Gladstone: A Biography

by Roy Jenkins

  I fear more than the usual amount of confusion and fuss reigning in Carlton Gardens [Rendel’s house, where the Gladstones were not unusually installed] – Mrs. G. and Helen waylaying everybody, scheming this and scheming that, intercepting letters and almost listening at keyholes. I pity poor Algy West, who naturally complains with some bitterness. I advised his insisting on having everything in his own hands.39

  And on 9 December, when that year’s Biarritz expedition was under discussion: ‘Algy West is much put out about the whole thing. The family decline to listen to anything he has to say.’40 Wherever the fault lay, that happily ‘interlocking protective cocoon’ of family and secretaries of the 1880s was not in equal harmony in the 1890s or able to provide an adequate compensation for the truculence of Harcourt, the self-centredness of Rosebery and the occasional behind-the-arras vinegar of Morley.

  The truth probably was that Gladstone by this stage was not much good at working on the intricacies of legislation. (He was still brilliant at sustaining a bill in the House of Commons once its details had been determined, but that was a matter for 1893 and not for 1892.) What he did however do well in that autumn of waiting for the final joust was to set a good shape for the general legislative programme of the government. Despite his age, his small majority and his preoccupation with Ireland, this was incomparably better planned than that for the 1880 government, when the circumstances were more propitious. As a result the last Gladstone government had a very respectable record, creating district and parish councils, raising the school-leaving age, limiting the hours of railwaymen, accompanied by important administrative advances, Mundella creating the labour department of the Board of Trade, and Asquith putting new strength into the factory inspectorate. Even Rosebery, arbitrating more successfully at home than abroad, earned trade union gratitude by settling the coal dispute of 1893.

  But in early December 1892 all of this was in the future and the intricate problems of drafting the second Home Rule Bill, as well as the intractable behaviour of some of his colleagues, were weighing heavily on Gladstone. He had a few nights of sleeping badly, encouraged Clark to say that another Biarritz sojourn would do him good, mobilized the ever available Armitstead to perform the functions of a Thomas Cook’s man who presented no bills, and on 20 December he was off, getting to Folkestone in time to attend an afternoon service in the ‘beautiful church’ and to Biarritz thirty-six hours later. He was away until 10 January. He returned to face his final parliamentary lap – ‘one fight more, the best and the last’. It was certainly the last, and in the quality of his own performance, although not in the results achieved, almost the best.

  LAST EXIT TO HAWARDEN

  TWO DAYS AFTER HIS RETURN, on 12 January 1893, Gladstone reported to his physician: ‘Biarritz has been very kind to me and the sleep has been completely restored.’1 He celebrated this happy result and marked his general gratitude to Clark by sending him a copy of a Gladstone bust made in Rome in 1868, which was very close to the time when Clark began to treat his illustrious patient. Nevertheless Gladstone approached his final circuit around the hazardous course of the Great Home Rule Handicap with an unusual and almost pathological nervousness. On the eve of the session he wrote: ‘Official dinner & evening party. 8–11. I feel, what? much troubled & tossed about; in marked contrast with the inner attitude on former like occasions.’2 The next day he spoke for fifty minutes in sharp reply to Balfour in the debate on the Address, and pronounced himself ‘much tired’. And on the day after that: ‘Did not rise until 10.30. Now that I have taken the plunge I feel slightly more at home’3 – which was an understandable but nonetheless odd expression to use for someone who had experienced nearer sixty to fifty debates on the Address, and dominatingly participated in most of them.

  Nor did his neurosis remain permanently at bay once his plunge had taken him into the water. On 5 February, returning from a Sunday-morning service at the Chapel Royal he felt ‘both depression & worry’. On the 13th before he made his last marathon oration on the motion for leave to bring in (or first reading) of the Government of Ireland Bill, he ‘felt very weak having heard every hour (or all but one) strike in the night.137 I seemed to lie at the foot of the Cross, and to get my arm around it. The House was most kind, and I was borne through. The later evening I spent on the sofa.’4 Seven weeks later when the bill came to its second reading, however, he seemed to have got back to normal to the extent of merely recording that he worked on papers for the debate in the morning and spoke for one and a half hours in the afternoon.

