in a visit of supplication from John Morley, who had come by the overnight train, on the morning of 5 August. Together they travelled back to London, but Rosebery then found it necessary to retreat for a weekend in Paris to ‘clear the cobwebs out of his brain’. After his return, with or without cobwebs, he withdrew to his house near Epsom for further communion with his conscience and then contradicted Morley’s view that he had come round, and told Gladstone in a ‘very trying and rather sad’ (Gladstone’s words) interview on 11 August that he could not join. Then he went to Mentmore, his great Rothschild pile near Leighton Buzzard,133 which was conveniently placed for receiving further representations. These were abundantly forthcoming, most influentially, it appeared, from the Prince of Wales, Buckle (the vehemently anti-Gladstone editor of The Times), and Henry Primrose (Rosebery’s cousin).

  Gladstone wisely abstained from further appeals until 15 August, the day he went to Osborne to accept office. Then, under pressure from his private secretaries, he wrote Rosebery a rather cool note saying that the Queen wished him to be Foreign Secretary and that the office was still open. Gladstone, unlike the courtiers and the private secretaries, and even the Harcourts and the Morleys, who had persuaded themselves that Rosebery was essential, sensibly thought that Spencer as leader of the House of Lords and Kimberley as Foreign Secretary would do more or less as well as Rosebery filling both posts.

  Rosebery’s response to that final cool offer was an insufferably self-regarding telegram. ‘So be it. Mentmore’ was the message he sent to Gladstone at Osborne. The substance was redolent with the conferring of a benefit rather than a commitment to co-operation. And the signature was at once arch and arrogant. Rosebery was an allumeur (if the word can be used in the masculine) on a scale which Gladstone had hardly encountered since Arthur Hallam died over sixty years before. And he was not even a very good Foreign Secretary. By September he had got the government in its first but considerable mess with his unilateral and jingoist handling of Uganda, which Rosebery, against the views of Gladstone, Harcourt and most of the rest of the Cabinet, was determined to turn into a permanent British possession.

  The Queen, for once, caused relatively little trouble over Gladstone’s return to office. Admittedly she wrote of her contemplation of it ‘with utter disgust’.27 She publicly accepted Salisbury’s resignation ‘with much regret’, which was unusual and improper but insignificant. She momentarily flirted with the idea of trying to get Rosebery instead, but made no serious diversionary attempt in this or any other direction. On 11 August the Salisbury government was defeated on an amendment to the address by 350 votes to 310, and by the 15th Gladstone had kissed hands (in fact omitting to do so) and the new government was in being.

  The rest of his Cabinet-making went somewhat more easily, although Gladstone claimed that it was the most difficult of his four experiences in this field, and Labouchère made a public fuss about being left out. For this Gladstone gallantly took the blame, rather than allowing Labouchère to put it on the Queen. In reality both factors were at work. Labouchère was distasteful to the Queen and somewhat brash for the Prime Minister’s taste, although Gladstone would have been content for him to achieve his second major ambition, which was the Washington Legation (raised to an embassy only in 1893), h
ad this not been vetoed by Rosebery.

  The Cabinet contained only two members whom Gladstone did not know well. They were Herbert Henry Asquith and Henry Hartley Fowler. Asquith became the youngest member of the Cabinet, appointed at thirty-nine to the senior secretaryship of state. He had been chosen by Gladstone as the most appropriate backbencher to move the amendment which brought down the Salisbury government, and did so with a most accomplished debating speech. Subsequently he proved the outstanding success of the government, ‘the best Home Secretary of the [nineteenth] century’, was Magnus’s somewhat sweeping judgement, and by so being laid the foundation of his brilliant career. He was also, despite being a ‘new man’ from a Yorkshire Nonconformist background who had been in the House of Commons for only six years, highly congenial to Gladstone. Here again, as with Morley, the essential link was Asquith’s classical erudition. Balliol had comfortably overcome Batley and put Asquith, in Gladstone’s eyes, in a quite different category from Chamberlain. His position was further (although later) buttressed by Gladstone’s fondness for his second wife, Margot Tennant. She was exactly the sort of pert young woman, flattering and unintimidated, whom he liked. She was several times bidden to Hawarden, and on the occasion of her first visit in 1889 he had written her a four-stanzaed piece of verse, of which the first ran:

  When Parliament ceases and comes the recess,

  And we seek in the country rest after distress,

  As a rule upon visitors place an embargo,

  But make an exception in favour of Margot.134

  In December 1890 Gladstone went for a five-day visit to the Tennant Scottish house near Peebles, and when the Asquith marriage took place in May 1894 (even though it was one of his last engagements before a doubtfully successful cataract operation which effectively closed down seventy years of diary-keeping) he attended and signed the register together with Rosebery and Balfour.