by A. N. Wilson
Far from moving with the times, Queen Victoria had reverted to pre-1832 ways of thinking about the electoral system. Rather than recognizing that Salisbury had lost in the polls, she thought that he ‘appeared to acquiesce too much in the result of the elections’38. To Vicky, she wrote, ‘It seems to me a defect in our much famed Constitution, to have to part with an admirable Government like Lord Salisbury’s for no question of any importance, or any particular reason, merely on account of the number of votes.’39
With such distressing evidence of the democratic process in action, it was all the more important to ensure the succession to the throne. Victoria was in no doubt at all that, after a decent interval, poor Princess May of Teck should be married off to Prince Eddy’s younger brother George – ‘so nice, sensible, and truly right-minded’40 – before a more eligible royal bachelor in Europe scooped her up. George, who would one day be King George V, was made Duke of York – in spite of his grandmother’s earlier objection to reviving the title, with all its memories of her moronic uncle of that name. George had it in mind to marry his cousin Missy, the daughter of Affie, Duke of Edinburgh, but this was hastily overruled. A straightforward naval officer, George was sent off to Heidelberg for a couple of months to perfect his German, and then he was ready to be married.
The wedding was fixed for 6 July 1892.
The only problem, in the weeks running up to the nuptials, was the rumour which circulated about the Duke of York being already married, and his wife alive. No evidence for this wild idea was ever produced, but it occupied much of the archbishop’s time as he prepared for the ceremony. It had been a sordid, difficult, time for the monarchy. Benson, as he drafted his words to the young couple, must have had in mind the plethora of stories of Cleveland Street homosexual brothels, of the fast country-house set, cheating at cards and at marriage, as he prepared to marry the future King George and Queen Mary.
‘This is an age,’ he wrote, ‘and this a people, which in spite of many outward changes, still, in its heart of hearts, looks to the highest to do the common duties of all better than them all . . . The first element of Society is the Family. The one prayer of all is that no blessing, no peace, no strength of the Family may be lacking to the Future which is in the hand of God for you.’41
6 July turned out to be a sweltering hot day. Bertie, as father of the groom, nevertheless had time, during the frenzy of wedding service, wedding breakfast and Royal Family dinner, to sneak off for an hour with his mistress, the Babbling Brooke.42
Outside the Royal Chapel, enormous crowds waited to see the arrival of the royal guests, and of the bride who only a year earlier had been the subject of tragic ballads as she buried her fiancé Eddy. Encouraged by Lord Salisbury and Archbishop Benson, the Royal Family put on such a display as the politicians of the 1870s had yearned for, but which in those days the Widow of Windsor had always refused. As if in reply to the socialists, to the scandal-sheets, to the satirical pamphlets and to the sneering lawyers with their distressing grasp of the rules of baccarat and the names of Bertie’s nouveaux- riches friends, the great Royal Establishment put on a wedding procession which thrilled the masses. There they all were in the bright sunshine of the Mall, Silver Stick-in-Waiting, Gold Stick, maids of honour, grand dukes, the Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard and the Master of Buckhounds. Four carriages trotted the short distance from the Palace to the Chapel Royal at St James’s Palace, the last of which contained the Duchess of Teck and the Queen. And when it was all over, the Queen and her family appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to wave the young couple goodbye.43
It was the Queen’s appearance, however, as she came into the small chapel, which made the greatest impression upon her archbishop. Benson wrote in his diary:
The Bishops of London and Rochester and I (with others) were standing in front of the Altar. I could scarcely believe my eyes when the Queen entered the Chapel by the lower end. There she was alone and began to walk up alone. The Duchess of Teck and her grandson of Hesse were behind her. On she came, looking most pleasant, slightly amused, bowing most gracefully to either side as she came, her black silk almost covered with wonderful lace, and lace and a little crown with chains of diamonds on her head, walking lame and with a tallish stick. She looked Empire, gracious Empire . . . 44
TWENTY FOUR
‘WHAT A FUNNY LITTLE WOMAN’
LEST ANYONE SHOULD have been under the impression that Great Britain had a monarch who was ‘above politics’, the Court Circular in The Times informed readers that she had accepted Lord Salisbury’s resignation ‘with much regret’.1
