Gladstone: A Biography (50 page)

In Florence, then the seat of government of the nearly united Italy, he called on King Victor Emmanuel. ‘He spoke with an outstanding freedom,’ Gladstone wrote, again to his Duchess,
although the significance of this comment needs to be adjusted for the nineteenth-century tendency of all interlocutors of crowned heads to regard any remark from them beyond ‘good
morning’ as an expression of extraordinary frankness. At Florence he also saw Bettino Ricasoli, Cavour’s successor as chief minister, and was given a banquet at Doney’s restaurant
by forty-five members of the Italian Parliament, arranged by the grateful Poerio.

In Paris, on the last stage of his journey home, he was treated with equal attention: dinner with the Emperor and Empress in the soon to be burnt Tuileries (where he was ‘surprised at the
extreme attention and courtesy of both their Majesties with whom I had much interesting conversation’); another evening banquet given by the political economists of France in joint honour of
Gladstone and Cardwell, and installation (for Gladstone, not Cardwell) as a foreign associate of the Institut de France, a rare honour.

Back in London on 29 January 1867, a week before the opening of the new session, he faced an uncertain prospect which turned out worse, for the short run at any rate, than anything he could have
expected. The session of 1867 was full of complexities, obscurities and sheer
opéra bouffe
blunderings from one side of the stage to the other. The third Derby–Disraeli
government had achieved office in the previous July on the basis of uniting with Lowe’s ‘Adullamites’ to defeat, because it was dangerously democratic, a Russell–Gladstone
Reform Bill which would have enfranchised an additional 400,000 voters. Of the two previous Conservative governments the first had lasted only ten months and the second only sixteen. Disraeli had
thus passed from being forty-one years old, at which age he had destroyed Peel and ended the last previous effective Conservative government, to sixty-one without any secure hold on power. He was
increasingly aware of this. ‘Power, it has come to me too late,’ he was sadly to ruminate even at the height of his post-Congress of Berlin success.
¹⁰
His principal aim in the autumn of 1866 therefore became that of keeping the government in office, despite its being nominally in a substantial minority in the House of
Commons
and there seeming no reason to think that a dissolution would change that. To achieve this result he had to keep the parliamentary initiative, maintain the divisions
within the Liberal ranks and weaken Gladstone. These objectives became much more important than any question of defending a particular position on the franchise. As Robert Blake wrote a century
later: ‘Of Disraeli at this time it could be said as Lord Beaverbrook wrote of Lloyd George: “He did not seem to care which way he travelled providing he was in the driver’s
seat.”’
¹¹
One difference between Gladstone and Disraeli was that Gladstone always believed, sometimes to his own humiliation but also in
a way that made him in the last resort a greater man, that he could drive in whatever direction he judged right, whereas Disraeli, although a tactician of genius and (in his own phrase about
Salisbury) ‘a great master of gibes and flaunts and jeers’, was a manoeuvrer rather than a statesman of wide strategy.

So much for Disraeli, but what about Derby, who was head of this government until February 1868, less office-hungry and less opportunistic? It was, however, a Conservative and not a reactionary
which Derby had become. He had been a member of the Cabinet which had carried the 1832 Reform Bill, and had become impressed (perhaps over-impressed) by the strength of popular feeling for reform
which had manifested itself over the summer of 1866. It had begun, oddly enough, with a demonstration in Carlton House Terrace on 27 June. A large group had surged to Gladstone’s house from a
meeting in Trafalgar Square. Gladstone was out, dining at Grillion’s club, but Mrs Gladstone was at home and, apparently at the request of the police, had gone to the balcony accompanied by
two daughters and had bowed and/or waved to the crowd, which, with many shouts of ‘Gladstone for ever’, had then peaceably dispersed. The Gladstones were nevertheless much criticized
for pandering to the mob.

Then, a month later, there were the Hyde Park riots, which sprang out of a reform meeting which Gladstone had been asked to address (but had refused), continued sporadically for three nights,
led to a tearing down of railings and reduced to tears the not very effective Home Secretary, Spencer Walpole. It was a gentle
émeute
compared with a revolutionary day in Paris, but
it took place on the edge of Mayfair, indeed almost under Disraeli’s windows, and created a wave of apprehension. More influential with Derby, however, was the series of large and orderly
marches and meetings of respectable citizens which took place in the main provincial towns, many of them addressed by John Bright.

