Read Gladstone: A Biography Online
Authors: Roy Jenkins
Tags: #History, #Politics, #Non-Fiction, #Biography
Gladstone: A Biography (49 page)
It contained his crushing rebuke of Disraeli, who had taunted him with his Oxford Union speech of thirty-five years before,
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and also a daring passage
on the contrast between Russell’s ‘warp and woof’ Whiggery and his own belated transition from Conservatism. This passage comprises a striking example of how a Latin quotation
could then be used for oratorical rather than for pedantic affect:
My position then, Sir, in regard to the Liberal Party is in all points the opposite of the noble earl, Lord Russell. Lord Russell might have been misled possibly, had he
been in this place, into using language which would have been unfit coming from another person. But it could not be the same with me. I am too well aware of the relations which subsist
between the party and myself. I have none of the claims he possesses. I came among you an outcast from those with whom I associated, driven from them, I admit, by no arbitrary act, but by the
slow and resistless forces of conviction. I came among you, to make use of the legal
phraseology,
in pauperis formá
. I had nothing to offer you but faithful
and honourable service. You received me, as Dido received the shipwrecked Aeneas –
Ejectum littore, egenum
Excepi
[an exile on my shore I sheltered].
And I only trust you may not hereafter at any time say
Et regni demens in parte locavi
[and, fool as I was, I shared with you my realm].
You received me with kindness, indulgence, generosity, and I may even say with some measure of confidence. And the relation between us has assumed such a form that you can never be my debtors,
but that I must for ever be in your debt.
The peroration, widely thought to be of compelling if somewhat florid quality, was also notable for depending on another untranslated Latin gobbet to lift him to the culmination of his
argument. It was also based on an historical inevitablism, reminiscent of his speech on the so-called Jew Bill nearly twenty years before.
Perhaps the great division of tonight is not the last that must take place in the struggle. At some point of the contest you may possibly succeed. You may drive us from
our seats. You may bury the Bill that we have introduced, but we will write upon its gravestone for an epitaph this line, with certain confidence in its fulfilment –
Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor
[which,
pace
Hartley Shawcross, may be very freely translated as ‘We will be the masters soon’]
You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side. The great social forces which move onwards in their might and majesty, and which the tumult of our debates does not for a moment
impede or disturb – those great social forces are against you; they are marshalled on our side; and the banner which we now carry in this fight, though perhaps at some moment it may
droop over our sinking heads, yet it soon again will float in the eye of heaven, and it will be borne by the firm hands of the united people of the three kingdoms, perhaps not to an easy, but
to a certain and to a not distant victory.
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The majority of five which was the result of the ‘great division’ was regarded as humiliating for the government and there was a substantial Cabinet group in favour of resignation or
dissolution. The amendment had been moved by Hugh, Earl Grosvenor, son of the Marquess of Westminster and later himself the first Duke, as well as Willy Gladstone’s
colleague as Liberal member for Chester, and thirty-five nominal Liberals had voted for it. The voice was Grosvenor’s voice (which gave it a neighbourly disagreeableness for
Gladstone) but the hands were the hands of Robert Lowe,
Times
leader-writer and MP for Calne. Over several months Lowe put up an inspired performance against any advance towards democracy
and, thanks to John Bright’s gift for a phrase, achieved immortality as the leader of the ‘Adullamites’ or cavemen. Later he was an unmemorable Chancellor of the Exchequer in
Gladstone’s first government (perhaps inevitably an unrewarding job under the man who had himself done it so well and for so long), so that when he came to be elevated to the peerage in 1880
Gladstone insisted, against the Queen, that he should have a viscountcy, not on account of his Treasury services, but because of the brilliant effectiveness of his opposition (to Gladstone) in
1866: ‘a man who had once soared to heights trodden by so few, ought not to be lost in the common ruck of official barons’.
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This was a
striking example both of Gladstone’s generosity and of a certain stiff chivalry, accompanied by a fine sense of gradations of rank, which informed not a few of his actions.