In the past, the Queen’s instinct, upon hearing that Mr Gladstone had won an election, had always been to seek some alternative Liberal as Prime Minister. In 1868, 1880 and 1886, she had asked Lord Hartington to form an administration over Gladstone’s head. In 1892, Lord Hartington had become the Duke of Devonshire, and split with Gladstone over the Irish Question, so she could no longer look to him to save her. She would have liked to ask Lord Rosebery, one of her favourite politicians among the younger generation, despite his political views which she regarded as ‘almost Communistic’. Ponsonby, however, dissuaded her, and she bowed to the inevitable, which was ‘to have that dangerous old fanatic thrust down her throat’.2
During the election campaign, Gladstone had been making a speech at Chester when a ‘middle-aged bony woman’ threw a piece of gingerbread which caught him in his left eye – the one eye which he still found ‘serviceable’. Like many humourless people, Gladstone was everlastingly prone to mishaps which were difficult to take quite seriously. Had he been half blinded by a stone or a gun, it would have been simply sad; but for so serious a person to be injured by a sweetmeat bordered on farce. For the rest of his life, he saw the world through a fog. At the end of August, shortly after becoming Prime Minister, he was walking in his park at Hawarden when a ‘dangerous cow’3 knocked him to the ground. She ‘might have done serious damage. I walked home with little difficulty & have to thank the Almighty.’4
The Grand Old Man, who had been sitting in Parliament since 1833, was eighty-three years old. He told Morley, his Chief Secretary for Ireland (and future biographer), that ‘his general health was good and sound, but his sight and his hearing were so rapidly declining, that he thought he might almost any day have to retire from office’.5 The Queen noted that he was ‘very deaf and aged’.6 She told Davidson that she found interviews with the old man ‘rather a farce, as she is as anxious as she can be to avoid reference to politics . . . We therefore confine ourselves to correspondence’.7
Something which could have united them was the death of their friend-in-common Lord Tennyson. Gladstone had been at Eton with Arthur Hallam, the friend whose premature death occasioned the lyrics of In Memoriam; and the old Prime Minister lent his letters from Hallam to the Queen – a fact she found touching. There seemed no obvious candidate to succeed Tennyson in his role as Poet Laureate. His personal friendship with Prince Albert and the Queen in their early days on the Isle of Wight, his reign-of-William-IV clothes and diction, his firm adherence to vague religious hopes and his necrophiliac obsession with the dear departed dead made him so perfect a poet of the Queen’s reign that he was quite literally irreplaceable. Tennyson himself had remarked that of the younger poets, only Rudyard Kipling had ‘fire in his belly’. Algernon Charles Swinburne was an avowed atheist and would never have been acceptable to the Queen; nor would William Morris, who added communism to the sin of religious unbelief. So, the laurel crown gathered dust. Victoria could find no brow worthy of it, and Gladstone, ever-conscious that he had but a short time in office before his sight and hearing altogether faded, pressed on with the formation of his Government and the advancement of the cause dearest to his heart: Home Rule for Ireland. In fact, this was an ambition doomed before it began, and his last, short administration was dominated by decisions concerning East Africa, Egypt, and the increase in the Royal Navy.
Gladstone’s Cabinet contained three future Prime Ministers: H. H. Asquith became Home Secretary, Henry Campbell-Bannerman the Secretary of State for War, and, after pleading and persuading from the Prince of Wales and the Queen, Lord Rosebery accepted the post of Foreign Secretary.
Gladstone had wanted to offer a Cabinet seat to Henry Labouchere, but the Queen insisted that she would not accept him, unless he severed connections with his lucrative newspaper Truth, a radical sheet which only a couple of years before had suggested that Buckingham Palace be converted into a home for fallen women. Since ‘Labby’ would never give up his paper, the Queen knew that her conditions should never be met. Radicals were not the only ones on this occasion who questioned whether she had been within her constitutional rights to determine the composition of the Cabinet. Ponsonby agreed with the Queen that she ‘had a perfect right according to the Constitution to dismiss Gladstone which means dismissing his ministers. But he thinks that when once appointed she cannot dismiss any one minister serving under a Prime Minister. Of course the conversation was “academic” as to dismiss a ministry would be impossible as long as they have a Majority in Parliament.’8
Gladstone clung to office long after he was physically incapable of it. Morley likened his unwillingness to resign to ‘the resistance of a child or an animal to an incomprehensible (and incredible) torment’.9
Rosebery and the Queen together were under no illusions about the crises facing Britain. Britain was undergoing a severe recession. Labour relations were poor. The success of the dockers in their long strike of 1889 had inspired other workers to join trades unions – the numbers were approaching 2 million. In 1893, 30,440,000 days’ work were lost in industrial stoppages. Agriculture was in apparently terminal decline. Prices had fallen by 40 per cent since 1890 and wages had been cut by as much as 25 per cent.