The two principal members of the Conservative government were therefore, for somewhat different reasons, persuaded by the autumn that they should introduce a Reform Bill of
their own. But, partly because they faced some trouble within their own Cabinet, they did little about preparing for it until the session was on top of them. The original intention was to proceed
by vague resolutions of the House paving the way for a Royal Commission which by a year’s deliberation would obviate the need for legislation before the session of 1868. For the government
this course would have the advantage both of excusing their procrastination and of imposing it on the opposition. It would be difficult for the Liberals, having failed ignominiously in 1866, to
bring in another bill of their own while the Royal Commission was sitting.

The Royal Commission needed some steer on the angle from which they were to consider the vast subject. On 22 December Derby wrote to Disraeli giving his suggestions, and the flippancy of his
tone owed less to an early onset of the Christmas spirit than to his interest in delay over substance: ‘Of all possible hares to start I do not know a better than the extension of household
suffrage,
coupled with plurality of voting
.’
¹²
‘Plurality of voting’ meant that where an elector had multiple
qualifications under the again envisaged ‘fancy franchises’ and, for example, met the property test, was a university graduate as well as a clergyman, had more than £X in the
‘funds’ and paid more than £Y in direct taxation, he should have votes in the
same
constituency, on each of these grounds. There thus opened the prospect that, by a
brilliant sleight of hand, the Liberal leadership could be outflanked by unfurling the banner of household suffrage (although in practice limiting it to those householders who paid rates directly,
as opposed to ‘compounders’ who did it through their landlords), while neutralizing any dangerous political effect, by almost balancing 400,000–500,000 ‘dangerous’ new
voters with 300,000–400,000 ‘safe’ additional votes through plurality.

‘Household suffrage’, however ‘cribbed, cabined and confined’ (in a subsequent Gladstone phrase), was a most powerful legend, and one which was launched into practical
politics by Derby’s letter. Gladstone, looking back many years later, first admitted that it outflanked him (‘We did not wish to make at once so wide a change as that involved in a
genuine household franchise’); and second that it threw him on to the defensive (‘But the government, it must be admitted, bowled us over by the force of the
phrase’).
¹³
It thus put the government, Disraeli in particular, well on the way to his primary objective of skewering
Gladstone. There were also penalties for the government. Three of the Cabinet of fifteen, Cranborne (soon to be Salisbury), Carnarvon and General Peel, the younger brother of Sir
Robert (what was he doing serving under Disraeli?), regarded the term household suffrage as anathema. Two of them might have weakened under Derby’s persuasion, but Cranborne, rather like
Enoch Powell in the Thorneycroft–Birch–Powell resignations of 1958, implacably drove them on, and on 2 March 1867 they all resigned. The substance of their analysis was absolutely
correct. Household suffrage, they said, will live, but the balancing safeguards, plural voting based on fancy franchises and admission to the vote for direct ratepayers only, will die.

They failed to allow, however, for the momentum of manoeuvre, as in a brilliant cavalry action, which had seized the Disraeli-directed if Derby-led government. The resigners were replaced by two
fairly obscure dukes (Marlborough and Richmond) and one even more obscure commoner (Lowry Corry) and the charge swept on. On Friday 12 February, quite contrary to the earlier intention, Disraeli,
without Cabinet consultation, had committed the government to bring in an immediate bill. On the 25th he introduced, with studied lack of enthusiasm, the so-called ‘Ten-Minutes Bill’,
which provided only for a £6 franchise in the boroughs, a £20 one in the counties, fancy franchises but no plurality. It was so called not because the speeches were limited to ten
minutes, as in a certain modern House of Commons procedure, but because it had been agreed upon only ten minutes before it had to be presented, first by Derby to a Conservative party meeting and
then by Disraeli to the House. It was designed to show the resigning ministers how out of touch they were, to invite opposition at a Carlton Club meeting and to build up pressure for something
stronger. Disraeli withdrew it on 4 March and announced that a fortnight later he would revert to the plan for household franchise for ratepayers plus plurality of voting which had been
foreshadowed in Derby’s letter of 22 December.