The activities of Lowe and his followers succeeded both in killing the bill and in getting the government out by midsummer. The immediate occasion was an eleven-vote government defeat on a
somewhat technical amendment which however Gladstone had made into a vote of confidence. Forty-four Liberals voted with the Conservatives.
That left the alternatives of dissolution or resignation. There was much to be said for dissolution. The basic contradiction was that the country expected reform, that the leaders of the Liberal
party in both Houses (Russell by long conviction, Gladstone by recent but vehement conversion) were committed to it, but that many of their parliamentary followers, elected essentially to support
Palmerston, who detested reform, were at best unenthusiastic. They provided fertile territory for a Conservative opposition which was anxious to make mischief, was relentlessly opportunistic and
above all eager to prevent a Liberal triumph on the issue. A new Parliament, elected on a mandate to extend the franchise, would have cleared the fog and filthy air. But Brand, the Liberal Chief
Whip and a future Speaker, was implacably opposed. He was no enthusiast for reform and he had on his side the sound argument that the dissolution of a Parliament barely a year old would be deeply
unpopular, if only on grounds of expense, with most members, to which he added the probably unsound supporting argument that it would produce a bad result. Russell and Gladstone allowed themselves
to be persuaded.
Resignation, however, was a peculiarly long-drawn-out process. This was partly because it was opposed by the Queen (she was in favour not of dissolution but of
acquiescence), who deliberately arrived slowly from Balmoral. A week after the decision Russell and Gladstone went together to Windsor (‘we had warm receptions at both stations’, was
one of Gladstone’s comments, which would have caused cynical amusement in those who believed him to be suffering from crowd addiction), but it was another ten days before Gladstone recorded
the formal severance from official life in a series of comments each of which had elements of both poignancy and pungency:
Went to Windsor to take leave. H.M. short but kind. . . . H. of C. on return: took my place on the Oppn. bench: the first time for 15 years. Dined at the Mansion Ho. (King
of the Belgians): thanked for the H. of C. Finished in Downing St. Left my keys behind me. Somehow it makes a void.
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The Russell government had never seemed deep-rooted. But the Gladstone chancellorship was. He had been at the Treasury for seven years, and the sense of void after such a period of incarceration
was wholly understandable. He had been less a prisoner of official life than is a modern minister, but there may nonetheless have been an element of a pit pony blinking its eyes after a long period
in the shades. He did not however react to his new freedom by retreating upon Hawarden. On the contrary, he recoiled from that base, normally such an important part of his life, for an even longer
period than he had done in 1858–9, when, following his four-month Ionian expedition, he had not gone home until nearly five months after his return to London.
In 1866–7, the position was still more extreme. During the session of 1866, when he was first leader of the House and then leader of the opposition, it was perhaps natural (although
unusual for him) that between January and July he did not once travel the 200 familiar miles. But what was not natural was to spend the whole of August and nearly the whole of September visiting
South of England houses (Wilton, the Bishop’s palace at Salisbury, Woburn and Cliveden among others), before departing for Italy on 28 September. Accompanied by his wife, by his daughters
and, for the Christmas holidays, by his three elder sons, he was away for four months, returning to London on 29 January 1867. He then allowed another two and a half months to pass before an Easter
visit to Hawarden, which meant that it was the first time he had seen his main house, his main library and his estate for fifteen months. He was then
there for two weeks, but
did not spend another night there for four months, even going in one day from London to Penmaenmawr in August, and stopping in Flintshire only to pick up clothes. Thereafter a normal Hawarden
pattern was resumed. The break was odd, almost inexplicable, and Gladstone, normally so free with explanations and analyses of motives, offered no comment. It was a minor example of his natural
extremism. He did not do things by halves. Hawarden was mostly the centre of his post-1850 life. Yet twice he appeared to turn away from it.