When he visited Windsor Castle in December, Rosebery had ‘poured out to her on the subject’ of Home Rule. ‘She says he told her that in his opinion the Home Rule Attempt is impossible . . . Lord Rosebery begs her on no account to mention Uganda to Mr Gladstone as he is quite rabid on the subject and desires to abandon it without scruple – a policy to which Rosebery is steadfastly opposed.’10
The area of Uganda was being administered by the British East Africa Company. Captain Frederick Lugard arrived in the Kingdom of Buganda, one of the main Ugandan states, in 1890 and found a chaotic situation: feuds between French Catholic and English Protestant missionaries, inter-tribal conflict, appalling atrocities being committed by King Mwanga. The British East Africa Company could not afford to go on losing £40,000 per annum, and it wanted to pull out of Uganda. If it did so, Lugard argued, there would be massacres. Only the British Government was in a position to intervene.
Gladstone and the other anti-imperialists in the Cabinet were against Government intervention. Rosebery did not agree. He realized that the ‘Scramble for Africa’ was on among the European powers and that if Britain did not dominate East Africa, it would fall into the hands of the French. It was largely this, and a certain deviousness, which enabled him to get his way, despite the arguments of Liberals, such as Sir William Harcourt, who argued that, unlike India, Africa could never be profitable to Britain. English settlers, argued Harcourt, ‘could never get these savages to work for them. These savages are not like the mild Hindoo with whom you can do as you please.’11
Largely through sleight of hand, Rosebery got the Cabinet to agree to ‘postpone’ withdrawal from Uganda, while in effect establishing it as a British dominion. He likewise strengthened the position of the British in Egypt, having no wish to preside over a repetition of the fiascos of ten years earlier, of a restless Egypt and the British humiliated by Gordon being murdered in the Sudan. Thus, for all his ‘Communistic’ radicalism, Rosebery was really an impenitent imperialist. And once he had decided, after the bitter bereavement of losing his beloved wife Hannah, to accept the post of Foreign Secretary and re-enter politics, there was no one else in the Liberal Party who could withstand his advance.
Gladstone’s attempt to achieve Home Rule for Ireland before he retired was, as Rosebery had told the Queen in December, doomed to failure. Rosebery, however, continued to support it, since, as he told her in June 1893, there was no realistic alternative, for ‘were the hope of Home Rule to be removed, the latent forces of anarchy and revolution would break out with renewed horror’.12
He was right in both his prophecies: Gladstone’s Bill would fail, and Ireland would descend into violent anarchy. But the unforeseen coup de grâce which brought an end to Gladstone’s parliamentary career was not Ireland, nor imperialism, but a combination of ill health and the increase in the Navy Estimates.
When the Queen asked the old man about the condition of Britain’s defence, Gladstone was overcome with a near gastric calamity, only just able to leave the royal presence and reach a bathroom before diarrhoea and vomiting overtook him.
The French and the Russian navies had greatly increased in recent years, and those two nations were now allies. Germany was also building up its navy, and there was overwhelming pressure on Earl Spencer, First Lord of the Admiralty, to increase the British naval capacity. Crucial technological advances had been made between the late 1880s and the early ’90s, not least the change from cordite to gunpowder as a propellant. Many naval vessels were still using obsolete muzzle-loading guns, only five vessels carrying the more modern breach-loaders. In the summer of 1893 two of the best British battleships, the Victoria and the Camperdown, collided in the Mediterranean. Ominously, it was the Victoria which sank, and with it Gladstone’s career. He had, rather nobly and with great obstinacy, opposed the majority in his Cabinet who wanted an expensive refurbishment of the Royal Navy.
