Sons, Servants and Statesmen

by John Van der Kiste

  Yet this was no more than a minor difference. The same may be said of a rather testy moment in the summer of 1884, when the Queen seemed to be taking an intense interest in every speech made by a member of her government, as well as in those by several of the backbenchers – and then writing to Gladstone to complain about them. During a six-week period he had to write her a total of sixteen letters, with a combined length of around 4,000 words, explaining, excusing and half-apologising for the speeches as he thought fit.7 It provoked him into one of his rare moments of answering back under extreme exasperation, that Her Majesty would readily believe that he had ‘neither the time nor the eyesight to make himself acquainted by careful perusal with all the speeches of his colleagues’.8

  A far worse rupture had occurred the previous year, after his government proposed towards the end of 1883 to withdraw British troops from the Sudan, where a Muslim, Mohammed al-Mahdi, was leading a campaign to free Egypt from foreign domination. Hoping that the Mahdi would be overthrown, the Queen insisted that the Cabinet must take firm action at once. Several thousand Egyptian soldiers were killed by rebels, and General Charles Gordon, sent out to report on the situation, was besieged at Khartoum. The Queen tried to insist on rescuing him, warning the government that she ‘trembled’ for his safety, and that the consequences of any disaster would be catastrophic.

  Of a less imperialistic frame of mind than his sovereign, Gladstone strongly believed that the Mahdi’s forces were valiant freedom fighters, and he resented the jingoistic emotions that had been inspired in Britain by Gordon’s mission. He and his Cabinet considered that the General was in a position to withdraw if he wanted, and it was up to him to do so at his discretion. Yet it was increasingly apparent that the public would not tolerate any further delay in trying to ease Gordon’s plight, and in the summer of 1884 an expeditionary force was mobilised in Cairo. In October it began its advance up the Nile to Khartoum, arriving within sight of the town in January 1885, but it came two days too late. Khartoum had fallen, and in the ensuing massacre Gordon had been stabbed to death; his head was cut off and sent to the Mahdi, who had it hung on a tree for three days.

  Outraged, the Queen sent identical telegrams en clair to Gladstone, War Minister Hartington and Foreign Secretary Granville: ‘to think that all this might have been prevented and many precious lives saved by earlier action is too frightful.’9 Gladstone firmly believed he was not to blame. Bitterly wounded by her reaction, he seriously considered resigning the premiership. A dissolution of parliament was due later that year, and he vowed that nothing would induce him to fight another general election.10

  In June 1885 the government was defeated on a vote on the budget. Gladstone resigned as Prime Minister, and the Queen offered him an earldom, which he declined on the grounds that such future small services as he could render the country would be better done if he remained in the House of Commons. Perhaps he was aware that he would not be out of office for long.

  Later that month, the Marquess of Salisbury was invited to form a Conservative administration. Salisbury had been Secretary of State for India during Disraeli’s administration of 1874–80, then Foreign Secretary, in which capacity he accompanied Disraeli to the Congress of Berlin. On the latter’s death he took over leadership of the parliamentary opposition in the House of Lords to Gladstone’s Liberal government.

  As a senior minister, Salisbury often expressed views that diverged from those of the Queen, and in September 1874 Sir Henry Ponsonby had noted that they were unlikely to see him at Balmoral, because ‘he is too independent and speaks his mind too freely to be acceptable’.11 However, when he visited Osborne the following January, she found him ‘particularly agreeable and gentle, and [a person] who one could not believe could be so severe and sarcastic in debate’.12

  In January 1886 Salisbury’s government was defeated and he resigned office, turning down the Queen’s offer of a dukedom. When his Cabinet surrendered their seals of office to the Queen at Osborne in February, she spoke to them firmly about their duty to fight the Home Rule Bill, which to her was an irreversible measure that ran counter to her Coronation oath. To the Earl of Cranbrook, outgoing Lord President of Council, she said that they must ‘agitate’, adding that ‘I do not like agitation, but we must agitate every place small as well as large and make people understand.’ Before he took his leave of her, Salisbury assured her that ‘in whatever position he was, he would do anything to help’.13

  Gladstone’s third, and brief, administration (February–July 1886) was dominated by his determination to secure the passing of the Home Rule Bill through parliament, repealing the Act of Union with Ireland and establishing a parliament in Dublin responsible for domestic affairs. It was a divisive move bitterly opposed by several members of his own party.