This tergiversation sounds as though the government ought to have been gravely damaged. In fact it was the opposition that suffered. Did this stem from Gladstone’s clumsiness, or from the
inherent difficulty of dealing with Disraeli at the peak of his opportunistic form, which was as difficult as gathering up a basketful of eels? Curiously, Gladstone apprehended the difficulty in
advance, and then failed to profit from his prescience. He had written to Brand, the Liberal Whip, early in his Roman sojourn.

Gladstone may have been afraid of it, as he had every reason to be, for Disraeli was far better than he was at woodcraft, but he was inept at keeping away from the treacherous paths. In
particular, he failed to realize that Disraeli’s governing tactic was to defeat any amendment from Gladstone, even if it meant accepting a more extreme one from another source. He had to show
he was winning, and this meant showing that Gladstone was losing.

This task was made easier by Gladstone commanding at that stage no great resources of loyalty or affection in the ranks of a parliamentary Liberal party which had been elected to support
Palmerston. He was respected as a Chancellor and feared as an orator, but not revered or loved as a leader. His strength in that capacity was coming to lie much more among the non-parliamentary
masses, who admired but did not know him, than with the members of Parliament, most of whom in fact did not know him either, but thought that they ought to do so. He was beginning to suffer from
what Bagehot, in general an admirer, described as not knowing the difference between leading and driving. This was well illustrated by the two meetings of the Liberal parliamentary party which he
held during the run-up to his three House of Commons humiliations of the spring. Of the first, held in his own house on 21 March, he recorded: ‘Meeting of the party 2½–4. I spoke
near an hour: the end as good as I could hope.’
¹⁵
And of the second on 5 April: ‘Liberal Party’s meeting at 2. Spoke at
length.’
¹⁶

At both these meetings the alleged purpose was to consult the party. At both it seems more likely that he harangued its members, and considerably exaggerated the degree of acceptance that he
achieved. On 25 March the second reading of the bill went through without a division, as had been agreed at the meeting on the 21st, but Gladstone’s two-hour speech, exposing in detail the
inconsistencies of the bill, was reported as losing the attention of the House. This mild failure was nothing compared with an 11–12 April debate on Gladstone’s principal amendment. He
both opened and wound up. The amendment provided that a qualified tenant could vote whether or not he paid his own rates. This lost the support of some Whigs. It was, however, predicated upon
a £5 qualification and not full household suffrage, and that lost the support of some Radicals. The so-called ‘Tea Room Revolt’ led to a significant defection
from Gladstone. Forty-three Liberals voted with the government and twenty were absent unpaired. Cranborne, Gladstone’s old Oxford colleague Heathcote and five other Tories voted for the
amendments, but this hardly compensated. The result was that in a House with a nominal Liberal majority of seventy-seven, the principal amendment to the principal bill of the session, moved by the
Liberal leader of the opposition, resulted in a majority of twenty-one for the Conservative government. Gladstone’s comment of ‘A smash perhaps without example’
¹⁷
was in the circumstances relatively restrained.

Gladstone went home in chagrin, contemplating retirement to the back benches, and Disraeli went home in triumph, calling in at the Carlton Club on the way and being toasted by Matthew Ridley as
‘the man who rode the race, who took the time, who kept the time, and who did the trick’. He was pressed to stay to supper (it was then nearly 3.00 a.m.) but disengaged himself with
habitual reserve and went on to Grosvenor Gate, his wife, a Fortnum’s pie and a bottle of champagne.
¹⁸
Even Bishop Wilberforce,
Gladstone’s continuing friend, but a cleric who could take a political temperature, wrote a little later: ‘The most wonderful thing is the rise of Disraeli. It is not the mere assertion
of talent. He has been able to teach the House of Commons almost to ignore Gladstone, and at present lords it over him, and, I am told, says that he will hold him down for twenty
years.’
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