As the row gathered pace, Gladstone’s eyesight faded to the point where he could scarcely see. He knew that his resignation was inevitable, but he decided to let Rosebery and friends sweat a little. ‘I am now like the sea in swell after a storm, bodily affected, but mentally pretty well anchored. It is bad: but oh how infinitely better than to be implicated in that [navy] plan,’ he told his diary. And then he went to recuperate in Biarritz, a favoured resort. There he made notes on the plan to introduce a new tax – (always an abomination to him) – death duties – to pay for the arms race, to which he refused to subscribe. He wrote, ‘Above all, I cannot and will not add to the perils and the coming calamities of Europe by an act of militarism which will be found to involve a policy, and which excuses thus the militarism of Germany, France or Russia. England’s providential part is to help peace, and liberty of which peace is the nurse. This policy is the foe of birth. I am willing to see England dare [?illegible] the world in arms: but not to see England help to set the world in arms.’13
Did the Grand Old Man ever write a grander sentiment? Morley – known by his mocking colleagues as the Grand Old Maid – was surely not hyperbolic when he began his chapter on Gladstone’s fourth administration with a quotation from the first book of the Iliad: ‘To generations of mortal men had he already seen pass away, who with him of old had been born and bred in sacred Pylos, and among the third generation, he held rule.’14
The Queen, who was also capable of greatness in her own way and at certain times, perhaps never behaved with less dignity than she did at the time of Gladstone’s resignation. She who accepted the weeping and rebellious Maharajah Duleep Singh back into her love; she who asked Lord Carnarvon to dinner, in spite of her early fury over his Cabinet resignation; she who forgave the young Davidson his impertinent advice to suppress her memoir of Brown; and who was all smiles – after six months of ‘no speaks’ with Princess Beatrice – could not, for a quarter of an hour, rise to the occasion and pretend to be civil to this mighty statesman, this eighty-four-year-old embodiment of the nineteenth-century political story.
On 3 March 1894, she was to hold a Council at Windsor Castle. Both the Gladstones stayed overnight with the Ponsonbys, and
Mrs Gladstone as well as her husband had an audience with the Queen after breakfast. ‘She was very much upset, poor thing, & asked to be allowed to speak, as her Husband “could not speak”. This was to say, which she did with many tears, that whatever his errors might have been, “his devotion to Your Majesty and the Crown were very great”. She repeated this twice, & begged me to allow her to tell him that I believed it, which I did, for I am convinced it is the case, though at times his actions might have made it difficult to believe. She spoke of former days & how long she had known me & dearest Albert. I kissed her when she left.’15
Part of the trouble, in the relationship between Victoria and Gladstone, was one of simple shyness. Gladstone could not ‘speak’, and Victoria was reduced to stiltedness in his company. But there was also a deep personal dislike, which she was not gracious enough to conceal. In her reply to his letter of resignation, the Queen did not express a word of thanks to him. ‘She trusts he will be able to enjoy peace and quiet with his excellent and devoted wife in health and happiness, and that his eyesight may improve. The Queen would gladly have conferred a peerage on Mr Gladstone but she knows he would not accept it.’ This was no way to sign off a great national hero. Gladstone let it be known that he was ‘a good deal hurt and does not wish to receive any further communications’.16
He was still having bad dreams about the Queen two years later, and he left instructions to his family that, after his death, they should ‘to keep in the background the personal relations of the Queen and myself in these later years, down to 1894 when they died a kind of natural death’.17
When he did die, in May 1898, Victoria’s children remonstrated with their mother for her failure to see his greatness. ‘Poor Mr Gladstone was often your Minister and though it was impossible always to agree with him, yet he was a great Englishman and it is fitting to do honour to his memory as such’ – so wrote the Empress Frederick. The Queen belted the shuttlecock back over the net at once: ‘I cannot say that I think he was a great Englishman. He was a clever man, full of talent, but he never tried to keep up the honour and prestige of Great Britain. He gave away the Transvaal, he abandoned Gordon, he destroyed the Irish Church and tried to separate England from Ireland and to set class against class.’18