  In her journal, the Queen noted that her outgoing Prime Minister ‘feels so much for me, and for my being alone, so cut off’. Within a week, she was sending him ‘very confidential’ letters, including copies of correspondence from Gladstone and his ministers, and reports on the possibility of a Liberal breakaway by disaffected members. Early in May 1886 the struggle was rising towards its climax, and she was forwarding to Salisbury not only copies of all Gladstone’s important letters, instructing him to return them, but also her own replies to Gladstone.

  While it was an unconstitutional business which Sir Henry Ponsonby found embarrassing, Victoria considered herself justified in keeping Salisbury properly informed. In her view, as head of state, it was part of her duty to ensure the main party leaders were fully in touch with anything to do with the issue, though in this instance she was probably too much motivated by her hatred of the idea of home rule for Ireland to see that she was exceeding her constitutional limits. In effect, her action was akin to a conspiracy – if the term is not too strong – with the opposition against the party leader and head of government, and with his own colleagues.14 She was fortunate that Gladstone, the Prime Minister so sinned against, was as fiercely loyal to the monarchy as he was. A less compliant prime minister might not have hesitated to provoke a crisis by publicly taking the sovereign to task – an action to which Lord Palmerston would perhaps have resorted some thirty years earlier.

  Salisbury behaved correctly throughout, referring her gently to the Prime Minister, and never once giving her anything but the most temperate advice. Nevertheless, he and his sovereign both passionately believed that the ends of defeating home rule fully justified the unconstitutional means involved. Among Salisbury’s colleagues, there was already talk that the issue might lead to civil war in Ireland, and Salisbury himself said that while he thought it unlikely, it might happen, and they ‘must not desert the loyal people of Ulster’.15

  Queen Victoria made no effort to disguise her impatience with what she saw as Gladstone’s self-inflicted predicament. Shortly after Gladstone took office again, Ponsonby had the unenviable task of conveying the Queen’s thoughts in writing to Lord Granville, the Colonial Secretary. ‘The Queen read your letter,’ he wrote, ‘and on coming to the remark “considering the state of the Irish question which Gladstone has inherited” she observed – he inherited it because he wished it. He insisted on inheriting it and now complains of what he found.’16

  Gladstone introduced the Home Rule Bill on 8 April, and after several weeks of debate it was defeated on the Second Reading on 8 June by 343 votes to 313, with 93 Liberals voting against. Queen Victoria’s comment in her journal was restrained: ‘Cannot help feeling relieved, and think it is best for the interests of the country.’17 As Elizabeth Longford observed, her lack of triumphalism might have been due to a twinge of conscience. While she had been known to point out to her relatives throughout Europe that it was her constitutional duty to support the government of the day, for the previous few months she had done just the opposite.18

  Gladstone asked for a dissolution of parliament, which the Queen granted without hesitation. Convinced that this would be the end of his career as prime minister, agai
n she offered Gladstone an earldom, which again he declined. He resigned on 20 July, and ten days later he was summoned to the Isle of Wight for his farewell audience with the Queen. Both took care to avoid any reference to Ireland in their conversation. She thought he looked pale and nervous, while he considered that she had become ‘seriously warped’. It would, he thought, be his last audience with her after fifty-five years in political life and ‘a good quarter of a century’s service to her in office’.19 As such, he found it odd that she was un-willing to discuss any matters of importance with him, apart from civil list allowances for her grandchildren.