  Despite this hesitant approach to the early fences, Gladstone’s conduct of the Government of Ireland Bill throughout that punishing session became a feat of sustained parliamentary resource which has rarely if ever been equalled before or since by any Prime Minister, let alone one aged eighty-three. It was made the more remarkable by the high likelihood that he throughout appreciated that his skills and his energy would be in vain. Nor was he much assisted by a sustaining Cabinet, apart from Morley and Spencer. Rosebery’s commitment to Home Rule was always skin-deep, and he quickly peeled it off as soon as Gladstone was out of the way. Within eight years it had become the foremost of the ‘fly-blown phylacteries’, a phrase of which the resonance exceeded the meaning, which he urged the Liberal party to discard. Harcourt was always unpleasantly hostile.

  The two difficult issues which remained to be decided after Gladstone’s return from Biarritz were first the old basically unanswerable question of Irish representation at Westminster, and secondly the financial settlement, particularly in relation to customs and excise. The first was temporarily resolved on the basis that there should be an Irish representation reduced from 103 to 80 to bring it in line with population, and that these numbers should ‘in general terms’ (that is, if a satisfactory dividing line could be devised, which was not so far the case) be excluded from voting on purely British questions. This was agreed on 13 January, with an overruled minority of Harcourt, Asquith, Fowler and Acland, who, in differing ways and activated by different reasons, were a disturbing quadrilateral of dissent, and one which proved itself to be right, at least to the extent that their scepticism about a satisfactory dividing line proved incontrovertible. In July the government gave up the attempt to find one and amended the crucial Clause 9 of the bill so as to give Irish representatives unrestricted rights of participation in all business.

  Although less inherently difficult, the financial provisions proved even more of a quagmire. This was partly because of the anti-Irish ill will of Harcourt (tempered only by his equally rumbustious anti-Toryism), who was of course in a key position to cause financial trouble, and partly by a malevolent voodoo which seemed to sit on British official calculations in relation to Irish finance. In 1886 Welby (permanent secretary to the Treasury) and Hamilton (more directly to blame) had made an embarrassing error. In 1893 an at least equally serious mistake was made, with the major blame resting on that normally impeccable prodigy Alfred Milner, then aged only thirty-eight but already West’s successor as chairman of the Board of Inland Revenue. In 1892 Welby again and the Dublin Castle administration were also involved. The result was to muddy the financial issues to an extent which now makes it difficult and doubtfully worthwhile to disentangle them. It is perhaps sufficient to say that the financial clauses had to be largely recast after the second reading of the bill, and that Gladstone was always dealing with them heavily on the defensive.

  The circumstances surrounding the presentation of the second Home Rule Bill to Parliament were therefore remarkably unfavourable. The majority was thin, although, such as it was, more cohesive than those of 1880 or 1886. The Prime Minister was infirm and backed by a far from enthusiastic or unanimous Cabinet. And the bill itself was by no means a perfect piece of draft legislation. In addition there was Gladstone’s strong suspicion that it would not make the statute book. It therefore had a good deal of gesture politics in it. All this makes the more heroic his last parliamentary tour de force. Essentially it was he
who took the bill through the House of Commons in the most strenuous parliamentary session on record. The Chancellor of the Exchequer gave some rather grudging help on the financial clauses, and the Irish Secretary was constantly at the GOM’s side. But Morley was not long on parliamentary experience, and was in any event a scratchy violin compared with the resonant organ notes which the Prime Minister was still able to produce. It was an organ which did not just produce great volumes of solemn sound. There was widespread agreement that he was supple, subtle, erudite, good-humoured and sometimes very amusing. His committee-stage speeches were almost entirely spontaneous. They almost had to be, for as he wrote to a correspondent on 4 March he could not see to read any notes which he might have made. On 11 May when Chamberlain had delivered one of his most vicious attacks at the end of a ‘clause stand part’ (that is, fairly general) debate, Gladstone after hesitating until the last moment about whether to speak, rose at the dinner-hungry time of just after 8.00 p.m. but nonetheless delighted the House, according to Morley, with ‘one of the most remarkable performances that ever was known’. ‘I have never seen Mr. Gladstone so dramatic, so prolific of all the resources of the actor’s art,’ wrote another observer. ‘The courage the audacity and the melodrama of it were irresistible.’5 Gladstone himself wrote of the occasion: ‘I seemed to be held up by a strength not my own. Much fatigued.’6