The Roman autumn and early winter of 1866–7 was due partly to a desire to get off his feet the dust of British politics, which during the summer of defeat and resignation he had come to
find distasteful, and partly to his natural italophil travelling exuberance, which had been suppressed by seven years in office. Save in very exceptional circumstances, ministers did not then go
abroad, and it was eight and a half years since he had been on the mainland of Europe, and eighteen years since he had even passed through Rome (on his wild Lady Lincoln chase). Nonetheless it was
a cool display of nerve to absent himself from England for four months at a time when he was the most likely but not the certain future leader of his party, and when he had just suffered a bruising
rather than successful session in the House of Commons.
He was far from being entirely cut off from British contacts in Rome. Apart from several visiting Anglican clerics, Monsignor Talbot (portrayed by Lytton Strachey as Manning’s great
channel for Vatican intrigue) and the painter Joseph Severn, who helped to make up Gladstone’s Roman circle, there were no fewer than three of his former Cabinet colleagues in Rome for some
or all of the time. The Argylls came at the beginning of December, and occupied rooms beneath the Gladstones’ spacious lodgings in the Piazza di Spagna. Cardwell and Clarendon were the other
two, and the latter wrote to Lady Salisbury (the stepmother not the wife of the future Prime Minister) a mildly mocking account of Gladstone’s activities:
Italian art, archaeology and literature are G’s sole occupations. Every morning at 8 he lectures his wife and daughters upon Dante, and requires them to parse and
give the root of every verb. He runs about all day to shops, galleries and persons, and only last night he told me that he hadn’t time for the reading room, and hadn’t seen an
English newspaper for three or four days.’
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This was to some extent contradicted by a private informant of Morley’s who told him ‘that Mr Gladstone seemed to care little or not
at all about wonders of
archaeology alike in Christian and pagan Rome, but never wearied of hearing Italian sermons from priests and preaching friars’. Morley himself endorsed this description: ‘He was a
collector of ivories, of china, of Wedgwood, but in architecture in all its high historic bearing I never found him very deeply interested. I doubt if he followed the controversies about French,
Gothic and Italian, about Byzantine and Romanesque, with any more concern than he had in the controversies of geology.’
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Although Morley came to
know Gladstone much better than Clarendon ever did, the diaries nonetheless bear out the old Whig more than the (then) young Radical.
What seems certain is that whether the alternative attractions were literary, aesthetic or religious they were successful in diverting Gladstone’s mind from any obsession with British
politics. He appeared detached and relaxed throughout the four months. Foreign (or local) issues occupied him more. On this trip, much more than on any previous journey with the possible exception
of his progress across the north of Italy in 1859, he was treated as a grand visiting statesman. He had a private audience of nearly an hour with the Pope (Piux IX) in his second week in Rome. The
audience began with a touch of stately farce:
. . . I repaired to the Vatican in household uniform. I found the Pope dressed with great simplicity in white. . . . When I had bowed and kissed his hand, dropping on one
knee as before the Queen (an operation in which he took my hand himself) he motioned, and asked me to sit down on a chair placed over against him. Mr Russell
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had told me that it was his wont notwithstanding this invitation to stand: I therefore begged permission to do so as I should if before the Queen. But he said if the Queen
ordered you to sit, you would sit.
Allora
, I said,
Santo Padre non mi resta altro che di ubbidire: Roma locuta est
, quoting the famous words of St Augustine. . . . The Pope
smiled, and finished the sentence,
causa finita est
.
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They then had a fine
tour d’horizon
, touching on everything from the strict etiquette of the Court of England, through Fenianism (a favourite subject of British politicians when
talking to Supreme Pontiffs) to the prospect for the French troops staying in Rome (they were withdrawn four years later and with them went the Pope’s temporal power). Gladstone was invited
to come again, bringing his family, which more
formal visit of blessing took place six days later. In Rome he also saw a total of twelve cardinals and commented oddly in a
letter to the Duchess of Sutherland, ‘I observe reserve in conversation, except with such persons as cardinals.’
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