  Any reticence on her part in speaking one-to-one was remedied the next day, when she put pen to paper. She had not, she wrote, liked ‘to allude to the circumstances which led to his resignation’ on the occasion of his visit, but she could not resist emphasising that the country had ‘unequivocally decided against his plan’ with regard to Irish home rule; and she trusted that ‘his sense of patriotism may make him feel that the kindest and wisest thing he can do for Ireland is to abstain from encouraging agitation by public speeches’.20

  In August Victoria welcomed Lord Salisbury back with some relief. She was convinced she had seen the last of Gladstone, who at seventy-six seemed increasingly frail. Though Salisbury was too down-to-earth to be able, or even try, to establish the uniquely theatrical relationship with her that Disraeli had done, she soon came to respect and admire him. His relaxed, slightly detached manner to the business of government and his lack of a Gladstonian obsession with causes appealed to her. So did his skilful approach to exalting, even exploiting, the Queen–Empress as an imperial symbol, a fitting subject for patriotism and unionism at the time of the jubilee celebrations in 1887 and 1897.

  The feeling was mutual, though privately he found the task of serving her as onerous as several of his predecessors had done. When a colleague commiserated with him on the inevitable strain that being prime minister and foreign secretary must entail, he remarked that he could ‘do very well with two Departments; in fact I have four – the Prime Ministership, the Foreign Office, the Queen and Randolph Churchill [his maverick Chancellor of the Exchequer]’;21 to another, he said ruefully that ‘the burden of them increases in that order!’22

  While Salisbury was always ready to defend the integrity of the royal family, he shared Ponsonby’s reluctance to be dazzled by them. No egalitarian, he still looked on what he termed minor royals as ‘minor irritations’. After a lady-in-waiting counted seventy-six members of British and European royalty in the south of France one summer, he complained to a colleague that the coast was ‘tiresomely full of minute royalties – persons known only to the editor of the Almanach de Gotha’.23 If the Queen was aware of such views, she never held it against him. By June 1890 she was assuring him that ‘She need not say that he knows he possesses her confidence, and how anxious she is to support him in every way.’24

  Under the circumstances, it was magnanimous of Gladstone to celebrate the Queen’s golden jubilee as he did. On 30 August 1887 he gave a special tea to all the parishioners of his country seat of Hawarden, in a tent erected below the terrace in front of his house. All those the same age as the Queen, sixty-eight, and upwards, were invited, and around 250 were present. (Gladstone himself was in his seventy-eighth year at the time.) In a special address on the occasion he told them that it was ‘not too much to say that the historian in future days, when he comes to write an account of this period in which we have lived, will point to the reign of Queen Victoria as the time in which the Sovereign of this country came finally and fully to understand the constitutional position and the great and noble conditions on which a free people can be governed, and not only to understand them but to accept them and to act upon them’.25

  In June 1892 parliament was dissolved and a general election held the following month. Queen Victoria was pessimistic about the outcome, particularly the prospect of Gladstone returning to power for a fourth time. To the alarm of his followers, in the Court Circular she announced Lord Salisbury’s resignation with regret, writing to Ponsonby that ‘the idea of a deluded excited man of 82 trying to govern England and her vast Empire with the miserable democrats under him is quite ludicrous!’26 Nevertheless, Gladstone emerged victorious, with the Liberals winning 273 seats and the Irish Nationalists 81, and one Labour member being returned, making a majority of 45 over 269 Conservatives and 46 Liberal Unionists. Salisbury waited to meet parliament and was defeated on 11 August on a vote of no confidence, after which his Conservative government resigned.

  Two days later, Ponsonby conveyed to Gladstone the Queen’s commission to form a new administration. Increasingly resistant to change, as well as to the mere idea of having to summon Gladstone yet again, the Queen wrote to Ponsonby of her ‘utter disgust’. On previous occasions, changes of government had always made it ‘painful to part with those one liked and esteemed’, but at least ‘it was to have to do with gentlemen like Lord Russell, Lord Palmerston’, and a host of others who had served her in the past.27 It was significant that the late and much-disliked Russell now compared favourably with her new bête noire. She briefly considered sending for Lord Rosebery, who had impressed her greatly when he served under Gladstone as Foreign Secretary – on his inclusion in Gladstone’s administration in 1886, she had called it ‘the only really good appointment’28 – but he declined to accept office. He considered himself too young and inexperienced, and he was still grieving for his wife, whose death from typhoid at the age of thirty-nine, less than two years previously, had shattered him.