  That incident also illustrates what was the one criticism of his parliamentary handling of the bill. The reply to Chamberlain was not strictly necessary. The division might have taken place immediately after Chamberlain; instead the debate was stimulated to such an extent that the vote was postponed until two hours into the following day’s sitting. Gladstone exposed a lot of surface, which meant that with an opposition trying to spin things out he was a helpful minister to have on the other side. Morley referring back sixty years from 1893 thought that an Althorp might have expedited matters more. Looking forward almost the same length of time it is probable that an Attlee might have done so too.

  On the other hand Gladstone’s resilience and expansive good humour could sometimes unravel parliamentary knots. Morley describes another afternoon of obstruction when no progress at all had been made until the dinner adjournment. Gladstone had gone off ‘haggard and depressed’ briefly to fulfil a dining engagement. When Morley returned to the chamber around 10.00 p.m. he found Gladstone on his feet making ‘a most lively and amusing speech on procedure’ which ungummed the works. He sat down a different man, and turned compliments from his colleagues by saying: ‘To make a speech of that sort, a man does best to dine out; ‘tis no use to lie on a sofa and think about it.’7

  Yet overall it was his courage and his endurance, the latter triumphing over frequent complaints of exhaustion, even more than his debating skill, which made his conduct of the marathon so memorable. In different parts of the House, even among his bitterest opponents, there was a sense of witnessing a magnificent last performance by a unique creature, the like of whom would never be seen again. One evening during the bill’s passage Lord Randolph Churchill, admittedly then on the edge of his decline into incoherence, accosted Albert (later fourth Earl) Grey, a prominent Liberal Unionist: ‘And that is the man you deserted,’ he said of Gladstone. ‘How could you do it?’8 There were at least two ironies to this exchange. The first was that Churchill’s last successful speech in the House, delivered on 23 February on Welsh Church disestablishment, had been a most violent attack on Gladstone. The second was that the accused deserter Grey was the son not only of Queen Victoria’s former private secretary who had travelled to Hawarden twenty-five years before to give to Gladstone his first opportunity to form a government, but also of the former Miss Caroline Farquhar, who had so sharply rejected his amorous overtures at Polesden Lacey another thirty-five years before that.

  A marathon the progress of the bill most certainly was. Gladstone moved the second reading on 6 April and carried it, after nine nights of debate, on the 21st, by a majority of forty-three. He wound up from 11.05 p.m. to 1.00 a.m. before an overflowing House. Of a total membership of 670, 651 voted, 4 were tellers, 14 were paired and one was the Speaker. The committee stage started on 8 May and continued until 27 July, consuming, together with guillotine and procedural motions, parts of fifty-three parliamentary days. During this stage of the proceedings Gladstone made over eighty speeches, sometimes as many as four in a single day. Between 7 and 25 August another ten days were devoted to the report stage. Third reading was secured after three parliamentary days, late at night on Friday, 1 September.

  By then the greater part of eighty-two sittings had been devoted to the bill. Even this rate of progress had been achieved only by the use at both committee and report stages of the still relatively unfamiliar ‘guillotine’ (although there was a good precedent in the Conservative use of it for the Irish Crimes Bill of 1887). When the blade fell on the night of Thursday, 27 July, there were nine divisions in a row, a form of parliamentary torture, particularly on a foetid July night, of which more cruel regimes might have been proud.