  On assuming the position of prime minister for the fourth time, Gladstone asked Ponsonby to explain to the Queen that contrary to what she might believe, Home Rule was a very conservative policy, in that it would bring peace to Ireland and would turn the Irish into loyalists – and probably into Tories as well.

  When Gladstone went to Osborne to kiss hands as prime minister, the Queen awaited his appearance with great trepidation. She found him much changed, walking rather bent, with a stick, ‘his face shrunk, deadly pale, with a weird look in his eyes, a feeble expression about the mouth, and the voice altered’. He was unimpressed by the Queen and thought he had noticed a further deterioration in her since their last meeting. It seemed that her intellect had become sluggish and her judgement impaired. To his ministerial colleague Sir Algernon West he remarked afterwards that the interview had been as dismal as any that might have taken place between Marie Antoinette and her executioner, and ‘not one sympathetic word, or any question, however detached’.29

  She would have been encouraged to know that he would only hold office for another eighteen months. On 23 February 1894 Ponsonby paid him a visit at Downing Street and was requested by him to ask the Queen if he might write to her in confidence. At first, the Queen feared that her Prime Minister was going to ask for a dissolution, intending to go to the country with an appeal for the abolition of the House of Lords. She was thoroughly alarmed, until Gladstone wrote to her with the news that he was planning to resign office, ‘on physical grounds’. On 28 February he saw her at Buckingham Palace, where she had come to ‘hold a drawing-room’ (a Court reception). In his diary, he noted afterwards that she ‘had much difficulty in finding topics for an adequate prolongation . . . . I thought I never saw her looking better. She was at the highest point of her cheerfulness. Her manner was personally kind throughout.’30

  He held his last cabinet on 1 March, and on the next day the Queen invited Mr and Mrs Gladstone to dine at Windsor and stay the night. After breakfast, Mrs Gladstone saw the Queen privately and told her, with tears in her eyes, that whatever his errors, her husband had always been devoted to the Queen. On receiving his formal letter of resignation, the Queen wrote to him, trusting that he would ‘be able to enjoy peace and quiet, with his excellent and devoted wife, in health and happiness’. She added that she would gladly have conferred a peerage on him, but she knew he would not accept it.31

  Although Gladstone was
her least-liked Prime Minister, it has been argued by one of his biographers, Sir Philip Magnus, that his greatest failure – his relationship with the Queen – ironically proved to be his most enduring success. He cut a new pattern of constitutional monarchy which was rejected by her but ‘triumphantly followed by all her successors’. His achievement was to transform the Crown politically into a rubber stamp, yet at the same time enhance to an incalculable degree the force of its moral and emotional appeal.32

  On Gladstone’s retirement the Queen sent for Lord Rosebery. By far the youngest of her Prime Ministers (only forty-five when he took office) and the only one who was born during her reign, in personality he was quite similar to her. His ‘nerves’ and chronic shyness at their first audience pleased the monarch. (In later life, he would say that the only two people who had thoroughly frightened him were Queen Victoria and Prince Bismarck.)33 His imperialistic views were also closer to her own than those of Gladstone. When she had seen him privately after he accepted office as foreign secretary again under Gladstone eighteen months earlier, he found that she spoke to him ‘quite maternally’, especially when she told him that she thought the work would do him good, and he answered sadly that he had nobody to look after his children.34 Soon afterwards he had made a series of speeches which aroused her wrath, and she complained bitterly to Ponsonby that one such address was ‘radical to a degree to be almost communistic’. Previously, she said, he had claimed he had nothing whatever to do with home rule, only with foreign affairs, ‘and now he is as violent as any one . . . . Sir Henry must try and get at him through some one, so that he may know how grieved and shocked The Queen is at what he said.’ If the government was to go down to sudden defeat she meant to send for him first, but after his ‘violent attack on Lord Salisbury’ and his ‘attempt to stir up Ireland’, she would find it impossible.35