  But there was also, in Gladstone’s words, ‘the sad scene never to be forgotten’.9 Chamberlain, always one on whichever side he was for provoking bitterness, launched a fierce attack on Gladstone whom he accused of behaving like an imperious and cruel god (reminiscent of those of Lucretius which Gladstone himself had so memorably summoned to the attention of the House in a Bradlaugh debate ten years before). As ten o’clock, the terminal time, approached, Chamberlain moved towards his derisory conclusion: ‘The Prime Minister calls “black” and they say it is good: the Prime Minister calls “white” and they say it is better. Never since the time of Herod has there been such slavish adulation.’10 The biblical allusion was typically provocative, but not wise. T. P. O’Connor, who had the distinction of being the only Nationalist MP elected from outside Ireland (by the Scotland division of Liverpool) started a widely taken up shout of ‘Judas.’ Within seconds this led to an almost unprecedented outbreak of fighting on the floor in which the ringleaders appear to have been J. W. Logan, Liberal MP for Harborough, and Hayes Fisher, Conservative MP for Fulham. Between them they got about forty members in a battling mass around the end of the clerks’ table. Speaker Peel, who, the House being in committee, was not in the chair, was sent for and quickly restored order, but the incident horrified Gladstone, who referred to it on the next day as ‘last night’s catastrophe’ and on the day after that, when some sort of apologies were exchanged, wrote of getting ‘the wretched incident to a close’.11 Its only benefit was that it somewhat restored his relations with Arthur Balfour, who as leader of the opposition dealt with the matter elegantly.

  The majority for the third reading was thirty-four, which showed a slight but uncomfortable decline from the forty-three of the second reading. Three Liberals voted against and two abstained, at least one of them because of the removal of the restriction on the voting rights of Irish MPs. Gladstone greeted the result with ‘This is a great step. Thanks be to God.’12 But his mood was not one of rejoicing or of optimism. Nor should it have been. He had shot his last bolt. On the next day (a Saturday) he wrote: ‘Saw . . . Lord Stanmore: an uneasy conversation. I was rather upset by that or some other cause: and spent the day mainly on my back.’13 Stanmore, who had been made a peer only that year, was the Arthur Gordon who had been his ADC in the Ionian Isles in 1858, had since held several colonial governorships, and in 1893 had just completed a (good) life of his Prime Minister father, the fourth Lord Aberdeen. He was, however, showing ingratitude for his Gladstone-bestowed peerage to the extent of making trouble about voting in the Lords for the Home Rule Bill. (He eventually did so, however.) The near unanimity with which Gladstone’s old connections and associates were reluctant to support him can hardly have been a solace.

  On the Monday he moved a business motion which provided for Parliament after a six-week break from 21 September to be recalled on 2 November and to sit indefinitely until the government’s business was completed. Durin
g this autumn session (on 4 September Parliament was still nominally in its normal summer session) the government would take the whole of the time of the House and pursue its two other major measures, the Local Government (or Parish Councils) Bill and the Employers’ Liability (or Industrial Accidents) Bill. Gladstone then departed by the night train to Perthshire, once again the guest of the ever welcoming Armitstead, but this time at his impressively named Black Craig Castle in the Forest of Clunie. There he stayed for three weeks of deserved rest, leaving Harcourt in charge in the House of Commons. But his holiday enthusiasm was less than usual. On the first day: ‘Drive and walk: 2 miles entirely knocked me up. . . . Early bed, worked on Odes of Horace: pleasant but how difficult.’ And on the second: ‘Worked on Odes: so slow. Backgammon with Mr. A. I have fallen back another step or stride in the power of reading.’14

  While the Commons was dealing with minor business and the Prime Minister was driving about the Perthshire Highlands and tinkering with his Horatian translations, the House of Lords was indulging in one of the seismic actions of its history. Yet it was an earthquake almost without noise or excitement, if that is a possible concept. On 8 September, after four short days of debate, it rejected the bill which was the centre of the government’s programme and on which the Commons had spent eighty-two days by a vote of 419 to 41. It was a division without precedent, both for the size of the majority and for the strength of the vote. There were only 560 entitled to vote, and 82 per cent of them did so, even though there was no incentive of uncertainty to bring remote peers to London.